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| Meta Title | When Did Neil Armstrong Step on the Moon? - The Atlantic |
| Meta Description | When, exactly, did the astronaut set foot on the moon? No one knows. |
| Meta Canonical | null |
| Boilerpipe Text | The Apollo 11 mission was, in most respects, a feat of extraordinary precision.
Traveling at a maximum velocity of about seven miles a second, the Saturn V rocket would have launched the crew far off course in the event of even a slight navigational error. From nearly 240,000 miles away, Houstonâs Mission Control could track the spacecraftâs position to within 30 feet. The command moduleâs guidance computer kept time to the millisecond.
And yet for all that precision, no one can say with absolute certainty when,
exactly
, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.
Most of the details of the moment are canonical: Armstrong took his one small step on July 20, 1969â50 years ago this past Saturday. The step took place just after 10:56 eastern time that night. And Armstrong bookended the step with the lines âOkay, Iâm going to step off the [lunar module] nowâ and âThatâs one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.â (Or was it â
one small step for
a
man
,â as Armstrong insisted?) At some point during the roughly eight-second interval between those two lines, he became the first human being to walk on the moon. But when exactly he did so is unclear.
The night of the moon landing, NASA told the press that Armstrong had stepped onto the lunar surface at 10:56:20 p.m., and
The New York Times
reported that same time stamp on its
front page
the next morning. The real-time transcription of the missionâs air-to-ground voice transmission suggests that Armstrong took the step sometime between 10:56:43 and 10:56:48. And when NASAâs official Apollo 11 mission report went public in November 1969, it pinpointed first contact five seconds earlier, at 10:56:15.
Read: The moment that made Neil Armstrongâs heart rate spike
Experts agree that the time NASA fed reporters is probably the least reliable of the bunch. They also donât put much stock in the air-to-ground transcript, a document rife with human error. Some even question the mission report, which incorporated months of data analysis and debriefings with the crew.
Heiko KĂźffen, a German software engineer and space enthusiast, first came across this discrepancy in 2009, while trying to design a homemade real-time tracker that he could use to relive the moon landing for its 40th anniversary. (When I called KĂźffen a decade later, on the morning of the 50th anniversary, he told me that he couldnât talk long, because he was closely following an online replay of the 195-hour Apollo 11 mission.) When he tried to match the air-to-ground transcript to an audiovisual recording, he found that the transcript was behindâand that one of the records had to be wrong about the time of Armstrongâs first step.
KĂźffen sees the moon landing as perhaps âthe greatest achievement of mankind,â and he was disappointed that NASA had not recorded so great a milestone with greater precision. In 2011, he began analyzing transcripts and footage in an effort to establish a definitive time stamp.
The obstacles to absolute precision, KĂźffen soon discovered, are many. For starters, the moon is very far away, and even light takes more than one second to travel the 238,900 miles between here and there. So, too, did the audiovisual data beamed back down into the analog television sets of the roughly 500 million people watching as Armstrong descended the ladder of the lunar module. Add the time to process those data, and the delay between the moment Armstrong took the step and the moment viewers on Earth saw it extends to as long as a few seconds, by some accounts.
Even accounting for lag, synchronizing the audio with the video still poses a problem, mainly because hardly any of whatâs audible in the recordings is visible in the footage. Had Armstrong taken out a bass drum and given it a thump just before stepping off the ladder, that moment would have anchored the sights to the sounds. But when the astronauts spoke, their reflective visors concealed their lips.
âIn the end,â KĂźffen acknowledged, âwe can never know if video and audio are really in sync.â
The one thing tying the audio recordings back to time stamps is the real-time air-to-ground transcript, which, of course, loops right back to the original problem: human error.
Read: The best banter from Apollo 11
âYou have to remember that it wasnât like an Olympic swim race where touching the wall stops the timer,â Bill Barry, NASAâs chief historian, said in an email, when I asked him about the discrepancy. âThe exact time of Neilâs first boot contact with the lunar surface is necessarily subject to interpretation because it was measured from a distance with âtoolsâ that were never meant to produce precision down to the second.â
To synchronize the transcripts and the recordings, KĂźffen made what he calls âreasonable assumptions,â which nearly a decade later he has yet to see contradicted. Armstrong, he found, first set foot on the moon at 10:56:25âcloser, in other words, to the almost universally dismissed time given to the press that night than to the time produced by the mission reportâs months-long analysis.
Eric Jones, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher who founded the
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
, concluded after conducting an investigation modeled on KĂźffenâs that first contact occurred at 10:56:17. NASAâs sticking with its November 1969 mission report: If thereâs an official time, Barry said, itâs 10:56:15.
A half century of scrutiny may not have produced a solution, but it has fairly well established the insolubility of the problem. Barry, for one, is not especially concerned. âThis,â he said, âis what happens when space geeks and engineers have 50 years to analyze and re-analyze data.â But listening to KĂźffen effuse in imperfect English, itâs hard to believe that geekery is all there is to this.
âThe adventure of going where nobody ever has been before, into the unknown, driven by our natural given curiosity, is deeply soul-touching, and so I dived into the matter a bit deeper,â he told me. âKnowing when walking on another celestial body happened for the very first time ⌠has a meaning to me, because it is important it happened, and I believe we should know all about it the best possible and most detailed way, and that includes the exact time.â
Even if we donât assign the moment of the step the kind of transcendental significance that KĂźffen does, our lingering uncertainty has a poignancy to it. Watching the Saturn V rocket rise âout of its incarnation of flameâ at Kennedy Space Center, Norman Mailer wondered whether the Apollo 11 mission wasnât one massive act of hubris, so vulgar as to verge on sacrilege. âThe notion that man voyaged out to fulfill the desire of God,â Mailer wrote, âwas either the heart of the vision, or anathema to that true angel in Heaven they would violate by the fires of their ascent.â
Read: âThe fires of their ascentâ
Contained within that moment of hubris, though, is a moment of humility. Even as we were surpassing the limits of human exploration, we were bumping up against the limits of human knowledge, though we didnât realize it at the time. We may have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God, but we were not infallible.
When I asked KĂźffen why heâs devoted so many hours to analyzing a single second, he answered with his favorite quote from the Apollo program. The quote doesnât come from Apollo 11, but from Apollo 15. Standing on the lunar surface, looking out over the plains of Hadley, Commander David Scott understood âa fundamental truth to our nature.â âMan,â he said, âmust explore. And this is exploration at its greatest.â Inconsequential as it seems, KĂźffenâs quest to answer an unanswerable question expresses that same fundamental nature, perhaps even in terms more universal than Scottâs: Few of us have walked the moon, but almost all of us have sought to know what cannot be known. |
| Markdown | [Skip to content](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/tiny-imprecision-heart-apollo-11/594556/#main-content)
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# One Small Controversy About Neil Armstrongâs Giant Leap
When, exactly, did the astronaut set foot on the moon? No one knows.
By [Jacob Stern](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jacob-stern/)
NASA
July 23, 2019
Share
Save
Editorâs Note: *This article is part of a [series](https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/apollo-11-moon-landing-anniversary) reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.*
The Apollo 11 mission was, in most respects, a feat of extraordinary precision.
Traveling at a maximum velocity of about seven miles a second, the Saturn V rocket would have launched the crew far off course in the event of even a slight navigational error. From nearly 240,000 miles away, Houstonâs Mission Control could track the spacecraftâs position to within 30 feet. The command moduleâs guidance computer kept time to the millisecond.
And yet for all that precision, no one can say with absolute certainty when, *exactly*, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.
Most of the details of the moment are canonical: Armstrong took his one small step on July 20, 1969â50 years ago this past Saturday. The step took place just after 10:56 eastern time that night. And Armstrong bookended the step with the lines âOkay, Iâm going to step off the \[lunar module\] nowâ and âThatâs one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.â (Or was it â[one small step for *a* man](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/proposal-armstrong-flubbed-his-big-moon-speech-because-of-ohio/276473/),â as Armstrong insisted?) At some point during the roughly eight-second interval between those two lines, he became the first human being to walk on the moon. But when exactly he did so is unclear.
The night of the moon landing, NASA told the press that Armstrong had stepped onto the lunar surface at 10:56:20 p.m., and *The New York Times* reported that same time stamp on its [front page](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/07/21/issue.html) the next morning. The real-time transcription of the missionâs air-to-ground voice transmission suggests that Armstrong took the step sometime between 10:56:43 and 10:56:48. And when NASAâs official Apollo 11 mission report went public in November 1969, it pinpointed first contact five seconds earlier, at 10:56:15.
[Read: The moment that made Neil Armstrongâs heart rate spike](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/apollo-11-moon-heart-rates/593971/)
Experts agree that the time NASA fed reporters is probably the least reliable of the bunch. They also donât put much stock in the air-to-ground transcript, a document rife with human error. Some even question the mission report, which incorporated months of data analysis and debriefings with the crew.
Heiko KĂźffen, a German software engineer and space enthusiast, first came across this discrepancy in 2009, while trying to design a homemade real-time tracker that he could use to relive the moon landing for its 40th anniversary. (When I called KĂźffen a decade later, on the morning of the 50th anniversary, he told me that he couldnât talk long, because he was closely following an online replay of the 195-hour Apollo 11 mission.) When he tried to match the air-to-ground transcript to an audiovisual recording, he found that the transcript was behindâand that one of the records had to be wrong about the time of Armstrongâs first step.
KĂźffen sees the moon landing as perhaps âthe greatest achievement of mankind,â and he was disappointed that NASA had not recorded so great a milestone with greater precision. In 2011, he began analyzing transcripts and footage in an effort to establish a definitive time stamp.
The obstacles to absolute precision, KĂźffen soon discovered, are many. For starters, the moon is very far away, and even light takes more than one second to travel the 238,900 miles between here and there. So, too, did the audiovisual data beamed back down into the analog television sets of the roughly 500 million people watching as Armstrong descended the ladder of the lunar module. Add the time to process those data, and the delay between the moment Armstrong took the step and the moment viewers on Earth saw it extends to as long as a few seconds, by some accounts.
Even accounting for lag, synchronizing the audio with the video still poses a problem, mainly because hardly any of whatâs audible in the recordings is visible in the footage. Had Armstrong taken out a bass drum and given it a thump just before stepping off the ladder, that moment would have anchored the sights to the sounds. But when the astronauts spoke, their reflective visors concealed their lips.
âIn the end,â KĂźffen acknowledged, âwe can never know if video and audio are really in sync.â
The one thing tying the audio recordings back to time stamps is the real-time air-to-ground transcript, which, of course, loops right back to the original problem: human error.
[Read: The best banter from Apollo 11](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/apollo-moon-landing-transcripts/594451/)
âYou have to remember that it wasnât like an Olympic swim race where touching the wall stops the timer,â Bill Barry, NASAâs chief historian, said in an email, when I asked him about the discrepancy. âThe exact time of Neilâs first boot contact with the lunar surface is necessarily subject to interpretation because it was measured from a distance with âtoolsâ that were never meant to produce precision down to the second.â
To synchronize the transcripts and the recordings, KĂźffen made what he calls âreasonable assumptions,â which nearly a decade later he has yet to see contradicted. Armstrong, he found, first set foot on the moon at 10:56:25âcloser, in other words, to the almost universally dismissed time given to the press that night than to the time produced by the mission reportâs months-long analysis.
Eric Jones, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher who founded the [Apollo Lunar Surface Journal](https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/), concluded after conducting an investigation modeled on KĂźffenâs that first contact occurred at 10:56:17. NASAâs sticking with its November 1969 mission report: If thereâs an official time, Barry said, itâs 10:56:15.
A half century of scrutiny may not have produced a solution, but it has fairly well established the insolubility of the problem. Barry, for one, is not especially concerned. âThis,â he said, âis what happens when space geeks and engineers have 50 years to analyze and re-analyze data.â But listening to KĂźffen effuse in imperfect English, itâs hard to believe that geekery is all there is to this.
âThe adventure of going where nobody ever has been before, into the unknown, driven by our natural given curiosity, is deeply soul-touching, and so I dived into the matter a bit deeper,â he told me. âKnowing when walking on another celestial body happened for the very first time ⌠has a meaning to me, because it is important it happened, and I believe we should know all about it the best possible and most detailed way, and that includes the exact time.â
Even if we donât assign the moment of the step the kind of transcendental significance that KĂźffen does, our lingering uncertainty has a poignancy to it. Watching the Saturn V rocket rise âout of its incarnation of flameâ at Kennedy Space Center, Norman Mailer wondered whether the Apollo 11 mission wasnât one massive act of hubris, so vulgar as to verge on sacrilege. âThe notion that man voyaged out to fulfill the desire of God,â Mailer wrote, âwas either the heart of the vision, or anathema to that true angel in Heaven they would violate by the fires of their ascent.â
[Read: âThe fires of their ascentâ](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/norman-mailers-fire-moon-blastoff/594154/)
Contained within that moment of hubris, though, is a moment of humility. Even as we were surpassing the limits of human exploration, we were bumping up against the limits of human knowledge, though we didnât realize it at the time. We may have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God, but we were not infallible.
When I asked KĂźffen why heâs devoted so many hours to analyzing a single second, he answered with his favorite quote from the Apollo program. The quote doesnât come from Apollo 11, but from Apollo 15. Standing on the lunar surface, looking out over the plains of Hadley, Commander David Scott understood âa fundamental truth to our nature.â âMan,â he said, âmust explore. And this is exploration at its greatest.â Inconsequential as it seems, KĂźffenâs quest to answer an unanswerable question expresses that same fundamental nature, perhaps even in terms more universal than Scottâs: Few of us have walked the moon, but almost all of us have sought to know what cannot be known.
### About the Author
[](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jacob-stern/)
[Jacob Stern](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jacob-stern/)
[Jacob Stern](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jacob-stern/) is a contributing writer at *The Atlantic.*
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| Readable Markdown | The Apollo 11 mission was, in most respects, a feat of extraordinary precision.
Traveling at a maximum velocity of about seven miles a second, the Saturn V rocket would have launched the crew far off course in the event of even a slight navigational error. From nearly 240,000 miles away, Houstonâs Mission Control could track the spacecraftâs position to within 30 feet. The command moduleâs guidance computer kept time to the millisecond.
And yet for all that precision, no one can say with absolute certainty when, *exactly*, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.
Most of the details of the moment are canonical: Armstrong took his one small step on July 20, 1969â50 years ago this past Saturday. The step took place just after 10:56 eastern time that night. And Armstrong bookended the step with the lines âOkay, Iâm going to step off the \[lunar module\] nowâ and âThatâs one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.â (Or was it â[one small step for *a* man](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/proposal-armstrong-flubbed-his-big-moon-speech-because-of-ohio/276473/),â as Armstrong insisted?) At some point during the roughly eight-second interval between those two lines, he became the first human being to walk on the moon. But when exactly he did so is unclear.
The night of the moon landing, NASA told the press that Armstrong had stepped onto the lunar surface at 10:56:20 p.m., and *The New York Times* reported that same time stamp on its [front page](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/07/21/issue.html) the next morning. The real-time transcription of the missionâs air-to-ground voice transmission suggests that Armstrong took the step sometime between 10:56:43 and 10:56:48. And when NASAâs official Apollo 11 mission report went public in November 1969, it pinpointed first contact five seconds earlier, at 10:56:15.
[Read: The moment that made Neil Armstrongâs heart rate spike](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/apollo-11-moon-heart-rates/593971/)
Experts agree that the time NASA fed reporters is probably the least reliable of the bunch. They also donât put much stock in the air-to-ground transcript, a document rife with human error. Some even question the mission report, which incorporated months of data analysis and debriefings with the crew.
Heiko KĂźffen, a German software engineer and space enthusiast, first came across this discrepancy in 2009, while trying to design a homemade real-time tracker that he could use to relive the moon landing for its 40th anniversary. (When I called KĂźffen a decade later, on the morning of the 50th anniversary, he told me that he couldnât talk long, because he was closely following an online replay of the 195-hour Apollo 11 mission.) When he tried to match the air-to-ground transcript to an audiovisual recording, he found that the transcript was behindâand that one of the records had to be wrong about the time of Armstrongâs first step.
KĂźffen sees the moon landing as perhaps âthe greatest achievement of mankind,â and he was disappointed that NASA had not recorded so great a milestone with greater precision. In 2011, he began analyzing transcripts and footage in an effort to establish a definitive time stamp.
The obstacles to absolute precision, KĂźffen soon discovered, are many. For starters, the moon is very far away, and even light takes more than one second to travel the 238,900 miles between here and there. So, too, did the audiovisual data beamed back down into the analog television sets of the roughly 500 million people watching as Armstrong descended the ladder of the lunar module. Add the time to process those data, and the delay between the moment Armstrong took the step and the moment viewers on Earth saw it extends to as long as a few seconds, by some accounts.
Even accounting for lag, synchronizing the audio with the video still poses a problem, mainly because hardly any of whatâs audible in the recordings is visible in the footage. Had Armstrong taken out a bass drum and given it a thump just before stepping off the ladder, that moment would have anchored the sights to the sounds. But when the astronauts spoke, their reflective visors concealed their lips.
âIn the end,â KĂźffen acknowledged, âwe can never know if video and audio are really in sync.â
The one thing tying the audio recordings back to time stamps is the real-time air-to-ground transcript, which, of course, loops right back to the original problem: human error.
[Read: The best banter from Apollo 11](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/apollo-moon-landing-transcripts/594451/)
âYou have to remember that it wasnât like an Olympic swim race where touching the wall stops the timer,â Bill Barry, NASAâs chief historian, said in an email, when I asked him about the discrepancy. âThe exact time of Neilâs first boot contact with the lunar surface is necessarily subject to interpretation because it was measured from a distance with âtoolsâ that were never meant to produce precision down to the second.â
To synchronize the transcripts and the recordings, KĂźffen made what he calls âreasonable assumptions,â which nearly a decade later he has yet to see contradicted. Armstrong, he found, first set foot on the moon at 10:56:25âcloser, in other words, to the almost universally dismissed time given to the press that night than to the time produced by the mission reportâs months-long analysis.
Eric Jones, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher who founded the [Apollo Lunar Surface Journal](https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/), concluded after conducting an investigation modeled on KĂźffenâs that first contact occurred at 10:56:17. NASAâs sticking with its November 1969 mission report: If thereâs an official time, Barry said, itâs 10:56:15.
A half century of scrutiny may not have produced a solution, but it has fairly well established the insolubility of the problem. Barry, for one, is not especially concerned. âThis,â he said, âis what happens when space geeks and engineers have 50 years to analyze and re-analyze data.â But listening to KĂźffen effuse in imperfect English, itâs hard to believe that geekery is all there is to this.
âThe adventure of going where nobody ever has been before, into the unknown, driven by our natural given curiosity, is deeply soul-touching, and so I dived into the matter a bit deeper,â he told me. âKnowing when walking on another celestial body happened for the very first time ⌠has a meaning to me, because it is important it happened, and I believe we should know all about it the best possible and most detailed way, and that includes the exact time.â
Even if we donât assign the moment of the step the kind of transcendental significance that KĂźffen does, our lingering uncertainty has a poignancy to it. Watching the Saturn V rocket rise âout of its incarnation of flameâ at Kennedy Space Center, Norman Mailer wondered whether the Apollo 11 mission wasnât one massive act of hubris, so vulgar as to verge on sacrilege. âThe notion that man voyaged out to fulfill the desire of God,â Mailer wrote, âwas either the heart of the vision, or anathema to that true angel in Heaven they would violate by the fires of their ascent.â
[Read: âThe fires of their ascentâ](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/norman-mailers-fire-moon-blastoff/594154/)
Contained within that moment of hubris, though, is a moment of humility. Even as we were surpassing the limits of human exploration, we were bumping up against the limits of human knowledge, though we didnât realize it at the time. We may have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God, but we were not infallible.
When I asked KĂźffen why heâs devoted so many hours to analyzing a single second, he answered with his favorite quote from the Apollo program. The quote doesnât come from Apollo 11, but from Apollo 15. Standing on the lunar surface, looking out over the plains of Hadley, Commander David Scott understood âa fundamental truth to our nature.â âMan,â he said, âmust explore. And this is exploration at its greatest.â Inconsequential as it seems, KĂźffenâs quest to answer an unanswerable question expresses that same fundamental nature, perhaps even in terms more universal than Scottâs: Few of us have walked the moon, but almost all of us have sought to know what cannot be known. |
| Shard | 21 (laksa) |
| Root Hash | 13119341252700813021 |
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