What we didn’t know about the moonwalk

That was something I read recently in an article about Neil Armstrong's humbleness. He felt it was unfair to take any credit when there were 400,000 people who made it possible for him to take those steps.

It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into this man who is a household name, yet we actually know very little about him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8133835.stm

People where less productive in 1960 because they lacked modern tools. The most striking example was how the onboard computer’s memory had to be hard coded by hand. Someone had to literally manually set each bit of program code by hand. Imagine if you needed to double check that your compiler acctually wrote the correct bits to disk.

It was also the first trip so R&D took a huge amount of effort.

Finally, everything had to be constantly reviewed so we did not accidently kill 3 people while the world was watching.

It's also easy to lose sight of the fact that the first moon landing was not the first mission shot into space. It was the end result of 12 Gemini missions and 10 previous Apollo missions. That's a lot of spacecraft to build and shoot into space beforehand.

Especially so emphatically -- "Was the moonwalk faked? No!" Usually, you'd see just "Was the moonwalk faked?", and no actual decision to the verity of the moonwalk. This was very nice to see.

Perhaps it's unfortunate that the media even thinks that these conspiracy theorists even need to be debunked. They wouldn't waste the column-inches (or whatever the online equivalent is) debunking claims from people who think the earth flat, or that cigarette smoking is unrelated to lung cancer.

Yet pose the almost the most fantastic conspiracy theory imaginable, and the mainstream media will sprinkle it with just enough fairy dust of credibility that they then have to debunk it.