By Rupert Cornwell
FORTY years on, the debate is over. He didn't say the "a". meant to, of course; the line he had prepared to mark the climax of humankind's greatest adventure of the 20th century should have come out as: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." But the "a" somehow got lost. Some experts blamed it on his flat Midwestern accent.
Some maintained the humble indefinite article was obliterated by static.
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin.
But a phalanx of phoneticians and speech analysts have gone over newly enhanced magnetic tapes of those imperishable words from the Sea of Tranquillity, and in May they announced their finding. There was not room - not even the 35 milliseconds posited by Australian researchers in 2006 - for an "a", whether half-swallowed, elided or otherwise consumed.
Armstrong simply didn't say it. Either he forgot, or for once nerves got to him.
If Armstrong had his way, this scientific debate about the missing "a" would be the only point of interest this coming July 20, and he would continue to live the quiet and anonymous life he has built for himself, without interruption. But, for a few weeks at least, it cannot be. That day in 1969, a global television audience of 500 million watched this quiet son of an Ohio state auditor become the first man to set foot on the moon.
The TV images may now be museum pieces. But they remain as thrilling and incredible as when they appeared for the first time, generating an unchanged sense of miracle. The technology was primitive: a tiny modern mobile phone packs vastly more power than the Doctor Who-like electronics that graced Apollo 11, all toggles and blinking lights. Yet these clunky instruments somehow guided Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin to an alien world - even if the onboard computer effectively crashed because of data overload as the lunar module started its descent.
There was another scary moment in the last instants before the landing, as Armstrong had to steer the craft away from some boulders, consuming extra seconds of vital fuel in the process - and yet another when they prepared to depart and the engine ignition switch for lift-off had broken. They solved that mini-crisis by using a pen to break a circuit and activate the launch process.
In the end, the mission went well-nigh perfectly. The men from Apollo 11 might have spent only 2½ hours outside the lunar module, and less than a day in all on the moon's surface. But in that short time Armstrong had joined Columbus, Amundsen and Lindbergh in the pantheon of explorers whose exploits changed history. And once inside the pantheon, he has managed the burden of celebrity as well or better than any of them.
Destiny surely pre-ordained him for the role. He was born in the flat farmlands of western Ohio, in the state that has produced more astronauts than any other, just 80-odd kilometres north of Dayton where Orville and Wilbur Wright pioneered the science that would take Apollo to the moon.
As a boy, Armstrong was fascinated by flight, and by the engineering and physics that made flight possible. At 16, before he had learnt to drive, he was the proud owner of a pilot's licence. Five years later, he was flying combat missions over Korea, and after that war he became a hotshot test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert, flying the Bell X-1, the hypersonic North American X-15 and other exotic planes chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff that formed the bridge between the early jet age and the space age.
In one 1962 incident that is now part of Edwards legend, Armstrong messed up an X-15 descent and flew over the base where he was scheduled to land at a speed of Mach 3 (3200 km/h) and an altitude of 30,480 metres. But he managed to rectify the mistake, turning from above north-eastern Los Angeles back towards Edwards, and executing a high-speed glide to get the plane safely down instants before it would have crashed.
The episode was vintage Armstrong, cool and resourceful, and seemingly without nerves. There would be similar moments later. In 1968, Armstrong was practising for the moon trip on the LLTV, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, better known as the "Flying Bedstead", when the craft began to fly out of control at an altitude of just 30 metres. He ejected a second or so before the LLTV smashed into the ground in flames. In typical unflappable fashion, he brushed himself down and went back to his office to do some paperwork.
It was mostly luck that Armstrong was on the Apollo 11 mission, his second actual space flight. An accident or a technical glitch might have altered the timetable; another crew might have found itself heading to the moon. But it was perhaps less accidental that Armstrong was selected to be commander and then designated to be first out on to the lunar surface.
The man himself insists not. "I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn't planned by anyone," he maintained in a 2005 interview with CBS television. But was it really a fluke? Perhaps some shrewd individual at NASA realised that the moon landing carried with it more than every man's standard 15 minutes. Armstrong, this wise man may have concluded, would be better able to cope with the lifetime of celebrity ahead than, say, Aldrin - who after his space days lapsed into depression and alcoholism and still attends rehab, and whose latest venture, confided to a New York Times interviewer last month, was a rap session with Snoop Dogg.
And incontestably, July 20, 1969, changed Armstrong's life forever. In his professional circle, "friends and colleagues all of a sudden looked at us, treated us slightly differently than they had months or years before when we were working together. I never quite understood that," Armstrong told James Hansen, author of the 2005 biography First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong.
For a person instinctively averse to publicity, even worse was to come. The success of the moon mission turned Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins - who flew the orbiting command module - into global heroes and champions of brand America.
Armstrong could have succumbed to the adulation, using celebrity as a springboard for a new career. He could have gone into politics, like his colleagues John Glenn - who represented Ohio for 24 years in the US Senate - and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, who served a term as senator for New Mexico. He could have become a professional pitchman, an ambassador for NASA, a television talking head. He could have cashed in on the lecture circuit with speeches for tens of thousands of dollars a time.
Among mind-changing experiences, few can rank higher than walking on the moon, an experience granted to just 12 men, of them only nine still alive. But Armstrong was different. His priority was a normal life. For him, two years as NASA's show pony were more than enough. In the summer of 1971, he went back to his early passion of aeronautical engineering, taking a professorship at the University of Cincinnati. A predictable flurry of media attention soon subsided after he made it clear he was there to teach, not talk to the press.
To aid the transition, Armstrong made a careful study of what had happened to Charles Lindbergh. By the time of the moon flight, the man who had made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight was in his 70s. His 1927 exploit had turned him into the most famous man in the world, and changed his life forever - and not for the better.
The similarities between Armstrong and Lindbergh were considerable. In their respective heydays, both were young and handsome heroes. Both men, too, were shy and reserved, and their politics leant to the right, based on a belief that America should stay out of foreign conflicts. And, finally, each had known family tragedy. Back in 1932, the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby - probably the most sensational and avidly covered criminal case in US history - had banished forever the moniker of "Lucky Lindy". In 1962, Armstrong experienced the grief of losing his two-year-old daughter, Karen, to brain cancer.
That the two pioneers, though 28 years apart in age, should feel an affinity and strike up an acquaintance was inevitable. "I wonder," Lindbergh wrote to Armstrong after the landing, "if you felt on the moon's surface as I did after landing at Paris in 1927: that I would like to have had more chance to look around."
Even more revealing was Lindbergh's reaction to an invitation to fly out with president Richard Nixon to personally greet the three returning conquerors on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet - albeit only through a glass window into the trailer where Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were being held in quarantine for three weeks, lest they had brought back some lethal lunar bug.
Lindbergh turned his president down. The decision, he later wrote, was based on what happened after his own historic flight, "when I spent close to a quarter century re-achieving a position in which I could live, work and travel under normal circumstances". The moon landing and its follow-up, the old aviator feared, "would attract the greatest concentration of publicity in the history of the world", and he himself would be forced back "into a press relationship and way of life I am most anxious not to re-enter".
took those words to heart. Since his departure from NASA, his career has been a case study of how to live with extreme celebrity - and proof that a dislike of the limelight, a somewhat solitary nature, and a reluctance to speak to the press do not mean that a man has turned into a hermit.
"Fame never turned his head; he's a true professional," says John Swez, an old family friend. "Buzz Aldrin may have lost it a bit, but not Neil. He's certainly not reclusive. He's got a good sense of humour. The first time I chatted with him at length, he was funny and outgoing. He's probably the most intelligent man I've ever talked to. Yes, he's careful in what he says, but I think it comes from that level of intelligence. He wants to get it right."
Above all, Armstrong sought normality. Unlike several of his colleagues, he never wrote his memoirs. It was only after some misgiving, and more than three decades after the Apollo 11 flight, that he agreed to co-operate with Hansen, an eminent historian. The 750-page authorised biography is dense and scholarly, crammed with fascinating detail, but as unflamboyant as its subject.
The moon walk has left its mark on Wapakoneta, an unpretentious Midwest town of 9400 souls. The Armstrong family moved away soon after Neil was born but returned in 1944 for three years when he was a teenager. The astronaut's old high school is now a residential building. But the family's two-storey weatherboard house at 601 West Benton Street looks much as it must have done then, neat and smartly painted in grey and white. Once there was a plaque reading "Eagle's Landing, boyhood home of , first man to walk on the moon", but it was blown away in a storm a few years ago.
You can scarcely drive a block without a reminder of Armstrong's feat - the Moon Florist, the Apollo Storage Company, not to mention the framed front page from The New York Times of July 21, 1969, that greets visitors to the men's room in the McDonald's on the way into town.
In his home town, Armstrong's reserve is not universally appreciated. Some would like to see a bit more of the local boy made good. His refusal of an invitation to take part in local festivities celebrating the 25th anniversary of the moon landing in 1994 was particularly upsetting.
Armstrong, however, has explained his modesty thus: "I guess we all like to be recognised not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily work." Lindbergh's flight was very much a solo affair; Armstrong, by contrast, was the beneficiary of a decade-long NASA operation that involved more than 300,000 people. So why, asks Armstrong, should he receive all the glory? And you can make the case that, in this post-Bush era, modesty, caution and a willingness to think before speaking are exactly what America's global image requires.
Then, as now, Armstrong was a man totally in control. Today he makes the odd public appearance but mainly lives quietly with his second wife, Carol, at the 80-hectare farm he bought in 1971 in Lebanon, Ohio, a half-hour drive north of Cincinnati.
As events would have it, NASA seemed to lose interest in things lunar not long after the giddy euphoria of 1969. The last manned landing, by Apollo 17, was in 1972, and the focus of space exploration shifted to manned low orbital shuttle flights and unmanned probes to more distant planets. The moon seemed less a gateway to the heavens than a cul de sac, and the headlines were consumed by bleaker earthly dramas such as Vietnam and Watergate.
Now, however, as Armstrong prepares to celebrate his 79th birthday next month, the moon is making a comeback. NASA intends to have a permanently staffed solar-powered base up and running by 2024 to prepare future human missions to Mars and other planets.
This October, the agency plans to send a rocket smashing into the surface of the moon to create a plume of rocks and debris stretching 240 kilometres into space. This in turn will be analysed by a satellite for traces of water ice, crucial for any permanent station. And, back down on Earth, a gentleman farmer in western Ohio will be monitoring proceedings, his fingers crossed, with a quiet smile of satisfaction on his face.
THE INDEPENDENT