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There have been rumours that part of the One Small Step statement came from a memo from William Shapley, Associate Deputy Administrator at NASA to Dr. Geo. Mueller, head of the Manned Space Flight Centre. This memo passed Deke Slayton's desk to pass onto Neil. Or so the story goes. It is just one of many stories about the origins of the One Small Step statement.
But in my opinion, that's all they are, stories. Legends lost in time.
Neil has absolutely no recollection of it, and Deke is not alive today to confirm or refute it.
Even Walter Cronkite made a comment on live television on the morning of the landing referring to "a giant leap".
Neil sums it up by saying,
"... you never know subliminally in you brain where things come from. Bit it certainly wasn't conscious. "
In regards to the missing "a". Neil says,
"For people who have listened to me for houes on the radio communications tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I'm not particularly articulate. Perhaps it was a supressed sound that was not picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn't sound like there was time there for the word (the letter "a") to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people realise that I "a" was intended, because that's the only way the statement makes sense.
So I hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn;t said - although it actually might have been".
Finally, asked how historians should quote his One Small Step statement, Neil answers only somewhat facetiously, "They can put it in parentheses".
That's enough for me. I'm convinced.
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