One small slip-up?

How Neil Armstrong came up with his famous phrase – and then misdelivered it. Richard Holmes reports

No one remembers the second thing Neil Armstrong said on the surface of the Moon. (“The surface is fine and powdery, I can pick it up loosely with my toe.”) Buzz Aldrin could have sung a song or confessed to an unsolved murder and no one would remember. That’s not just because Armstrong’s first words were historic, but because they were poetry – the hopeful epitaph for the 20th century.

“The words are beautiful, they’re beautiful and they’re still true,” says Scottish poet Richard Price, whose latest collection, Moon for Sale, turns the Moon into a landscape of striving humanity and fading dreams. (“Magnificent desolation,” as Aldrin actually said on July 20 1969.)

The Moon has featured in English poetry from before the time of Chaucer. An anonymous poem in a manuscript from 1340 begins, “Mon in the mone stond and strit/On his botforke his burthen he bereth” (or “the man in the moon stands and strides/ on his forked stick his burden he bears”). It has inspired Percy

Shelley (“Art thou pale for weariness/Of climbing heaven and gazing on the Earth”), Emily Dickinson (“Her Bonnet is the Firmament/The Universe – Her Shoe”) and Sylvia Plath (“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right/White as a knuckle and terribly upset.”)

“From a poet’s point of view, the Moon is there for elopement, moonlight flits, escaping from somewhere dangerous and maybe going to somewhere dangerous as well,” explains Price. The sight of men walking on the Moon’s surface didn’t rob it of that mystery. “You would think it made it ordinary, but sometimes it’s almost as if the Moon landing made it less real; it still feels mythic. Poets such as Edwin Morgan began to use space – in [his 1973 book] From Glasgow to Saturn – as a way of thinking what the best of humankind might be.”

For those who were young in 1969, the Moon’s associations can be more domestic. “The big memory for me was of my little brother being born on the day that Neil Armstrong got out of that incredible tripod-looking thing and on to the dust,” says Price. “There’s a reason his middle name is Neil! The sense of families gathered around really touches me.”

Appropriately, Armstrong’s first recital happened not on the Sea of Tranquillity, but in a suburban living room. Armstrong claimed the line occurred to him on the way down the ladder. However, after his death at the age of 82, his brother, Dean, revealed a different story. “Before he went to the Cape [Canaveral], he invited me down to spend a little time with him,” Dean said in a BBC documentary. “He said, ‘Why don’t you and I, once the boys go to bed, why don’t we play a game of Risk?’ We started playing Risk and then he slipped me a piece of paper and said, ‘Read that’.” On the paper were written the famous words. “He says, ‘What do you think about that?’ I said, ‘Fabulous.’ ”

Why did he do it? Armstrong was a humble Corvette-driving test pilot who touched the face of God. It’s doubtful he was trying to add “poet” to his CV, too. More likely, in a project where every moment was planned to the second, he wanted to avoid bureaucracy. There was no shortage of committee-approved speeches that day. Bill Safire, Nixon’s speechwriter, had prepared a draft speech in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.” It’s almost a limerick.

Armstrong was aware that even the words of a non-writer would carry weight. Apollo’s dark forebear, the Manhattan Project, was full of scientists spouting maxims. Watching his first successful nuclear weapon test, J Robert Oppenheimer was reminded of a line from the Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds” – a line now forever associated with that moment.

Armstrong knew long before he stepped out of the capsule that he would need to say something. But what, exactly, did he say?

The paper he handed his brother had read “a man”. Armstrong insisted that a combination of a weak signal and his own soft Ohio accent meant the “a” had been lost. “Tape recorders are fallible,” he wrote later. Nasa backed up his story, claiming in an official statement that “the ‘a’ apparently went unheard and unrecorded in the transmission because of static”.

The journalists watching in Houston, needing to get their stories straight, huddled together

‘Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the Moon, didn’t I?’ Armstrong admitted