Don Eyles > Quotes

“It was estimated that the LM had landed about 4 miles downrange of the intended site.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Now space navigation became easier to understand. Multiply the velocity vector by the time since the last update and add the result, component by component, to the position vector. Presto, your new position — that is, if you are in deep space far from any attracting object.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Norton took himself too seriously for us to respect him fully.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“The astronaut could not switch backwards from a less automatic to a more automatic mode.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Were we lucky or were we good? Both I think. To a point we made our own luck. The main ingredient in that was honesty, with ourselves above all.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“You are a spy, seized in a strange city, blindfolded, thrown in a car. The car makes frequent turns to shake off pursuers. All you have to go on are the sensations of acceleration and side force as the car speeds up and turns and brakes. Can you keep track of where you are? If you can, you are an inertial navigation system.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Nearly everyone who has had a problem to solve on a large-scale digital computing machine has probably felt that it would be indeed convenient if one could give the machine his problem in ordinary mathematical language with perhaps a suggestion for a method of solution.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“velocity be more useful than what’s there now?” “Forward velocity, Don,” replied Armstrong. I had not realized that the crew could see us. Did Armstrong really know who I was, from our brief conversation in the hallway during crew training when I urged him to use the redesignator if he saw an “interesting” spot? As possibly the most “alternative” person they saw around the space center had I become a topic of special notice?”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Faced with computer alarms, throttle instability, low fuel, and an unexpected boulder field, does Armstrong abort the landing and fly back to orbit using the independent abort guidance system? Or does he in a split second switch to manual throttle and attitude control and land, knowing that if he succeeds he may find himself sitting on the Moon with a failed primary guidance system?”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“The beauty of it was, when the crew launched, simulator time became plentiful. —”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Technology advances when the solution to a particular problem finds a more general application.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“We needed people in the spacecraft because we had people in the spacecraft.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“After Apollo, Norton, still with TRW, worked on a project to computerize the distribution of hydroelectric power in the Northwest. He was still writing his painfully detailed critiques of other people’s software. As it happened, a high school senior named Bill Gates came to work for him as a programmer. Gates has credited Norton with being among his best software teachers. Norton surely learned more from reading our code than we learned from him. Users of Microsoft software might wish he had learned more.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Battin made much of the date, 1961. It reads the same upside down. That had not happened since 1881 and we must wait until 6009 for the next occasion”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“This was bewildering at first but confusion is a stage of learning.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

“Each of our fifteen-bit words of memory actually had an additional, sixteenth bit, called the parity bit, which the assembler set to a one or a zero to force the total number of ones among the 16 bits to be odd. When the computer accessed a word of memory it counted the bits that were set to one and if the result was not an odd number it would trigger a restart.”
― Don Eyles, Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir