Comment by ChicagoBoy11
9 hours ago
For anyone who liked this, I highly suggest you take a look at the CuriousMarc youtube channel, where he chronicles lots of efforts to preserve and understand several parts of the Apollo AGC, with a team of really technically competent and passionate collaborators.
One of the more interesting things they have been working on, is a potential re-interpretation of the infamous 1202 alarm. It is, as of current writing, popularly described as something related to nonsensical readings of a sensor which could (and were) safely ignored in the actual moon landing. However, if I remember correctly, some of their investigation revealed that actually there were many conditions which would cause that error to have been extremely critical and would've likely doomed the astronauts. It is super fascinating.
And that's why it's harder (or easier?) to make the same landing again -- we taking way less chances. Today we know of way more failure modes than back then.
They sent people up in a tin can with the bare minimum computational power to manage navigation and control sequencing. It was barely safer than taking a barrel over Niagara Falls. We do have much more capable and reliable technology.
Buzz Aldrin (?) was quoted as recalling holding a pencil inside the capsule as they were out in space and thinking "that wall isn't very thick or strong, I could probably jam a pencil through it pretty easily..."
Death being a layer of aluminum away changes your mind.
It's a miracle nobody died in flight during the program. Exploding oxygen tank, rockets shaking themselves to pieces during launch, getting hit by lightning on top of a flying skyscraper full of kerosene and liquid oxygen....
Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died on the Apollo program. I feel it's not polite to ignore that fact even if you add an 'in flight' qualifier.
Starting from the first test pilots, a lot of people died for us to get to the point to launch that flight. So while no one died on the flight, lots of people died just getting us there. If I recall, in The Right Stuff, it's mentioned that those early test pilots had something like a 25% mortality rate.
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"popularly described" and how it's currently understood are two different things. Because it's hard to explain to lay people, it's popularly described in a number of simplified ways, but it's well understood.
Related topic on CuriousMarc and co.’s AGC restoration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641528