Edgar Mitchell
Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2016 7:06 pmI just read at the BBC site, Edgar Mitchell has passed away.
I found this somewhat amusing
Whew, that was close'
"We noticed as we were on our last circuit of the moon before starting down, while checking out the lunar module and getting ready, that the abort light came on in the lunar module," said Mitchell in a 1997 NASA interview. "And that was a surprise. It shouldn't do that."
The false signal was about to become a real problem after the descent engine fired, as it would have led the on board computer to command an auto-abort. After a scramble by flight controllers back on Earth, Mitchell was able to enter a software fix, comprising more than 80 keystrokes, just in time.
"We had something like 30 seconds to spare when we got all of that done, and we started de-orbit then and fired the engines to start down, with just a few seconds left to spare and it worked," Mitchell recounted.
With today's programs being so huge can you imagine if you had to go in and fix the code? The auto abort would have activated and the module would have flown them back to earth by the time you could fix today's code.
