The Michael Knowles Show - July 13, 2019


Apollo 11： What We Saw ｜ Part 1 Preview

Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Mentioned
Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin Bill Whittle Roger Rorschach Kennedy Gemini
Ep. 380 - Has Politics Ever Been This Fun？ Ep. 381 - Twitter Isn’t Real Life

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

162.18

Word count

1,868

Sentence count

126

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A 10-minute preview of a new four-part series on the events leading up to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic moon landing, Apollo 11: What We Saw. In this episode, we'll take you back in time to the last five minutes of the Apollo 11 mission, to the moment that changed the course of human history.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.260 So I think most of you might know our pal Bill Whittle.
00:00:03.340 Bill is one of the OG conservative YouTubers and internet figures,
00:00:08.600 and he's one of the best out there, and he's actually a pretty good guy too.
00:00:12.440 Don't let him know that I said that.
00:00:14.040 One of the things that is very cool about Bill is that he is a pilot and a space enthusiast.
00:00:19.300 He is a total thrill seeker, and he is obsessed with outer space.
00:00:23.180 So what you are about to hear is the 10-minute preview of an incredible four-part series called Apollo 11, What We Saw.
00:00:34.260 Bill takes you back in time to experience what it felt like to the millions of Americans
00:00:38.820 who lived through one of the greatest endeavors mankind has ever attempted, putting a man on the moon.
00:00:45.800 He knows so much about this.
00:00:48.200 He said so many things that I had no idea, and you can just tell how excited he is about this topic.
00:00:55.380 I learned so much.
00:00:56.440 He shot the series right here in our studios, and we are really excited to share this preview with you.
00:01:01.440 It is a story unlike any other.
00:01:03.620 Be sure to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:01:08.800 The link to the show is in our episode description.
00:01:11.400 We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing.
00:01:18.500 Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
00:01:27.320 Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
00:01:33.660 Liftoff. We have a liftoff.
00:01:35.620 32 minutes past the hour.
00:01:37.880 Liftoff on Apollo 11.
00:01:41.400 Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
00:01:47.720 A badly humiliated nation would show the world, but mostly we'd show ourselves,
00:01:52.540 the kind of country we were by doing the hardest thing ever attempted.
00:01:57.780 You know, Kennedy got it all in those first seven words.
00:02:00.360 We choose to go to the moon.
00:02:02.460 That was the hard part, just deciding that we were going to go.
00:02:05.700 Everything else was a mere engineering problem.
00:02:07.780 Now, in part one of what we saw, we'll start with the real-time catastrophe that was unwinding
00:02:13.880 behind the images of a model lem landing on a plaster moon.
00:02:18.500 And then, to really understand why we made this commitment, we'll go back to before the
00:02:23.480 beginning of the space race, into the world of cap guns and cowboys and Indians, of fallout 0.92
00:02:28.760 shelters and H-bombs, and of the steady beeping from a 1,000-pound Soviet cylinder as a dead 0.91
00:02:35.880 dog flew over our country 16 times a day.
00:02:40.020 Roger on the stand, go for landing.
00:02:45.540 Okay, we've got good luck on.
00:02:47.940 Altitude lights out.
00:02:49.980 LH is minus 2,900.
00:02:52.780 Roger, we copy.
00:02:53.800 That's the Earth, right out our front window.
00:02:57.280 Houston, you're looking at our Delta.
00:02:59.300 That's the primate program alarm.
00:03:01.500 Looking good to us, over.
00:03:04.240 12-02.
00:03:06.120 12-02.
00:03:07.400 Okay, let's hold it right there.
00:03:09.380 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are almost exactly halfway from the start of PDI, that's
00:03:15.060 the Power Descent Initiation, and Touchdown on the lunar surface.
00:03:19.760 They're standing side by side in an ungainly, asymmetrical, shockingly delicate vehicle named
00:03:26.240 Eagle.
00:03:27.140 They have about five minutes left until Touchdown.
00:03:29.960 They have simulated this scenario hundreds of times before.
00:03:33.540 The entire point of simulation is to make the simulator tougher than reality.
00:03:39.480 Any number of glitches, failures, spikes, cutouts, runaway thrusters, ice in a fuel
00:03:45.060 line, loss of communications, loss of radar, loss of the flight computer, all of it.
00:03:49.980 Everything that could possibly go wrong on this final five minutes of the last decade of
00:03:55.200 effort, death, triumph, humiliation, and sacrifice had been dished out to Armstrong and
00:04:01.880 Aldrin in various combinations and at the worst possible moments.
00:04:07.140 So when Neil Armstrong mentions he's got a 12-02 error on the flight computer, sounds
00:04:12.080 like just another routine hiccup.
00:04:14.440 But here's the thing.
00:04:16.500 Neither Neil Armstrong, nor Buzz Aldrin, nor any of the hundreds of men monitoring this
00:04:21.880 final phase of this ultimate mission, none of them, have any idea what a 12-02 error is.
00:04:28.300 They've never seen it before.
00:04:30.820 The ground controllers have never seen it before, and it's never been simulated.
00:04:34.660 There's never been a procedure written to deal with it.
00:04:37.180 All they know is that halfway down to the surface of the moon, with 600 million people back on
00:04:43.580 Earth listening live to their every word, they suddenly do not have altitude or range data
00:04:49.440 from the flight computer.
00:04:52.240 Neil and Buzz have just finished rolling their lunar module, the Eagle, from a Windows down
00:04:57.420 to a Windows up position.
00:04:59.400 Now, just a few seconds before the computer failure, they felt as though they were looking
00:05:04.740 up at the moon as it scrolled gracefully past the two large triangular windows on the
00:05:10.320 limb.
00:05:10.920 But once completing that scheduled roll maneuver, they not only cannot measure the distance to
00:05:15.840 the surface, they can't even see it.
00:05:18.020 They are as high above the moon as your typical commercial jet flight is above Earth.
00:05:22.940 Let's say 30 Empire State buildings stacked one on top of the other.
00:05:27.940 And they have lost the only piece of flight hardware that had not been rigorously flight
00:05:32.800 tested on a previous mission, their flight computer and their ground surface radar.
00:05:38.000 Now, it hadn't been flight tested because no one had ever had to use it before.
00:05:41.820 At 33,500 feet, they are 15,000 feet lower than the point at which the dress rehearsal flight,
00:05:48.580 Apollo 10, had aborted to orbit as planned.
00:05:52.600 So let's just back up a second and listen to that again.
00:05:55.940 Program alarm.
00:05:57.280 Looking good to us, over.
00:06:00.040 12-02.
00:06:01.860 12-02.
00:06:04.560 Put yourself in Armstrong or Aldrin's place.
00:06:07.500 You're both standing in a ship about the size of a bedroom closet.
00:06:10.740 Not a walk-in closet, just a decent-sized closet.
00:06:13.820 A few seconds ago, you were looking at the moon getting closer and closer, and it was
00:06:19.360 not only getting closer, it was getting closer faster.
00:06:23.040 And of course, it's not just the two of you and that fragile metallic insect that's hurtling
00:06:27.560 towards the surface of the moon.
00:06:29.780 600 million people, every single person on Earth with access to a television set, are with
00:06:36.920 you as well.
00:06:37.500 375,000 engineers, technicians, computer specialists, flight surgeons, lunch ladies, and bathroom 0.95
00:06:47.720 scrubbers are up in the Eagle with you as well.
00:06:50.360 An entire army of people who've given everything they've had over the last 10 years to get to
00:06:55.740 these next five minutes.
00:06:58.540 Five dead astronauts, close friends, every one of them, are in that lunar module.
00:07:03.480 And so is a young president who dared them to do it, shot through the head five years,
00:07:09.160 seven months, and 29 days earlier.
00:07:12.720 If they can't resolve this 1202 error, and quickly, it could be the end of the mission,
00:07:19.060 the end of the promise, and perhaps the end of their lives.
00:07:23.940 So, listen to the tone.
00:07:27.060 Program alarm.
00:07:28.440 Looking good to us, over.
00:07:31.660 1202.
00:07:32.220 How about two?
00:07:34.400 Since every single ounce that went down to the moon's surface had to slow down, stop,
00:07:39.760 come back, and then take off again, carrying the weight of the computer that they wanted
00:07:44.140 was just out of the question.
00:07:46.340 Now, their solution was an elegant one.
00:07:48.800 Take a much simpler and lighter machine, and then divide all of the data it needed to process
00:07:53.960 into groups based on priority.
00:07:56.460 The computer would then do whatever calculation it could in a certain allotted time, and then
00:08:01.500 move down the stack to work on the next set of instructions for several hundredths of a
00:08:05.760 second, and then proceed to the third set, and so on.
00:08:08.840 Now, this way, it could do the work of the much heavier machine that could handle all of
00:08:13.160 these computations simultaneously.
00:08:14.940 Now, Garmin had a theory.
00:08:18.160 At certain times during the descent, a great deal of data, top-priority data, was coming
00:08:23.320 rapidly from the radar altimeter, not to mention all of the other calculations the computer had
00:08:28.300 to perform.
00:08:29.320 A 1202 error was a stack overflow.
00:08:32.160 When the workload became too high to perform in the allocated time, the computer would skip
00:08:37.240 to the next task, and it would overload again.
00:08:40.000 Now, there was a simple solution to this, and that is, reboot the computer.
00:08:45.420 And so that's what the machine was designed to do, restart every single time it got an
00:08:50.080 overflow error.
00:08:51.860 Now, fortunately for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, this only took about a second.
00:08:56.120 That's not only how simple the machine was, it's also a measure of how simple the math
00:09:00.580 was.
00:09:01.480 Now, hang on for another second or two, and you will hear Neil Armstrong, who took manual
00:09:06.600 control of Gemini 8 as it was tearing itself to pieces in Earth orbit.
00:09:10.980 Neil Armstrong, who ejected from the lunar landing simulator a tenth of a second before
00:09:16.080 it was too late, who parachuted down through the fireball, and who was sitting at his desk,
00:09:21.340 calmly filling out the paperwork as his colleagues arrived for work that morning.
00:09:25.700 Listen carefully, and you will hear Neil Armstrong coming as close to panic as he ever did in
00:09:32.740 his entire life.
00:09:34.500 Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.
00:09:39.340 Roger, we got you.
00:09:40.360 We're going on that alarm.
00:09:42.980 So, the descent continued, and I watched it happen.
00:09:47.620 Me and the rest of the human race back on July 20th, 1969, and this is what we saw.
00:09:59.860 We're go.
00:10:00.780 Same type.
00:10:01.440 We're go.
00:10:01.860 2,000 feet.
00:10:04.900 2,000 feet.
00:10:06.080 End of the egg.
00:10:06.800 47 degrees.
00:10:07.820 Roger.
00:10:09.060 47 degrees.
00:10:11.780 So, here's the first thing I remember about watching man set foot upon the moon half a
00:10:16.140 century ago.
00:10:17.180 I was 10 years old, and I was watching the television set, and there was also, of course,
00:10:20.860 the extra excitement that you get when you're 10 years old, and it's 11 o'clock at night,
00:10:24.880 and there are adults with cocktails in the room.
00:10:26.820 I remember looking at this fuzzy, fuzzy image on this black and white TV, and below it was
00:10:32.660 the caption, big clear letters, live from the moon.
00:10:35.700 Now, I could tell that something was moving, but for the life of me, I just had no idea
00:10:40.960 what I was looking at, none.
00:10:42.160 And my dad had to actually get up, walk over to the TV set, and kind of, with his finger,
00:10:47.880 he sort of drew the outline of, here's Neil Armstrong's helmet, and here's his backpack,
00:10:51.660 and you can see his legs moving as he slowly gets lower and lower and lower down the ladder.
00:10:56.320 Then all of a sudden, like that, I got it.
00:10:58.380 I could suddenly make sense out of this Rorschach test of black and white squiggles.
00:11:06.940 Once you've seen an astronaut descending a ladder to the surface of the moon, you can't
00:11:10.120 really unsee it.
00:11:10.840 Hey, thank you for listening to this preview from Episode 1 of Apollo 11, What We Saw.
00:11:17.060 But there is so much more to this story.
00:11:19.580 If you liked what you heard here, then head to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to
00:11:24.020 podcasts and subscribe to Apollo 11, What We Saw right now.
00:11:28.840 You won't want to miss one small step of it.