Neil armstrong and buzz aldrin were in their spaceship in the lunar module and they were getting ready to fly from the lunar orbit around the moon to Tranquility Base to the surface. That last leg of the 240,000mile journey would take just 13 minutes from 50,000 feet to the surface of the moon. The first three minutes of the 13 minutes went perfectly normally. The last ten minutes were a cascade of problems. You might not have even noticed the problems if you were listening live because that is the bait astronauts and Mission Control word. The first problem is that as armstrong and aldrin swooped down towards the moon, they were looking out the window and armstrong discovered the place they were intending to land was strewn with boulders between ten and 20 feet, as big as honda accord and toyota camrys. So, the module had been flying on autopilot. The computer had been flying and at that point the armstrong took control and had to look for a different place to land. That led to the second problem. The second problem was did the lunar module have enough fuel to look for a good place to land and what would happen as they dont closer and closer to the bottom of the fuel tank. It was burning a thousand pounds of fuel every 30 seconds. The total cushion for fuel was 120 seconds. Theyd flown all the way to the moon and the extra fuel they had was exactly two minutes and of course this is houston. You probably know this, but the reason you fly with such a little push in his weight is always a problem. A pound of fuel in the lunar module requires three extra pounds on the launch pad in cape canaveral. So it was a constant balancing of what you could bring and how slim. They didnt have enough fuel to do this and run so it was chosen at 120 seconds. Shes looking around, fly into looking for another place to land and in the back of his mind, thinking how low do i have to be t at the surface of the mn so that if i run out of fuel it will be okay. 25 feet, no problem its designed to fall from a 25 feet to the surface of the moon and not be damaged. Of course theres no atmosphere on the moon. The atmosphere is thin so once you run out of fuel you are straight down like a rock. 40 feet they would probably be okay. Above 40 feet, between 40 to 70 you might well damage the lunar module in such a way that you wouldnt be able to take back off. You would be trapped on the moon forever. In the back of his mind, Neil Armstrong was thinking of how much fuel there was and where he wanted to be relative to the surface in case he ran out. Heres how serious those situations were. During the last three minutes of the Lunar Landing, Mission Control onlmissioncontrol only e twice and they only said two words each time. One space at 60 seconds and once they said 30 seconds just reminding Neil Armstrong and buzz aldrin how much fuel they have in case they were not paying attention otherwise Mission Control was silent for which was pretty unfamiliar with Mission Control. They were letting them fly their spaceship. Looking for a new place to land and running low on fuel were not in fact the big problem of the first Lunar Landing. The big problem is the lunar modules computer. It was flying the ship even with armstrong running the positioning control, running the joystick he was giving commands to the computer into the computer waand the computerwas. The computer on the lunar module was a marvel. It was the smallest, fastest, most nimble computer that had ever been created. It was taking data in from gyroscopes into data straight in from Mission Control from the lunar module on the radar and it was sending instructions out to all kinds of devices as well, controlling the big engine, that the lunar module was hovering on, the positioning thrusters around at the top end of the lunar module. In fact, there are two drip input and outputs to that one little computer. As armstrong and aldrin are heading for the surface, the computers main alarm goes off. This isnt the seatbelt in your car. Its the car alarm of your car inside the car. It was a hard t to ignore and it was called to the master of them for a reason. The alarm went off five times in four minutes. Just as armstrong discovered he needed a new place to land and started looking for it just as he was thinking of running out of fuel and the question is what did he meet . Is it safe to land a on the moo, you only got one shot. There were no go around. It was a 20 milliondollar program at stake in that moment. There was one in Mission Control who knew what the alarm meant. His name was jack garman, he was in Mission Control veteran. Three years out of the university of michigan and he had a hand written chart of the apollo code hed written every single code and sent across what it meant and what the significance was and whether it was okay to keep going east on what the alarm was and when it happened. Jack garman had ten seconds to decide that its 25yearold kid, three years out of university, 102nd to decide the fate of the first Lunar Landing. Here is why the alarm was going off. The computer was being overloaded with work. An electrical circuit inside of the lunar module from a radar that 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. The alarm meant theres something wrong with your spaceship. I. E. The computer and finding and continuing to do my work that he wants to check out whats wrong. That is the alarm sounded. Im throwing away the work i dont need. Im continuing to do my work. But something has gone wrong somewhere else. Please check it out. And jack garman knew that is what the alarm was. He gave the okay to land and they said to armstrong and aldrin dont worry about the alarm. Then jack garman could hear the alarm from the lunar module going off again and again every few seconds, every 30 or 40 seconds. The computer was reporting the same thing. Jack didnt wait. He simply shouted into his headset same type of alarm, go to land, keep going. So, 159 after the last alarm, we have the Famous Exchange that we are all familiar with. Houston Tranquility Base here, the eagle ha eagle has landed. And from houston, roger, Tranquility Base. You have a lot of guys about to turn blue. We are breathing again. Thank you. Most of us didnt know why they were blue or why they had resumed breathing because if you listen to the transcripts, you dont have a sense of how urgent the situation was that they were going through. The apollo flight computer actually saved the first Lunar Landing. It was the size of a small briefcase, and even in 1969, that very basic computer understood what was going on. It was making decisions a lot faster than armstrong and aldrin ever could have made the decisions. I find it remarkable that it was rebooting itself as the lunar module was floating down to the ground. It rebooted itself much more typical than the macintosh laptop does these days. At one point when they were just a thousand feet off the lunar surface in the last alarm went off, the display on the computers in the module with dark. Completely blank. For ten seconds, if the dashboard on my car went blank for ten seconds as highway at hy speed, that would seem like a lot. They were falling at 40 feet a second. You dont hear a word about that. Neither armstrong nor aldrin set it to Mission Control by the way, the computer screens or blank now. Armstrong said in his technical debriefing we were not sure they were coming back. Even the computer display was going blind as a sign that the computer was actually doing exactly the right thing. At that moment it didnt have enough Processing Power to write up the display so it turned the displays on and was able to dump all of that work and what it didnt need. I bet everyone in here has a smart phone and most of you have an iphone. A current iphone does 5 trillion calculations. It would have taken that computer 681 days to do the work that your phone can do in one second. Different kinds of work of course. It had less brain power than your microwave oven but please do not ask your microwave oven to fly you to the moon. Coming tgoing to the moon it tut was the largest single project ever undertaken by human beings outside of the war. Ten times the size of the panama canal, three times the size of the manhattan project. And yet, weve lost track and here we are at the 50th anniversary this summer. Itits lost track of two importt things about that undertaking. One is how hard it was and how hard it is to get to the moon. The second is the impact that effort had on the way we live now. Thats why i decided to write the book. I wanted to bring that back to life for the current generation and step back a little bit and reassess what the impact of the moon project 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 much of my life reporting about space. I started reporting about space with challenger disaster in 1986 and ive been writing about it ever since. Im going to tell you some stories and read a little bit from the book. Then i hope that you will have some questions. Im going to read a little passage from a book. This is about what happened about seven hours after they landed. This is the scene of the first moon walk, but not the one that you are used to hearing about that. In spite of nasas Mission Control building watching every move on the big screen. Neil armstrong and buzz aldrin got comfortable bouncing around on the moon and got to work. They were fine. They were the work of playtex, people who brought america to work of the cross your heart brought in the 60s. They sold the Industrial Division to nasa in part with the observation that the company had a lot of expertise developing clothing that had to be both flexible and formfitti formfitting. Its when they started on the moon that he got butterflies in his stomach. Buzz aldrin had spent half an hour gone in and around in his spacesuit witspace suit with hid helmet when all of a sudden, hughes became bounding from foot to foot like a kid in a playground right at the video camera they set up at the far side of the landing site larger and larger he was talking about how he had discovered you have to watch your self when you start bouncing around because exactly like he was bouncing around because he couldnt quite trust your sense of balance in moon gravity. You might get going too fast, lose your footing and end up on your belly. You have to be rather careful to keep track of where your center of mass is what they might find this moonwalk advice useful sometimes it takes two or three pieces to make sure that you have your feet underneath you. They should have been having the most glorious moment of his career. He joined the Industrial Division of playtex in 1960 at age 22 and by the time of their landing before he turned 30, he had become the project manager for space. The spacecraft had room for just one. They had been tested, tweaked and custom tailored to each astronaut thats what happened on earth really didnt matter. That is what he was thinking. In full view of the world with unabashed enthusiasm if he should trip and land har landedn the moon rock it would be a seamstresss problem, it would be a disaster. It would deflate instantly, catastrophically. The astronaut would die on tv in front of the world. Thats what he was thinking about. Those aldrin planted his left leg and cut to the right again nfl player dodging tacklers. He announced this wasnt a good way of moving around. Forward mobility isnt quite as good as it is in the more conventional 1 foot after another. Then he disappeared from the cameras view. But this time he could barely contain. That silly bastard is out there running all over the place, he thought. Seconds ticked by and the moon base was quiet. Armstrong was working with respect to the camera and suddenly aldrin came cashing in from the left straight across the landing site moon dirt flying from his boots and the narration was calm but his speed was anything but. He was doing a moon run. I think the one im using now it is rather tiring after several hundred feet. Even though the whole point was to explore the moon come he couldnt wait for the moonwalk to an end. Why in the world was aldrin acting crazy on the moving of all places. He knew of course the astronauts were out there, quote, euphorically enjoying what they were doing. The world was excited about the moon landing, imagine being the two guys that got to do it. In fact according to the flight plan right after the landing, armstrong and aldrin were scheduled for a fivehour nap and they told Mission Control they wanted to ditch the math. They didnt fly all the way to the moon in order to sleep. Watching them coming he could think of nothing but please get back up the ladder and into the safety of the lunar module. They went up the ladder and showed that hatcheshutthe patcht moment of my life. It wasnt until quite a while later i reveled over the accomplishment. The anxiety is a time machine. It made it possible to leave those distinctive boot prints i was captured i remember the moment when i watched this video of these guys in the Mission Support control room and talking about the first moon walk because why wouldnt he be exuberant over what you had accomplished. I hope they get back in the spaceship and close the hatch. What was so captivating about that moment for me was i never thought about the moon landing from the perspective of not knowing that they have been and that they succeeded. So its sort of opened up a window into the beginning of what it was like to be somebody in charge of or working on the technology with the whole reputation of the country that it was relying on. When they said lets go to the moon, it was impossible, it wasnt literally impossible task. There was no moon rocket Strong Enough to fly to the moon and no spaceship that could land on the moon. There wasnt even agreement about what kind of shape you could land on the moon. There were no space suits to walk around in. There was no moon car to drive around. There was no space computer small enough, there was no space food. In fact when kennedy said lets go to the moon, they have 15 minutes of total space Flight Experience and only five of those minutes were in zero gravity. There was even a debate among scientists inside nasa about whether human beings would be able to think in zero gravity, and of course space travel would be a lot harder if we couldnt think in space. Apollo created a culture of innovation on a deadline. Required innovation on a deadline. There were 10,000 problems to be solved between 1961 and 1969. Nasa looked everywhere within openmindedness of how t to get the problem solved. As i said, they picked playtex of all people to design the space suit and by the way, that decision, there have been many Corporate Information since th then. That same group still makes all of the space suits and maneuvering units that are used around. Often, the innovation got ahead of our ability in the 1960s to manufacture what was conceived and designed. That didnt slow anyone down. So, the space suits were hightech marvels. 21 layers of fabric they were Strong Enough to stop a meteorite but flexible enough to allow those aldrin to do king roo hops across the moon. Every stitch and every layer by women working in dover delaware. The heat shield for the apollo capsule coming back through the atmosphere the command module of course came back for the broad backside to slow down the capsule that the friction created temperatures of 5,000 degrees and all materials had to be invented to protect the command module and astronauts from 5,000 degrees. They have no trouble coming up with the material and how to get it on the back of the capsule and get it to stay there. Each was filled on at the time by an ma a man or womans yielda gun each filled by hand one at a time. To be certified to do that work, what about the computer, the remarkable computer that is what the astronauts to the moon and then from orbit down to the surface. The apollo guidance computer revolutionized computing in the United States. It literally laid the foundation for the world we live in today that it had just 73 k. Of memory. If you get an email from your local newspaper, is likely if ly requires more than 70 k. It was literally handcrafted. Every single one was wired and woven into the precise position by thousands of women in a factory in massachusetts. The ability to manufacture the computer went about five years behind the design and the need for the computer so they wove the computer memory one at a time. Each had to be in exactly the right place. It took six weeks to manufactu manufacture. Just remarkable. We think of the astronauts as courageous and daring and they were. The more that i learned about the quantity of work that they did in the range of things they took responsibility for and the more impressed i was with them. But the story of the astronauts as well told. The computer programmers into the aeronautical engineers and factory workers it turned out well so courageous an also cour. They have to be. It had to be perfect if we were going to successfully get 11 Apollo Missions into the air. As a part of the reporting and research for the book, i added up the total amount of time to the total amount of work that was done during those apollo mission. Nasa is very good at producing statistics, thankfully for somebody like me. The 11 Apollo Missions lasted 2,500 hours. A little more than 100 days total in space, 2,500 hours for every hour of spaceflight, 1 million hours of work was done on earth. With a million hours of work . A typical person in the United States, their whole career is 100,000. Every hour of spaceflight required to work life of ten people to prepare for that o