“Houston, We've Had a Problem” (1975) | Hacker News Reader

“Houston, We've Had a Problem” (1975)

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118 pointsskbohra12347 comments

Although 13 was quite a near-disaster, I'm surprised that there isn't just as much attention to how much 11 very nearly was a disaster too.

During 11's descent to the moon the LEM's computer was overloaded and started throwing alarms. In addition Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin realized the craft overshot its intended landing spot and was heading for a field of rocks and boulders where landing would be impossible. What saved them is Neil taking manual control of the LEM, finding a smooth landing spot, and touching down the LEM with only seconds of fuel to spare.

Neil's landing is in my mind just as amazing as the recovery of 13. There was no way Neil could have really prepared for a manual landing in the low gravity of the moon. In fact when they tried to test it on Earth, it very nearly killed him (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDI8SQ2fmLA). It was purely Armstrong's intelligence and attitude under pressure that got 11 on the moon safely.

And if you learn more about Armstrong you'll see it was no fluke how he performed on 11's landing. When testing the X-15 rocket plane he lost control and skipped off the top of the atmosphere but was still able to save the flight. Or during Gemini 8 when a thruster got stuck he aborted the docking attempt and fired the re-entry thruster to regain control (all of this while the craft was spinning more than once a second! http://news.discovery.com/space/history-of-space/neil-armstr...). There's a great write-up here with more details on his amazing performances under pressure: http://www.wired.com/2012/08/neil-armstrong_test-pliot/

Without Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 very likely would have ended with Richard Nixon reading this somber message to a devastated nation: http://watergate.info/1969/07/20/an-undelivered-nixon-speech...

> Neil's landing is in my mind just as amazing as the recovery of 13.

You're giving short shrift to Aldrin (and the training they all received) by calling it "Neil's landing". The whole team (Armstrong/Aldrin/Collins) were extraordinary.

What made this clear to me was reading the transcripts of the LEM flight recorder (can't find them right now, just the audio, but they are on the NASA web site). I read Aldrin reading out meter values to Armstrong, who was looking out the window.. then realized that Aldrin couldn't see out the window and wasn't giving out readings in a fixed order! Instead he was scanning all the readings and relaying what he thought he'd want to know if he'd been the one looking out the window (without knowing what Armstrong could see). And Armstrong never asked for a reading; he assumed Aldrin was telling him just what he needed to know and nothing else.

That reflects an extraordinary degree of training trust and teamwork.

All the Apollo astronauts were legendary test pilots (except Dr Harry Schmitt) [0]. Buzz and Neil are the ones everyone remembers, and they earned their place on that mission, however it took a huge team to get them there.

When Apollo 13 had the explosion, other astronauts including Ken Mattingly, and John Young, had a significant role in helping get them back home.

Astronauts were not just great pilots, but they knew how to work with a team. No astronaut would get selected if they were a great test pilot, but couldn't work as a crew. One particular test pilot (Chuck ..) who never became an astronaut is a classic example of that.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt

Here's the whole PDF[1] - the landing starts around page 160. Neil does ask for some readings, but not many. Really crazy to read through.

1. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS11_CM.PDF

There was no way Neil could have really prepared for a manual landing in the low gravity of the moon. In fact when they tried to test it on Earth, it very nearly killed him

That seems like an incomplete summary of the story. You're neglecting to mention all the successful flights Armstrong had in the LLRV, not to mention the successful training he received on its successor, the LLTV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle

I don't agree that it was "purely" Armstrong's intelligence and attitude that resulted in Apollo 11 success. He also received a great deal of relevant sophisticated training.

The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle was jokingly known as "the only thing more dangerous than landing on the moon". Three LLRV/LLTV craft were destroyed in crashes where the pilot ejected. Despite this, the LLRV was instrumental in making the lunar landings successful.

When future astronauts will train for the next lunar landing, it will surely be done in computer simulations. While it's obviously safer, the element of danger in the LLRV was probably quite character building. Armstrong had nerves of steel when he landed the Eagle in a field of house-sized boulders with just seconds of fuel remaining and alarms ringing in the cockpit.

Note that if the Apollo flight software had been designed differently the Apollo 11 landing could easily have been unsuccessful or disastrous. Margaret Hamilton's work deserves a lot of credit for that, it was a very advanced and robust design for the time and for the resource constraints (4k of ram, etc.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)#A...

"In fact when they tried to test it on Earth, it very nearly killed him [...] Without Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 very likely would have ended with Richard Nixon reading this somber message"

Not necessarily. It can be argued that Neil Armstrong should have aborted the landing, rather than risk it with so little safety room.

After all, if he couldn't reliably do it on earth, how can you argue that it was purely his intelligence and attitude under pressure that got them on the moon, and not also a bit of luck?

Of course they had luck (and more than a bit). But aborting safely would have required luck too. They were already off their pre-planned trajectory, which meant initiating an abort would have put them off of the pre-planned abort trajectory. So a successful abort would probably also have required manual control, and not just for the minute or so required to land, but for an extended period of time while they tried to figure out the right trajectory to get back up into lunar orbit and rendezvous with the command module.

Given that choice, I'm not surprised that Armstrong elected to attempt the landing.

Mission control would have had the trajectory back up calculated and in hand, but separating from the lower lander stage and engaging the (different) return rocket at low altitude, outside of normal flight parameters, with an ongoing computer problem of (then) unknown origin - I would agree, that sounds still dicier. Plus, a manual landing was practiced in computer-governed simulators; it wouldn't feel the same, but otherwise the task would be quite similar - except for the dust perhaps.

"Without Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 very likely would have ended with Richard Nixon reading this somber message to a devastated nation"

That's why they put him in that position and not your regular Joe Average (not to downplay the capabilities of other members of the space program)

Yeah, maybe the safe thing was to abort the landing. But you're already 300 thousand kms from home, your safety margin is already very small.

I have read the selection process that was described in Lost Moon (the book of appolo 13). The NASA were literally recruiting superhumans back then. The smartest, healthiest, toughest and on on ...

So I am not at all surprised that he managed to pull it off.

https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/2/18/hans-solo-and-ba...

And at the interview they could fly any spacecraft on a whiteboard.

We are allowed to consider national hero's the "smartest". They get an exception to the usual PC rules. Software Engineers aren't allowed to be considered super smart because that would hint at biological determinism (not saying that one directly implies the other, but any connection is enough). Therefore any interview process that is designed to select for intelligence (rather than other qualities) is going to be regarded as illegitimate.

I was honored to have dinner with Ken Mattingly a couple of years ago, and am looking forward to meeting Jim Lovell later this year. I've now met and talked with five Apollo era astronauts, and they are genuinely amazing. True gentlemen with wonderful stories, and self-deprecating. All amazingly skillful with hundreds of thousands of hours of technical training. And all different in their own way - all individuals.

And all slightly embarrassed because they were just doing their jobs, and little or no credit is given to the hundreds of thousands of people on the ground who did their jobs and made it possible.

"And Houston, as I step off at the surface at Taurus- Littrow, I'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible." - Gene Cernan

Anyone read Andrew Smith's Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth?

Perhaps more about Mr Smith than the Apollo missions (sort of gonzo style journalistic account of his search for the Apollo astronauts) but interesting.

If you enjoyed this story, I recommend "The Martian" by Andy Weir. It reads like it was written by an engineer (it was) and is a thoroughly researched, fun read.

> With the wisdom of hindsight, I should have said, "Hold it. Wait a second. I'm riding on this spacecraft. Just go out and replace that tank."

That's crazy. I didn't realize the tank was acting funny before they even took off. To me, the risk-adverse non-astronaut, that seems like something that would've triggered big ominous "DANGER" signs going off in my head.

I guess that's the benefit of hindsight, though.

Anything that complex always will have things acting funny.

Heh, that's fair.

I didn't particularly notice the background pattern but cycling through that story was really a great read. To put yourself in those shoes really had me going. Absolutely amazing what these young men did.

> Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, "Did you have suicide pills on board?"

I would have to imagine that if the circumstances made it obvious that returning to Earth was impossible, the astronauts probably would have chosen to end their days on the surface of the moon. Assuming the LM could land with three on board.

Buzz Aldrin was asked how he would spend his last hours alive on the moon if the ascent engine had failed to light and left them stranded.

His reply was that he would spend that time trying to fix the engine.

I don't think they ever would have given up like that. You keep trying things to save it until you're dead, even if it's obvious that you're not going to make it.

To me, it's more important to realize that you're never not going to make it. You're either trying to make it or you've already failed.

Unless they cared about preserving the state of the moon for future scientists without leaving human corpses lying around.

The astronauts left an awful lot of stuff on the moon but luckily the moon is a big place - a few people entombed there in the lander wouldn't make any difference.

The Apollo 13 explosion turned out to be a magnificent example of "false redundancy". By packing the three (supposedly redundant) fuel cells tightly together, NASA actually tripled the chance of losing all power. They now had three fuses that might be the wrong wattage. (As I remember what I've read, someone got but never read a memo that the fuse wattage had been changed in the fuel cell design - the memo was found speared with many others in an unread pile after the accident.) Reading the details of Musk's designs his team really does seem to understand what redundancy is and is not. It's all too easy to get wrong.

There's a very nicely presented transcript of this mission (and others) on spacelog.

http://apollo13.spacelog.org/

Do people put these background patterns behind text expressly to hamper legibility?

According to a comment in the source, the page seems to be from 2001, when people didn't know better. Also look at that tell-tale footer!

A few more years from now, people are going to ask about web pages from 2015: "why did everybody's blog have light grey text on a white background everywhere? They must have had excellent visual acuity back in 2015"

> "when people didn't know better"

My god, what do you think 2001 was, the stone age?

When i hear "the startup bubble of 2001", I always take a moment to imagine what was a startup in 2001. I imagine an HTML 2 page with no Javascript and an ad banner at the top, inlined styles and <blink> tags... Like Altavista or Yahoo.

So in truth, what were webpages before 2006?

Enter your favorite web sites URL at the Way Back Internet Archive: https://archive.org/web/

There were different web design trends, from my subjective perspective:

* 1991-1995 the early web with all sort of experiments,

* 1995-2000 What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get era 8Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/etc) with Frames and Table-based layout and quite interesting design decisions, Java-applets, every website looked different often with very nice artworks and designs

* 2000-2005 no frames more CSS less graphical too much content on each page, Flash and various other embedded plugins, XML and XHTML 1 were hot

* 2005-2010 usage of AJAX, upcoming JSON

* 2010-today leaner design, less is more, inspired by the Google startpage and styled after recent operating system themes from iOS/Windows8/Android5, HTML5, JS5, CSS3, heavy usage of AJAX on some sites (one page apps), responsive design (work on different screen resolutions)

The web design was most colorful and interesting in the early days til about 2000. Then came the more boring years with cooperate designs and pages with too much content stuffed on one page. It got a lot more interesting from the design point of view though some of the flat-designs mean developer-art which isn't everyone likes.

Dynamic web apps in the first "bubble" era were generally either perl/cgi or ASP (without the .NET suffix, obviously). Javascript was used, but only for small things like required field validations. Databases would be SQL Server or Oracle or Sybase, typically. PHP and MySQL was also used. Servers were mostly either Sun or Microsoft (for ASP), though there was some Linux.

The main difference from today was that almost all dynamic content was generated server-side (of course we do still see that today also, but it's not "trendy"). Layouts were table-based and yes, styles were almost always in-line and not in separate stylesheets. Very little JavaScript, because it was common for browsers to not support it, there were significant quirky differences between browsers, and the CPU speeds of the day meant you couldn't do anything substantial with it anyway. If it was used, it was again typically in-line in an "onblur" or "onsubmit" handler.

Security of web apps at the time was laughable by today's standards. SSL had a significant impact on server performance and was mostly limited to use on the login page, if it was used at all. SQL injection was only beginning to be understood by most developers, many (most?) sites used SQL queries made with unescaped concatenated strings and were vulnerable.

If they were really on board with Microsoft technologies, they might have abstracted their logic into business objects likely written in VB6, running in a COM layer in Microsoft Transaction Server, which called stored procedures in SQL Server. Or they might have used Java and JSP and servlets

Almost nobody had broadband unless they worked at a university or tech company. Dial-up was the norm elsewhere so page assets had to be pretty minimal. Many people had screens that were 640x480 so most websites designed for that.

I still see a lot of code in languages like PHP that is quite similar to what was being written in 2000.

I worked at a startup in 1997/1998 to write a turn-key intranet application for bioinformatics search and analysis services. It had interfaces for people and for machines. It wasn't internet based because it dealt with potentially proprietary data, which customers didn't want out on the public network.

It was a bunch of CGI scripts in Perl behind httpd, and some command-line executables. I rolled my own template language for it ("mhtml" for "macro html"). We had never heard of using a database for the web, and so it tracked no user information outside of simple logging. It used a couple of lines of Javascript - my first in shipping code - but no CSS. I didn't use CSS until 2000.

Wired, ca. 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216025755/http://www.wired....

My site is still pretty much as I originally had it in the mid to late 1990s: http://www.solipsys.co.uk

Didn't know better then, don't know better now. Still prefer content over style.

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/DistanceToTheMoon.html

OK, I'm intrigued and will be thinking about that one when I'm getting my students into their exam on Monday...

http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/

1992 style. See html comments for the reasons...

I still see a lot of web pages like that among computer science academics, especially those who are of "pre-internet" generations. E.g http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/

That footer is really 1995 style.

First thing I did was open inspector tools and delete that background attribute.

Yes, it's an attribute - not a CSS property. We're talkin' early space age stuff here, remember.

There was a year or two where virtually the entire internet had flat gray backgrounds.

Those textured gray ones were a fancy new addition.

I'm old.

Because a pattern like that looks quite alright with a contemporary 800x600 resolution 15" CRT monitor, probably a lot more pleasant than black text on plain white background.

Nope, I was bitching about those *I#$@! backgrounds way back then. It was part fashion and part narcissism: "Look ma, what I can do. I'm a real programmer!"

I use the following bookmarklet for this purpose. [1]

[1] https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_colors

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