Televisions around the world are focused on the big event. The year is 1969, the day is July 20th.. Rai cannot miss it: a live broadcast is scheduled that will go straight for 25 hours. In the studio there is a journalist who has climbed the ranks continuously thanks to his unshakeable calm, the sense of security he instills in viewers, his narrative skills. To think that Titus Pond – because that’s his name – started years earlier as a sports reporter at the Winter Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo. And now he finds himself here, followed by millions of Italians, to tell the story of an absolutely decisive moment in the modern history of humanity. Apollo 11 is about to land on the Moon. These are moments of extreme excitement. Anxiety digs a furrow inside the chest. Everyone hopes that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin can hook onto the surface of the Earth’s satellite without any problems. After all, no one ever knows how things will go the first few times.
What is better known is that Stagno, for that moment, had prepared himself a lot. Already three years earlier, in 1966, he had flown to America to witness the first cries of the Apollo Program. He studied and did his research, because he knows that journalistic talent is not enough to get by in certain situations: it is much better to know things. The other indisputable fact is that the journalists who follow the moon landing live are two: Stagno from the studios in Rome, precisely, and Ruggero Orlando, who instead is in the press room in Houston. And here the television disaster creeps in, which then, if watched later, would have remained engraved in collective history as an epic moment.
There Rai’s “vigil” It’s been a while. The landing module is getting closer and closer to the Moon. The tension is palpable. Then, suddenly, the formidable announcement. Stagno clenches both fists and exclaims: “It touched! It has just touched the lunar soil!”. People in homes all over Italy are hugging and smiling: it went well, they succeeded. However, someone does not agree and, singularly, it is his colleague, Orlando. The latter is connected live with the Lander and hears in his headphones what the two astronauts are saying. Only when he clearly hears the words Reached landinforms Stagno that the module did indeed touch the ground, but at least ten seconds after his colleague’s announcement.
Moment of impasse. The two journalists who are great friends, do not see it the same way. Each is convinced of what he said, but it is also true that the distance between the studios of via Teulada and Houston could favor misunderstandings. In the end, however, from subsequent analysis of the recordings it emerges that they were both wrong: Tito Stagno announced the moon landing 56 seconds early and Ruggero Orlando about 10 seconds late.
A little bad,
anyway. Despite the surreal misunderstanding live, Rai achieved an unprecedented television exploit. And today everyone, remembering the moon landing, associates that moment with the faces and voices of Stagno and Orlando.