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Astronaut Neil Armstrong Has Died
dsinc writes "Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, has died. NBC News broke the news, without giving other details. Neil was recovering from a heart-bypass surgery he had had a couple of weeks ago. Sad news, marking the end of a glorious and more optimistic era... RIP, Neil." Also at Reuters.
Don't forget, he was one of the first true engineer-pilot astronauts.
The boomers were teenagers or just graduating college when Armstrong walked on the moon. It was the generation before. There's a reason they call them "the greatest generation".
And with balls of steel, he proved this with the uncontrollably rolling Gemini 8 and the successful manual landing on the moon.
He was known for his patience and concentration in difficult situations. In early Earth orbit tests, his capsule was spinning out of control off-axis due to a faulty stabilizer nozzle. He used the spares to straighten the ship even though it was difficult to tell which end was "up".
He later had to bail out of a LEM lander during a test run in the desert just barely in time to open the chute as the lander crashed. He came to work the next day cool and calm as if it was any other work day, yet determined to find out what went wrong.
And then during the Apollo 11 landing, he took control from the auto-pilot because the lander was headed for some large boulders. Fuel was running out because back then they didn't know the moon's center of gravity was offset from its physical center. The margin was tiny, but he found a way.
They picked the right guy for the mission.
Table-ized A.I.
He was non-military, for one.
He was a former Naval Aviator who flew combat missions in Korea. This experience probably made a significant contribution to his ability to remain focused and calm.
Retired is not "non-military".
It's even better than that. NASA in the sixties and seventies showed us just how powerful a robust process is.
A process is fragile if it attempts to solve a crisis by planning ahead for all contingencies. Inevitably an incident will happen that was not planned for, and the whole edifice will fail.
A robust process assumes something unforeseen will go wrong, and concentrate on making sure that there are adequate resources to respond in an ad-hoc manner.
NASA's processes in the Apollo project relied on a robust response: when anything went wrong, a highly qualified person was on the spot to think of a response and execute it. Sure they planned for incidents, but the final contingency plan was to have smart people with high stress tolerance to provide incident response 'on the ground'.
Armstrong was one of the exemplary examples of those people. He was by no means the only one though.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
"A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands, where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins." from A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
Neil wasn't the quarterback, he was the football.
When the football has a bad spin or tumbles it does not correct the spin/rotation itself. Armstrong did so with a Gemini capsule that was in danger of going out of control. Similarly he had to land Apollo 11 manually when the computers were hazarding the ship. He was a pilot, not a passenger.
If only it were true.