Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

As of 2004, a much more radical comparison is needed to convey how primitive the computers of the late 1960s really were. We heard one recently: The entire Saturn V stack—all three stages of the booster plus the command module and the lunar module—had less computing capacity combined than today’s typical cell phone.

The Saturn V may not have had any nifty microprocessors on board—the microprocessor wasn’t invented until two years after the first lunar landing—but it worked every time, and its power dwarfed that of any launch vehicle made since.

more than a ton of kerosene and two tons of liquid oxygen burst into the combustion chamber. Per second.

With the sole exception of a nuclear explosion, the noise of a Saturn launch was the loudest noise ever produced by man.

The first of Kraft’s precepts was simplicity itself: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.”

Tindall recognized that what matters most to people is not that they get their way, but that they feel they have had a chance to make their case.

For a few short years, Apollo was almost like a Renaissance, Petrone thinks, but nobody wants to confront that kind of possibility now—to do so would make the nation recognize how much it abandoned so casually.

Under the heat of Apollo, your marriage either melted or annealed.