Steve Wallace

“Kennedy had vowed to do something that, at that moment, couldn’t be done. Eight years later—eight years and two months—one astronaut was orbiting the Moon, and two were bouncing around on the surface. In eight years the spaceships were imagined, designed, constructed, tested, and then test-flown. The astronauts were chosen and learned to fly those spaceships, practicing so relentlessly that the routine procedures became instinctive. The spacesuits were designed and sewn; the problem of flying back through the atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour without burning up was solved; a small group of determined engineers managed to get an electric car designed, built, and added to the flight manifest.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“First, NASA used integrated circuits—the first computer chips—in the computers that flew the Apollo command module and the Apollo lunar module. Except for the U.S. Air Force, NASA was the first significant customer for integrated circuits, and for years in the 1960s NASA was the largest customer for them, buying most of the chips made in the country.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“One thing made the Polaris missiles and subs possible: precision inertial navigation, provided by the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Each submarine had to have an inertial navigation system so it knew where it was. And each missile also had an inertial navigation unit to guide it from its submerged launch platform to its target.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“the astronauts also traveled to the Moon with paper star charts so they could use a sextant to take star sightings—like the explorers of the 1700s from the deck of a ship—and cross-check their computer’s navigation. The guts of the computer were stitched together by women using wire instead of thread. In fact, an arresting amount of work across Apollo was done by hand: the heat shield was applied to the spaceship by hand with a fancy caulking gun; the parachutes were sewn by hand, and also folded by hand.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon