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Comment by enlyth | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing having humans on board makes it easier, since they can tend to the landing instead of having to do it semi-autonomously all the way from Earth

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As I recall, Armstrong chose the landing site personally, using the awesome power of looking out of the window and judging a good descent speed for touchdown. He avoided big rocks and craters.

He had no choice since he had only 20 seconds before the fuel ran out.

Are you saying there was only one spot for him to land? 20 seconds gave him time to make many adjustments.

That does make the most sense. Given the technological gap over more than 50 years, that's the one advantage those missions had, and with 6 successful landings (and none of the failures being in the moon landing phase) it couldn't just be luck.

To an extent, given how crewed spaceflight safety standards have improved since then, it was a combination of luck and only doing it 6 times that no crew was lost on the Moon.

Famously there were two versions of the president's speech prepared, one for the case that the astronauts would be unable to return.

Yes, agreed that there was some luck involved, certainly. I'm just saying that there were enough successes that it's statistically significant that their results were better than more recent ones. And agreeing with the parent that the manned component is the best explanation for that.

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