Small Steps, Giant Leaps: Engineering Lessons from Apollo
summary
Fifty years after 1969 the talk lays out eleven concrete engineering lessons: the Apollo Guidance Computer runs at 2.0 MHz with 32 words of 15‑bit memory, Margaret Hamilton’s fault‑tolerant scheduler drops low‑priority tasks and enables fast in‑flight restarts (the 1202 alarm survives descent), mission architecture chooses lunar orbit rendezvous over direct ascent, Apollo uses creative simulation (vomit‑comet, underwater rigs), CAPCOM centralizes decisions, half a million people coordinate mission‑wide efforts, and the source code now sits on GitHub.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:46Small Steps Giant Leaps
- 4:42Strategy Vision Roadmap
- 15:30The People
- 26:33The Programs
- 29:31Naming
- 33:52Margaret Hamilton
- 39:13Apollo 13 Ron Howard
- 39:58Carbon Dioxide
- 41:08Standardization
- 46:15Lunar Gravity
- 47:28Testing Requires Creativity
- 49:53The 1202 Error
- 53:31Lightning Strike
- 55:36Dealing with the Unexpected
- 56:52Caps Your Communicator
- 59:32The User Journey
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