Now some of you might be familiar with our friend bill. Little bill is a dude who knows more about the space program than any person. I have ever met his pilot and he is a space enthusiast and he is an expert on this stuff. Well, what you're about to hear is a ten minute preview of a truly remarkable four part series called APOLLO eleven what we saw bill will take you back in time to experience what it felt like to the millions of Americans who lived through one of the greatest endeavors mankind has ever attempted putting a human being on the moon. You'll shot this series right here in our studios. We're really excited to share this preview with you. It's a story, unlike any other, be sure subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. The link to the show is in our episode description

check out of the mold in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are five, four three, two one: zero thirty two hours three hours, not because it is easy, but because it is hard a badly humiliated nation which showed the world, but mostly we show ourselves the kind of country we were by doing the hardest thing ever attempted. You know Kennedy got it all in those first, seven words we choose Go to the moon. That was the hard part. Just citing that we were going to go everything Now this was a mere engineering problem now, in part, one of what we saw will start with the real,

time catastrophe that was unwinding behind the images of how to landing on a plaster, moon and then to really understand why we made this commitment will go back to before or the beginning of the space race into the world of cap guns cowboys and Indians of fallout shelters and h bombs and up the steady beeping from one thousand pounds soviet cylinder as a dead dog flew over our country. Eighteen times a day. That's another after, like that, how late is minus two thousand nine hundred Broadway copy at the earth right outer part? person you're looking at are guilty clicking good guys over hello, who almost there. He looked hold it right there

strong and buzz. Aldrin are almost exactly halfway from the start of Pdi. That's the power dissent. Initiation and touchdown on the lunar surface, standing side by side in ungainly asymmetrical shockingly delicate vehicle named eagle in about five minutes left until touchdown they have simulated this scenario, hundreds of times before the entire If simulation is, make the simulator tougher than reality any number of glitches failures. Spikes, cut outs, runaway thrusters ice in a fuel line, loss of communications, loss of radar loss of the flight computer, all of it everything possibly go wrong on this final. Five minutes of the last decade of effort death triumph humiliation and sacrifice had been dished out Armstrong and Aldrin in various combinations and at the worst possible moments.

So when Neil Armstrong mentions he's got a one thousand. Two hundred and two error on the flight computer sounds like just another, routine hiccup. But here's the thing neither Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, any Hundreds of men monitoring this final phase of this ultimate mission. None of them have any idea. What a one thousand two hundred and two error is they've, never seen it The ground controllers had never seen it before and it's ever been simulated there's. Never. Going to procedure written to deal with it. All they know is that halfway down to the surface of the moon, with six hundred million people back on earth. Listening live to their every word. They suddenly do not have altitude or range data from the flight computer, Neil and Buzz had just finished rolling their lunar module the eagle from a windows down to a windows up position now, just a few seconds before the computer failure they felt as though they were looking up at the moon.

As it scrolled gracefully past, the two large triangular windows on the limb, but once completing that scheduled roll maneuver. They know we cannot measure the distance to the surface You can't even see it there. High above the moon as your typical commercial jet flight is above earth. Let's say: thirty Empire state buildings stack one on top of the other, and they have lost the only piece of flight hardware that had not been vigorously flight tested on a previous mission, their flight computer and their ground surface radar now head in flight tested, because no one had ever had to use it before at thirty three thousand five hundred feet. They are fifteen. Thousand feet lower than the point at which the dress rehearsal flight ten had aborted to orbit as planned. So let's just back up a second and listen to that. Again. Get us over I don't know who barber who put your

Open Armstrong are all Trans place, you're, both standing in a ship about the size of a bedroom closet, not a walking class just up decent size closet a few seconds ago. You were looking at the moon getting closer and closer, and it was are only getting closer. It was getting closer, faster and, of course, it's, not just the two of you in that fragile metallic insect, that's hurdle, towards the surface of the moon six hundred million people every. The person on earth with access to a television set or with you as well, three hundred and seventy five thousand engineers, technicians, compute, Special flight surgeons once ladies and bathroom scrubbers open eagle with you as well, an entire army of people who've. Given everything they've had over the last ten years to get to these next five minutes, five

dead, astronauts, close friends, everyone of them are in that lunar module, and so is a young president who dared them to do it shot through the head five years, seven months and twenty nine days earlier. If they can't resolve this one thousand two hundred and two error and quickly It could be the end of the mission, the promise and perhaps the end of their lives, so listen to the tone, program, alarm, clock and get back over one thousand two hundred and two. How about this? Since every single oz that went down to the moon surface had to slow down, stop come back and then take off again carrying the weight of the computer that they wanted was just out of the question now, their solution was an elegant one, take a much simpler and lighter machine and then divide all of the data it needed to process into groups based on priority

Peter, would then do whatever calculation it could in a certain a lot of time and then, move down the stack to work on next set of instructions for several hundreds of a second and then proceed to the set and so on. Now this way it could do the work of the much heavier machine that could handle all of these computations. Simultaneously, no Garman had a theory certain times during the descent, a great deal of data top priority data was coming, leaked from the radar altimeter, not to mention all of the other calculations. The computer had to perform a twelve. Two error was a stack overflow when the workload became too high, perform in the allocated time. The computer would skip to the next task and it would overload again there was a simple solution to this, and that is reboot the computer and so that the machine was designed to do restart every good time it got an overflow error. Fortunately for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This only took about a second. That's

Only how simple the machine was also a measure of how simple the math works. No hang, for another second or two, and you will hear Neil Armstrong who took manual. Control of Gemini eight, as it was tearing itself to pieces in earth orbit. Neil Armstrong who Jeff did from the lunar landing simulator a tenth of a second before it was too late who parachuted down through the fireball and was sitting at his desk calmly, filling out the paperwork, as his colleagues arrived for, work that morning listen carefully and you will hear Neil Armstrong coming as close to panic, as he ever did in his entire life, not a problem program, alarm yeah! We got to work on that alarm, so the dissing continued I watched it happen,

me and the rest of the human race back on July twentieth. Nineteen sixty nine! This is what we saw where go inside where go enter the act. Forty seven degrees right here choose first thing I remember about watching man set foot upon the moon half a century ago, I was ten years old and I was watching the television set and there was also, of course, the extra excitement that you get when you're ten years old and it's one thousand one hundred o'clock at night and there are adults with cocktails in the room. I remember looking at this fuzzy fuzzy image on this black and white tv. An below it was the caption big, clear letters live from the moon. Now I could tell that something was moving, but for the life of me, I just had no idea what I was looking at. None my dad had.

Actually get up walk over to the tv set and kind of with this finger sort of drew. The outline appears near alarm, Strong's, helmet and here's his backpack, and you can see his legs moving as he slowly gets, lower and lower and lower down the ladder. Then, all of a sudden like that, I got it I could suddenly make sense out of this rorschach black and white squid once you've seen a national to a letter to the circus, the moon. You can't really answer. Thank you for Listening to this preview. From episode, one of APOLLO eleven, what we saw, but there is so much more to this story. If you like what you heard here, then head to Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to APOLLO eleven, What we saw right now, you won't want just one small step of it.