One Giant Leap Quotes

“What NASA did for semiconductor companies was teach them to make chips of near-perfect quality, to make them fast, in huge volumes, and to make them cheaper, faster, and better with each year.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Reihm wasn’t thrilled by the Moon walk that he and his colleagues had worked for years to make possible; he was thrilled by its being over,”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“didn’t usher in the Space Age; it ushered in the Digital Age. And that is as valuable a legacy as the imagined Space Age might have been. Probably more valuable.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The rover camera was operated from Mission Control by Ed Fendell, who managed to record the entire liftoff, sending commands to angle the camera up in sync with the LM’s swift ascent. Fendell started sending commands three seconds before the astronauts gave the blastoff command, to account for the time it took the radio signals to reach the Moon (still from video).”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“That is the spirit of America, and it is the essence of the American dream: to imagine something that is out of reach, and then do what’s necessary to make it happen, to prove that it wasn’t out of reach after all.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Here’s another thing we don’t give Apollo credit for, then: it was dramatically ahead of its time. Part of why it has left so much space behind it is that it wasn’t just a leap to the Moon; it was a leap that took the technology and the people to a place we weren’t otherwise ready to go. We haven’t spent 50 years neglecting space; we’ve spent 50 years catching up.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The New York Times had it exactly right, and Mailer had it exactly wrong: the boredom was a measure of NASA’s success. The first splitting of the atom is a milestone event in human history, but every minute of every day, nuclear power runs everything from alarm clocks and coffeepots to aircraft carriers, and the only people watching are the people in charge of the nuclear reactors. The first time a Boeing 747 took off and landed successfully, carrying 350 people, having been christened by the first lady of the United States, it was front-page news. But every day for decades there were hundreds of 747s in routine service, and their comings and goings attracted notice only if something went wrong.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“In fact, the point of saying “If we can put a man on the Moon” is to conclude the conversation on a subject. It’s a way not just of finishing but of winning an argument and declaring victory. It must be inarguable that if we can send a man to the Moon, we can deal with our garbage, our racism, our poverty, our missing salmon. Case closed.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“NASA and Apollo didn’t exist in a world where we could lay out a thoughtful, methodical, half-century-long plan of spaceships and space exploration, and then execute it. Nor has the U.S. government ever shown any talent for that kind of forward thinking. It might be true that the Saturn V or the lunar module weren’t the right specific space technologies for whatever the post-Apollo step should have been. But the skills required to build them, the insights and lessons learned about how to travel in space—those were unquestionably transferable to the next step.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“No human being has left low Earth orbit—from the U.S. or any country—since December 7, 1972, when Ron Evans, Harrison Schmitt, and Gene Cernan fired the engine of their Apollo 17 ship America to head for the Moon.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“the business scholar Jim Collins ranks the IBM 360’s impact with that of the Ford Model T and Boeing’s first passenger jet, the 707. Among the customers for the IBM 360: MIT and NASA. The computer was used to write software for the Apollo flight computer, and the IBM 360 was the core of the computing power in Mission Control during Apollo, in the Real-Time Computer Complex. Just without integrated circuits. Integrated circuits might have been the future, but not even the biggest, most powerful computer company in the world was ready to use them.24 There was only one big customer for integrated circuits in the first half of the 1960s: the U.S. government.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The Space Age—the charmingly technologized world of The Jetsons—came to seem like a version of the world mostly free of the dark shadow that “technology” had carried since Hiroshima. “Apollo had a powerful cultural impact,” said Schatzberg. “It’s absolutely certain that it generated enthusiasm for high technology.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Pavlics had designed it and built the scale model, with meticulous detail, including seats sewn by his wife, and the 18-inch car motored along using batteries, operating by radio remote control. As he was finishing the model, Pavlics noticed that his young son’s latest GI Joe was a new version, “Astronaut GI Joe,” wearing a shiny Mercury spacesuit. For the trip to Huntsville, Pavlics had borrowed Astronaut GI Joe and put him in the little rover’s driver’s seat. The men set the model down in the corridor outside von Braun’s office. “I guided the little model with radio control into his office,” said Pavlics, “right to his desk. He was on the telephone, looking at what’s coming into his office.” The NASA rocket chief, who was also director of the Marshall center, immediately hung up. “What have we here?” he asked.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“On the morning of July 9, 1969, at 4 a.m., Kinzler supervised installation of both items on the lunar module. That was a delicate period for Apollo 11, which had long since been moved from the protective cover of the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launchpad 39-A. It was launched a week later.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“the whole debate overlooked two small details. The Soviets had landed their banner on the Moon a full decade earlier, albeit robotically. And in an almost completely overlooked moment, an actual, intact American flag was already sitting on the Moon before Armstrong and Aldrin landed.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Moon, in one-sixth lunar gravity. The Apollo spacesuit, including the life-support backpack, weighed 180 pounds, so on Earth a fully outfitted Apollo astronaut weighed about 350 pounds.17 On the Moon he weighed 60 pounds.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Some parts of the lunar module couldn’t be tested at all. The batteries that supplied power throughout the lunar landing and the surface stay were specially made for Grumman; they were high capacity, but they could not be recharged.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“After the lunar modules were assembled, each stage was mounted in a huge contraption known as “the Tumbler.” It turned each half of the lunar module upside down and rotated it in midair, shaking it out. The goal was to rattle loose anything left inside—even something as small as the shavings from a rivet.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“most of the lunar module would be left on the Moon. It would be separated into two vehicles itself, so that just the crew cabin would blast off back to orbit, leaving behind as much equipment as possible: the entire lower stage, including legs, ladder, fuel tanks, plumbing, and the big descent engine. In fact before each of the six lunar modules lifted off from the Moon to head back to orbit, the astronauts depressurized the cabin, opened the hatch, and tossed out onto the surface the backpack life-support units from their spacesuits that they had needed to walk around.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Houbolt’s calculations were arresting. He figured you could save almost half the weight of a Moon rocket by using lunar-orbit rendezvous, compared to hauling everything all the way to the Moon and back. In spaceflight terms, being able to cut the total weight of your launch rocket and its spaceships in half was huge. That, in fact, is part of why Houbolt found lunar-orbit rendezvous so compelling. It really did make a Moon flight seem possible.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Six days later President Lyndon B. Johnson announced, in his somber Thanksgiving Day address to the nation, that he was renaming the space center in Florida the John F. Kennedy Space Center and renaming the piece of land it sat on Cape Kennedy. In a brief meeting the day before, Jacqueline Kennedy had asked Johnson to do that, and he had agreed, and immediately called the governor of Florida, Farris Bryant, to win his help and support. When Americans rocketed off to the Moon landing, they would do so from a spaceport at Cape Kennedy.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Kennedy was in good spirits during that November 16 Cape visit; he also helicoptered 30 miles out to sea to a navy observation ship to watch the launch of a Polaris missile from a submarine 50 feet below the surface.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Kennedy wanted to do a lot of things in this world; he wanted America to do a lot of things in this world; and he clearly saw the race to the Moon as instrumental. But also as a project that was wrecking—his word, “wrecking”—his ability to get a lot of other important things done.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon. . . . We choose to go to the Moon, in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“shaking Richard Nixon’s hand, he declined. Not long after Apollo 14 returned to Earth, Rolling Stone magazine sent Tim Crouse to profile Eyles. He’s pictured with his hand on the abort button on MIT’s lunar module simulator. The headline: “EXTRA! Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14!”89”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“For Apollo, rope-core memory had powerful advantages. In the mid-1960s it was the densest memory available—which is to say, the most memory to be had for the weight and space, between 10 and 100 times more efficient than other kinds of computer memory.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The Apollo spacecraft computers contained memory composed of 1s and 0s, like all modern computer memory. For Apollo, the fixed memory that contained the programs was composed of exactly 589,824 1s and 0s.64”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The memos had a conversational tone—Tindall often addressed readers as “you,” as if he were talking directly to them—but they were galvanizing. By the end of 1966, dozens and dozens of people were reading each one, so even the kind of memo that was mocking and funny had a serious purpose. Self-check did not, in fact, fly to the Moon.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Instrumentation Lab software engineer Margaret Hamilton, who graduated from college in 1958, joined the MIT Apollo project in 1963, and by 1969, just 11 years out of college, was overseeing software for the command module, and is often credited with popularizing the phrase “software engineering.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon