Take a front seat ride in the Apollo Lunar Module as it makes its historic descent and avoids a near catastrophe unfolding behind the scenes. Then travel back to a time before the Space Race, to the America of cowboys and Indians, to understand how all of America’s small steps led us to the one giant leap.
Listen to "Apollo 11: What We Saw" at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/apollo-11-what-we-saw/id1471188269
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Well, many of you are hopefully familiar with our friend Bill Whittle.
Something that's really cool about Bill is that he's a pilot and he's a space enthusiast, as in outer space, right?
What you're about to hear is the 10-minute preview of a really just incredible four-part series called Apollo 11, What We Saw.
Bill takes you all the way back in time to experience What it felt like for the millions of Americans who lived through one of the greatest endeavors mankind has ever attempted, putting a man on the moon.
It really takes you into that moment for those of us like myself who didn't live through it.
It's just an amazing thing to see.
Bill shot this series right here in the studios, and we're really excited to share this preview with you.
It's a story unlike any other.
Be sure to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The link to the show is in our episode description.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing.
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.
Liftoff!
We have a liftoff!
32 minutes past the hour.
Lift off. We have a lift off. 32 minutes past the hour.
Lift off on Apollo 11.
Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
A badly humiliated nation would show the world, but mostly, we'd show ourselves the kind of country we were by doing the hardest thing ever attempted.
You know, Kennedy got it all in those first seven words.
We choose to go to the moon.
That was the hard part, just deciding that we were going to go.
Everything else was a mere engineering problem.
Now, in part one of what we saw, we'll start with the real-time catastrophe that was unwinding behind the images of a model LEM landing on a plaster moon.
And then, to really understand why we made this commitment, we'll go back to before the beginning of the space race, into the world of cap guns and cowboys and Indians, of fallout shelters and H-bombs.
and of the steady beeping from a 1,000-pound Soviet cylinder as a dead dog flew over our country 16 times a day.
Roger, understand.
Go for landing.
Okay, we've got good lock on.
Altitude lights out.
Delta-H is minus 2,900.
Roger, we copy.
That's the Earth right out our front window.
Houston, you're looking at our Delta-H.
That's affirmative, program alarm.
Looking good to us, over.
1202.
1202.
Okay, let's hold it right there.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are almost exactly halfway from the start of PDI, that's the Power Descent Initiation, and touchdown on the lunar surface.
They're standing side by side in an ungainly, asymmetrical, shockingly delicate vehicle named Eagle.
They have about five minutes left until touchdown.
They have simulated this scenario hundreds of times before.
The entire point of simulation is to make the simulator tougher than reality.
Any number of glitches, failures, spikes, cutouts, runaway thrusters, ice in a fuel line, loss of communications, loss of radar, loss of the flight computer, all of it.
Everything that could possibly go wrong on this final five minutes of the last decade of effort, death, triumph, humiliation, and sacrifice.
had been dished out to Armstrong and Aldrin in various combinations and at the worst possible moments.
So when Neil Armstrong mentions he's got a 1202 error on the flight computer, sounds like just another routine hiccup.
But here's the thing.
Neither Neil Armstrong, nor Buzz Aldrin, nor any of the hundreds of men monitoring this final phase of this ultimate mission, none of them, have any idea what a 1202 error is.
They've never seen it before.
The ground controllers have never seen it before, and it's never been simulated.
There's never been a procedure written to deal with it.
All they know is that halfway down to the surface of the moon, with 600 million people back on Earth listening live to their every word, they suddenly do not have altitude or range data from the flight computer.
Neil and Buzz have just finished rolling their lunar module, the Eagle, from a windows-down to a windows-up position, just a few seconds before the computer failure.
They felt as though they were looking up at the moon as it scrolled gracefully past the two large triangular windows on the LM.
But once completing that scheduled roll maneuver, they not only cannot measure the distance to the surface, They can't even see it.
They are as high above the moon as your typical commercial jet flight is above Earth.
Let's say 30 Empire State Buildings stacked one on top of the other.
And they have lost the only piece of flight hardware that had not been rigorously flight tested on a previous mission, their flight computer and their ground surface radar.
Now, it hadn't been flight tested because no one had ever had to use it before.
At 33,500 feet, they are 15,000 feet lower than the point at which the dress rehearsal flight, Apollo 10, had aborted to orbit as planned.
So let's just back up a second and listen to that again.
Program alarm.
Looking good, Doc.
Over.
1202. 1202.
Put yourself in Armstrong or Aldrin's place.
You're both standing in a ship about the size of a bedroom closet.
Not a walk-in closet, just a decent-sized closet.
A few seconds ago, you were looking at the moon getting closer and closer.
And it was not only getting closer, it was getting closer faster.
And of course, it's not just the two of you in that fragile metallic insect that's hurtling towards the surface of the moon.
600 million people, every single person on earth with access to a television set, are with you as well.
375,000 engineers, technicians, computer specialists, flight surgeons, lunch ladies, and bathroom scrubbers are up in the eagle with you as well.
An entire army of people who've given everything they've had over the last 10 years to get to these next five minutes.
Five dead astronauts, close friends every one of them, are in that lunar module, and so is a young president who dared them to do it.
Shot through the head five years, seven months, and 29 days earlier.
If they can't resolve this 1202 error, and quickly, it could be the end of the mission, the end of the promise, and perhaps the end of their lives.
So, listen to the tone.
Program alarm. Looking good, Doc. Over.
12-02. 12-02.
Since every single ounce that went down to the moon's surface had to slow down,
stop, come back, and then take off again, carrying the weight of the computer that they wanted was
just out of the question.
Now their solution was an elegant one.
Take a much simpler and lighter machine and then divide all of the data it needed to process into groups based on priority.
The computer would then do whatever calculation it could in a certain allotted time and then move down the stack to work on the next set of instructions for several hundredths of a second and then proceed to the third set and so on.
Now this way, it could do the work of the much heavier machine that could handle all of these computations simultaneously.
No, Garmin had a theory.
At certain times during the descent, a great deal of data, top priority data, was coming rapidly from the radar altimeter, not to mention all of the other calculations the computer had to perform.
A 1202 error was a stack overflow.
When the workload became too high to perform in the allocated time, the computer would skip to the next task, and it would overload again.
Now, there was a simple solution to this, and that is, reboot the computer.
And so that's what the machine was designed to do.
Restart every single time it got an overflow error.
Now, fortunately for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, this only took about a second.
That's not only how simple the machine was, it's also a measure of how simple the math was.
Now, hang on for another second or two and you will hear Neil Armstrong, who took manual control of Gemini 8 as it was tearing itself to pieces in Earth orbit.
Neil Armstrong, who ejected from the lunar landing simulator a tenth of a second before it was too late, who parachuted down through the fireball, and who was sitting at his desk calmly filling out the paperwork as his colleagues arrived for work that morning.
Listen carefully, and you will hear Neil Armstrong coming as close to panic as he ever did in his entire life.
Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.
Roger, we got you.
We're going at alarm.
So, the descent continued.
And I watched it happen.
Me and the rest of the human race back on July 20th, 1969.
And this is what we saw.
Same tide.
We're go.
2,000 feet.
2,000 feet.
Into the egg.
47 degrees.
Roger.
47 degrees.
So here's the first thing I remember about watching man set foot upon the moon half a century ago.
I was 10 years old and I was watching the television set and there was also, of course, the extra excitement that you get when you're 10 years old and it's 11 o'clock at night and there are adults with cocktails in the room.
I remember looking at this fuzzy, fuzzy image on this black and white TV and below it was the caption, big clear letters, live from the moon.
Now, I could tell that something was moving, but for the life of me, I just had no idea what I was looking at.
None.
My dad had to actually get up, walk over to the TV set, and kind of, with his finger, he sort of drew the outline of, here's Neil Armstrong's helmet, and here's his backpack, and you can see his legs moving as he slowly gets lower and lower and lower down the ladder.
Then all of a sudden, like that, I got it!
I could suddenly make sense out of this Rorschach test of black and white squiggles.
Once you've seen an astronaut descending a ladder to the surface of the moon, you can't really unsee it.
Hey, thank you for listening to this preview from episode one of Apollo 11, What We Saw.
But there is so much more to this story.
If you liked what you heard here, then head to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to Apollo 11, What We Saw right now.
