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00:00I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out
00:10of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
00:15In the 1960s, an impossible dream came true when human beings walked on another world.
00:24In all, 24 Americans went to the moon.
00:31But it took an unseen army of over 400,000 engineers and technicians to make it possible.
00:39This is the story of the men and women who built the machines that took us to the moon.
00:54Washington, D.C., 1961.
01:01And as the implications of Kennedy's speech sank in,
01:05many of the country's top aerospace engineers wondered whether it was really possible to get to the moon.
01:13Kennedy's speech shocked me personally.
01:15And I was relatively close to what was going on.
01:20I mean, it was, wow, can we conceive of doing this?
01:24Because we literally hadn't gotten off the ground yet.
01:27The planning in NASA at that time said that we should not have, as part of our program, a manned lunar program.
01:50We're not ready enough with our rockets and so on to spend any time on it.
01:57But NASA was in a hurry, and two months after Kennedy's announcement, the first Apollo contract was awarded.
02:19It was not for a rocket, but for a system that would guide the rocket to the moon.
02:27If you look at all of the prime contracts to build the rockets, to build the spacecraft, to build the capsules, to build the lunar lander,
02:36none of those contracts would even be let for months, in some cases years.
02:40That's a measure of the importance that the upper NASA administration saw in guidance.
02:48How are we going to get to the moon?
02:52The contract went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
02:56and ran into immediate controversy.
03:00There was actually a budding industry out there that had developed guidance systems,
03:08and people from industry were quite upset.
03:12They felt that they should have been given a chance to bid on the contract,
03:17and a university is not ordinarily what the government contracts out to build hardware for operational systems.
03:24Here was a university essentially committing to build a system that was going to fly to the moon.
03:33But MIT was no ordinary university.
03:38And MIT's lab, no ordinary research lab.
03:42MIT's instrumentation lab was run by a colorful and charismatic engineer called Charles Draper.
03:56An overriding policy of the laboratory is its emphasis on technology of the real world.
04:05Draper was this sort of larger-than-life personality.
04:08He had this unique background in psychology and physics,
04:13and a lot of people felt that gave him a kind of special insight into human characters
04:17that surrounded these types of technologies.
04:23Bob Siemens was one of Draper's early students.
04:28He said, you're not going to have money for the babes,
04:30you're not going to have money for the horses,
04:32but you'll have an awful lot of fun.
04:34There was a big clock on the wall,
04:39and he could control the speed of the clock.
04:43And all of a sudden, it would be 5.30,
04:46even though your own watch might not say 5 yet.
04:50And he yelled to his secretary,
04:52Murray, come on in, it's time for drinks.
04:54But eccentricities aside,
05:04Draper was a single-minded engineer
05:06who had caught NASA's attention
05:08with a revolutionary navigational aid.
05:14Hi, hi.
05:15Hello, Dr. Draper.
05:16He called it an inertial guidance system,
05:21an extraordinarily clever device that, in 1953,
05:26had enabled him to navigate an airplane from Boston to Los Angeles
05:30without any reference to external landmarks.
05:33They put this inertial system,
05:38at the time it was quite large,
05:39it looked like a, you know,
05:41the size of an atomic bomb or something.
05:44Put it aboard an Air Force bomber
05:47and flew it all the way across the country.
05:55Chip Collins was Draper's pilot
05:57on what turned out to be an eventful 3,000-mile flight.
06:01My job was to get out of the seat
06:04and let the system work through the autopilot.
06:11As far as navigation is concerned,
06:14we could be flying in a sealed box,
06:17definitely flying.
06:19All went well for the first few hours.
06:25Then, towards the end of the flight,
06:28Draper's guidance system suddenly
06:30appeared to lose its way.
06:33I saw it, and I heard Doc say,
06:36hey, Chipper, what the hell's going on up front?
06:39I said, Doc, I don't know,
06:41but the system is commanding a turn to the right.
06:45Well, there was a big bustle in the back
06:49of people trying to decide what to do next,
06:52what was happening.
06:53Here we were in the 11th hour,
06:56and the thing looked like it was going to go crazy.
07:03Yet, as the plane emerged from clouds over Los Angeles,
07:07it was precisely on course.
07:10The guidance system had simply been correcting for side winds.
07:15The system recognized that it was being pushed off course,
07:19and it was merely resisting that
07:22and doing just what it was supposed to do.
07:24By the time they reached their destination,
07:31they were within sight of the airport
07:33based entirely on this inertial guidance technology.
07:37Long ways from MIT, sir.
07:39Thanks so much for letting us come along.
07:41Maybe one could say this is one small step
07:43toward the age of spacecraft.
07:45It was this technology NASA now hoped could be developed
07:56to take humans not a few thousand miles across America,
08:00but the half million miles to the moon and back.
08:07It would be a huge challenge.
08:15Spring, 1962, and as engineers at MIT got down to work
08:23on the Apollo navigation system,
08:25their starting point was the university's
08:28revolutionary guidance technology.
08:33It consisted of a bundle of gyroscopes
08:36and instruments for measuring changes in direction.
08:41It looked like a basketball.
08:43It's about that size.
08:45And inside of it are these very, very precise gyroscopes.
08:50And all the gyroscopes do is actually keep the platform
08:53perfectly flat and aligned in what's called inertial space.
08:57That means not space relative to the Earth or to the Earth horizon,
09:01but out there in some abstract idea of place.
09:06The system was based on the principle
09:09that when a gyro is set spinning,
09:11it remains on a fixed axis, whatever happens around it.
09:15So it provides a known baseline or platform
09:22against which to calculate movement.
09:30In this demonstration,
09:32the gyros are the rock-solid blue cylinders
09:35in the center of the spinning chamber.
09:37Then on that platform are accelerometers.
09:45There's a separate kind of instrument that measures the accelerations.
09:50These detect whether a craft is moving forwards or backwards,
09:55left or right, up or down, relative to the fixed platform.
09:59If you then keep a record of these movements,
10:01you'll always know exactly where you are.
10:05It was really high mechanical technology.
10:09Draper worked actually closely with the Waltham Watch Company
10:11out in the suburbs of Boston,
10:13where he taught his people precision machining,
10:16mechanical gyroscopes, spinning with ever-higher precision,
10:20very low friction, very low wear.
10:22Really, these things were put together like watches,
10:26like the most precise watch you can imagine.
10:28Nobody had ever tried to manufacture instruments
10:32that would work with such accuracy.
10:34Draper imposed new standards of hygiene and cleanliness.
10:38He forbade workers from coming to work
10:40and assembling the gyroscopes.
10:42If they had just come back from vacation in a sunny area,
10:45and they might have skin flaking off from their suntans,
10:48and he wouldn't allow women to wear makeup
10:50when they were assembling the gyroscopes.
10:52The most troublesome component was the gyro's ball bearings.
10:56Even a minute flaw could, over the huge distances in space,
11:00lead to major inaccuracies.
11:04The most troublesome component was the gyro's ball bearings.
11:10Even a minute flaw could, over the huge distances in space,
11:14lead to major inaccuracies.
11:17Gyro after gyro failed to meet the required standard.
11:26People were clamoring on us, our group,
11:29saying, well, why are you rejecting these gyros, you know?
11:32How can you keep rejecting them?
11:35And meanwhile, we're saying, well, we don't trust their reliability.
11:39It didn't take long to feel like, holy mackerel, where am I, you know?
11:45After a couple months, I knew that this was a very big job.
11:54Nobody was sure the new system would ever be reliable enough on its own,
11:59and so MIT added a very ancient instrument,
12:03something sailors had used for hundreds of years to navigate out of sight of land.
12:09It's called a sextant.
12:13Draper built a simulator on the roof at MIT that enabled astronauts to practice
12:18manually checking the inertial guidance system against the stars.
12:28But the lab would also need to provide one other vital piece of equipment.
12:32Draper's aircraft experiments had used a simple electromechanical device
12:40to read the data from the gyros and turn it into flight instructions.
12:48The journey to the moon would require something much more sophisticated.
12:52They would need a modern digital computer.
12:57Yet, to put one of these in a spacecraft was an entirely new challenge.
13:20Computers in the early 1960s were huge.
13:23The idea of squeezing such a monster into a spacecraft seemed preposterous.
13:34Dick Batten was the man who had to do it.
13:38When North American got the job to build the command module,
13:42they get on the phone and call MIT and say,
13:46understand that there's going to be a computer in the command module, how big is it?
13:52And we had no idea how big it was going to be.
13:56Right now, it was just a bunch of equipment on a rack.
13:59And so we asked around, what do you think?
14:03What should we tell them?
14:04And I said, oh, well, maybe a cubic foot.
14:07Let's say it's a cubic foot.
14:09Batten's new computer would draw heavily on a newly emerging technology that used silicon chips.
14:18But the chips were still very new.
14:21Manufacturers were still learning to make them.
14:24And nobody was sure of their reliability.
14:27One of their tests involved taking all of these integrated circuit chips
14:32and immersing them in a bath of Freon.
14:37Then they would take them out, and they would dry them off, and they would weigh them.
14:42And if the weight of the chip came out after the bath of Freon,
14:47just a few micrograms greater than it was supposed to be when it went in,
14:52that meant that some of the Freon must have gotten into a little hole in the chip,
14:56and somewhere there was a fault in the chip.
14:58And just those few micrograms would indicate that
15:01this chip should be rejected, and the whole batch would be rejected, too.
15:08So that put a lot of attention on making sure every part was built properly
15:15and had quality components.
15:18What was special about this computer was people had to stake their lives on it.
15:23If this computer failed, if one of the circuits went bad, or crashed,
15:27or had a bug at the wrong moment, people were going to die.
15:30And that was really a first to put people's lives on the line with integrated circuits and hardware.
15:37At its height, the Apollo program was consuming 60% of the chips manufactured in the United States.
15:49But even when they were reliable, their processing speeds were so slow,
15:55there were severe limits to the number of tasks they could handle simultaneously,
16:00before the computer ground to a standstill.
16:06For a while, it looked as though the technology would never match the needs of landing on the moon.
16:12The man who came up with a solution to the problem was Hal Lanning.
16:27Hal is one of the most brilliant people I ever worked with.
16:30He was very quiet, hard to get a word out of him.
16:33He's a very shy person, it struck me, kept out of the limelight.
16:38And it was others who spoke for him and recognized his brilliance.
16:43He was someone who everybody at the laboratory knew about and looked up to
16:48as a sort of a genius at the laboratory.
16:51Lanning remembers wrestling with the difficulty of computer overload.
17:01I think it was a pretty tough job.
17:03I know a lot of meetings were held on the subject of what was expendable.
17:11Thinning of things together, how things could overlap each other,
17:16what liberties you could take.
17:20Lanning's answer was a radical but beautifully simple solution
17:25that ensured important jobs got priority.
17:31The high-technology way to run computer systems in the 1960s was called timesharing.
17:36And in timesharing, there were a bunch of different users or demands on the computer's time,
17:41and each one got an equal slice of the computer's time.
17:45Hal Lanning really took an entirely different approach,
17:48and that is assigning a different priority to each task.
17:52So a low-priority job might be updating the display to show the astronaut something
17:58that was just sort of an indicator of how it was doing.
18:01A high-priority job is keeping the lunar module upright as it's moving toward a landing.
18:07And then if you got into trouble, you could drop the low-priority jobs, keep the high-priority jobs running.
18:18Yet as the computer evolved, there was confusion at NASA.
18:22The technology was so new, nobody was sure exactly what it could do.
18:28Should it provide the navigation for the entire mission?
18:32Or was it primarily an aid to the astronauts?
18:36Over the course of the 1960s, you see groups of astronauts
18:40and groups of engineers at the instrumentation lab really working together,
18:44they're almost negotiating out a role for the human operator.
18:49It was a fundamental confusion that would, in the years to come,
18:55cause serious problems for the newly emerging breed of software engineers.
19:00What kind of computer programs would they need to write?
19:04What would they need to do?
19:06And how many would there need to be?
19:18In the early 1960s, as work on the Apollo computer and navigation system got underway,
19:24software was an almost unknown concept.
19:28I went home and told my wife that I was in charge of software.
19:34And she said, please don't tell any of our friends.
19:41It sounded like a real nothing piece of work.
19:47The word was barely invented at the time.
19:50And the original contract for the Apollo system says,
19:53of course, the instrumentation lab will write the programs that will run the thing.
19:59It turns out that software became one of the major defining problems of the system.
20:07With nobody clear on exactly what the computer should do,
20:11the software engineers were free to write almost anything they liked.
20:17At least, at first.
20:19There were no specs.
20:22We made it up.
20:24And it's always amazing to me.
20:28Why was I allowed to program something that hadn't even been specified
20:34that would be critical in assuring the success of the whole Apollo program?
20:38I couldn't believe it.
20:39But that's the way it was.
20:41We made it up as we went along.
20:48The lack of specifications led to a proliferation of software routines
20:53at a time when programs were agonizingly laborious.
20:58Each program was written by hand and turned into punched cards a computer could read.
21:04If you submitted a job during the daytime, it was likely to be hours before your output would appear on the table outside the computer room.
21:15We could stand there and watch it and wait for it to come out.
21:18There's a line printer output that was maybe an eighth of an inch thick.
21:23If you screwed up, you got an output that was maybe two feet thick.
21:27But the real problem was not the glut of paper.
21:34It was memory.
21:35The computer simply didn't have much.
21:39The overall memory for the Apollo guidance computer program was equivalent to 72K kilobytes, 72 kilobytes of memory in modern terms.
21:50Today, a $100 MP3 player has 50,000 times more storage space.
22:01Furthermore, the computer disks that stored the programs were fragile and unreliable.
22:14The solution today seems extraordinary.
22:17It was called rope memory.
22:23You actually had to send the program to a factory, and women in the factory would literally weave the software into this core rope memory.
22:36We called it the LOL method, the little old lady method, of wiring these cores.
22:47Not a very nice, today you couldn't say that.
22:51Computer code consists of ones and zeros.
22:57In this case, it was a physical distinction.
23:00Margaret Hamilton was one of the very few female engineers on the project.
23:09The rope is made up of rings and wires.
23:13And if the wire goes through the core, it represents a one, and around the core, it represents a zero.
23:19It was extremely slow.
23:24One program could take several months to weave, and if there was an error, it was a nightmare to correct.
23:33The software program was falling dangerously behind schedule.
23:38Everybody was running behind. We weren't the only ones.
23:44But it became more and more nerve-wracking to Houston to see, what are those MIT guys up to?
23:50Are they going to pull this off?
23:51It was becoming painfully clear that everybody had dramatically underestimated the scale of the job facing Draper's lab.
24:08In 1966, NASA sent in a troubleshooter.
24:12Bill Tindall starts looking at the Apollo software and ringing alarm bells.
24:23In fact, he writes back to headquarters and says,
24:27I worry that we might not make the end of the decade deadline for the moon landing because the programs won't be finished.
24:33Very strong statement when you're building these enormous rockets and you're building launch pads and you're training astronauts,
24:43and then a bunch of programs might keep you from getting to the moon on the president's deadline.
24:48Very, very unusual situation.
24:56Bill Tindall started going through the lab's work with a fine-tooth comb.
25:00He found widespread duplication in the software that made it grossly inefficient.
25:11It was slow, full of bugs, and was outgrowing the available memory.
25:20He began writing this series of memos from Cambridge where he would come visit back to the NASA headquarters,
25:26which are known to this day as Tyndall Grahams.
25:31They basically said, MIT is screwing this up.
25:35They're not paying enough attention.
25:37They don't have the discipline of a large organization.
25:40This is not a research project anymore.
25:43They really have to get serious.
25:45Tyndall started knocking heads together.
25:50Bill Tyndall came to the laboratory on Friday the 13th.
25:53It already was bad news.
25:57We all resented these guys coming in here and ripping our baby apart.
26:02He really put our nose to the grindstone and really kept bird-dogging us.
26:07That is, this is what you said last week.
26:09What are you going to tell me next week?
26:11You told me it was going to be ready now.
26:13When is it going to be ready?
26:14And so on.
26:15We kept pushing this in our face to the point of being, we thought, extremely arrogant.
26:20As programs were discarded, there was a whiff of rebellion.
26:25People at the instrumentation laboratory, in one case, actually rebelled.
26:30We actually had, I can recall, a meeting where we all got together and actually complained about how difficult it was to work under this environment.
26:38By mid-1966, Draper's dream of an onboard navigation system that ran the entire mission had vanished.
26:49They now said, we will make the navigation from the ground primarily.
26:57We will use the radio waves as the primary source of navigation and the onboard computer will be essentially the backup.
27:04The astronauts would now get their principal navigational data from radio signals from the Earth.
27:14Yet Draper's guidance system would still be their only backup on the far side of the Moon.
27:23Or if the radio signal failed altogether.
27:26But would even the demoted system be reliable enough?
27:35And would it ever be ready on time?
27:371967.
27:51And with the deadline for landing on the Moon getting closer, the instrumentation lab at MIT was struggling to meet its schedule.
28:01Engineers began to put in long hours.
28:04Too long for some of them.
28:08In my personal case, I think that contributed to the end of my first marriage.
28:15Almost all of us are divorced that ended up doing that.
28:20I don't know that that's directly responsible, but it's probably more than a coincidence.
28:24My wife said to the kids, they were youngish then, guess who's coming to dinner tonight?
28:33Daddy?
28:35That was their response, because it was a fairly rare event that I was home for dinner.
28:41Finally, after one of the hardest years many at MIT could remember, the computer had been squeezed into what looked like a small refrigerator.
28:55And the software had been tested to exhaustion.
29:04In October 1968, Apollo 7 became the first successful manned Apollo mission.
29:10For 11 days, three astronauts orbited the Earth using the sextant to check the automatic guidance system.
29:21It worked perfectly.
29:25It was time to take the next step.
29:29It was time to take the next step.
29:42We have ignition sequence start.
29:44The engines alarm.
29:45One, four, three, two...
29:48On December 21st, 1968, Apollo 8 took off from Cape Kennedy and headed into space.
29:59It was going to be the first attempt ever to send men around the moon.
30:07At the Draper Lab in Cambridge, tension was high.
30:16Well, it was more or less unbelievable.
30:19You were trying to think, you mean this stuff is all finally going to work?
30:23They kept announcing what the velocity of the spacecraft was, and it was getting bigger and bigger.
30:28And I turned to the guy next to me and I said, my God, they're really going to do this.
30:34It's very hard for me to convey to you, at this time, the level of excitement in that room.
30:42It was like listening to every syllable of every word that the astronauts might say.
30:49Transmission is coming to you approximately halfway between the moon and the Earth.
30:54We have about less than 40 hours left to go to the moon.
31:02As the astronauts headed towards the moon, they checked their position over and over again.
31:08Jim Lovell decided that he would show that you could do navigation onboard the spacecraft using the sextant.
31:21And he did that many times, actually, and demonstrated it worked extremely well.
31:25Then, as Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon, all communication with Earth vanished.
31:38Now, they would be entirely dependent on the MIT system.
31:42Everything went blank for a while.
31:46And you had to wait, and you knew when you would pick up their voice again if they were in lunar orbit.
31:54And you know when you'd pick it up if they never made lunar orbit.
31:58Or if they were halfway into lunar orbit, which would have been even worse.
32:01We all knew what instant of time there would, if everything went right, when we would hear from them again.
32:12We just sat there for 45 minutes waiting to hear whether this was a success or not.
32:24And after 45 minutes, the communication officer at Houston started to call the Apollo spacecraft.
32:30Apollo 8, Houston, over.
32:31Apollo Control, Houston, Jerry Carr has placed a call. We're standing by.
32:43No one answered, and so everyone was pretty concerned.
32:51Finally, just a little bit after we expected to hear from him, there was a voice.
32:55Go ahead, Houston, this is Apollo 8. Very complete. Our orbit is 160.5 by 160.5.
33:05Apollo 8, this is Houston. Roger. Good to hear your voice.
33:09Apollo 8 had reemerged, right on schedule, and was back in radio contact.
33:16Seconds later, MIT's computer relayed back its onboard calculation of where the spacecraft was.
33:27It corresponded exactly with NASA's Earth-based calculations.
33:33There was a tremendous amount of relief in the room, a lot of cheering, a lot of satisfaction that what we had produced actually worked.
33:46For the engineers, it was the vindication of years of hard work and broken marriages.
34:01I remember watching it at home, Christmas Eve, 1968.
34:06So I was like, you know, a million other people that watched the same flight.
34:13Brought tears to the eyes.
34:16It's doing it to me now.
34:21Even just sitting at home, watching it on a little TV, black and white.
34:26It was a, we did that. Staggering thought.
34:38But now, the computer that had helped them around the moon would have to do something even more demanding.
34:44It would have to land them on the moon.
34:55And you have maneuvering, right?
34:57We'll be shortly.
34:59July 21st, 1969.
35:02And Apollo 11 was three days into its mission to land on the moon.
35:06Apollo 11, Houston, we are go for undocking, over.
35:09Roger, Eagle, Thunder.
35:11As the lunar modules separated from the command module,
35:16Armstrong and Aldrin were 12 minutes from the lunar surface.
35:21I think you've got a fine-looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact you're upside down.
35:26Somebody's upside down.
35:28They were about to draw on an entirely new software routine never fully tested in space before.
35:37The program without which it would be impossible to land on the moon.
35:46Yet, incredibly, the program had been written almost as an afterthought by a junior engineer.
35:53If you talk to the guy who really wrote a lot of that software, Don Isles,
35:59here's this 22-year-old guy, gets his first job.
36:03The program is already two-thirds of the way complete.
36:06And they assigned him to write the programs to do the actual lunar landing.
36:10There was always a trade-off of time versus memory.
36:13You could always write something quicker if you could use more space to do it.
36:17It wasn't just brand new.
36:20It was one of the most complicated routines MIT had ever written.
36:25Neil Armstrong said,
36:27in terms of a scale of 1 to 10 of difficulty,
36:32walking around on the moon was about a 3.
36:35Landing on the moon was a 13.
36:38It was the most complex series of continuous operations in the entire Apollo mission.
36:44As the lunar module dropped towards the moon's surface, everything seemed to be going smoothly.
36:55But then, out of the blue, there was an alarm.
37:00Program alarm.
37:0512-02.
37:0712-02.
37:09When we got this first program alarm, and that was total news to me.
37:1412-02 alarm.
37:16Yeah, and the same thing we had.
37:19Then more of these alarms started to show, and we got extremely nervous.
37:24Everybody in that room, management and programmers listening to this,
37:32not knowing exactly what was happening, and not knowing what these alarms were.
37:38Maybe some people in the room know what a 12-02 alarm was,
37:41but I don't remember anybody popping up and saying,
37:43oh, I know what that is.
37:44With only seconds to go before landing, the astronauts asked for advice.
37:52Should they abort the mission, or override the alarm?
37:57It was a reading on the 12-02 program alarm.
38:01I was panicked. They were actually going close to the moon landing, and they were getting a 12-02 alarm.
38:10No way that should have been happening.
38:13As concerns spread through mission control, one man put his hand up.
38:21Jack Garman had the only summary of the alarms in the building.
38:25I wrote them down in pencil on a piece of paper, every alarm, what it would do.
38:30I taped it to a piece of cardboard, and I stuck it under the plexiglass that was on top of our consoles.
38:36You know? It's like an umbrella. If you carry it, it won't rain.
38:41We had a nickname for Jack. He won't forgive me for saying this, but we call him Gar Flash.
38:46You know, I haven't heard that in a long time, but the, yeah, Garman, Gar Flash.
38:54I did tend to react rather quickly sometimes.
38:59Garman's note told him the alarm indicated the onboard computer was overloaded.
39:05Executive overflow, it was called. That is, the computer did not have enough time to do its work.
39:11Thus, it was overflowing, and it spewed out this alarm.
39:19A normal computer would have ground to a standstill.
39:23But thanks to Hal Lanning's revolutionary operating system,
39:28the Lunar Module's computer was simply dumping low-priority jobs
39:33and carrying on with the important ones.
39:36There was no immediate threat.
39:38Garman gave the okay to land.
39:43Okay, off-flight controllers, gonna go for landing.
39:45Retro, go.
39:46Fido, go.
39:47Guidance, go.
39:48Control, go.
39:49Telcom, go.
39:50GNC, go.
39:51Ecom, go.
39:52Surgeon, go.
39:53Capcom, we're go for landing.
39:55We don't get to here, go for landing.
39:59Yet, as the Lunar Module touched down,
40:02the big unresolved question was, why had the computer overloaded?
40:08And would it compromise the return journey?
40:12The expression, out of the frying pan into the fire, comes to mind,
40:15because there was no time to think, really, for anybody.
40:19It was time to get on with the checklists and procedures.
40:21It wasn't, I would say, 15 seconds after they land that we have Houston telephone
40:26wanting to know what is that 1202 and 1201 alarm.
40:30I saw Fred Martin across the room, and our eyes locked.
40:34It was like, oh, no, what is going on?
40:36Why are these 1201, 1202 alarms happening?
40:39She looked at me, and I looked at her.
40:42Not really seeing anybody else in the room, but more of registering,
40:47we've got to find out what this is.
40:50In all the testing that I had witnessed,
40:52and all the things that I had witnessed at the laboratory,
40:55I had never seen one of these alarms come up,
40:57so I didn't know what it was about.
41:02Eventually, they discovered the problem.
41:04Buzz Aldrin's checklist had instructed him to turn on the return radar too early,
41:11and the computer had simply been unable to handle that,
41:15as well as all the immediate landing data.
41:20It was a checklist error.
41:22The computer had worked exactly as it had been designed to.
41:29They were safe to return,
41:31and after nearly 22 hours on the moon,
41:34Armstrong and Aldrin were given the go-ahead to return home.
41:38Very clear.
41:40Two and a half days later,
41:54with the support of the computer guidance system,
41:57the command module crashed through the Earth's atmosphere
42:00at precisely the right angle.
42:21I had teared up because of that,
42:23but I think a lot of people did.
42:25It was the culmination.
42:27That moment was the moment.
42:29As much as Apollo 8 was the biggest step, perhaps,
42:32that moment was it.
42:36You know, I remember more about the 1201-1202 alarms
42:40than I do when it finally landed back on Earth.
42:45The relief at MIT was overwhelming.
42:48Everybody was just super happy that we were successful.
42:58And we were super happy.
43:00It was the end of nearly a decade of some of the most fruitful and creative computer engineering in U.S. history.
43:09For many who took part in it, it's still the most remarkable thing they've ever done.
43:21I spent a good chunk of my life working hard to produce guidance software that enabled that to happen,
43:31and that they left behind.
43:33So sitting on the moon is code I wrote.
43:36This has always been my proud post.
43:38Something I did is sitting on the moon right now.
43:41That is a neat thought.
43:43A neat thought.
43:45And a nice thought.
43:542024
44:05Transcription by CastingWords
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