 I've done this talk a couple of times in the past, and usually what I do is I start this talk by saying that I'm gonna do a different kind of talk today. Given the talks we've had at this conference, let me tell you that I'm gonna do the most conventional talk of the conference. But it's still a little offbeat, it's still a little weird. Just to see what I wanna do today is I'm gonna tell you a story. It is a story, the story I'm gonna tell you is a story that's really close to my heart, and I think it's a fun story. I think if nothing else for the kind of ending up the day will end the day and have some fun, I think it's kind of an exciting story. But I also think that this story has lessons to teach us, lessons about the things that we do in our jobs every day. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna tell you the story, and like I say, I hope it'll be a fun story. I think it is a fun story. And then at the end I'm gonna circle back around and I'm gonna try and make the case that this story has little things to teach us about the work we do, and it also has great big things to teach us about what we do for a living, how we spend our time. So here goes, here's my story. It's summer of 1969 and it's hot. I mean, it's really hot. And when it gets hot like this, people go a little crazy. The whole world goes a little crazy. So here in the summer of 1969, there are all kinds of things that are going crazy. And 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 are starting to put air conditioners in their houses. It's just crazy. And you better have that air conditioner because you know how much a coke costs today? Here in the summer of 1969, the price of a coke, it's just a glass bottle with some, you know, fizz and water and sugar with a metal cap on the top. That is now 15 cents. It's just crazy. But if you want real crazy, look no further than the New York Mets. The New York Mets, those bums of an expansion team, they've never had a winning season. The New York Mets this year 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, the Russians as we call them. And we have been locked in this not quite peace, not quite war thing for two and a half decades. All around the world, we are confronting them. They are confronting us. In Berlin, their tanks are literally on one side of the street. Our tanks are literally on the other side of the street. The guns are pointed at each other. And for 25 years, each side has been sitting there, waiting for the other side to make the first move, or make the first mistake, or sneeze. You better hope nobody sneezes. You better hope nobody sneezes because they have thousands of nuclear weapons. We have thousands of nuclear weapons. So let me tell you, somebody pushes that actual button. Somebody pushes that button and those bombs go 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. And so here in the summer of 1969, we're all hanging on by our fingernails. We're living life 15 minutes at a time. But for once, it's not the New York Met, it's not the price of a Coke, it's not even the heat that's filling up all the newspapers. For once, it's something else. It's something different. 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 the early 1960s, the Russians were making us look bad. They were making us look bad by doing all these spectacular things in space. They launched the first Earth satellite. They put the first person in orbit. They got the first picture of the far side of the moon. It was an incredible achievement. Really, really crappy picture. So the Cold War was like a chess game. They make a move, we have to respond. And so they were doing all these things in space, and we were going all around the world, telling people, be on our side, we're the smart ones, we're gonna win. And you can't afford to do nothing if the other side is making you look bad by doing all these spectacular things. And so John Kennedy was president then, and he got his advisors together, and they came up with a strategy. And the strategy was based on the idea that if you're behind in a race, the way we were behind in the space thing, it's better to be behind in a marathon than a 50-yard dash. Why? Because in a marathon, you have a long time to catch up. You have a chance to catch up and recover. And so Kennedy just decided to declare a marathon. He got his advisors together, and he said, where can we go in space? Where can we go in space that's far away, that'll take a long time, that'll turn us into a marathon? His advisor said, well, the moon's gonna go far away. Said, fine, we're going to the moon. It's just a completely arbitrary goal. And we need a deadline. We need to stake in the calendar. We need a timeline for getting to the moon. 1970 is a nice round number. We're going to the moon by 1970. It's a completely arbitrary deadline. Completely arbitrary goal. No one here has ever experienced that. So Kennedy got up in front of the Congress, and he made the speech, and he said, we are gonna take a person, land them on the moon, and return them safely to the Earth by 1970. And a funny thing happened after he made that speech. Funny thing happened is people start looking at each other and they would say, yeah, yeah, we all understand this is all about the Cold War, but we are going to the moon. We're going to the moon. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, we're going to the moon. Who cares if this is about the Cold War? We are going to the moon. And so it's funny, you could tell that Kennedy actually caught a little bit of the fever. This was just a completely cold-blooded Cold War strategy, but you could tell that Kennedy got some of the excitement because a few months after he made that first speech, he made a second speech, and he said words through the effect in that second speech. We choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's 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. So whenever you're talking about astronomical distances, how far the planets are, and that kind of stuff, you always have to have this analog. So I've got tennis ball, right? And if the tennis ball, this tennis ball is the Earth, but I've got this little rubber ball. This is about the right size for the moon. So I want you to think back, think back to your fifth grade physical science textbook, right? There's always a picture. You've seen this picture a thousand times. Here is the Earth, and here is the moon, and maybe they're talking about the tides or how eclipses happen, or the face of the moon. They always had this picture, and they always put the Earth and the moon about this far apart, right? You know the picture, you've seen it, right? Like I 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. They're not this far apart. They're not this far apart. My arms aren't long enough. At this scale, they'd be about seven feet apart. Now, when Kennedy said that we were gonna go to the moon by 1970, people had just started going out in the space. One American handful of Russians had been out in the space when Kennedy got up in front of the world and said, we're going to the moon. Now far, we had gotten out in the space. Not quite as high as the fuzz on this tennis ball. We hadn't gotten as far as the fuzz on the tennis ball, and suddenly, we're going seven feet by an arbitrary deadline. It was just insane. It was crazy. And if you have this crazy project and this insane deadline, how do you even start? How do you even start a project that's this hard? How do you, what's 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 that they could possibly need to get to the moon, and they started a whole series of projects all up front, all at the same time. And the prayer was that they'd all finish and all fit together at the last minute, at the end. That's always the plan. So one of the things they did was, they tried to reason, they tried to say, what's the simplest version of this project that we can do right now, right at the beginning? The final goal is to take a person, land them on the moon, bring them back safely to the earth, but we can't do that right at the beginning. What's the simplest possible thing that we could do that would work right now? Well, pretty obvious. Leave the person out of the equation, right? You can just send the machine, a robot, land it on the moon and return it safely to the earth. That's gotta be easier, you know? There's all the air and the shielding and everything that people need. You can make a much smaller state ship. If you left the person out, that's clearly easier. But is it the easiest thing we could possibly do? No. If you're just sending a machine, there's no reason to bring it back. So just send the machine and land it on the moon. That's easier. Is that the easiest thing we could do up front? Not quite. We need to talk about what this word, land, means. What if we redefine lands to mean they're screaming in at about 17,000 miles an hour? We can take some pictures on the way, get some practice in doing this thing. Thus was born Project Ranger, a project to hit the moon, it's a space wreck, right? You've heard the phrase, throw away prototype? So, and you know they're not putting this one in production, think about it. So Ranger One was launched in August of 1961. And you know, it's kind of a funny project, right? The goal is to crash the spaceship. And Ranger One succeeded beyond all expectations. Certainly ahead of schedule. Ranger One crashed in the Atlantic Ocean. Ranger Two did better. Ranger Two crashed in the Pacific Ocean. Ranger Three, in all seriousness, did better. Ranger Three made it all the way out to the orbit of the moon. The moon wasn't there at the time. It was all the way out there. There was a navigation problem. One of those, oh god, was that supposed to be a plus sign? So Ranger Three missed the moon by like 17,000 miles. Ranger Three is still out there. Ranger Four actually hit the moon. But Ranger Four died on the way to the moon. It had this total electrical failure that ripped it. And this stone-dead thing, piece of metal, actually hit the moon. That was success, sort of, I don't know, not really. Let's see. Five. Ranger Five was apparently worried about Ranger Three and joined it and we had to get out of it. Ranger Six had a flawless, perfect, three-day trip to the moon. Takes about three days to get to the moon. And on the morning of that third day, the people behind Ranger Six, they're realizing, hey, neither God nor Isaac Newton is going to prevent this thing from hitting the moon. The spacecraft is working. And the only thing left to do was turn on the TV cameras so they could get these pictures of the moon getting closer and closer and closer. And they commanded the TV cameras to come on and nothing happened. And Ranger Six went screaming into the moon, blind as a bat. This is close. Ranger Seven actually worked. Ranger Seven flew to the moon, took these pictures on the way to the moon as the moon gets closer and closer. And this last picture is evidence that Ranger Seven fulfilled its destiny because it took this picture and it was radioing it back to Earth when the lights went out. And so you can imagine that the people behind Ranger, when they saw this picture, they were, you know, there were popping champagne corks and slapping each other on the back, but you also can imagine that they were saying to each other, my God, it took us two years and seven tries to do the simplest thing that could possibly work. How can we do, in God's name, are we gonna do the real thing? The answer is they just kept plowing ahead with all of these different projects. And, for instance, one of the things they realized really early on was that they were gonna need to build these huge going-to-the-moon rockets and spaceships, but those rockets and spaceships were not gonna be ready in time to train the people, right? You needed, it didn't just be the hardware, you needed the skills to get to the moon and they needed to train astronauts and they needed to train the people of mission control. And so they built a whole different rocket, a whole different spaceship called Gemini that was just for practice. They would just go up in the Earth orbit, still in the fuzz, and practice things in space, the kind of skills that you needed to know to go to the moon. They learned a lot from Gemini. One of the things they learned was about the little steering rockets. Like, every spaceship has these little rockets all over it that help it steer. It's the kind of thing, you know, it'll turn it left or right, upper, you know, nose up, nose down or roll it. It's the kind of thing that airplanes do with their rudder and their aero-larons. But there's no air in space so you have these little steering rockets do that. What they found out with Gemini is what happens if one of those steering rockets now functions and goes on and keeps firing and will not shut off. And the answer is what happens is your spaceship starts to tumble slowly at first, but then faster and faster and faster. And the other thing they learned is that when that happens, the people inside that spaceship start to have trouble seeing what they're doing because the world, literally, is going spinning around them. But what they also learned is that if you have an astronaut inside that spaceship who is calm enough to work the problem while his spaceship is cleaning out of control and is well-trained enough that he can find the right switches to throw without being able to see what he's doing, this is a survivable accident. And that is something to know. While all this is going on, while they are trying to hit the moon with rangers, while they've got spaceships tumbling out of control with people in them, they're building these huge workshops and they're building these workshops so they have a place to build these enormous going-to-the-moon rockets. And the end result of that is this. This is the largest rocket ever built. It stands 27 stories tall, it weighs 7 million pounds, and it only has one job. The job of this gigantic machine is to throw the very queenie bit at the top, the very tippy top up there at the moon. Because the very tippy top that you can barely see in this picture, you can see it better here, at the moon is the result of another project. This, the queenie bit at the top of that huge rocket, is the Apollo mothership. This is a spaceship designed to keep three people alive on the trip to the moon, find the moon and not find the great beyond. Keep the layer on the moon for a few days and bring them back safely to the earth. It has air and heat and cooling and all the protection that people need. It has this big rocket engine on bottom to send them back from the moon to the earth. It has heat shields and parachutes so they can survive re-entry and it can even act as a boat because it lands in the ocean. It is a marvel of 1960s technology and there's only two things wrong with it. Thing number one is it killed its first crew. They weren't even traveling in space, they were just sitting on the launch pad practicing. Let's simulate a launch and just go through all the motions when a fire broke out inside the spacecraft. Three times the ground crew tried to fight their way in to get those people out and three times the flames and the smoke and the heat drove them back. On the fourth time, they got the hatch open. There's nobody left to save. It's the problem number one. But here on the summer of 1969, you think we've gotten all those fire hazard problems fixed. It's not really time to be absolutely sure who think we fixed all of them. But that's problem number one. Problem number two is something else. Problem number two is that this thing with the heat shields and the parachutes and the big rocket engine and the food and the air and everything else that it needs is actually too heavy to land on the moon. It can go from the earth, it can go to the moon, it can orbit around the moon and it can come back but it cannot make the last 50 or 60 mile trip from orbit around the moon down to the surface of the moon. So for that, we have this. This bizarre looking thing is actually a specialized spaceship. It's sole purpose is to take two of the three astronauts. So one guy gets left behind to kind of watch the mothership. Take two of the three astronauts down from orbit around the moon down to the surface of the moon. It's actually a fairly complicated machine. It's actually a two-stage rocket. There's a rocket engine and fuel tanks for landing on the moon and there's a separate rocket engine and fuel tanks for coming back up. And that's the only important if you're on your way down to the moon and you change your mind and you wanna go back up is then there's this sort of fairly complicated process that you need to go through to do that because you need to switch over to the other rocket engine to see why that's important in that event. So the plan is for these two spaceships to go out for the moon carrying these guys. The guy on the far end is one of the two who's gonna actually try and land on the moon. His name is Buzz Aldrin and he is an expert in spacecraft navigation. His job is to keep them from flying off into the great beyonds. Can you imagine why they have him here? Guy closest to me is the other guy who's actually gonna try and land on the moon. He's Neil Armstrong and we've already met Neil Armstrong. Neil Armstrong was the astronaut in that out-of-control spaceship who managed to get control back and save himself and his crewmate. Can you imagine why they picked him? The guy in the middle is the guy who's gonna stay and watch the mothership and he has the suckiest job in the world in the universe. His job only sucks partially because he doesn't get the land on the moon but mostly his job sucks because of the what-ifs. What if something happens to the other two on the way down to the moon? What if something happens to him on the moon? What if they can't get back up off the moon back in the lunar orbit? Collins, the guy in the middle, his job is to leave his friends behind and make a three-day silent, sad journey back home. That's gotta be the suckiest job in the universe. It is July 20th, 1969. It's a Sunday, it's about four o'clock in the afternoon. A few days ago, Apollo 11 carrying those three guys took off and they've had a textbook journey out to the moon. A few hours ago, Armstrong and Aldrin gotten this weird-looking contraption and they've been on their way down to the surface of the moon ever since. They are about to enter the critical last 10 minutes of that trip down to the moon. It's a part of the trip that NASA calls power descent. Back at Mission Control, there are a room full of people who are arming for war. Many of these people have spent a substantial fraction of their adult lives getting ready for these 10 minutes and they are deadly serious. The door is locked. There's an armed guard on the other side of the door. No one is getting in or getting out until this thing is over. They've locked down the circuit breakers on a lot of their important electrical equipment. 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 be doing. So they're the third, fourth, fifth, 27 pair of eyes watching that spaceship, making sure that it's functioning the way it should be functioning. Across the United States on that Sunday afternoon at four o'clock, there is a blanket of tension. The streets are mostly empty. Most people are inside polluted TV sets. It's right around now. It's right around four o'clock in the afternoon. Something weird starts to happen, but the cars that are out on the road, they start to pull off. On city streets, they find a place to park. On highways, they pull off onto the shoulder. On rural roads, they just stop. The drivers can't drive and listen to their radios and listen to what's going on in the moon at the same time. In this row house in Philadelphia, a 10-year-old boy and his dad are sitting on the couch and they're watching the coverage on TV. It's right around now. It's right around four o'clock in the afternoon that the dad gets up and walks about halfway into the TV and gets down and sort of crouched. That's his hand on his head. That's the way he'll stay until it's over. They are watching this guy on TV. This is Walter Cronkite. He's like the king of TV newsmen in the United States. They do public opinion surveys. What public figure do you trust? Cronkite regularly comes in first and the president of the United States comes in second. Cronkite is one of those nothing bothersome people. If there's a war, you will find Cronkite in the war zone getting shot at, calmly telling them people back home what it's like to be in a war getting shot at, completely unemotional. Many people remember Cronkite years ago as the very calm voice with just a touch of sadness in it telling the world that John Kennedy had been assassinated. It is four o' five p.m. right at the beginning of that last 10 minute flight down to the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin are at 50,000 feet. They've gone through about a quarter of their fuel to get here and things are not really going very well. The problem is that their radio is not really working. They can talk to the ground for a few seconds but then they get these huge blasts of static and they don't know where the interference is coming from or what's causing it. But they do know that they can't talk to the ground reliably and even worse all the data is dropping out. They're losing their data link which means that they don't have that third, fourth, 26 pair of eyes reliably telling them that their machine is working. So Armstrong and Aldrin have their heads down and they're playing with the channel and they're adjusting the antenna angle and doing all the things that you might do to try and make the radio work. Unfortunately, they have time to do that because they are not actually flying the spaceship. There is a new cool device, the new gadget that's flying that spaceship. It's called a computer. And the computer in Apollo 11 is there. Armstrong and Aldrin are not just trying to land anywhere on the moon. They're just generically on the moon. They have a specific, pre-selected, very tight landing zone, a place that they are going to land on. Now, when they were planning the mission, there was a certain level of controversy over where Apollo 11 should land on the moon. On the one side, you had the geologists and the scientists who studied the moon, astronomers, and they were like, yeah, yeah, this is the Cold War. We all know this is the Cold War. It's about the Cold War. But it's also the scientific opportunity of a lifetime. We have got to land someplace on the moon that's scientifically interesting, geologically interesting. And on the other side, you have the astronauts themselves and the rocket scientists and the engineers who are responsible for the spaceship. And they're like, fine, what's geologically interesting? And the scientists are like, the floor of a valley would be good. This bottom of a canyon would be better. No, no, top of a mountain. No, even better, the rim of a crater. Which the astronauts and the rocket scientists and the engineers responded, yeah, we're not landing anywhere that there are any of those places. And in the end, it was the rocket scientists and the astronauts who won the argument because this was about the Cold War and you were not gonna win the Cold War having your little spaceship tip off the edge of a crater. So Apollo 11 has this computer and that computer is flying them to the flattest, the dullest, the most geologically uninteresting spot that NASA can find. It's 4.10 p.m., about five minutes into that 10-minute flight. Armstrong and Aldrin are down at 35,000 feet. They've gone through about half their fuel and good news, the radio is working. Mysteriously as the radio problems go or contain, they just go away. Nobody knows why, but the radio just starts working and you gotta believe that Armstrong and Aldrin are thinking, okay, something had to go wrong, maybe this is it and maybe it's all gonna go well from here. And maybe they're thinking that when a display in front of them lights up with the number 1202. 1202 is a message from their computer. Now I know nobody in this room is really familiar with ancient guidance computers. So let me try and translate 1202 into something anti-civilized person in the world today would recognize. And it's not that, maybe that. You guys are, there's a Ruby conference, right? Armstrong is on the radio and he's like 1202 program alarm. He radius down the mission control. He doesn't know what 1202 means because there's hundreds of these codes. The people in mission control, they have this moment of frozen horror because they don't know what it is. There's hundreds of these codes and there's one guy in there. He's in his 20s. His name is Steve Bales. He's a guidance system engineer and he knows what 1202 means. 1202 means that the computer has more to do than it can get to. And so it's dropping tasks. It's trying to do more than it can actually do. But Bales also knows that that computer, the software in that computer is designed such that when this happens the computer will do the most important things first. And right now there is only one important thing, fly the darn spaceship. So Bales has like three seconds to make this decision and it is literally a life or death decision. He says, just ignore the 1202s, just don't pay any attention to them, just keep going. So mission control, they radio this advice of the Armstrong and Aldrin. But Armstrong and Aldrin, well, they can't quite ignore the 1202s. For one thing, after a while they start getting a different error code, which is 1201, which turns out is pretty much the same thing, but that takes a little bit of time to figure that out. But the real problem is that there's a bad user interface design. Whenever one of these error codes appears, it just stays on their display until they push a button to clear it. And they have to push that button to see the next error code. And who knows, the next error code might be 867, which means maybe the engine fell off and they really kind of want to see that other error code. So again, Armstrong and Aldrin, they have their head down and they're pushing these buttons, clearing these error codes. It's 412 p.m., seven minutes into this 10 minute last bit of flight. Armstrong and Aldrin are down to 2,000 feet. And good news, the computer starts working. So mysteriously, as the computer problems come, computer problems just go away. The error codes slow down and then they stop. And finally, finally, finally, after all this time of having his head down, messing with the radio, screwing with the computer, Armstrong finally has a chance to look up and look out the window. He's got this little triangular window in front of him. He looks out that window. Now they're at 2,000 feet. If you're flying into, I don't know, Houston or New York and your airliners at 2,000 feet, that means you're almost ready to land. Your tray tables in the upright position, your seat belt is fastened. You can look out the window at 2,000 feet since the traffic is bad around the neighborhood or who has a swimming pool or whether it's trash day. At 2,000 feet, New York or Cleveland is not that place you're going to next week. It's not the spot on the map. It's not where the home office is. 2,000 feet, it's a place, it's all around you. Armstrong looks out the window at 2,000 feet and for the first time in human history, the moon is no longer that light up in the sky. It's not this geopolitical, we're gonna kick the Russian's asses by getting their first thing. It's not this goal that he's been training for years. For the first time, the moon is a place. You can look out, you can see the ground scrolling beneath them and they can see rocks and craters and cracks in the ground. You can look out in the distance and on the distance there's mountains and the mountains are higher than he is. Now, nobody knows what Armstrong felt at that moment, he never said. But sometimes when I was a kid and quite honest with you, even now, I imagined him, right? Put yourself in his place. You're in that big bulky space suit and you get this glass helmet on and you are looking out that window and you're seeing something no one's ever seen before. How would you feel? I don't know what Armstrong felt, I don't know what you would feel, I know what I would feel and the word is terror. The moon is a place. It's the wrong place. Armstrong knows exactly what he should be seeing when he looks out that window. They need, they took photographs, they need maps, they need plaster models. He knows exactly what he should be seeing when he looks out that window and this is not it. And he can't see the right place from the window and then it gets worse because on that window there are these little markings and he can find the right marking and kinda use it as a gun sight and line his eye up on that marking and look down and see where on the ground the computer is taking them to land. So he does that, he lines up on this marking and kinda sights down it and he sees that. And very geologically interesting crater. And the crater is not that big but the crater is surrounded by this huge debris field of boulders. Remember, right, what's a crater, right? It's a hole in the ground made by a rock coming in and there's stuff all over the place. Armstrong looks at these craters for a couple of seconds and then he makes a very meal-armed strong decision. He makes a very meal-armed strong decision. He shuts off the autopilot and he does two things. He kills most of their downward velocity so they're not falling nearly as fast and he guns it forward. He does that because he thinks he can see way out past the boulder field. He thinks he can see out past the boulder field a decent place to land. And he has gotta get there before they run out of fuel. Back at Mission Control, remember all this data is streaming down so they can see Armstrong click off the autopilot and they can see him killing the downward percent. They can see him zooming forward. The one thing they cannot see are the boulders. There's no live video feed but there's one other thing that they can see. They can see Armstrong's heart rate. He's got like monitors all over him and they can see that his heart rate goes from about 85 which is probably slower than my heart rate right now. He's just landing on the moon, right? His heart rate goes from 85 all the way up to 150. They see all of this and their reaction to it, the people at Mission Control, their reaction to it is extraordinary. What they do is absolutely nothing. And they shut up. The guy running the show at Mission Control died named Gene Krantz, tells everyone in that room, he doesn't want anybody talking to the astronauts anymore, not one word except for one thing. He wants to send up periodic updates to the astronauts of how much time they have left, how much time before they run out of fuel. It is 414 p.m., nine minutes into that 10 minute flight. Armstrong and Aldrin are down to 313 feet. They've gone through 95% of their fuel and they are slowly sinking towards the surface of the moon and zooming forward. They're going so fast forward that they don't know how fast they're going because no one ever imagined they'd be going this fast, this close to the ground, so their speedometer is pegged. But they can see that the edge of the boulder field is getting closer and closer. They're going by these boulders really quickly. It's 416 p.m., 11 minutes into that 10 minute flight. Armstrong and Aldrin are past the boulder field. They're at down to 30 feet. And Armstrong, yes, this is a good place to land. And Armstrong is jamming on the brakes to get this thing to stop. So he can lower it the last little bit like a helicopter straight down. So right around now, so right around now that the first ominous warning comes up from the earth, it's just two words, 60 seconds, you have one minute of the fuel left. Armstrong barely hears them because now he's working to try to find the ground. They're kicking it, their rocket engine is kicking up this huge cloud of dust and he can't see the ground anymore. But he knows it's down there. It's down there somewhere and he's just gotta find it. So he's feeling with his toes, trying to find the ground down there somewhere. You're down to 2% of their fuel and the second warning comes up from the ground. Again, it's just two words, 30 seconds, for God's sake, land this thing. Aldrin looks out the window and he sees a shadow on the ground. It's the shadow of the spaceship. They are really, really close now and then Aldrin looks down at this instrument panel and there's this little blue light in front of him that's labeled contact and as he looks at it, it comes on. The contact light. Contact light means that the sensors on the landing gear of this weird looking machine have touched something hard. Contact light means they've landed. Contact light means that these two guys are not gonna die and better, they're not gonna fail. Contact light means that Armstrong and Aldrin, all those people with mission control, that the United States of America that you manoeuvre has arrived. It is 417.41, but Armstrong and Aldrin 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. So now they're sitting on the ground with this rocket engine running. It's throwing up dust and dirt and rocks and they've got to shut down this dangerous machine full of explosives very carefully. And so they have this long kind of technical shut down checklist that they go through and it's really important that they get it right. So they do it together. They pair astronaut. And so Armstrong starts it by sitting shut down and then Aldrin says, okay, engine stop, ACA out of D10 and Armstrong says out of D10 auto and they get through this long list of technological mumbo jumbo as they're shutting everything down. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the people with mission control will all the status streaming down so they can see the full spaceship has stopped moving and they can see their version of the contact light come on and then they can hear Armstrong and Aldrin flicking off all the systems and they can see the system shutting down. And you would think that in a moment like this somebody would say something profound, something historical, but it's not really how people are. And so the guy on the ground radius up to the astronauts words to the effect, we think you landed. Really, duh? Really? Armstrong is still coming, just coming to the end of the shutdown checklist and he gets the last item. He says engine arm off and then he says the words. He says the words that he had practiced, the words that he had made up, the words that he wanted to be the first words from another world. He says Houston, it's where mission control is, tranquility base here, they had landed in a place on the moon called the Sea of Tranquility. The eagle, that's the name of the little spaceship, has landed. And with those words, this room full of nerdy, highly disciplined engineers with their skinny black ties and their white shirts and their pocket protectors as a group stand up and start shouting. You can imagine there's probably some shouting going on in those cars, those cars that were pulled off on the road. What would you do? You would pull your car off and you're listening to this on the radio, right? But you pound on the steering wheel a little bit, they yell and look around, see if anybody saw you. Certainly there was some shouting going on in that roadhouse. It takes the 10 year old boy just a second or two to realize the goodness, the suffer, the vivid. And then he realizes his dad is no longer down in that crouch. Well, there's a hand on his head but his dad is jumping up and down and shouting. It's shouting louder than he's ever heard his dad shout before and then the boy realizes, it's not just his dad who's shouting. It's the people in the store, they're shouting. It's the people on the other side, they're shouting. It's the people across the street, they're shouting. It's the people on the back street, the whole neighborhood is shouting. And it's the kind of noise that you don't actually hear so much as you kind of feel in your stomach and it comes in waves. It'll be really loud and then it will trail off and you think it's gonna end and now it gets really loud again. And amidst all the shouting, the boy focuses back on the television and sees the second incredible thing of the day. It was there on TV, it was just there for a second. The camera cut away, but it was just there. It was there, the boy saw it, he sure he saw it. It was there, it was. Just for a second, he saw a Walter Cronkutty. All right, that's my story. That's my story, but that's not really true. It's your story too. You get 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, everything that happened in that story was done by people just like you. Story is yours, it's part of your cultural heritage for being one of us. So the story is yours, you should embrace it. But I did say that I was gonna try and make the case that the story had like practical things that teach us. Little practical things and great big practical things. So let me try and start with the little things. What little things can we learn from this story? I think one of the little things that we can learn from the story is that in a complex technological project like this, or like the stuff you work on, in a complex technological project, little things can kill you. Let's talk about all of the things that went wrong in that last 10-minute flight down to the moon and why they happened. And I'll give you a hint. All of the causes were the little tiny things. Why did the radio stop working for a while, right? The radio stopped working for these five critical minutes. Why did that happen? Well, the radio stopped working because of those darn steering rockets again. Remember the steering rockets from that early that made the other thing go out of control? Well, that weird-looking spaceship was covered with these steering rockets and the problem wasn't that people were worried that the rockets were gonna malfunction. They had pretty much solved those problems. What they were worried about was that the rockets would actually burn through the skin of this very fragile spaceship. This thing was very thin skin and some of those steering rockets were pointed pretty close to the skin of this thing. So the engineer is responsible for this thing. A few months before they went to the moon, put these shields, I've got two of them circled in yellow, just pieces of sheet metal near the steering rockets that deflect the exhaust away from it. So the steering rockets wouldn't burn through the skin of this thing. The shields did a great job of deflecting the rocket exhaust, but they also acted as radio signal deflectors, reflectors. And at certain angles, they would completely screw up the radio communications. Little things can kill you. Little pieces of sheet metal can kill you in a complicated technical project. Why did their computer crash? They had this high-tech computer and it crashed on them. The computer crashed because it had a couple of modes and you could select the mode with the switch. And the mode they should have been in was just pay attention to the ground computer. We're interested in how high we are above the moon and how fast we're going. But the mode that the computer was actually in was pay attention to the ground, but also watch the mother ship up in orbit. And it turned out that that ancient computer couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. And so it crashed. Little things can kill you. A switch in the wrong place. Piece of sheet metal. Complicated technical project. Little details can kill you. Why were they off course? They had this pinpoint landing picked out and they missed. What happened there? Well, for that, we have to go back to a few hours before the landing to when these two spaceships were hooked together. When these two spaceships were hooked together, there was a tunnel that ran between them so that people could pass back and forth between the two spaceships. And when they were getting ready to separate, they'd close the hatch at one end of the tunnel. They'd close the hatch at the other end of the tunnel. And then they were supposed to pump all the air out of the tunnel and then separate. Well, maybe they were hurry. Maybe they had other things on their mind. They didn't quite get all of the air out of the tunnel. So when they separated, there was this puff of air that pushed on the lander and changed its speed by one foot per second. This is one foot per second, right? One foot per second. What possible difference could one foot per second make in a spaceship that's going 1,400 miles an hour? Well, do the math. This was like two and a half hours before they landed. One foot per second is 60 feet per minute. It's 3,600 feet per hour. 3,600 feet is a little more than a half a mile. Multiply that by a few hours and you've got an error of a mile or two. The distance between the perfect, flat, boring landing site and the crater of deck, right? Little things can kill you, a little puff of air can kill you in a complicated technical project. But there's something else you can learn from this. And that is that if you look at those two spaceships between them, they had two million separate parts. Think about that for a minute. Two machines with about a million parts each, right? If you were going to worry in excessive detail about everything about a machine that's made of two million parts, well, maybe you'd be ready to leave for the moon a week from Tuesday, right? The trick is not to worry in absolute stunning detail about everything you're doing. The trick is to try and get every single detail ready and then be ready to deal with the inevitable failure of the things you missed. That's the real lesson of this story, one of the real lessons of the story. I think one of the other lessons is the value of trust in a team that's trying to get something done, right? Think about how much trust went on in that room. Steve Bales, this guy in his 20s says, ignore the error code. And they say, okay, we'll ignore the error codes. Armstrong deviates from the plan. There's clearly something wrong. And they don't radio up to him. Neil, you've turned off your targeting computer. What's the matter? They just go with it, right? They just trust that the person on the spot knows what they're doing. Trust is a key element in overcoming the failures that actually do occur. There's something else you need. I think another lesson is the value of leadership. We need leaders. We need people who can lead these kind of projects. What we don't actually need are heroes. The kinds of things that we do, we need leaders a lot more than we need heroes. And we tend to put too much emphasis, I think, on heroics in our business and in life. And give me a good example. This is a very heroic photograph. I look at this photograph, taking a few hours after the landing, and it grabs me. It's very heroic, and that's the problem with it. It looks like it was flawless. It looks like there was these brilliant people, and they flew to the moon, and everything worked perfectly, and they got out and they took this stunning photograph. We know that's not what happened. We know that this thing was a struggle every step of the way, right? When I think of what I wanna remember from that day, I think of the shutdown checklist. I like the shutdown checklist. Remember when they're turning their engine off? These are the words of two people trying to finish the job at the end of a really bad day, right? I like the, something else I like about this is that it's a impregnable jargon, right? It's incomprehensible what they're talking about here. It's the kind of stuff that we talk to each other with all the time, right? We all have this jargon. I like the fact that I could go into work on Monday and speak something almost the same comprehensible to my coworkers. I think probably you could too. These are our kind of words. They're your words and my words. They're part of what makes us who we are. You know what else these words are? These are the first words spoken from another world. I like the fact that they're real. I like the fact that they are two people trying to do something when everything is not going well. And that kind of brings me to some of the bigger things, some of the bigger lessons. And I think one of the bigger lessons from this thing is that when you do something of this magnitude, when you do something really tactically difficult, you cannot predict the outcome. There's always going to be effects that are unanticipated. Now, the best example that I can think of to give you of that kind of thing with Apollo is this. We went out to the moon mostly to kick the Russian's butts and maybe to learn a little bit about the moon, right? We thought we'd go to the moon and we'd be all macho and everything and land on the moon and find some rocks and find some scientific facts and a funny thing happened on the way to the moon. Funny thing happened on the way to the moon. We looked back, we looked over our shoulder and we saw that. We saw ourselves. We saw our place in the universe. I know for just about everybody in this room, pictures like this are just part of the wallpaper. You've seen them a thousand times, right? People put them on T-shirts. They're literally wallpaper on computer screens, backgrounds, that stuff, right? I would like for you to try to imagine just for a second that you had gotten to a certain point in your life having never seen a picture like this. And one day somebody comes and slaps it down in front of you. How would you feel? What would you say? I can tell you, you look at it and you say, holy mother of God, that's everything. It's all we are. It's all we've ever had, it's all we've ever known. It is every birthday, every first day of school. It's every graduation, it's every first date. It's every love affair, it's every marriage. It's every wedding anniversary. It's every funeral, it's every birthday. So all we are, it's all we have, all we've ever known. It's beautiful, it's tiny. It's out there in the black. There is no greater irony than the fact that Apollo, this macho Cold War high-tech government program that kicked the Russian sasses, inspired those kinds of feelings, inspired what became the modern environmental movement as kind of a mass political movement. Pictures like this coincided almost exactly with modern environmentalism. So it's this huge irony, this unanticipated consequence that Apollo helped give us birthday. You cannot predict what will happen when you do something technically cool. There are always things that come out of it. And that kind of brings me to what I think of is the ultimate lesson of Apollo. And it's something I have a hard time putting into words. Mostly I think of it as a conversation, a conversation between you and me. Maybe the two of us, we go out for lunch. Maybe we have pockets, or someplace we have pockets. Maybe we go out for lunch. And one of us, it doesn't matter who has an idea and it doesn't matter what the idea is, right? Maybe I want to get rich selling pet food on the internet. Maybe it's you. Maybe you want to create a new programming language or a database or some data interchange format or some new protocol or some product. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's me. It doesn't matter who's idea or what the idea is. Now you could maybe tell me that it's a bad idea, that nobody's going to be interested and maybe I'll believe you. Sure. You could tell me that it's just not worth the money, right? That you won't be able to sell it for anything and maybe I'd believe that. And you didn't even tell me it's bad public policy. It'll be bad for people, it'll be bad for the environment. It'll make society more unfair. Sure, maybe I'll believe you, sure, absolutely. The one thing you cannot tell me is that it is not possible. I just won't believe you. I don't like heart, I won't believe you. See, I'm familiar with the impossible. It's not done on TV when I was a kid. The ultimate lesson of Apollo for me is that when you do something technically cool, when you do something technically sweet, something hard, we have to think, congratulations, maybe you'll get rich. But there's the second effect that goes out from it. It's like this wave that goes out from it. It is a wave of belief. You make people believe. If she can do it, I can do it. Make people believe in the possibilities. He can do it, I can do it. Make people believe in the future. I can do it, make people believe in themselves. I know this for a fact. I know this for a fact because I am the result of one of those waves. I'm a child of Apollo. I sat on that couch and my life changed. It got off of whatever path it had been on and it got on a different path. A path that led me to college and to engineering and a little bit later to computer programming, a little bit after that to writing books and a little bit after that to be in here with you tonight. For me, the ultimate lesson of Apollo about the real value of the story has really very little to do with the moon or space travel or any of that and it has everything to do with inspiring people to do the next thing, to do something bigger than they think they can do. So I said that the story belongs to you and it does. But if you're one of us, the story also comes with a challenge. The challenge is to inspire the next bunch of people, to inspire your colleagues, to inspire the people who are trying to come up into this profession, make a better life for themselves, to inspire the next bunch of 10 year olds. So for me, the real lesson of the story goes all the way back to the words that started in all of those decades ago. We choose to go to the moon, not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Don't do something hard. Thank you very much. Thank you.