That’s one small misstep for most moon tales

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - As the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of the first human footprint on the moon, retellings of the Apollo 11 story often note that Neil Armstrong flubbed the word “a” in his famous line, “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

But the tale-tellers often commit a flub themselves, by misunderstanding the very nature of that “one small step.”

The misunderstanding is far more than a semantic anomaly, or a “Trivia Quiz” question.  It goes to the core of what Armstrong meant to convey with his remarkably insightful verbal contrast. 

In a growing number of TV documentaries, books and even graphic novels, Armstrong is portrayed as noting his "one small step" as he dropped down several feet from the lunar module ladder’s bottom rung to plop into the lunar dust. But that's not how it happened, and this almost comical portrayal of an in-the-blind, barely controlled fall to the ground completely obscures the gentle, deliberate nature of the authentic "small step" he took a few moments later.

What actually happened is that he dropped from the ladder onto a trashcan-lid-sized footpad at the bottom of the module’s landing leg, and not the actual lunar surface. He immediately hopped back up to the bottom rung, to gauge how difficult the jump was, and then dropped back to the footpad.

At that point he announced, “I’m going to step off the LM now.” Barely moving in the fuzzy television scene, he turned to his left, shifted his body slightly, and placed his left foot over the lip of the landing pad to press it into the lunar dust. It was a deliberate "first contact" in full sight of his eyes — if not the TV camera — and he was in complete control of what he knew was a historic event of planetary significance.

Watching his own foot compress the moon dirt, and shifting his weight onto that leg, he made his immortal comment. The contrast between what he had just done physically and the leap he had made metaphorically was astronomical in scale.

Redubbing history
Even as it was happening, many watchers didn’t “get it.” As Armstrong dropped off the ladder for the first time, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite immediately reported he was now “standing on the moon” and nearly talked over the famous comment about actually stepping there. And when the crew of the next Apollo landing exited their own lunar module in November 1969, commander Pete Conrad (one of the shortest astronauts) dropped off the ladder and joked, “That may have been a small one for Neil, but it was a long one for me.”

In the years that followed, historical re-creations of the first steps on the moon as often as not redubbed the audio in order to make Armstrong’s “small step” comment coincide with the first drop off the ladder.

In the mid-1990s, the CBS series “Cronkite Remembers” shows it that way — as do a number of NASA documentaries, along with the flagship film shown a dozen times daily at Space Center Houston, a museum adjacent to NASA's Johnson Space Center. Taking its cue from these authoritative sources, more recent TV specials often use the same erroneous audio/video matchup.

Some programs and books have portrayed it correctly. A good example is the Discovery Channel's "One Giant Leap," showing signs that some producers took the extra trouble to get it right. But the widespread misrepresentations in other shows are reminders that people should seek truth where it can be found — and the TV screen, with its need for visual excitement and compressed action, is not an environment always conducive to historical accuracy.

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