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Quote by: Nono  Anyone who knows modern aircraft and peeks in the window at the control panel of the Apollo craft on display at the Smithsonian will immediately grasp how damn lucky they were to make it at all, as Scribbler suggests.
They knew what they were doing, they just had precious few resources to deal with anything going wrong (see Apollo 13).
As for conspiracy theories, why bother? What they accomplished is not at all implausible, and they did it. They also brought back plenty of rocks that would have been impossible to fake. Now that would have been an interesting conspiracy. |
All true.
If you are reading this then you probably have a computer that is much faster, with much more memory, and much more disk space than anything used on the lunar orbital vehicle or the LEM, not to mention the computers used at mission control. Some years after the initial lunar landing I visited the Johnson Space Center mission control center, and there, at each and every station was a 486 computer, not much different from what I had, touted as an upgrade from previous systems. So they each did their computations and threw them out onto the network where they were available for other stations. At that time, I was using the same sort of system for accounting data.
Indeed it was all cutting edge. But the programming was pristine and the humans performed without notable error.