Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual

"The reason I put this down is that all of the other books and the film that I’ve chosen are largely about the astronauts, and you’ve got to remember that honouring Kennedy’s challenge of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth required an enormous effort. It was the work of 400,000 people for a decade, so four million human years of work went into solving the elaborate daisy-chain of engineering challenges that allowed you to do this journey to the surface of the Moon, collect some rocks, explore, and come back. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Our Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual —which it’s jokingly called—is really an attempt to shine a spotlight on those 400,000 people and the effort that they went to. I picked out a handful of engineers—many of whom I’ve interviewed over the years for other projects—to try and communicate something of a) the immensity of the challenge, b) the ingenuity that goes into solving some of those problems, and c) the tenacity to never ever to give up. That is, for me, what Apollo really is. It’s this lesson in setting yourself impossible challenges and then managing to achieve them. That’s something that we all need to bear in mind as we embark on the environmental challenges we face today. It’s a very accessible story of the engineering. Although the title might suggest otherwise, it’s not an owners’ workshop manual: I’m not trying to teach you how to take your Saturn V apart and fix the F1 engine. It’s purely the engineering stories. It’s a very readable account and an inspiring one, I think, of what humans can do when they put their minds to it. You can see the Great Wall from Earth’s orbit—though not from the Moon, of course. The thing about Apollo’s computing power is this was the 1960s. It was just the birth of digital computing. In those days, computers filled entire rooms or even buildings, and part of Apollo’s great challenge was shrinking the computer from something that large and power-hungry down to something the size of a couple of shoe boxes that you could run off a battery and put in a spacecraft to help you navigate somewhere beyond Earth, where you couldn’t use a compass anymore. This computer was crude by today’s standards, but totally awesome in terms of its time and the ingenuity that had gone into it. We’re all spoiled today by the computing power that we thrive on. We barely consider it, because we’re so used to it. It’s invisible. It’s buried in the phones in our pocket. But yes, it’s way more powerful than anything that they had at their disposal back then."