Journalism please please help me giving a warm welcome to charles fishman. [applause] good evening. Im delighted to be in houston. I am always delighted to be in houston. Tonight is a nice night. 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, in the lunar module. They were getting ready to fly from lunar orbit, down to the moon to Tranquility Base and that last leg of the 240,000 mile 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 we 10 minutes were a cascade of problems. You would not have noticed the problems if you are listening live because that is the way astronaut and Mission Control were. The first problem was as armstrong and aldrin swooped down toward the moon, looking out the window, armstrong discovered the place they were intending to land was strewn with boulders between 10 and 20 feet, boulders as big as honda accords and toyota camrys. The lunar module had been fine on autopilot and at that point Neil Armstrong took control and had to go looking for a different place to land. That led to the second problem. The second problem was, did the lunar module coveted the eagle have enough fuel to look for a good place to land . What would happen as they got closer and closer to the bottom of the fuel tank . The lunar module was burning 1000 pounds of fuel every 30 seconds. The total quotient for fuel was 120 seconds. They had flown all the way to the moon and the extra fuel they had was exactly two minutes. This is houston, people probably know this, the reason you fly with such a little cushion is a pound of fuel in the lunar module requires three extra pounds of fuel on the launchpad in kate kennedy. It was a constant balancing, house when you had to be and they didnt have enough fuel to do a second run at landing on the moons the margin was chosen at 120 seconds. As armstrong is looking around for another place to land in the back of his mind he is thinking how low do i have to be to the surface of the moon so if i run out of fuel we all going to be okay . 25 feet no problems, the leader module is designed to fall from 25 feet to the surface of the moon and not be damaged. There is no atmosphere on the moon or passively thin. Once you run out of fuel you are falling straight down. 40 feet they would probably be okay. Above 40 feet, 4070 feet you might well damage the lunar module in such a way that you wouldnt be able he would be trapped on the moon forever. In the back of his mind Neil Armstrong is thinking how much fuel there was and where he wanted to be in case he ran out. This how serious those situations where. During the last three minutes of the Lunar Landing, Mission Control only spoke to the lunar module twice and lisa two words each time. Once they said 60 seconds. Once they said 30 seconds. Telling them how much fuel they had in case they werent paying attention. Otherwise Mission Control was silent which is unusual for people familiar with Mission Control, usually instructions going up whether they need them or not. They were letting armstrong and dalton aldrin fighter spaceship. Looking for a new place to land and running low on fuel were not the big problem of the first Lunar Landing. The big problem was the lunar module computer. The computer was flying the ship even with armstrong running the positioning control, he was just giving commands to the computer and the computer was doing the flying. The computer on the lunar module was a marvel. It was the smallest, fastest, most nimble computer that had ever been created. Taking data from gyroscopes and accelerometers straight from Mission Control, from the lunar modules own radar, and it was sending instructions to all kinds of devices as well, controlling the big engine, controlling the positioning thrusters on the top edge of the lunar module. 200 input and outputs to that one little computer, taking data and sending information back in the lunar module. As armstrong and aldrin are headed to the surface the computers main alarm goes off. This isnt the seatbelt finger in your car. This is the car alarm of your car inside the car. It was called the master alarm for a reason. The computers alarm went off five times in four minutes just as armstrong was discovering he needed a new place to land and started looking for it, just as he was thinking about running out of fuel. The question was what did the alarm mean . Were they safe to land on the moon . Or was it and abort in the cockpit of the lunar module . A saturday morning Cartoon Version of an abort button, and actual red button. If you push the red abort button the leader module took straight back off immediately and headed back to orbit. The question was what did the alarm mean that was reveling the entire inside of the lunar module . There was only one shot, now go arounds, a 20 billion program at stake. There was one guy in houston, in Mission Control, who knew what the alarm meant. His name was jack garland. A Mission Control veteran, three years out of the university of michigan. He had a handwritten chart of apollo lunar module alarms. He had written every single alarm code down, what it meant and what its significance was and whether was okay to keep going based on what the alarm was. Jack diamond had 10 seconds to decide. Is 25yearold in three years out of the university had 10 seconds to decide the fate of the first Lunar Landing. The computer was being overloaded, an electrical circuit inside the lunar module from radar that wasnt in use was pouring signals into the computer. The computer was dumping the extra work that he didnt need, restarting itself in the middle of the Lunar Landing while continuing to fly the ship and it was sounding the alarm. The alarm meant there is something wrong with your spaceship. The computer is fine, i am continuing to do my work but you ought to check out what is wrong. That is the alarm code is im getting too much work and continuing to do my work, something has gone wrong somewhere else, please check it out. Jack garland knew that was the alarm light so he gave the okay to land, you are go, to the bosses in Mission Control and capcom said go to land, dont worry about the alarm. Then he could hear the alarm go off again and again every two seconds. The computer reporting the same thing. He didnt wait to be asked, he said we shouted into his head set same type of alarm, go to land, keep going. 159 seconds after the last alarm we have that Famous Exchange we are all familiar with, houston, Tranquility Base here, the eagle has landed. 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 they were going through. The apollo flight computer was the size of a small briefcase. Even in 1969 that very basic computer understood what was going on. It was making decisions a lot faster than armstrong and aldrin could have. I find it remarkable he was rebooting itself as the lunar module was floating down to the ground. Rebooted itself more quickly than the typical macintosh laptop these days. At one point when armstrong and aldrin were just 1000 feet off the lunar surface the last alarm went off, the display on the computers of the lunar module went dark. For ten long seconds, if the dashboard on my car went blank for ten seconds at highway speed that would seem like a lot. 1000 feet, falling at 40 feet a second, you dont hear a word about that. None of them said to Mission Control by the way the computer screens are blank. Armstrong said in his technical debriefing we werent sure they were coming back. Even the computer display had gone blank, a sign that computer was doing the right thing. At that moment it didnt have enough processing power, it turned at the displays on and was able to dump all that work it didnt need. The apollo computer did 85,000 calculations a second. Everyone in here has a smartphone and most of you have an iphone. The current iphone does 5 trillion calculations a second, taking that apollo computer 681 days to do the work your iphone can do in one second, just different kinds of work. The apollo computer had less brainpower than your microwave oven. Please do not ask your microwave oven to fly you to the moon. Going to the moon was the largest single project ever undertaken by human beings outside of war. It was 10 times the size of the panama canal. We have lost track on the 50th anniversary this summer, we have lost track of two important things about that undertaking. One is how hard it was to get to the moon. The second is the impact on the way we live now. That is why i decided to write a book, 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. As i said im delighted to be in houston. I have literally lived in this town for months of my life reporting on spaces i started reporting on space with the challenger disaster in 1986 and i have been writing about it ever since. Im going to tell you some stories, review a little bit from the book. I hope you have some questions. Im going to read you a little passage from the book. This is about what happened about 7 hours after they landed. The scene of the first moon walk but not a senior used to hearing about. Here we go. The first moonwalk ever, sonny reem was watching every move on the big screen. He was a supervisor of the most important Moon Technology for the spacesuits. As Neil Armstrong and buzz aldrin got comfortable bouncing around on the moon, got to work, sonny reihm got more uncomfortable. The spacesuits were fine, they were the work of playtex, the people who brought america across your heart brought in the mid1960s. The Industrial Division to nasa, made the cheeky activation the company had a lot of expertise in clothing that had to be formfitting. When the cavorting started on the moon, sonny reihm got butterflies in his stomach. Buzz aldrin was bumping around in his spacesuit with his big round helmet when all of a sudden here it came, bounding from foot to foot like a kid in the playground right at the videocamera he and armstrong had set up at the landing site. Aldrin was romping straight at the world and talking about how he had discovered how to watch yourself when you start bouncing around like he was bouncing around because you couldnt trust your sense of balance in lunar gravity. Going too fast, lose your footing and end up liability on the rocky learner ground. You have to be careful to track where your center of mass is as though earthlings would soon find this moonwalk advice useful. The time it takes three paces. Sonny reihm should have been having the most glorious moment of his career. He had joined playtex Industrial Division in 1960 at age 22. By the time of the moon landing before he turned 30 he had become the project manager for space suits. The blaze white suits were a triumph of technology and imagination. They were completely selfcontained spacecraft with room just for one. They had been tested, tweaked, custom tailored but what happened on earth didnt matter, that is what sonny reihm was thinking. Only one test mattered and buzz aldrin was contacting it right then in full view of the whole world on the airless moon with unabashed enthusiasm. Aldrin should trip and land hard on a moon rock a tear in the suit would not be a seamstresss problem, it would be a disaster. The suit would deflate instantly, catastrophically. The astronaut would die on tv in front of the world. That is what sonny reihm was thinking about. Aldrin would land on his left leg and came to the right like an nfl running back. He kangaroo hopped in front of the american flag. This was not a good way of moving around. Not quite as good as the more conventional 1 foot after another, he said. And he disappeared from the camera at you. This time sonny reihm could barely contain himself. That silly basket is out there running all over the place. Seconds ticked by. Armstrong was by the lunar module looking back to the camera. Suddenly aldrin came dashing into the left straight across the landing site, moon dirt flying from his boots, his narration back to Mission Control was called but his speed was anything but. He was doing a moon run. What a sustained pace might be like the one i am using now is rather tiring. Even though the whole point of the spacesuits was to explore the moon, sonny reihm could not wait for the moonwalk to end. Why in the world was aldrin acting crazy . He knew the astronauts were out there euphoric lee enjoying what they were doing. The world was excited about the moon landing. Imagine being the two guys who got to do it. In fact, according to the flightplan, right after the landing armstrong and aldrin were scheduled for a nap but they want to get out right away. They hadnt phone all the way to the moon to sleep. Instead watching aldrin around, sonny reihm could think of nothing but get back up the ladder and into the safety of the lunar module. They went back up the ladder, the happiest moment of my life. It wasnt until quite a while later that i reveled in the accomplishment. Sonny reihms anxiety is a time machine. It puts us back in the moments before anyone knew how the story would come out. It is a reminder of the mostly unsung men and women who made it possible for armstrong and altman to leave those blueprints at Tranquility Base. I was captured, i remember the moment i watched this video of these guys in the Mission Control support room and heard them talking about watching the first moonwalk. Why wouldnt you be exuberant over what you have accomplished . A guy who is 29 years old is in charge of spacesuits for the first ever landing of human beings on another planetary body and all he can do is think god, i hope they get back in the spaceship. What was so captivating about that moment for me was i had never thought about the moon landings from the perspective of not knowing they had happened and succeeded. It opened a window into the beginnings of what it is like to be somebody in charge of or working on all this technology not just the astronauts but the whole reputation of the country was relying on. When john kennedy said in may 1961 lets go to the moon, it was impossible. It was literally an impossible task. There was no moon rocket Strong Enough to fly to the moon, there was no spaceship like the lunar module that could land on the moon. There wasnt even an agreement what kind of ship could land on the moon,its Walking Around in. There was no moon car to drive around on the moon in, there was no space computer small enough to fight to the moon, there was no kennedy said lets go to the moon, the United States had 15 minutes of total spaceflight experience and only 5 of those minutes were actually in 0 gravity. There was even a debate among scientists inside nasa about whether human beings would be able to think in 0 gravity. Of course space travel would be a lot harder if you couldnt think in 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 between 1961, and 1969. Nasa looked everywhere with real openmindedness how to get those problems solved. They picked playtex to design the spacesuits and that division of playtex, many corporate iterations since then. It is not part of ames. That same group still makes all of nasas spacesuits. They make the space station spacesuits and the maneuvering units used around the space station. General motors designed and engineered the lunar rover. Often the innovation got ahead of our ability to manufacture what was conceived and designed. That did not slow anyone down. The spacesuits were hightech models, 21 layers of nested fabric. They were Strong Enough to stop micrometeorites but not Strong Enough for buzz aldrin to do kangaroo hopped across the moon. Every stitch in every layer sown by hand by women working and over, delaware. The heat shield for the apollo capsules coming back, the command module coming back through the atmosphere, the command modules came back but first, the backside, to slow down the capsule. The friction created temperatures of 5000c. All the material had to be invented to protect the command module and the astronauts. They had no trouble coming up with the material. How to get it onto the back of the capsule and get it to stay, they designed a honeycomb made out of fiberglass on the back of the command module where they needed heat shield material and the honeycombs contained 370,000 individual cells, each cell was filled one at a time by a man or woman using a caught gun, filled by hand one at a time, filling the cells with materials so delicate answer technical they trained for two weeks on how to fill the cells, to be certified to do that work. What about the computer, that remarkable computer that flew the astronauts to the moon and flew them from orbit to the surface . The apollo guidance computer, the apollo flight computer revolutionized computing in the United States. It literally laid the foundation for the world we live in today. They had just 703k of memory. If you get email this morning, headlines from your local newspaper, it likely requires more than 703k. The Apollo Computers memory was literally handcrafted. Every single one and 0 was a wire, each of those wires was woven into precise position by dozens of women in factories in massachusetts. The ability to manufacture the computer lagged 5 years behind the design and need for the computer and so these women wove the computer one bit