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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

Its certainly pretty amazing. But the moon landing was likely to be something just totally different: I can't even imagine just how many things could have gone wrong with the technology then, how precise everything had to be in order to take people to the moon and bring them back. The kind of expertise, testing etc. required for such an absolutely critical task.... blows my mind. e.g. they only had one shot at it; they had to get it right the first time; they only had the primitive computing and communication technologies of their era etc.

Having stayed up nights to fix some critical production outages, I've felt the stress of having a company's fate hang in your hands. Cant even imagine what it would've been like to be in the Control center for the moon landing; having the entire world watching ...

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They dug up some of the speechwriter's letters a while back for if things went wrong, some pretty sobering stuff.

https://www.space.com/7011-president-nixon-prepared-apollo-d...

Those were written by William Safire, who's to speech writing what Mozart was to composing music. Previous HN discussion of what's been called the greatest speech never given here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064103

The full set of prepared speeches can be found here:

https://m.xkcd.com/1484/

It is different not only on a technical level, but culturally as well. I don't think the entire country is rooting for SpaceX as representative of the group. Instead, it's Elon's company. If they get to the moon... good for Elon.

I think that's most likely just you projecting your own views. See people's reactions to their launches. YouTube is the home to some of the most antagonistic commentary, yet check out the comments to the Falcon Heavy Launch. If you can make YouTube look like a great group of enthusiastic, optimistic, unified aspirants - then it's safe to say they're already bringing the world like nothing before. And that's with little more than the launch of a special rocket. When SpaceX is putting people on another planet, I think we will have entered into the beginning of a new era in humanity.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c

The whole world is rooting in favor of human achievements in space travel. Look at the reaction to the first Moon landings.

> they had to get it right the first time;

They have time. They are doing and have done a lot of test flights with no humans aboard

I read an article (blogpost?) by one of the Apollo programmers who presented a very elaborate argument saying that the Apollo mission would have ended in disaster if not for one very specific code change that happened by accident.

Sadly I haven't been able to find it again for the last year or two, but if anyone knows what I'm talking about I'd be grateful.

https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html

All of my upvotes, I regret I have but one to give.

Thanks! Also HN-based mechanical Turk search engine for the win.

You mean the hollywood stage ? must have been quite chill.

sarcasm aside it's true that it was sooooo impressive. I visited NASA last year and they have a way of presenting the space race as a human achievement that brings out many emotions of pride even as a foreigner.

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