The Matt Walsh Show - July 13, 2019


Apollo 11： What We Saw ｜ Part 1 Preview

Topics
1202 error Apollo 11
Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Mentioned
Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin Bill Whittle Roger Rorschach Kennedy Gemini
Ep. 294 - Another False Allegation Falls Apart Ep. 295 - Trump Bails Out The Democrats Again

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

161.07

Word count

1,795

Sentence count

123

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A 10-minute preview of the four-part series, "Apollo 11, What We Saw: The Real-Time Account of the Last Five Minutes of the Moon Landing," by pilot Bill Whittaker. In this episode, we take a look back at what it was like to be on the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they prepared to land on the surface of the moon.

Transcript

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Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, many of you are hopefully familiar with our friend Bill Whittle.
00:00:03.460 Something that's really cool about Bill is that he's a pilot and he's a space enthusiast, as in outer space, right?
00:00:09.780 What you're about to hear is the 10-minute preview of a really just incredible four-part series called Apollo 11, What We Saw.
00:00:18.300 Bill takes you all the way back in time to experience what it felt like for the millions of Americans who lived through one of the greatest endeavors mankind has ever attempted, putting a man on the moon.
00:00:28.640 It really takes you into that moment for those of us like myself who didn't live through it.
00:00:32.600 It's just an amazing thing to see.
00:00:34.880 Bill shot this series right here in the studios, and we're really excited to share this preview with you.
00:00:40.100 It's a story unlike any other.
00:00:42.180 Be sure to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:00:46.760 The link to the show is in our episode description.
00:00:51.600 We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy,
00:00:57.920 but because they are hard.
00:01:04.680 Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
00:01:11.060 Liftoff.
00:01:11.900 We have a liftoff.
00:01:13.180 32 minutes past the hour.
00:01:15.460 Liftoff on Apollo 11.
00:01:21.260 Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
00:01:24.580 A badly humiliated nation would show the world, but mostly we'd show ourselves, the kind of country we were by doing the hardest thing ever attempted.
00:01:35.340 You know, Kennedy got it all in those first seven words.
00:01:37.920 We choose to go to the moon.
00:01:40.020 That was the hard part.
00:01:41.260 Just deciding that we were going to go.
00:01:43.280 Everything else was a mere engineering problem.
00:01:45.340 Now, in part one of what we saw, we'll start with the real-time catastrophe that was unwinding behind the images of a model Lem landing on a plaster moon.
00:01:55.580 And then, to really understand why we made this commitment, we'll go back to before the beginning of the space race into the world of cap guns and cowboys and Indians, 0.90
00:02:05.740 of fallout shelters and H-bombs, and of the steady beeping from a 1,000-pound Soviet cylinder as a dead dog flew over our country 16 times a day.
00:02:17.580 Roger, understand. Go for landing.
00:02:22.920 See, we've got good luck on.
00:02:25.460 Altitude lights out.
00:02:27.540 LH is minus 2,900.
00:02:30.340 Roger, we copy.
00:02:31.360 That's the Earth. Right out our front window.
00:02:34.800 Houston, you're looking at our Delta.
00:02:36.860 That's the primate program alarm.
00:02:39.040 Looking good to us. Over.
00:02:42.300 1202.
00:02:44.000 1202.
00:02:44.960 Okay, let's hold it right there.
00:02:46.940 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are almost exactly halfway from the start of PDI, that's the Power Descent Initiation, and Touchdown on the lunar surface.
00:02:57.320 They're standing side by side in an ungainly, asymmetrical, shockingly delicate vehicle named Eagle.
00:03:04.700 They have about five minutes left until Touchdown.
00:03:07.540 They have simulated this scenario hundreds of times before.
00:03:11.100 The entire point of simulation is to make the simulator tougher than reality.
00:03:17.040 Any number of glitches, failures, spikes, cutouts, runaway thrusters, ice in a fuel line, loss of communications, loss of radar, loss of the flight computer, all of it.
00:03:27.180 Everything that could possibly go wrong on this final five minutes of the last decade of effort, death, triumph, humiliation, and sacrifice had been dished out to Armstrong and Aldrin in various combinations and at the worst possible moments.
00:03:43.420 So when Neil Armstrong mentions he's got a 1202 error on the flight computer, sounds like just another routine hiccup.
00:03:52.000 But here's the thing.
00:03:54.060 Neither Neil Armstrong, nor Buzz Aldrin, nor any of the hundreds of men monitoring this final phase of this ultimate mission, none of them, have any idea what a 1202 error is.
00:04:05.860 They've never seen it before.
00:04:06.860 They've never seen it before.
00:04:07.860 The ground controllers have never seen it before, and it's never been simulated.
00:04:12.180 There's never been a procedure written to deal with it.
00:04:14.740 All they know is that halfway down to the surface of the moon, with 600 million people back on Earth listening live to their every word,
00:04:23.900 they suddenly do not have altitude or range data from the flight computer.
00:04:28.660 Neil and Buzz have just finished rolling their lunar module, the Eagle, from a windows-down to a windows-up position, now just a few seconds before the computer failure.
00:04:40.180 They felt as though they were looking up at the moon as it scrolled gracefully past the two large triangular windows on the limb.
00:04:48.480 But once completing that scheduled roll maneuver, they not only cannot measure the distance to the surface, they can't even see it.
00:04:55.580 They are as high above the moon as your typical commercial jet flight is above Earth, let's say 30 Empire State buildings stacked one on top of the other.
00:05:05.440 And they have lost the only piece of flight hardware that had not been rigorously flight-tested on a previous mission, their flight computer and their ground surface radar.
00:05:15.580 Now, it hadn't been flight-tested because no one had ever had to use it before.
00:05:18.820 At 33,500 feet, they are 15,000 feet lower than the point at which the dress rehearsal flight, Apollo 10, had aborted to orbit as planned.
00:05:30.180 So let's just back up a second and listen to that again.
00:05:33.200 Program alarm. Looking good to us, over.
00:05:37.580 12-02. 12-02.
00:05:40.100 Put yourself in Armstrong or Aldrin's place. You're both standing in a ship about the size of a bedroom closet, not a walk-in closet, just a decent-sized closet.
00:05:52.020 A few seconds ago, you were looking at the moon getting closer and closer, and it was not only getting closer, it was getting closer faster.
00:05:59.820 And, of course, it's not just the two of you in that fragile metallic insect that's hurtling towards the surface of the moon.
00:06:07.320 600 million people, every single person on Earth with access to a television set, are with you as well.
00:06:18.480 375,000 engineers, technicians, computer specialists, flight surgeons, lunch ladies, and bathroom scrubbers are up in the Eagle with you as well.
00:06:27.720 An entire army of people who've given everything they've had over the last 10 years to get to these next five minutes.
00:06:36.180 Five dead astronauts, close friends, every one of them, are in that lunar module, and so is a young president who dared them to do it, shot through the head five years, seven months, and 29 days earlier.
00:06:48.980 If they can't resolve this 1202 error, and quickly, it could be the end of the mission, the end of the promise, and perhaps the end of their lives.
00:07:01.500 So, listen to the tone.
00:07:04.660 Program alarm.
00:07:06.000 Looking good to us, over.
00:07:09.200 1202.
00:07:10.960 1202.
00:07:11.480 Since every single ounce that went down to the moon's surface had to slow down, stop, come back, and then take off again, carrying the weight of the computer that they wanted was just out of the question.
00:07:23.920 Now, their solution was an elegant one.
00:07:26.380 Take a much simpler and lighter machine, and then divide all of the data it needed to process into groups based on priority.
00:07:33.600 The computer would then do whatever calculation it could in a certain allotted time, and then move down the stack to work on the next set of instructions for several hundredths of a second, and then proceed to the third set, and so on.
00:07:46.160 Now, this way, it could do the work of the much heavier machine that could handle all of these computations simultaneously.
00:07:53.380 Now, Garmin had a theory.
00:07:55.700 At certain times during the descent, a great deal of data, top priority data, was coming rapidly from the radar altimeter.
00:08:02.960 Not to mention all of the other calculations the computer had to perform.
00:08:07.080 A 1202 error was a stack overflow.
00:08:09.720 When the workload became too high to perform in the allocated time, the computer would skip to the next task, and it would overload again.
00:08:18.220 Now, there was a simple solution to this, and that is reboot the computer.
00:08:22.900 And so that's what the machine was designed to do.
00:08:25.240 Restart every single time it got an overflow error.
00:08:28.500 Now, fortunately for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, this only took about a second.
00:08:33.680 That's not only how simple the machine was.
00:08:36.200 It's also a measure of how simple the math was.
00:08:39.060 Now, hang on for another second or two, and you will hear Neil Armstrong, who took manual control of Gemini 8 as it was tearing itself to pieces in Earth orbit.
00:08:48.080 Neil Armstrong, who ejected from the lunar landing simulator a tenth of a second before it was too late, who parachuted down through the fireball, and who was sitting at his desk calmly filling out the paperwork as his colleagues arrived for work that morning.
00:09:03.260 Listen carefully, and you will hear Neil Armstrong coming as close to panic as he ever did in his entire life.
00:09:11.320 So, the descent continued, and I watched it happen.
00:09:25.180 Me and the rest of the human race back on July 20th, 1969, and this is what we saw.
00:09:37.440 We're go. Same time. We're go.
00:09:41.320 2,000 feet. 2,000 feet. End of the egg. 47 degrees. Roger.
00:09:46.600 47 degrees.
00:09:49.340 So, here's the first thing I remember about watching man set foot upon the moon half a century ago.
00:09:54.740 I was 10 years old, and I was watching the television set, and there was also, of course, the extra excitement that you get when you're 10 years old, and it's 11 o'clock at night, and there are adults with cocktails in the room.
00:10:04.380 I remember looking at this fuzzy, fuzzy image on this black and white TV, and below it was the caption, big, clear letters, live from the moon.
00:10:13.260 Now, I could tell that something was moving, but for the life of me, I just had no idea what I was looking at, none.
00:10:19.720 And my dad had to actually get up, walk over to the TV set, and kind of, with his finger, he sort of drew the outline of, here's Neil Armstrong's helmet, and here's his backpack, and you can see his legs moving as he slowly gets lower and lower and lower down the ladder.
00:10:33.920 Then all of a sudden, like that, I got it.
00:10:35.940 I could suddenly make sense out of this Rorschach test of black and white squiggles.
00:10:44.460 Once you've seen an astronaut descending a ladder to the surface of the moon, you can't really unsee it.
00:10:48.940 Hey, thank you for listening to this preview from Episode 1 of Apollo 11, What We Saw.
00:10:54.600 But there is so much more to this story.
00:10:56.740 If you liked what you heard here, then head to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to Apollo 11, What We Saw right now.
00:11:06.380 You won't want to miss one small step of it.