A few months after the death of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, his brother Dean gave an interview in which gives a new version of the origin of the famous phrase “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind”. The astronaut said he had improvised the phrase once arrived on the Moon but now his brother claims that he had asked him for an opinion about that phrase a few months before the Apollo 11 mission.

In 2007, the writer and journalist Andrew Chaikin published “A Man on the Moon”, a chronicle of the Apollo missions to the Moon and obviously he also wrote about Neil Armstrong’s historic quote. Chaikin explains that the astronaut received a lot of suggestions on what to say when he set foot on the Moon but confirms that the decision was made at the last minute.

According to the version told now by Dean Armstrong, included in a new BBC documentary to be broadcast in UK on January 6, 2013, during a game of Risk his brother handed him a piece of paper on which he had written that phrase and asked for his opinion.

Neil Armstrong’s phrase has been the subject of discussion from the beginning because no one heard the “a” before the word “man”. The he article, or the lack thereof, changed its meaning, making it confusing. Armstrong claimed that he said the phrase correctly and that the “a” was lost in transmission due to some disturbance. Someone thought that the astronaut had just fluffed it due to the emotional moment.

In 2006, a computer analyst performed an analysis of the recording of Neil Armstrong’s phrase and found a sound wave that could be the missing article arrived on Earth too disturbed to be understood.

All of this seem trivial but that was a historic moment and every detail was analyzed many times and probably will be analyzed again in the future with new instruments. Because of its importance, it’s anything but strange to think that that historic phrase had been thought out in advance but that Armstrong chose to pretend that it was a spontaneous idea of the moment. Regardless of the truth, that will remain one giant leap for mankind.

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