[applause] good evening, im delighted to be in houston, always delighted to be in houston and its almost always a good space so i want to take you back to sunday afternoon, july 20 1969. It was about 2 15 central time. Neil armstrong and buzz aldrin were in their spaceship, they were in the lunar module. They were getting ready to fly lunar orbit, from an orbiter on the moon to Tranquility Base. And that last leg of the 240,000 mile journey takes just 13 minutes from the thousand feet to the surface of the moon. The first three minutes of the 13 minute went perfectly normally. The last 10 minutes were a cascade of problems and you might not have even noticed problems if you were listening live because thats the way after not adMission Control work. The first problem was that as armstrong and aldrin down to the moon they were looking out the window. Armstrong discovered the place they were intending to land was strewn with boulders between 10 and 20 feet. They were boulders as big as honda accord and Toyota Camrys so the lunar module had been flying on autopilot, the computerhad been flying and at that point Neil Armstrong took control and he had to go looking for a different place to land. The second problem was in the lunar module, did the lander have enough fuel to look for a good place to land and what would happen as they got closer and closerto the bottom of the fuel tank. The lunar module was burning up thousand pounds of fuel every 30 seconds. The total cushion for fuel was 120 seconds. They had flown all the way to the moon and the extra fuel they had was exactly 2 minutes and this is houston and people probably know this but the reason you fly with such a little cushion is because weight is always a problem. A pound of fuel in the lunar module requires three extra pounds of fuel on the launchpad in cape kennedy so it was a constant balancing of what you could bring and how soon you had to be and they didnt have enough fuel to do a second run the margin was chosen at 120 seconds so as armstrong is looking for another place to land in the back of his mind hes thinking how low do i have to be to the surface of the moon so that if i run out of fuel, we will be okay . 25 feet, no problem. The lunar module is designed to fall from 25 feet and not be damaged. Of course theres no atmosphere on the moon, atmosphere is passing thin so once you run out of fuel, youre falling straight down like a rock. Defeat, theywould probably be okay. About 40 feet, between 40 and 70 feet, you might well damage the lunar module in such a way that you wouldnt be able to take back off. Youd be trapped on the moon forever. So in the back of his mind Neil Armstrong is thinking how much fuel there was and where he wanted to be relative to the surface in case we ran out. Heres how serious those two situationswere. During the last three minutes of the Lunar Landing , Mission Control only spoke to the lunar module twice and they only said 2 words each time. Once they said 60 seconds and once they said 30 seconds. Just reminding buzzaldrin and Neil Armstrong how much fuel they had in case they werent paying attention. Otherwise Mission Control which was silent which was unusual for people familiar with missioncontrol. Theres lots of instructions going on whether anybody needed them or not. They were letting armstrong and aldrin fought fly their spaceship but the amazing thing is there looking for a new place to land and was not in fact the big problems of that first Lunar Landing. The big problem was the lunar modules computer. Thecomputer was flying the ship , even with armstrong running the positioning control,running the joystick. He was just giving commands to the computer and the computer was doing the flying. A computer on the lunar module was a marvel. It was the smallest, fastest, most noble computer that had ever been created. It was taking info in from accelerometers, Mission Control, from the modules on radar, it was sending instructions out to all kinds of devices as well. It was controlling the big in that the lunar module was controlling,the positioning thrusters around the top edge of the lunar module. There were 200 inputs and outputs to that one little computer, taking data and sending information back to hundred spots in the lunar module. As aldrin is headed for the service, the Computers Made alarm goes off. This is not the seatbelt hanger in your car. This is the car alarm of your car inside the car. It was hard to ignore. It was called the master alarm for a reason Area Computers alarm went off five times in four minutes. Just as armstrong was discovering that he needed a new place to land and started looking for it, just as he was thinking about running out of fuel. And the question was what did neil need . Were they safe to land on the moon . Or did they have to, it was actually an abort button right there in the cockpit of the lunar module, or the saturday Morning Party version of an abort what. I tactical red button andif you push the red abort button , the lunar module took straight back off immediately and headed for orbit and safety of the question was what did neil need was rattling the entire inside of the lunar module because as i said, you only got one shot. There were no go rounds, there was a 20billion program at state in that moment. There was one guy who was used in in Mission Control who knew what the alarm that. His name was jack barnett. It was a serious Mission Control veteran. Years out of the university of michigan. And he had a hand written chart of apollo lunar module alarm code. He had written everything alarm code down and across what it meant and what significance was and whether it was okay to keepgoing based on what that alarm was and what had happened. Jack garman had 10 seconds to decide, this 25yearold kid, three years out of university. Had 10 seconds to decide the fate of that first Lunar Landing. Heres what was happening, heres why the alarm was going off. The computer was being overloaded with work. An electrical circuit inside the lunar module from a radar wasnt in use was pouring signals into the computer. The computer was dumping the extra work that it didnt need, restarting itself in the middle of the Lunar Landing while continuing to fly the ship. And then it was sounding the alarm alarm meant theres something wrong withyour spaceship. Either computer and find, i am doing my work you want to check out whats wrong. Thats the alarm code that was sounding, im getting too much work, throwing away the work i dont need. Im doing my work but some things wrongsomewhere else. We check it out. And jack garman new thats what the alarm was. So he gave the okay to land, you are go. To the bosses in Mission Control and, said armstrong and aldrin go to land, dont worry about the alarm. And then jack garman could hear the alarm from the lunar module go off again and again every three seconds, every 30 or 40 seconds. It was a computer recording the same thing and jack garman didnt wait to be asked, he shouted into his headset same type of alarm,go to land. And so on and 59 seconds after the last alarm, we have that Famous Exchange that were all familiar with. Houston, Tranquility Base here. Eagle has landed. From houston, roger, Tranquility Base. Youve got a lot of guys about to turn blue. We are breathing again, thank you. And most of us didnt know why they were blue or why they had resumed breathing. Because if you listen to the transcript, you dont actually have a sense of how urgent the situation was that they were going through. The apollo flights computer actually say that first Lunar Landing. It was the size of a small briefcase. And even in 1969, very basic computer understood what was going on. It was making decisions a lot faster than armstrong and aldrin ever could have madedecisions. I find it amazing that it was rebooting itself as the lunar module was slowing down to the ground area and rebooted itself or quickly in the typical macintosh laptop does these days. At one point when armstrong and aldrin were 1000 feet off the lunar surface and the last alarm went off, the display from computers and the lunar module dark, completely blank. For 10 long seconds, to be honest if the dashboard on my car were blank for 10 seconds at highway speed, that would seem like a lot. They were 1000 feet following a 40 feet a second. You dont hear a word about that. Either armstrong nor aldrin is a missioncontrol by the way , a computer screens are blank. Armstrong said in his technical debriefing we work sure they were comingback. Even the computer displays going blank was a sign that computer was actually doing exactly the right thing it didnt have enough Processing Power to light up the displays for the astronauts and fly the station so it flew the station and it turned the displays on it was able to some call that work that it didnt need. The power computer gets 85,000 calculations a second. That sounds prettygood. Ill bet everyone in here as a smart phone and most of you have an iphone. The current iphone does 5 trillion calculations a second. It would have taken that apollo computer 681 days to do the work that your iphone can do in one second. Just different kinds of work, of course. Apollo computer and less brainpower than your microwave oven do not ask your oven to fly you to the moon. Going to the moon it turns out was the largest single project ever undertaken by human beings outside of war. It was 10 times the size of the panama canal, three times the size of the Manhattan Project and yet here we are at the 50th anniversary, weve lost track of two really important things about that undertaking. One is howhard it was. How hard it was to get to the moon and the second is the impact that thats efforts had on the way we live now and thats why i decided to write a book. I wanted to bring that to life for the current generation and step back a little bit and reassess what the impact of the moonproject was. We are 33 days from the anniversary, as we stand here today and as i said, im delighted to be in houston. I have lived in this town for months of my life reporting about space. I started reporting about space with the challenger disaster in 1986 and ive been writingabout it ever since. Im going to tell you some stories and im going to read a little bit about the book and i hope you guys are going to have some questions im going to read a little passage from the book. This is about what happens about seven hours after they landed. This is the scene of the first moonwalk, but not the scene you are use to hearing about. There we go. For the first moonwalk ever, sonny ream was inside nasas Mission Control building watching every move on the big screen. Three and was a supervisor of the most important Moon Technology after the lunar module itself, the spacesuit and as neilarmstrong and buzz aldrin got comfortable bouncing around on the moon , they got towork , ream got more and more uncomfortable. The spacesuits themselves were fine, they were the work of people who brought america across your heart brought in the mid1960s. Playtex had sold its Industrial Division to nasa in part with a cheeky observation that the company had a lot of expertise and loving clothing had to be both taxable and formfitting. It was when the cavorting started on the moon that ream got butterflies in his stomach. Buzz aldrin and spent half an hour bumping around in his spacesuit with his baby round helmet when all of a sudden, there he came bounding from foot to foot a kid on a playground right at the video camera he and armstrong had set upin the far side of their landing site. Aldrin was romping right at the world going larger and larger and he was talking about how he had discovered that you have to watch yourself when you start bouncing around exactly like you was bouncing around because you couldnt quite trust your sense of balancein moon gravity. He might be going too fast, lose your footing and end up on your belly getting along the lunar ground. You do have to be careful track of where your center of mass is. As if his fellow earthlings soon find this moonwalk advice useful. Sometimes it takes two or three pages to make sure you got your feet underneath you. Ream should have been having the most glorious moment of his career. He joined the Industrial Division of playtex, killed over in 1960 at age 22. And by the time of the moon landing before he had turned 30, he had become a project manager or space. It seems blazing wetsuitswere a triumph of technology and imagination. They were completely selfcontained scratch with room just for one. Theyhad been tested , to and custom tailored to each astronaut. But what happened on earth really didnt matter. Thats what ream wasthinking. There was only one test that mattered and buzz aldrin was conducting it right then, there in full view of the whole world on the airless mood with unabashed enthusiasm. Aldrin should trip land hard on the moon rock, well, the suit would be a seamstresses problem, itwould be a disaster. The suit would deflate instantly. Catastrophically. Afternot would die on tv in front of the world. Thats what sonny really was thinkingabout. Aldrin ran, planted his left leg andcut to the right like a running back dodging tackles. He had kangaroo hot right past the American Flag and announced that this was not a good way of moving around forward mobility is not quite as good as it is in a more conventional one after another, he said he and he disappeared fromthe cameras view. By this time, ream could barely contain his cheekiness. That silly bathis out there running all over the place. Conflict by and the moon base was quiet. Armstrong was working by the lunar module with his back to the camera. Suddenly aldrin came dashing in from the left parade across the land site, moon dirt flying from his glutes. And the generation back to Mission Control was called but his feet was anything but. He was doing a move run, as far as saying what a sustained pace might be, but what im using now we get rather tiring after several hundred. Even though the whole point of the spacesuit was to explore the moon, ream could not wait for the moonwalk to end. Why in the world where they all acting crazy on the moon, of all places . Ream knew that the astronauts were out there you for actually enjoyingwhat they were doing. If the world was excited about the moon landing, imagine that you guys got to do it. According to the flightplan after the landing armstrong and aldrin were scheduled for a five hour. A told Mission Control and wanted to get the net and get outside had flown all the way to the moon to wait. Still, what aldrin aaround ream, nothing please get back up the ladder, get back into the safety of the lunar module they went back up that ladder and shut that and it was the happiest moment of my life really wasnt until quite a while later i reveled in the accomplishment. Reams anxiety is a time machine that puts us back in the moments before anyone knew how the story would come out and its a reminder of the mostly unsung men and women who made it possible for armstrong and aldrin to leave those distinctive blueprints and Tranquility Base. I was really captured, i remember the moments when i watched this video of these guys in Mission Controls support room and heard them talking about watching the first moonwalk was why wouldnt you the exuberance over what you have accomplished . Those are your spacesuits. The guys 29 years old, he can charge the spacesuit for the first landing on a another planetary body and only all he could do was think i hope theyll get back in the spaceship and close the hatch. And what was so captivating about that moment for me was i had never thought about the moon landings from the perspective of not knowing that they happened and if they succeeded. So it was sort of opened the window to just the beginnings of what it was like to be somebody in charge of or working on all this technology. Not just the astronauts, the whole reputation of their country was relying on. Class when john kennedy said in may 1961, lets go to the moon. It was impossible. It was literally an impossible fact. There was no moon rocket Strong Enough to fly to the moon. It wasshipped like the lunar module that can land on the moon. Not even agreement about what kind of ship could land on the moon there were no spaces to walk around in. There was no moon car to drive around on the moon in area there was no base small enough to fly to the moon, no basic area and in fact, when kennedy said lets go to the moon, United States and 15 minutes of total space Flight Experience and only five of those minutes are actually in zero gravity. There was even a debate at that moment on scientists inside nasa on whether human beings would be able to think in zero gravity and of course, they travel would be a lot harder if you couldnt thinkin space. Apollo created a culture of what i think of as innovation on a deadline. Apollo required innovation on a deadline. There were 10,000 problems to be solved between1961 and 1969. And nasa looked everywhere with real openmindedness about how to get those problems solved. As i said, they picked playtex of all people to design the spacesuits and that division has been in many corporate iterations since then. Playtex is part of haynes but that same group still makes all of nasas spacesuits. They make the spacesuits and the maneuvering unit that are used around the space station. General motors designed and engineered the lunar rover. Often, the innovation got have our inability in the 1960s to manufacture what was conceived and designed that did not slow anyone down. So spacesuits as i said were hightech marbles. 21 layers of fabric, they were Strong