
How Curiosity, Luck, and the Flip of a Switch Saved the Moon Program (2014) - dctoedt
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/john-aaron-apollo-12-curiosity-luck-and-sce-to-aux
======
dmd
> (For the astronauts, speeding into space at one and a half times the speed
> of sound, a mile and a half up, time, according to Einstein, was literally
> slowing down.)

Indeed! Those intrepid relativistic explorers, at Mach 1.5, would experience
0.99999999999855 seconds for every 1 we poor earth-bound non-moving folks did.

Of course, once they were on the way to the moon, moving at the far faster 11
km/s, then they'd _really_ start to get some relativity going on: 0.9999999993
seconds for every 1 in our rest frame.

~~~
ubernostrum
The relativistic effects of just being a satellite in Earth orbit are enough
that GPS has to correct for it.

Don't discount the impact of even tiny errors in this stuff.

~~~
rimantas
Don't discount the importance of context.

------
Animats
This is a dumbed-down version of a story told in more detail in various
histories of Apollo. I think it's in Mike Collins' book. Anyway, there are key
points here that the story doesn't mention. The Saturn V booster's control
system was completely independent of the crew capsule systems. It had its own
guidance, gyros, computers, and telemetry, those were all working, and the
ground knew they were all working.

The astronauts had no control over the booster anyway; they could abort, but
that's all. They weren't driving at that point. As long as boost phase was
going well, there was no urgent reason to abort; more altitude offered more
return options, along with time to fix the problem.

The Apollo stack had a good grounding system; the possibility of a lightning
hit had been considered. Lightning didn't, in fact, do any significant damage
to the onboard systems.

------
quesera
> There was a driving rain on Cape Canaveral on the morning of November 14,
> 1969 ...

Interestingly, Cape Canaveral didn't formally exist in 1969. The name was
changed to Cape Kennedy six years prior, and restored four years hence.

Great article though. _Vice_ has come a long way.

------
raverbashing
Funny how there was a small fumble with the 'SCE to AUX' and they didn't try
to use the phonetic alphabet to solve that

------
grecy
> _burning some thirteen metric tons of fuel per second_

Whoa, the mind boggles.

~~~
noselasd
I suppose when you have 5 of these, [http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/eande-...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/eande-f1scale.jpg) , you can push a lot of fuel
through.

