Closing Keynote: To The Moon

Talks

Russ Olsen

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Closing Keynote: To The Moon

by Russ Olsen

In the closing keynote titled "To The Moon," delivered by Russ Olsen at the Keep Ruby Weird 2014 conference, the speaker narrates the inspiring story of the Apollo 11 moon landing, linking it to lessons applicable to modern technological work and project management. The presentation begins with an acknowledgment that this talk will be somewhat unconventional yet rooted in an exciting story full of relatable lessons. Olsen recounts the summer of 1969, a period marked by both chaos—from the heat of the summer to the tensions of the Cold War—and unprecedented aspirations as humanity prepared to venture into space.

Key Points:

The Context of Apollo: The Apollo program was a response to the Soviet Union's early successes in space exploration, and the decision to land on the moon by 1970 was driven by a combination of Cold War competition and a desire to reclaim American prestige.
Project Complexity: Olsen details how complex projects like Apollo required the juggling of numerous interconnected tasks, emphasizing the necessity of teamwork and trust between mission control and astronauts.
Lessons from Challenges: Throughout the moon landing process, many small mechanical failures and mishaps occurred. Olsen emphasizes that small issues, such as radio malfunctions and navigation errors, taught vital lessons about preparation and adaptability in technology.
Leadership Over Heroism: The talk stresses that massive projects benefit more from effective leadership than from pursuit of heroism, highlighting the contribution of teams rather than individual feats.
Inspiration Beyond the Task: Ultimately, Apollo sparked a wave of belief in possibilities; it resonated deeply with Olsen as a child and shaped his career in technology.

Important Conclusions:

The story of Apollo illustrates that while ambitious technical goals are important, the unexpected consequences—such as inspiring future generations and igniting interest in technology and engineering—are equally significant.
A call to action is issued: attendees should strive to challenge themselves with projects that are hard and inspire others to embrace a future filled with possibilities.

In summary, the Apollo program was not simply about landing on the moon but about fostering innovation, teamwork, and inspiration for future generations in technology.

00:00:22.199 I've done this talk a couple of times in the past, and usually what I do is start by saying that I'm going to do a different kind of talk today given the talks we've had at this conference. However, let me tell you that I'm going to do the most conventional talk, but it's still a little offbeat and a little weird. You see, what I want to do today is tell you a story—it's a story that's really close to my heart, and I think it's a fun story. If nothing else, it will end the day with some fun and excitement. I also believe this story has lessons to teach us about the things we do in our jobs every day.

00:01:30.360 So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell you the story, and as I said, I hope it will be a fun story. I think it is a fun story, and then at the end, I'm going to circle back around and try to make the case that this story has little things to teach us about the work we do and great big things to teach us about how we spend our time. Here goes; here's my story. It's the summer of 1969, and it's hot—I mean, it's really hot. When it gets hot like this, people tend to go a little crazy. In the summer of 1969, there are all kinds of things going crazy. I'll give you an example: it is so hot out there that regular people are starting to put air conditioners in their houses. I'm not talking about rich people, or supermarkets, or movie theaters; I'm talking about regular working people. It's just crazy, and you better have that air conditioner because you know how much a Coke costs today.

00:02:50.640 Here in the summer of 1969, the price of a Coke, just a glass bottle with some fizz and water and sugar, is now 15 cents. It's just insane! But if you want real crazy, look no further than the New York Mets. The New York Mets—those bums of an expansion team—have never had a winning season, yet this year they are killing everybody! They are winning game after game after game, and there's even talk— I can barely say it—there's even talk that they might go to the World Series! It's just insane! But if you want real, real insanity, you need to look no further than the Cold War. Here in the summer of 1969, the Cold War has been going on for 25 years. There's us over here, and there's them over there—the Soviet Union, as we call them.

00:03:47.120 For two and a half decades, we have been locked in this not-quite peace, not-quite war situation. All around the world, we are confronting them, while they are confronting us. In Berlin, their tanks are literally on one side of the street, and our tanks are literally on the other side, with guns pointed at each other. For 25 years, each side has been sitting there, waiting for the other side to make the first move, the first mistake, or even to sneeze. You better hope nobody sneezes! They have thousands of nuclear weapons; we have thousands of nuclear weapons, and let me tell you, if someone pushes that actual button, and those bombs start flying, we are all dead. Don't let anybody kid you! And if those bombs start flying, we all have about 15 minutes to live.

00:05:04.880 So here in the summer of 1969, we are all hanging on by our fingernails, living life 15 minutes at a time. But for once, it's not the New York Mets, it's not the price of a Coke, nor even the heat that's filling up all the newspapers; for once, it's something else—it's Apollo! It is the project to land a person on the moon. Don't get me wrong; Apollo is all about the Cold War. You see, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Russians were making us look bad, doing all these spectacular things in space.

00:05:59.840 They launched the first Earth satellite, they put the first person in orbit, and they got the first picture of the far side of the moon—an incredible achievement, albeit a really bad picture. The Cold War was like a chess game: they make a move, we have to respond. They were doing all these things in space, and we were going around the world telling people, 'Be on our side! We're the smart ones! We're going to win!' And you can't afford to do nothing if the other side is making you look bad by accomplishing all these spectacular feats.

00:07:15.640 So John Kennedy, who was President at the time, got his advisers together and they came up with a strategy based on the idea that if you're behind in a race—like we were behind in this space race—it's better to be behind in a marathon than in a 50-yard dash. Why? Because in a marathon, you have a long time to catch up and recover. So Kennedy declared our marathon; he got his advisers together and asked, 'Where can we go in space that is far away and will take a long time?' His advisers said, 'The moon's been far away.' He said, 'Fine! We're going to the moon!' It was just a completely arbitrary goal.

00:08:45.600 And we needed a deadline, a stake in the calendar. 1970 is a nice round number; we're going to the moon by 1970. It was a completely arbitrary deadline and a completely arbitrary goal. No one here has ever experienced that, have you? So Kennedy got up in front of Congress and made the speech, declaring, 'We are going to take a person, land them on the moon, and return them safely to the Earth by 1970!" A funny thing happened after he made that speech. People started looking at each other, nodding, and saying, 'Yeah, we understand this is all about the Cold War, but we are going to the moon! Who cares if this is about the Cold War? We're going to the moon!'

00:09:52.840 And you can tell that Kennedy actually caught a little bit of the fever. This was just a completely cold-blooded Cold War strategy, but you can tell he got some of the excitement because a few months after he made that first speech, he made a second speech that had words to the effect of, 'We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.' It's an interesting way of looking at life. So how hard is it to go to the moon? Well, it really all depends on how far away the moon is. Whenever you're talking about astronomical distances—how far the planets are and that kind of stuff—you always have to have this analogy. I've got a tennis ball right here. If this tennis ball is the Earth, then I've got this little rubber ball, which is about the right size for the moon.

00:11:19.480 So I want you to think back to your fifth-grade physical science textbook. Here's the Earth and here's the moon. They always illustrate it by putting the Earth and the moon about the same distance apart, right? You've seen this picture thousands of times. But I have to tell you, this picture is more about getting the Earth and the moon on the same page than they are about the real distances. The Earth and the moon are not this far apart! At this scale, they'd be about 2,400 miles apart. Now, when Kennedy said we were going to the moon by 1970, people had just started going out into space. One American, a handful of Russians had been out. And suddenly, we are going to the moon by an arbitrary deadline.

00:12:37.200 It was just insane! If you have this crazy project and this insane deadline, how do you even start? What is the right thing to do to get this going? Well, I don't know what the right thing to do is, but I know what they did: they did everything all at the same time. They thought of every single thing they could possibly need to get to the moon and started a whole series of projects all upfront—all at the same time! The hope was that they would finish and all fit together at the last minute.

00:13:59.200 One of the things they did was to ask what the simplest version of this project would be that they could do right now, right at the beginning. The final goal is to take a person, land them on the moon, and bring them back safely to Earth. But we can't do that right at the beginning! So what's the simplest possible thing they could do that would work right now? Well, pretty obviously, leave the person out of the equation! Just send a machine, a robot, land it on the moon, and return it safely to Earth—that's got to be easier! You don’t need all the air, shielding, and everything that people need. You can make a much smaller spaceship if you leave the person out.

00:14:51.599 But is it the easiest thing they could possibly do? Not quite! They needed to talk about what this word 'land' means. What if we redefine 'land' to mean going screaming in at about 17,000 miles an hour? We can take some pictures on the way, get some practice in doing this! Thus was born Ranger— a project to hit the moon with a spacecraft. You've heard the phrase 'throwaway prototype,' right? Well, you know they're not putting this one in production! Think about it! Ranger 1 was launched in August of 1961. It was a funny project—the goal was to crash the spaceship! Ranger 1 succeeded beyond all expectations, certainly ahead of schedule! Ranger 1 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean.

00:16:02.360 Ranger 2 did better: it crashed in the Pacific Ocean. Ranger 3, in all seriousness, did even better: it made it all the way out to the orbit of the moon, but the moon wasn't there at the time! It made it all the way out there, but there was a navigation problem. Oh God, was that supposed to be a plus sign? Ranger 3 missed the moon by about 177,000 miles! Ranger 3 is still out there! Ranger 4 actually hit the moon, but it died on the way; it had this total electrical failure. It was dead— a stone-dead piece of metal hit the moon. That was a success, sort of.

00:17:32.280 Not really. Ranger 5 was apparently worried about Ranger 3 and joined it. Ranger 6 had a flawless trip to the moon—it takes about three days to get to the moon. On the third day, the people behind Ranger 6 realized that neither God nor Isaac Newton was going to prevent this thing from hitting the moon. The spacecraft was working, and the only thing left to do was to turn on the TV cameras to get pictures of the moon getting closer and closer. They commanded the cameras to come on, and nothing happened! Ranger 6 went screaming into the moon, blind as a bat! This is close! Ranger 7 actually worked: it flew to the moon and took pictures on the way.

00:18:59.840 As the moon got closer and closer, this last picture is evidence that Ranger 7 fulfilled its destiny because it took this picture and was radioing it back to Earth when the lights went out. You can imagine that the people behind Ranger 7 were popping champagne corks and slapping each other on the back, but you can also imagine they were saying, 'My God! It took us two years and seven tries to do the simplest thing that could possibly work! How in God's name are we going to do the real thing?' The answer is they just kept plowing ahead with all of these different projects.

00:20:24.800 For instance, they realized early on that they needed to build these huge rockets and spaceships, but those rockets and spaceships were not going to be ready in time to train the people. You didn't just need the hardware; you needed the skills to get to the moon! They built a whole different rocket and spacecraft called Gemini, which was just for practice. They would go up into Earth's orbit, still in the fuzz, and practice the skills they needed to go to the moon. They learned a lot from Gemini!

00:21:44.880 One of the things they learned was about the little steering rockets. Every spaceship has these little rockets all over it that help it steer. It's like the kind of thing airplanes do with their rudder and ailerons; but in space, there's no air! So you have these little steering rockets doing that. What they found out with Gemini is that if one of those steering rockets malfunctions and keeps firing and will not shut off, what happens is your spaceship starts to tumble. Slowly at first, but then faster and faster! The other thing they learned is that when that happens, the people inside have trouble seeing what they're doing because the world is literally spinning around them.

00:23:13.680 But what they also learned is that if you have an astronaut inside that spaceship who is calm enough to work the problem, even while the spaceship is careening out of control, and who is well-trained enough to find the right switches to throw without being able to see, this is a survivable accident! While all this was going on, while they were trying to hit the moon with Rangers, while they had spaceships tumbling out of control, they were also building huge workshops to assemble these enormous moon rockets. The end result of that effort was this!

00:24:21.960 This is the largest rocket ever built. It stands 27 stories tall and weighs 7 million pounds. It only has one job: to throw the very pointy bit at the top—the very tippy top—up at the moon! Because the very tippy top, which you can barely see in this picture, is the result of another project. The pointy bit at the top of that huge rocket is the Apollo Mother Ship. This spaceship is designed to keep three people alive on the trip to the moon, help them stay on the moon for a few days, and bring them back to Earth safely.

00:25:28.560 It has air, heat, cooling, and all the protection that people need. It has a big rocket engine on the bottom to send them back from the moon to Earth. It even has heat shields and parachutes so they can survive reentry, and it can even act as a boat because it lands in the ocean! It's a marvel of 1960s technology! But there are two problems with it: problem number one is it killed its first crew when they weren't even traveling in space. They were just sitting on the launch pad practicing, simulating a launch.

00:26:46.840 When a fire broke out inside the spacecraft, three times the ground crew tried to fight their way in to get those people out. Three times, the flames, smoke, and heat drove them back. And the fourth time they got the hatch open, there was nobody left to save! That's problem number one. Here in the summer of 1969, we think we've resolved all those fire hazard problems, but we think we've fixed all of them. Problem number two is that this thing, with the heat shields, parachutes, and everything else it needs, is actually too heavy to land on the moon! It can go from the Earth to the moon, it can orbit around the moon, and it can come back, but it cannot make the last 50 to 60-mile trip from orbit down to the surface of the moon.

00:27:57.560 So for that, we have this bizarre-looking thing. It is actually a specialized spaceship, and its sole purpose is to take two of the three astronauts down from orbit around the moon to the surface. One astronaut stays behind to watch the mothership. The guy waiting is Michael Collins, and he has the suckiest job in the universe! His job only sucks partially because he doesn't get to land on the moon, but mostly because of the 'what if' scenarios: what if something happens to the others on the way down, what if something happens while they are on the moon, or what if they can't get back up off the moon. Collins's job is to leave his friends behind and return to Earth alone—a sad journey that has to be the suckiest job in the universe!

00:29:18.080 It is July 20, 1969—a Sunday, around 4:00 in the afternoon. A few days ago, Apollo 11, carrying those three men, took off, and they've had a textbook journey out to the moon. A few hours ago, Armstrong and Aldren climbed into this weird-looking contraption and started heading down to the surface of the moon. They are entering the critical last 10 minutes of their trip down to the moon, a time NASA calls 'powered descent.' Back at Mission Control, there's a room full of people who are armed for war. Many of these people have spent a significant fraction of their adult lives preparing for these 10 minutes, and they are deadly serious. The door is locked, there’s an armed guard, and no one is getting in or out until this is over.

00:30:57.440 They've locked down circuit breakers on a lot of their important electrical equipment because they would rather risk a fire than have the lights go out at the wrong moment. Their job is to watch the data streaming down from that weird-looking spaceship and make sure it's doing what it’s supposed to do. Across the United States, on that Sunday afternoon at 4:00, there is a blanket of tension; the streets are mostly empty because most people are inside glued to their TV sets. But something weird starts to happen: cars begin to pull off the city streets, onto the highways, and rural roads. Drivers can't drive and listen to their radios at the same time!

00:32:12.480 Meanwhile, in a row house in Philadelphia, a 10-year-old boy and his dad are sitting on the couch watching the coverage on TV. It’s right around 4:00 in the afternoon when the dad gets up, walks over to the TV, kneels down, and puts his hand on his head, waiting for it all to be over. They are watching Walter Cronkite on TV—he is like the king of TV newsmen in the United States! They do surveys to see who the public trusts, and Cronkite always comes in first while the president of the United States usually comes in second.

00:32:30.960 Cronkite is one of those people who stays calm while he’s getting shot at in war zones, telling everyone back home what it's like; he’s completely unemotional. Many remember him as the very calm voice with just a touch of sadness announcing the assassination of John Kennedy. It is now 4:05 p.m., just at the beginning of the last 10 minutes of the flight down to the moon. Armstrong and Alrder are at 50,000 feet, and they’ve burned through about a quarter of their fuel to get here. However, things are not going very well! The problem is that their radio is not working properly—they can only talk to the ground for a few seconds before getting huge blasts of static.

00:33:52.760 They don't know where the interference is coming from or what's causing it, they just know they can't talk to the ground reliably. Even worse, all the data is dropping out! They are losing their data link, which means they don't have that extra set of eyes reliably telling them that their machine is working. Armstrong and Aldren have their heads down, adjusting the antenna angle and doing whatever they can to make the radio work. Fortunately, they have time to do that because they aren't actually flying the spaceship; there’s this cool new device—the new gadget that is flying that spaceship—called a computer!

00:35:09.720 The computer in Apollo 11 is there because Armstrong and Aldren are not just trying to land anywhere on the moon; they are trying to land in a specific pre-selected, very tight landing zone. There was some controversy over where Apollo 11 should land on the moon. On one side were the geologists and scientists studying the moon—they wanted the landing to be scientifically and geologically interesting. On the other side were the astronauts themselves and the rocket scientists responsible for the spaceship. They insisted on landing in a place that was flattest, dullest, and most geologically uninteresting because this was about the Cold War. You are not going to win the Cold War having your little spaceship tip off the edge of a crater!

00:36:19.640 So, Apollo 11 has this computer, and that computer is flying them to the flattest, dullest, most geologically uninteresting spot that NASA can find. It is now 4:10 p.m., about five minutes into that 10-minute flight; Armstrong and Aldren are down to 35,000 feet and have gone through about half their fuel. Good news—the radio is working! The mysterious radio problems just go away—nobody knows why, but the radio starts functioning again! You can believe that Armstrong and Aldren are thinking, 'Okay, something had to go wrong, and maybe this is it. Maybe it’s all going to work out from here!'

00:37:30.440 Suddenly, a display in front of them lights up with the number 12-02. 12-02 is a message from their computer; I know nobody in this room really remembers the old guidance computers, so let me translate it for you. The controller, Arlong, is on the radio saying, '121—program alarm.' He radios down to Mission Control, but does not know what 12-02 means. The people at Mission Control have a moment of frozen horror—it denotes that the computer has more to do than it can handle, so it is dropping tasks. The software is programmed so that when this happens, the computer will do the most important things first. Right now, there is only one important thing: fly the darn spaceship! So, Bales has about three seconds to make a life-or-death decision, and he says, 'Just ignore 12-02! Just keep flying; ignore it!'

00:39:07.920 They radio this advice, but Armstrong and Aldren, well, they can't quite ignore it. Eventually, they start getting another error code, which is 12-01—pretty much the same thing! The real problem is that there’s a bad user interface design; whenever one of these error codes appears, it stays on their display until they push a button to clear it, and they must push that button to see the next error code. Who knows? The next error might be even worse! Armstrong and Aldren are busy pushing buttons to clear these error codes! It's now 4:12 p.m., seven minutes into this last 10-minute flight, and they've dropped down to 2,000 feet; good news: the computer starts working again. As mysteriously as the computer problems came, they go away! The error codes slow down, then stop.

00:40:29.560 Finally, after all this time of having his head down messing with the radio and computer, Armstrong has a chance to look up and out the window! He's 2,000 feet up, and if you're in an airliner flying down to New York, at 2,000 feet, you see if the traffic across the neighborhood is bad! But looking out at 2,000 feet, you're around the neighborhood—this is nowhere near home! Armstrong looks out the window, and for the first time in human history, the Moon is no longer just a distant light in the sky; it's not just a geopolitical prize or a goal that he’s been training for! Now the moon is a place he can see ground scrolling below with rocks, craters, and cracks. He can see mountains; the mountains are higher than he is!

00:41:38.320 Nobody knows what Armstrong felt at that moment; he never said. But sometimes, when I was a kid, and even now, I imagine that I'm him! Put yourself in his place: you're in this bulky space suit, looking through a glass helmet, seeing something no one has ever seen before! How would you feel? I don’t know what Armstrong felt, but I know what I would feel: terror! The moon is a place; it’s the wrong place! Armstrong knows exactly what he should see when he looks out that window; it isn’t this! He can’t see the right place, and it gets worse because on that window there are these little markings. He finds the right marking and uses it as a guide to look down at the ground the computer is taking them to land.

00:43:05.640 He lines up on this marking, then looks down to see a very geologically interesting crater, not that big, but surrounded by a huge debris field of boulders. You see, a crater is a hole in the ground made by a rock coming in—and there’s stuff all over! Armstrong looks at these craters for a couple of seconds. Then, he makes a very Neil Armstrong decision—he shuts off the autopilot and does two things: he kills most of their downward velocity, so they’re not falling too fast, and he guns it forward! He does this because he thinks he can see a decent place to land beyond the boulder field!

00:44:33.720 And he needs to get there before they run out of fuel! Back at Mission Control, they can see Armstrong click off the autopilot and notice he is slowing their descent. They can see him zooming forward, but one thing they can’t see are the boulders—there’s no live video feed! However, they do see Armstrong's heart rate; he has monitors all over him. His heart rate goes from about 85, which might be slower than my heart rate right now, to 150! Their reaction? The people in Mission Control do absolutely nothing! They shut up! The guy running the show—mission control, a guy named Gene Kranz—tells everyone in the room not to speak to the astronauts anymore except for one thing: he wants periodic updates on how much time they have left.

00:46:06.400 It is now 4:14 p.m.—nine minutes into this 10-minute flight—and Armstrong and Aldren are down to 313 feet. They have burned through 95% of their fuel and are slowly sinking toward the surface of the moon, zooming forward so fast they don’t even know how fast they’re going because no one ever imagined they would be this close to the ground at such speeds! Their speedometer is pegged! But they can see that the edge of the boulder field is getting closer and closer. They fly past these boulders quickly—it’s now 4:16 p.m., 11 minutes into the 10-minute flight—Armstrong and Aldren are past the boulder field, down to 30 feet.

00:47:27.760 Armstrong thinks this is a good place to land, and he is jamming on the brakes to stop the spaceship so he can lower it the last bit, like a helicopter. It’s right around now that the first ominous warning comes up from the ground—just two words: '60 seconds!' You have one minute of fuel left! Armstrong barely hears the warning because he’s trying to find the ground! The rocket engine is kicking up a huge cloud of dust! He can’t see the ground anymore, but he knows it’s down there. He feels with his toes to find the ground.

00:48:56.560 Now they’re down to 2% fuel when the second warning comes from the ground: '30 seconds; for God's sake, land this thing!' Aldren looks out the window and sees a shadow on the ground! It’s the shadow of the spaceship! They are really close now! Aldren looks down at his instrument panel; there’s a little blue light in front of him, labeled 'contact.' As he looks, it lights up! The contact light means that the sensors on the landing gear of this weird-looking machine have touched something solid! Contact light means they've landed! It means Armstrong and Aldren, all those people in mission control, that the United States of America, that humanity has arrived!

00:50:34.960 It is 4:17:41 p.m. and Armstrong and Aldren are not quite done. The plan had been for them to turn off the rocket engine just a few feet above the moon and let the thing fall the rest of the way, but they were too busy not dying to do that! Now, they’re sitting on the ground with the rocket engine running, kicking up dust, and they must shut down this dangerous machine full of explosives very carefully! They have this long, technical shutdown checklist they need to follow, and it’s vital they get it right. They do it together. Armstrong starts with, 'Shutdown,' and Aldren confirms, 'Okay; engine stop, out of detent!' Then Armstrong says, 'Out of detent, auto!' They work through this long list of technical mumbo jumbo as they power everything down.

00:52:18.160 Meanwhile, back on Earth, the people at mission control see data streaming down; they see that the little spaceship stopped moving! They can see their version of the contact light come on, and they can hear Armstrong and Aldren clicking off all the systems. You would think that in a moment like this, someone would say something profound, something historic, but that’s not really how people are. Instead, the guy on the ground radios up to the astronauts with words to the effect of, 'We think you landed!' Well, duh!

00:53:41.040 Armstrong is still finishing the shutdown checklist and gets to the last item. He says the words he had practiced, the words he had made up—that he wanted to be the first words from another world: 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!' With those words, this room full of highly disciplined engineers, with their skinny black ties and white shirts, began standing up and shouting! You can imagine the excitement in those cars that were pulled off the road! If you pulled your car off and were listening on the radio, you would pound your steering wheel and maybe yell, looking around to see who saw you! In that row house, the 10-year-old boy takes a second or two to realize they did it! And he realizes his dad is no longer crouched with his hand on his head—he’s jumping up and down, yelling louder than ever before!

00:55:05.680 The boy realizes it’s not just his dad who is shouting; it’s the neighbors next door, across the street, everywhere! The whole neighborhood is shouting! It’s the kind of noise you don’t hear so much as you feel it in your stomach, and it comes in waves. It’s really loud, then trails off, and just when you think it’s done, it gets loud again. Amidst it all, the boy focuses on the television and sees the second incredible thing of the day! It was just there for a second—the camera cut away, but he saw Walter Cronkite crying! That’s my story.

00:56:35.680 But I say that’s my story, and that’s not entirely true—it’s your story too! You gain that story for being one of us. If you live and breathe technology, if you get out of bed every day just to build the next cool thing, then everything that happened in that story—plus or minus a few politicians—was done by people just like you. The story is yours; it’s part of your cultural heritage for being one of us! So this story is yours—embrace it! But I did say I would try to make the case that the story had practical lessons—little practical things and great big practical things.

00:57:31.200 Let me start with the little things. What can we learn from this story? One of the little things we can learn is that in a complex technological project like this, or the work you do, little things can kill you! Let’s discuss all the things that went wrong during that last 10-minute flight down to the moon, and why they happened. I’ll give you a hint: all the causes were little tiny things. Why did the radio stop working? It happened for five critical minutes; that was caused by those darn steering rockets!

00:59:12.720 The engineers, a few months before they went to the moon, put shields in place—pieces of sheet metal near the steering rockets—deflecting exhaust away so it wouldn’t burn through the skin of the very fragile spacecraft. These shields did a great job of deflecting the rocket exhaust, but they also acted as radio signal reflectors and, at certain angles, completely messed up radio communication! Little things can kill you! A little piece of sheet metal can cause a disaster in a complicated technical project! Why did the computer crash? They had this high-tech computer that crashed on them because it had different modes selected with a switch. The mode they should have been in was to pay attention to how high they were above the moon and how fast they were going.

01:00:44.480 However, the mode the computer was actually in was to watch both ground and mother ship up in orbit. It turned out that computer couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time, so it crashed! Little things can kill you! A switch in the wrong place—then the spacecraft is off course! They had pinpoint landing coordinates! What happened? Well, this goes back to when the two spacecrafts were hooked together. There was a tunnel between them for astronauts to pass, and when they got ready to separate, they closed the hatches and didn’t completely pump the air out. So when they separated, there was a puff of air that pushed on the lander and changed its speed.

01:02:06.240 This was just one foot per second! At first, what difference could one foot per second possibly make in a spaceship going 1,400 mph? Do the math! A foot per second is about 60 feet per minute, and that translates to a mile or two of error. This all made the difference between their perfect flat, boring landing site and what could have turned out to be a crater of death! Little things can kill you! A little puff of air can lead to disaster in a complicated technical project!

01:03:26.600 But there’s something else you can learn from this! Between the two spacecraft, they had two million separate parts. Think about that for a minute: two machines with about a million parts each! If you were going to worry in excessive detail about everything on machines with that many parts, you might be ready to leave for the moon a week from Tuesday! The trick is not to worry in absolute detail about everything you do. Get all the details right, and be ready to deal with the inevitable failures of the things you missed. That’s one of the real lessons!

01:04:43.360 Another lesson we learn is that trust in a team is valuable. Think about how much trust went on between mission control and astronauts—Steve Bales, this guy, says, 'Ignore the error code!' and they do! Armstrong deviates from the plan; there’s clearly something wrong, but they don’t shout, 'Neil, you've turned off your targeting computer!' They just trust that the person on the spot knows what they’re doing! Trust is critical in overcoming failures that occur! Another lesson is the value of leadership. We need leaders to lead these kinds of projects; we don’t actually need heroes.

01:05:53.560 The kinds of things we do require leaders much more than heroes! We tend to put too much emphasis on heroics in our business and life. I give you a good example; this is a very heroic photograph, taken a few hours after the landing. It grabs me, but that’s the problem—it looks flawless! These brilliant people flew to the moon, and everything went perfectly. We know that’s not what happened! We know this was a struggle every step of the way! When I think about what to remember from that day, I think of the shutdown checklist. These are two individuals trying to finish the job after a really bad day!

01:06:58.520 I like that the checklist is in technical jargon—it’s incomprehensible! It’s the kind of stuff we use to talk to each other! We all have this jargon! I like that I can go into work and say something almost as incomprehensible to my co-workers! This is our kind of lingo! The words of these two astronauts signify that they were trying to coordinate an event when everything wasn’t working perfectly! This brings me to some of the bigger lessons. When you do something this extraordinary, technically difficult, you cannot predict the outcome. There will always be unanticipated effects.

01:08:30.560 The best example of this kind of occurrence with Apollo is that they went out to the moon mostly to send a message to the Russians—maybe to learn something about the moon too! They envisioned themselves landing on the moon, gathering rocks and scientific facts. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moon—they looked back over their shoulders and saw themselves! They saw their place in the universe! I know for many people in this room, pictures like these have become wallpaper—seen a thousand times. Pictures are put on t-shirts, becoming wallpaper on screens, yet I would like for you to imagine for a second never having seen such a picture, and one day, someone slaps it down in front of you. How would you feel? What would you say?

01:09:43.440 You’d look at it and perhaps say, 'My God! That’s everything! It’s all we are! It’s all we've ever had! It’s all we've ever known!' This ground is beautiful, tiny, and out there in the black, and maybe we should take care of it! There’s no greater irony than the fact that Apollo, this macho, Cold-War, high-tech government program that kicked the Russians' butts, helped inspire the modern environmental movement as a mass political one! Pictures like this coincided almost exactly with the start of modern environmentalism! This is a profound irony, an unanticipated consequence of Apollo that helped give us context!

01:11:31.560 You cannot predict what will happen when you accomplish technically cool things! There are always effects that come from it. This brings me to what I think is the ultimate lesson of Apollo. I have a hard time explaining it mostly; I think of it as a conversation. Maybe you and I go to lunch—let’s say we have tacos! Is there somewhere we could get tacos? Maybe we’re chatting over lunch, and one of us has an idea—doesn’t matter whose it is or how it goes! I might want to get rich selling pet food online; maybe it's you wanting to create a new programming language or database. It does not matter whose idea it is!

01:12:44.560 You could tell me it’s a bad idea—nobody will care. I'll believe you! You could say it’s not worth the money, and I might see your point! You could even tell me it’s bad for the public or environment; I might agree. But one thing you can’t tell me is that it’s impossible! I simply won’t believe you because I’m familiar with the impossible! I saw it on TV when I was a kid! The ultimate lesson of Apollo for me is that when you do something technically cool, you might achieve other benefits too! Congratulations! Maybe you’ll get rich, but there’s this second effect; it sends out waves! It’s like a wave that originates from your accomplishment—it’s a wave of belief! You make people believe!

01:14:38.440 'I can do it!' You empower people to believe in possibilities—'I can do it!' You allow people to believe in the future, and they gain self-belief! I know this for a fact because I am the result of one of those waves! I am a child of Apollo! I sat on that couch, and my life changed! I shifted off whatever path I’d been on and got on a different path—one that led me to college and to engineering, and then to computer programming, then to writing books, and eventually to being here with you tonight!

01:16:13.560 For me, the ultimate lesson of Apollo—the story means very little when it comes to the moon, space travel, or anything. It’s everything to do with inspiring people to do the next thing, to do something bigger than they think they can do! I said the story belongs to you, and it does! But if you are one of us, the story comes with a challenge—to inspire the next bunch of people—to inspire your colleagues, to inspire others trying to improve their livelihoods! Inspire the next bunch of 10-year-olds!

01:17:18.640 So the real lesson of this story goes back to the words that started it all decades ago: 'We choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy but because it’s hard!' Go! Go to something hard! Thank you very much!

Russ Olsen

2 talks

Keep Ruby Weird 2014