heidi | It was the summer of '69

I don't know when I first learned about the left out "a", the word Neil Armstrong didn't say when he stepped out onto the moon. I think the first time I read about it in full was in a book called Big Secrets, back in 1985. The Snopes page explains it pretty well, but basically, Armstrong ws supposed to say "One small step for a man", but instead, he said "One small step for man...">

Initially, NASA and Armstrong said that the word "a" was obscured by static; Doctor Who took that little micromoment and blamed, well, Silence. Armstrong's words were not entirely his own - they had been rehearsed and specifically crafted for the occasion, and at the time he said he was sure that he'd said "a", but a few decades afterwards, he seems to now believe he misspoke. There was some static on the transmissions, and the recorders then were not as high-fidelity as they are now, but there is no hint of the "a" on the recordings.

It was so subtle in Doctor Who tonight - if you didn't already know that there was some dispute/history in the question of whether Armstrong said "a", if you didn't know that the question, at this point, is entirely based on a comparison of Armstrong's memory with what was recorded on earth, it would just seem like a neat little place for Moffat & Co to have slotted something in. But the fact that they put it there, I find enchanting.

(But I don't know of any houses in Central Florida that look like that orphanage. Maybe it was the same Florida as used by SPN in Mystery Spot.)