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

“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

“In 1960 Tindall provided the orbital calculations for the world’s first communications satellite. Echo 1 was an almost fanciful creation of the Eisenhower era of the space race; it was launched as a small payload into a 1,000-mile-high orbit, where it unfolded and then inflated itself into a vast gleaming silver balloon 100 feet across. It was, quite literally, a satellite as big as a 10-story building, but it was made entirely of filmy Mylar thinner than a single sheet of plastic wrap (the same Mylar we use today for “Happy Birthday” balloons filled with helium).”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“VERB 16 NOUN 36 ENTER meant “Display” the “ground-elapsed time”—the length of the mission since launch. The time would appear as lines of numbers. If the astronauts wanted the computer to execute a program, they used VERB 37 and then the number of the program to be executed; 64, for instance, was the guidance program to take the lunar module from orbit on the first phase of its flight down to the lunar surface.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“One of the quiet triumphs of the Apollo era for NASA was the construction of a worldwide space tracking network with astonishing capacity and resilience; it had 14 tracking stations on land, two satellites in geosynchronous orbit, four tracking ships at sea during missions, and, during reentry, eight planes in the air.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“When NASA designed the Real-Time Computer Complex for Mission Control in Houston, it specified that the machines needed to operate for 336 hours (14 days) with “up-time” reliability of 99.95 percent, which would have allowed for 10 minutes of downtime in two weeks. In its bid to provide the computers—which was ultimately successful—IBM said it could guarantee only 97.12 percent reliability, meaning nearly 10 hours of downtime during a 14-day spaceflight. (That level of “up-time” wasn’t even as good as what had been provided during Glenn’s flight.)42”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“It was 76 days after President Kennedy’s “go to the Moon” speech. MIT had submitted its formal proposal to run navigation and guidance for the Moon mission just five days before, on August 4.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“One thing made the Polaris missiles and subs possible: precision inertial navigation, provided by the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Each submarine had to have an inertial navigation system so it knew where it was. And each missile also had an inertial navigation unit to guide it from its submerged launch platform to its target.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“A single AGC like the one on Eagle that Armstrong and Aldrin were using had 3,840 bytes of erasable memory, what we call random access memory (RAM) today. It had 69,120 bytes of fixed memory, or read-only memory (ROM).”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The Moon will require “the full speed of freedom.” That’s a splendid, original phrase that captures the innovation of capitalism and the determination of democracy, unleashed. It was an echo of what the U.S. had done economically, technologically, and militarily in World War II, which was at that moment only 16 years and two presidents in the past.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“It was a remarkable dinner nonetheless, because three or four years into the future, Kennedy would make possible the most significant achievement to come from Draper’s work—a Moon landing—and Draper’s work would make possible the most dramatic legacy of Kennedy’s presidency: that same Moon landing. But at that first dinner Draper came away with the distinct impression that John Kennedy didn’t know that much about space and didn’t care that much about it.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Kennedy’s press conferences were full-dress affairs. He prepared the night before with briefing books laying out 20 to 30 likely questions and their answers, and did a practice run-through with senior staff the following morning. The press conferences were either in late afternoon or early evening, and Kennedy typically took a nap beforehand. So many reporters wanted to cover them that they were held at the auditorium at the U.S. State Department. The smallest gathering for the first eight was 297 reporters.8”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Out of frustration and political necessity, he concluded that the only way to reassert American leadership in space wasn’t with individual launches or steadily matching Soviet achievements or patient explanations of the sophistication of American satellite technology. Kennedy wanted a single leap that was distinctly American in ambition.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Kennedy had vowed to do something that, at that moment, couldn’t be done. Eight years later—eight years and two months—one astronaut was orbiting the Moon, and two were bouncing around on the surface. In eight years the spaceships were imagined, designed, constructed, tested, and then test-flown. The astronauts were chosen and learned to fly those spaceships, practicing so relentlessly that the routine procedures became instinctive. The spacesuits were designed and sewn; the problem of flying back through the atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour without burning up was solved; a small group of determined engineers managed to get an electric car designed, built, and added to the flight manifest.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“First, NASA used integrated circuits—the first computer chips—in the computers that flew the Apollo command module and the Apollo lunar module. Except for the U.S. Air Force, NASA was the first significant customer for integrated circuits, and for years in the 1960s NASA was the largest customer for them, buying most of the chips made in the country.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon