6 Minute English / Learning lessons from the Moon

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Georgie. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind famous words, but do you know who said them?

Of course - that was Neil Armstrong, the first person to land on the Moon.

Right, the Apollo 11 spacecraft landed Neil Armstrong on the Moon on the 20th of July 1969. But in decades after that famous event, interest in returning to the Moon faded away... until now.

Summer 2023 saw the start of a new race for the Moon between Russia s Luna-25 spacecraft and India s Chandrayaan-3. Russia s rocket crashed on landing, but Chandrayaan-3 successfully touched down on the 23rd of August, making India only the fourth country to successfully land on the Moon.

But why this sudden interest in going back to the Moon? That s what we ll be discussing in this programme and, as usual, we'll be learning some useful new vocabulary too.

But before we blast off, I have a question for you, Georgie. Everyone knows that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, and was followed by a second astronaut, Buzz Aldrin. But who was the third Apollo astronaut who flew the command module while his crewmates walked on the Moon? Was it:

a) Yuri Gagarin?b) Michael Collins? or,c) Alan Shepard?

Hmm, I think it was Michael Collins.