copyright (c) July 2001 Greg Utrecht

Recently a friend sent me a copy of a fictional story in which Windows
NT is mixed with the Starship Enterprise. It won a prize, and is
attached.

This caused me to look up the attached transcription of Neil Armstrong
landing his spaceship on the moon. I have some pop up style
observations:

* This was an emergency landing.
* During the time that Armstrong was searching for a 'better' emergency
landing field, his ship was having computer failure.
* At around 5000 feet Armstrong overrode the attitude controls, verified
that manual controls were working, and obtained permission for manual
landing.
* The spaceship was designed with enough extra fuel to hover for 60
seconds or travel 1000 yards sideways.
* When the tech in Houston pointed out that the computer was failing,
Armstrong said not to worry about it.
* Jetliners fall a foot or two when landing, the spaceship was designed
for a fall up to two feet - 13 feet on the moon.
* With 30 seconds of fuel Armstrong was at 30 feet coming down at half a
foot per second. Do the math.
* One of the earliest graphical computer games was Lunar Lander.
* The computer failure was the equivalent of a hard disk not being able
to keep up with page faults - thrashing on a peripheral.
* The first time I saw thrashing in a computer was in Pat J's office in
1992. Pat's spreadsheet crashed.

* After he landed Armstrong told Houston he had overidden the descent
engine. He did not turn off the computer.
* We had to turn off Pat's computer.
* Apollo computers were made by Prime Computer Inc
* In order to judge altitude, Armstrong had to rotate the ship so that
his shadow was always visible out his tiny window.
* Armstrong landed a few hundred feet from boulders.
* Pat only worried about long division.

* I have been to Neil's hometown of Wapakoneta and he did not have a
neighbor named Grigsby.
* Neil probably knew people who learned to fly directly from Wilbur Wright.
* When Neil was in Gemini 8 the ship went into a 60 RPM spin when a
thruster "failed ON". Neil brought it home.
* Neil lost a finger a few years ago when his class ring got caught in a
garage door. Go figure.
* Neil has a mild stutter. You thought that was static?
* Roughly one third of people who go into space become nauseous for the
entire flight.

* Due to eccentric orbits it is possible to see 59% of the moon's
surface, but only 50% at a time.
* When there is a half moon, you can see one fourth of the lunar surface.
* The moon appears "full" for three nights.
* When the moon is in the first quarter it is plainly visible in the afternoon sky.
* On the moon the horizon is only 1 mile away.
* The two golf balls that Alan Shepherd hit on the moon reached about 5
percent of orbital velocity and probably only went a few hundred miles,
well beyond the green.
* In 1969 The Flat Earth Society claimed the lunar landings were faked.
* You can see the curvature of the ocean at 15th St in Newport Beach.
Maybe only the land is flat.
* Because of solar heating, spaceships spin on the way to the moon.
Communication with earth is limited during "rotisserie mode".
* Telescopes routinely tracked the Apollo spaceships part of the way to
the moon.

* When the Apollo 13 astronauts got back to earth they were pretty mad.
* Hand held video cameras were invented for use on spaceships, but so
was Tang and freeze dried food.
* The man who invented freeze dried food passed away last week.
* There are 3 American and 2 Soviet laser reflectors on the moon. Due
to atmosphere and eccentric orbits and so on, it usually takes one
thousand laser shots to get a reflection.
* A Japanese space craft is planned to fly by the moon next year and
photograph the Apollo landing sites.
* When Irving Langmuir took his new Waco biplane up on his first flight
in Troy Ohio in 1932 he went into a tailspin, pulling out at the last
second. He said later, "I just wanted to see what would happen." Some
has got it, and some has don't.

forward freely but not for sale

*****
Fiction
"Kirk's mind raced as he quickly assessed his situation: the shields were
down, the warp drive and impulse engines were dead, life support was
failing fast, and the Enterprise was plummeting out of control toward the
surface of Epsilon VI and, as Scotty and Spock searched frantically through
the manuals trying to find a way to save themselves, Kirk vowed, as he
stared at the solid blue image filling the main view screen, that never
again would he allow a Microsoft operating system to control his ship." –
Mike Rottmann, Reno, Nev.

One of the winning entries in the 20th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction
Contest.

Armstrong after the moonwalk. Armstrong did not pose for any photographs on the surface of the moon.

Apollo computer. Actually made by Northrup for MIT. The CM version had two display/keyboard sets. The LEM version had one. The 68K of software was compiled and woven into the wiring of the magnetic core memory. There was 4K of writeable memory and a tape drive. The programmable thermostat in your house probably contains more storage than both Apollo computers. The astronauts made 10,500 keystrokes during an Apollo flight.

The Whole Earth. There was a rumor that NASA had a secret reason for never releasing a photograph of the whole Earth. Finally they did. Stewart Brand published a very popular ecology minded catalog called the Whole Earth Catalog.

 Apollo 17 – the Earth rises quickly

Apollo 17 – an Earthlit morning on the moon

Apollo 17

 Photos by NASA, Computer photo by Bruce M Yarbro and Smithsonian Institution