“Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.” – Plaque on the Apollo 11 landing module left on the moon.
On this day in 1969, the late Neil Armstrong made history by taking “one small step” onto the surface of the moon.
The first words Armstrong spoke upon landing were actually the terse, “Tranquility Base here. the Eagle has landed.”
When the time came to utter the words Armstrong knew would resonate through history forever, he muffed his line, leaving out one crucial word.
“It’s one small step for Man, a giant leap for mankind,” should have been, “one small step for a man.”
Or perhaps the line was garbled in the spotty transmission. Armstrong himself said cryptically, “We’ll never know.”
And though it is claimed Armstrong decided on his line in the six-and-a-half hours between touchdown and exiting the craft, the suspicion naturally arose that the line was scripted when an Air Force choir came up with a hymn using the line with suspicious rapidity.
Point being, very seldom do men know with absolute certainty they are making history at any given moment. Often the history-maker’s famous lines are scripted for them after the fact by helpful biographers with the advantage of hindsight.
Armstrong knew the step he took represented the first step in an endless journey the human race was only beginning. He knew he carried the hopes and fears of an army of scientists, technicians, and engineers who built the craft they would never embark on.
And the hopes and dreams of a nation as well.
I watched the moon landing with two of my closest friends. We had just graduated from high school and were about to go our separate ways. I think our conversation was puerile and more than a little stupid. Because we were touched by awe, and like adolescent boys covered it up with idiot bravado.
But we knew what Armstrong was doing, because we were like him in one crucial way. We three boys with no accomplishments yet to our name, and the former Navy pilot, Korean War veteran, engineer, and astronaut who had already made less dramatic history by performing the first spacecraft docking maneuver, were alike in one way. We read science fiction. We knew what Armstrong was doing changed the history of the human race forever. We knew what he was doing might ensure there would be a human race into the far future, perhaps forever.
Robert A. Heinlein science fiction author and guest commentator for Walter Cronkite during the Apollo 11 landing, once said, “Earth is too fragile a basket for the human race to hold all its eggs in.”
His colleague and friend Sir Arthur C. Clarke observed, “If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs—those creatures whom we often deride as nature’s failures—then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word ‘ship’ will mean— ‘spaceship.’”
Armstrong took that first step for mankind, and generations yet unborn will follow him, and remember.
This essay appears in a collection of Steve Browne’s essays and newspaper columns, “The View from Flyover Country: A Rural Columnist Looks at Life in the 21st Century” which is available on Amazon Kindle.
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