Adios, Neil Armstrong

"That's a rather large step for a man . . . one giant leap for Mankind."

You don't remember it that way, do you? That's because the first transmission was edited before sending it out as the second and subsequent playbacks. Everybody remembers it as "That's one small step for [a] man . . . one giant leap for Mankind."

On July 20th, 1969 a friend of mine was recording the TV broadcast with a friend in his bedroom with an Ampex reel to reel recorder. That was about the same time I was watching it "live" on TV. When the replay began, he and his friend noticed a slight change in the wording. After a few replayed broadcasts, they ran the tape back and heard what was originally broadcast.

The reason given for the discrepancy, several years later, was because the bottom rung of the lunar landing module was a few feet from the bottom - where the lunar surface was. The engineers didn't know how soft the lunar surface might be, and how far the lander might sink into the surface, so they apparently planned for the lander sinking into the surface by several inches and left several inches extra on the bottom of the ladder, as well.

The lunar surface proved to be somewhat compact, leaving the bottom rung of the ladder several inches higher than the engineers (and Armstrong) expected. In the suit, he couldn't bend his knees very far and had to literally jump off the bottom rung to get to the surface. What he actually said reflected his immediate response, but was not according to the script as practiced before the landing.

So they edited it with what was a pre-recorded "transmission", or re-recording a live transmission.

That's what the world remembers him saying, as that'sn the only re-transmission that is replayed and officially acknowledged.