TODAY IN HISTORY On July 20, 1969, at 10:56 p.m. EDT, man took his first step on the moon. It was an event that would cleave humans relationship with space in two, separating the millennia in which human beings had merely served as observers, and the moment that humans became visitors to planetary bodies their ancestors could see only from a distance. News coverage of the event was a massive undertaking, involving thousands of reporters, photographers, editors, technicians and other staff from all over the world. There was little sleep for the more than 3,000 news personnel at the Houston Space Center during those two historic days. Meals were hasty. Pressure was immense. Time flew, AP staffer Richard Beene wrote in a story about APs coverage of the mission launch and moonwalk. Dozens of AP reporters would build on that to tell almost every conceivable angle of the story, working 24 hours a day from desks at the Space Center in Houston, watching the landing with astronauts families, and elsewhere. Leading the APs coverage of the mission was Lou Boccardi, in his first field assignment for the company. Boccardi would go on to become APs president and chief executive officer. Everyone was just so energized and high on the excitement of the event, Boccardi said this week from his home in suburban New York. It took people a while to come down from the high of when (Neil Armstrong) said, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. When we heard those words it was just electric; we knew then that the mission had been successful. There we were, a few feet from Mission Control talking to the guys up in the capsule, about the time that man landed and walked on the moon, Boccardi recalled. I was directing the finest news staff you could imagine assembling and we were constructing part of history. Armstrong maintained before his death in 2012 that the actual words of his famous quote were, Thats one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind. A 2006 computer analysis of the original recordings found evidence that this was the case, but the a was uttered too quickly to be picked up by human ears. The APs original stories and transcripts of the audio recording do not include the a. Story courtesy of Associated Press
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 16:06:12 +0000
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