Armstrong, an engineer, modestly downplayed the importance of his ‘giant step for mankind’.
“To me it was one important project and I was delighted to play a part in it, but I don’t think it was any more important than other advances in the same timeframe.”
“There are big challenges that every one of you face every week.You have to choose which are important to you to attack and try to solve,” he told the 2,000-strong FTF audience of engineers.
Asked if he’d been scared, Armstrong replied: “It’s a business with which there’s a well-known acceptance of a certain degree of risk. We reckoned we had a better than 90 per cent chance of getting back safe but only a 50 per cent chance of making a successful landing.”
Asked what was his most worrying moment, Armstrong replied: “It was the final approach and landing when the systems were extremely heavily loaded and the computer and I had a bit of a disgreement. The computer (which had 4kbyte of memory, a 13 key keyboard and no screen) was giving an alarm which was not a common alarm. But it looked OK to me, velocity, altitude, the approach all looked appropriate so my feeling was to go for the landing despite the yellow lights blinking”.
It tuned out later that the cause of the alarm was information overload.
Armstrong wryly rcalled all those radio messages to the mooncraft beginning: ‘Hello Apollo 11, this is Houston’. “Who else was it going to be?” cracked Armstrong.
Asked if it was true they only had one chance, after leaving the moon’s surface, to dock with the command module which, if botched, would have left them on the moon forever, Armstrong replied: “We had to rendez-vous with the command module, dock in, open the passageway, carry in the rock samples, detach ourselves from the lunar module. There were a lot of things and we did them very carefully and slowly to make sure we didn’t make a mistake. There were a number of things which could have contibuted to us staying on the moon and starting the first settlement there.”
Armstrong recalled how the very first experiment was to set up mirrors which were to be accessed by laser from a laboratory on earth to judge the distance between the earth and the moon.
“We needed to do that so we could claim our expenses,” he joked. However the first few times they fired the laser it kept missing and eventually they found that it was the longtitude and latitude of the earth observatory which had been wrongly determined in the past. “So the first experiment on the moon was to find out where Mount Hamilton was!”
