He had one-hundred-and-nine hours to rehearse his lines, and his lines amounted to a mere thirteen words. He could have spent eight hours on each word if he really wanted to. He could have devoted an entire working day to making sure each word came out just right.

You couldn’t have blamed him for doing so. It had cost $25 billion to get him to this point. He’d travelled 240,000 miles. Half a billion people were watching.

It had officially kicked off eight years ago, but this event was the fulfilment of a dream as old as dreams themselves. After centuries of learning, of striving, of fantasising, this was to be humanity’s finest hour. This was to be our first stop on our way out of the cradle and into the big, wide universe. A human being was going to walk on the moon.

The occasion was momentous enough to be recorded to the second. At 02:56:15 UTC on the 21st of July 1969, Neil Armstrong set his left boot on the surface of the moon and delivered those famous words:



Exactly which famous wor…