From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2000 - 21:56:57 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
> (It might explain some of the less than poetically triumphant utterances
> broadcast from space. ... `Uh, duh, it's, like, real... barren... and, like,
> empty up here,
> Capcon. I'm gonna play some miniature golf now.')
Actually the explanation for the way astronauts broadcast from space
is simpler. They had hands-free radios that would start to broadcast
when the voice activated the transmitter, a little like speaker phones
do today, only in those days, with slower electronics, the first 200
or so milliseconds of transmission would be lost. So the astronauts
would always use a one-off from "duh," which was "ahhh" as in
"ahhhh Houston ahhhhh we have ahhhhh problem..."
Legend holds that Armstrong was so overwhelmed when he stood
on the moon, he forgot to say ahhhh, which caused the "a" to be
lost, so that his comment came out "one small step for...man." At
least thats what was claimed. The second half of that sentence was
unintelligible at the time, so we all thought he was saying "This is
really no big deal, just another small step for man." spike
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