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Moon landing anniversary coming up

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'Giant leap for mankind' moon landing speech was my idea, claims British scientist

 

 

A British scientist today laid claim to Neil Armstrong's historic 'one small step' speech as the U.S. astronaut set foot on the Moon.

 

Gary Peach said he suggested the phrase because he was worried that the American astronauts might not live up to the occasion.

 

Mr Peach was working at a space tracking station as the Apollo 11 mission was about to blast off when an American colleague asked his opinion on what should be said when men first stepped on the Moon.

 

"One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," he said. The American passed it on to Nasa, according to Mr Peach, now a 73-year-old grandfather living in Newbury, Berkshire.

 

The words were listened to by an estimated 450 million people worldwide who were watching the moon landings.

 

The Briton, who at the time was an expat engineer specialising in microwave radiation at Canberra's Tidbinilla tracking station, had been pondering the question already because he was afraid that the U.S. astronauts might utter something banal.

 

He said the director of the network support facility, a Mr Monkton, came to him on July 15, the day before launch, as Mr Peach was conducting final equipment checks.

 

"He asked whether there were any technical problems and I said there weren't," the British scientist recalled today.

 

"Then I told him I was worried about what would be said when they landed on the moon.

 

"I thought, being Americans, they might say something like, 'Holy chickenshit, look at all that fucking dust.'

 

"I felt that would not be a suitable thing to be quoted in history books until eternity."

 

'He asked me what I thought should be said. I had been thinking about this the day before.

 

"I told him, 'One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.' And I definitely said 'a man'."

 

It is generally believed that Armstrong actually said 'a small step for man' rather than 'for a man' - making the phrase a tautology rather than a contrast.

 

Mr Peach said Mr Monkton rushed out of the room, 'presumably to pass it on'.

 

"The idea was to let future generations know that we were aware of what we were doing, and we were not doing it by accident," the British scientist said.

 

He added: "I heard the landings at work and when I heard what he said I was not displeased. But at the time I just got on with my job."

 

Mr Peach returned to the UK in the 1970s and helped invent the CAT scanner.

 

Armstrong's own comments on the origin of the 'one small step' phrase have been ambiguous.

 

In an oral history project in 2001, he said: "I thought about it after landing, and because we had a lot of other things to do, it was not something that I really concentrated on but just something that was kind of passing around subliminally or in the background."

 

He added: "I didn't think of it as being as important as others. I didn't want to be dumb, but it was contrived in a way, and I was guilty of that."

 

In his book Apollo 11, Dr Chris Riley claimed there was evidence that the famous words were spontaneous rather than scripted by Nasa or the White House.

 

 

 

 

 

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