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The One Thing Everyone Gets Wrong About The Moon Landing
By SANJIV SATHIAH
Astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon in 1969, and the eyes and ears of the world were fixed on his first step and his first words from the Moon's surface. For years since the landing, people have debated what the first words Neil Armstrong uttered actually were.
The famous quote is “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind,” but since the grammatically correct phrase would be “for a man,” many believe he misspoke. However, Armstrong always insisted that he said “for a man,” but it wasn’t picked up by the transmission.
Armstrong said of his famous words years later, “I thought about it after landing. And because we had a lot of other things to do, it was not something that I really concentrated on.” As for the case of the missing “a,” Australian computer programmer Peter Shann Ford downloaded the audio recording of the historic proclamation from a NASA webpage in 2006.
The software used by Ford produced a graphical representation of the words Armstrong spoke, and while the word "a" could not be heard by the human ear, it was represented graphically, revealing Armstrong indeed said it. Of Ford's finding, Armstrong said, "I ... find his conclusion persuasive."