To the Moon • Russ Olsen • GOTO 2015

I want to do a different kind of talk this morning for you because you know and listening to the conference introduction and you listen to all the topics that we're gonna be talking about in the next couple of days micro services and the cloud and security it always reminds me when I hear these sort of conference introductions it always reminds me of how we are right now people right we get paid to solve problems right now and we are intensely interested in how to do things right almost all of the talks you're gonna hear at this conference at most conferences are all about a better way to do it or some experience I've had it's all about right here right now let's get things done but every now and then you want to pause whatever you're doing every now and then you want to pause take a breath and think about why you're doing things what why do you do this for a living right clearly it pays pretty well but here's a room full of really smart people you could go off and do a million different things but you choose to do this why alright then that's kind of what I want to talk about the why question is kind of a hard question the answer and it's a hard question the talk about so I'm gonna talk about it in a weird kind of way I am gonna talk about the why question by telling you a story it is a story that is really close to my heart it's it's a fun story so if nothing else we'll all sort of get woken up this morning kick off the conference I think it's a fun story but I also think it's a story that can speak to some of the issues around what we do and it can teach us little things about what we've chosen to do for a living and it can teach us great big things and in particular one of the great big things I think that this story can teach us is why we do this stuff so here's what I'm going to do I'm gonna tell you the story and then I'm gonna circle bet around at the end and I'm gonna try and make the case that this story has little things to teach us and great big things to teach us about how we spend their time so here goes here's my story it's the summer of 1969 and it's hot I mean it's really hot and when it gets hot like this people go a little crazy sometimes Society goes a little crazy and here in the summer of 1969 it seems like everything is going crazy in the United States they're a huge and growing protest sometimes violent protests against the Vietnam War here in Europe at times whole countries France for example have been shut down in the last year as people take to the streets demonstrating for better education a fairer society a better government and it's not just the you know civil unrest that seems a little crazy here in the summer of 1969 there's also the pace of technological change because here in the summer of 1969 there are a few people there's not very many of them but there are a few people who work with computers they're a little odd but they're basically harmless but here in the summer of 1969 the technology is changing so fast that these people who work with computers have had to learn a new word that word is megabyte because here in the summer of 1969 it is now possible to buy a computer with not one not two but four megabytes of RAM can you believe that four megabytes of RAM and that memory will only cost you a hundred thousand US dollars per megabyte it's just insane but if you want real crazy look no further than the Cold War here in the summer of 1969 the Cold War has been going on for 25 years this beautiful city here in the summer of 1969 is divided Germany is divided Europe is divided the world is divided on one side is the United States and what we call the West and on the other side is the Soviet Union and and basically Eastern Europe and if to other countries and they have these suicides have been locked in this not quite peace not quite were thing for 25 years for 25 years they've been facing each other armed to the teeth each side waiting for the other side to make the first move or make the first mistake or the sneeze and you better hope nobody sneezes because they no matter who they are from your point of view they have thousands of nuclear weapons we have thousands of nuclear weapons so let me tell you if those bombs start flying if those bombs start flying we all have about 15 minutes to live so here in the summer of 1969 we are hanging on by our fingernails living life 15 minutes at a time but for once for once the newspaper is here in the summer of 1969 are not filled with news of the Cold War or the heat or the technology or the civil unrest for once it's something else it's Apollo it's the project to land a person on the moon but don't get me wrong Apollo is all about the Cold War you see in the late 1950s in the early 1960s the Soviets were doing all these marvelous things in space they launched the first or satellite they put the first person in orbit they got the first picture of the far side of the Moon really really crappy picture but it was a marvelous there were the less and the Cold War was like a chess game right they make a move we make a move and when you're going or all around the world saying hey be on our side we're the smart ones we're gonna win you cannot afford to have the other side do all the spectacular amazing stuff and not do something so John Kennedy was President of the United States at the time and it was the United States that felt like they had to do something about what the Soviets were doing in space so Kennedy got his advisers together and they came up with the strategy and the strategy they came up with was based on the idea that if you're behind in a race the way we or the US was behind in the space thing it's better to be behind in a very long race in a marathon than it is in a very short race because in a long race you have time to catch up so Kennedy just decided the declarer marathon where can we go he asked where can we go in space that's far away that'll turn this into a marathon Kennedy's adviser said well the moon's pretty far away can we said fine we're going to the moon it's just completely arbitrary goal and we need a deadline we need a stake in the calendar 1970 is a nice round number we are going to the moon by 1970 it's completely arbitrary goal completely arbitrary deadline no one here has ever experienced that have you so Kennedy got up in front of the US Congress and he said we are going to go to the moon by 1970 we're gonna take a person land them safely on the moon return them to the earth by 1970 and a funny thing happened after Kennedy gave that speech you know people maybe you're walking down the street and you see your friend and you start talking and you say have you heard this Kennedy thing the moon we're going to the moon I mean Jules Verne and HG Wells we are going to the moon who cares if it's about the Cold War and it's funny you could tell that Kennedy caught a little bit of that excitement that fever because a few months after he made the first speech he made a second speech and in that second speech Kennedy said words more or less we choose to go to the moon not because it's easy but because it's hard so how hard is it to go to the moon what really all depends on how far the moon is away and so I have a tennis ball here right you because whenever you talked about astronomical distances right you need an analogue right so here's my tennis ball this is the earth right then they have this little rubber ball and if this is the moon about the right size for the moon now how far apart do you think the earth and the moon are think about you know when you're in school there is always that picture in your textbook you know the picture I'm talking about this is how tides where I can remember that picture this is how the lunar eclipse happens with the shadows there's always a picture in the earth on the moon or about this far apart the earth in the moon let me tell you are not this far apart that picture is about getting the earth and the moon on the same page the earth and the moon are not this far apart they're not this far apart they're not this far apart my arms aren't long enough to be about two meters at the scale so when Kennedy said that we're going to meters by an arbitrary deadline a few people had gone out in the space handful of Russians one American do you know how far they've gotten into space not quite as high as the fuzz on this tennis ball they hadn't made it out of the fuzz yet and suddenly we're going to meters by an arbitrary deadline it's just a completely insane project so if you have this incredibly hard project and this impossible deadline how do you even start like what's the right thing to do to start well I don't know what the right thing to do is but I do know what they actually did which is they did everything everything all at the same time they tried to think of everything that would have to be done to get people to the moon right the goal is to take a person land safely on the moon return them to the earth well they tried to think of everything that would have to be done and they started doing them all all at the same time and the prayer was that it would all come together at the last minute perfectly because that's always a good plan so one of the things they did what's the ask themself what's the simplest thing that could possibly work here right go is person land them on the moon return them the earth but we can't do that right at the beginning so what's the simplest thing that we can do right now that will work so how do we simplify it well it's pretty obvious could leave the person out right if you just sent a machine to the moon and landed it on the moon and returned it to the earth that has got to be easier than people cuz you know people like to breathe and eat they don't like radiation and all that stuff so if you leave the person out that would make it simpler maybe that's something we could do right up front but could we make it simpler still easier still sure if you're just sending a machine and landing it on the moon you don't have to bring it back you can cut the trip in half so that's got to be easier right but is that the easiest thing we could possibly do not quite we need to talk about what this word land means right what if we read the fine land let's go screaming into the surface of the Moon it you know five thousand kilometers per hour right that would be landing of a sort and we could take some pictures as the moon got closer and closer and closer thus was born project Ranger a project they hit the moon with the spaceships Ranger one was launched in August of 1961 it was kind of a weird project right it's the goal is to crash the spaceship so Ranger one actually exceeded expectations certainly it was ahead of schedule Ranger one crashed into the Atlantic Ocean Ranger two did better it crashed into the Pacific Ocean Ranger three in all seriousness did better it made it all the way out to the orbit of the Moon Moon one there at the time and two Rangers three just went sailing on by out into the great beyond Ranger three is still out there let's say Ranger four actually hit the moon Ranger four hit the moon but it died on the way to the moon it died electronically and the stone dead brick of a spaceship hit the moon is that success no not really let's see five Ranger five was apparently worried about Ranger three and joined it and the great beyond Ranger six had a textbook three-day trip to the moon takes about three days to get to the moon and on the morning about there a day the people behind Ranger 6 realized hey the spaceships working and now it's falling towards the moon neither God nor Isaac Newton is gonna keep this thing from hitting the moon and the only thing left to do was turn on the TV cameras and get these cool pictures of the moon getting bigger and bigger and the commander of the cameras to go on and nothing happens and Ranger six went screaming into the moon blind as a bat razor seven actually worked Ranger seven actually worked and it took these pictures as it got closer and closer and closer to the moon and this last picture is kind of a symbol of Ranger 7 working because it took the whole picture and it was radioing it back and it got about halfway through radioing the picture back when the lights went out and so you can bet that when this picture showed up the people behind Ranger 7 were slapping each other on the back and drinking champagne but you can also bet that they were thinking my god it took us seven tries and two years to do the simplest thing that could possibly work how are we ever gonna do the whole thing and the answer is they were doing everything all at the same time so while they were trying to hit the hit the moon with Rangers they realized that well they were also building these giant going to the moon rockets but those Rockets were not going to be ready in time to train people train the astronauts train the people at Mission Control on the things they needed to know to actually make it to the moon so they built this whole separate thing well Gemini which is a two-person spaceship that would go up in the orbit just so that the astronauts could practice those going to the moon skills and they learned a lot in Gemini one of the things they learned is about steering rockets every spaceship has these Rockets all over it little tiny Rockets steering rockets and they make it turn left turn right nose out and those down spin it's the kind of thing an airplane does with flaps in a rudder but there's no air in space so you have these little rockets what they discovered in Gemini is what happens if one of those Rockets goes on and stays on and will not shut off and the answer is that your spaceship starts to spin slowly at first but then faster and faster and faster and the other thing they learned was that when that happens the people inside the spaceship after a while they can't see anymore as the world literally go spinning around but the other thing they learned was that if you haven't asked not in that spinning spaceship hookahs calm enough to work the problem while he's literally spinning out of control and can find the controls the switches the throw without being able to see what he's doing this is a survivable accident and survived they did that is something to know while they're trying to hit the moon with Rangers while they're sending people up in Gemini they're building these enormous workshops and they're building these workshops so that they have a place to build these gigantic going to the moon rockets and the end result of that is this this is the largest rocket ever built it stands about 27 stories tall it weighs about three million kilograms and it only has one purpose one purpose to throw the very pointy bit at the top the very you can barely see it up there at the moon because the very pointy bit you see if that are here at the top is the result of yet another project this is the Apollo mothership and this is a spaceship designed to keep three people alive for two weeks take them to the moon bring them back it's got it's a marvel of 1960s technology it's got shielding they keep the radiation out it can carry food and water and air for three people for two weeks it's got this big rocket engine on the bottom to blast them back to the earth it's got a heat shield and parachutes and it floats because lands in the ocean it is a brilliant piece of technology and there's only one thing wrong with it with all the heat shields and the parachutes and the big rocket engine and all the rest of it it's actually too heavy to land on the moon it can go from the earth to the moon you can orbit around the moon and it can come back but it can't make the last 50 60 kilometer trip down to the moon so for that we have this this bizarre-looking contraption is a specialized little spaceship and it's designed to take two of the three people from orbit around the moon down to the surface of the moon so two people get in this thing and go down to the moon one guy stays in orbit to watch the mothership so the plan is to send these two spaceships out carrying these guys this is a the crew of Apollo 11 they are the people first people to try to land on the surface of the moon and this guy here is Buzz Aldrin and he is an expert in space navigation or to put it another way in not flying off into the great beyond right can you imagine why they have him on the trip god he is one of the Buzz Aldrin is one of the two people were actually gonna try and land on the moon the guy on the other side is Neil Armstrong and we've already met Neil Armstrong Neil Armstrong was the guy in the spinning out of out of control spaceship who could work the problem without being able to see what he was doing can you imagine why they picked him the guy in the middle his name is Mike Collins and the guy in the middle is the guy who gets to stay in the mothership instead of landing on the moon and he's got the suckiest job in the universe I guess his job sucks not just because he doesn't get the land on the moon oh that's part of it his job sucks because of the what else what if something happens to the other two on the way down to the moon what if something happens to them on the moon once they can't get back in that case Colin's job is the turnaround and make the three day silent sad journey back home leaving his friends behind can you that is the worst job in the universe it is July 20th 1969 so Sunday it's about I would think of it as four o'clock in the afternoon maybe you'd think of it as 1600 a few days ago Apollo 11 took off they've had a textbook journey to the moon a few hours ago this weird-looking spaceship with armstrong and aldrin and them separated and they've been on their way down to the surface of the Moon ever since they are about to enter the critical last 10 minutes of that journey a part of the journey that NASA calls powered the sent back on Earth's at Mission Control there is a room full of people arming for war their job is to watch the data streaming down from that weird-looking spaceship and be the third fourth fifth 27th pair of eyes making sure it's working properly and they are deadly serious many of these people are in their late 20s or early 30s and they have spent a big portion of their adult lives getting ready for this moment the door is locked there's an armed guard on the other side of the door no one is getting in or out until this thing is over they've locked down the circuit breakers almost there electrical equipment they would rather risk a fire than have the lights go out at the wrong moment outside of Mission Control than the rest of the United States and in various places around the world there is a blanket of pension it's right around now it's right around 1600 in the United States that something weird starts to happen on the streets there's very few cars to start with because most people are inside glued to their televisions but just right around now it's right around 1600 that the cars that are on the roads start to pull off on city streets they find a place to park on highways that go off onto the shoulder on rural roads they just stop the drivers can't drive and until their radio listen to what's going on above the moon at the same time in this very Monst house in Philadelphia on the east coast of the United States a ten-year-old boy and his dad are sitting on their couch watching the coverage on TV it's right around now it's right around 1600 that the dad gets up walks about halfway to the TV gets down and puts his hand on his head and that's the way he'll stay until it's over they're watching this guy this is Walter Cronkite they're watching you on TV Walter Cronkite is the kind of the king of TV news guys in the United States the Cronkite's thing is that nothing upsets him nothing bothers him he regularly goes to war zones where people are shooting at him and report to them this very even voice what slate they have people tried to kill you it is 1605 just right at the beginning about last 10 minutes down to the surface of the Moon Armstrong and Aldrin are at 15,000 meters they've gone through about a quarter of their fuel to get here and things are not going well the problem is that their radio is not really working right they can talk to the ground for a few minutes but then look at these huge bursts of static and even worse it's not just the voice their data is dropping out as well and they need that third fourth twenty seven pair of eyes watching this machine so Armstrong and Aldrin they're doing what you would expect people to do when the radio isn't working they're changing channels and adjusting the antenna so they basically have their heads down playing with the technology and fortunately they have time to do that because they are not actually flying the spaceship there is a new cool gadget that's flying that spaceship it's called a computer and while it's the rockets and the spacesuits and all the other flashy technology that gets all of the all of the press the computer in that little spaceship and the especially the software in that computer is no less of a leap into the just barely possible and in fact the woman who designed the software that is flying that little spaceship let me pause here for a minute and say that again someone got to say this often enough the woman who designed that software a woman named Margaret Hamilton has realized that what she's doing is different than the software that people have been we're doing before it's different because it's doing 25 things all at the same time and it's prioritizing its job and it's doing everything in real time and so Hamilton she comes up with a new term for the kind of software development she's doing she calls it software engineering and Hamilton software the reason that they have Hamilton software in that computer is that Apollo 11 is not just trying to generically land someplace on the moon they are trying to land at a particular pre-selected spot on the moon now when they were planning the mission when they were planning the mission there was a certain amount of controversy over where they should land on the one side there were the scientists and the geologists who are saying yeah yeah yeah this is all about the Cold War but this is the scientific opportunity of a lifetime we have got to land someplace scientifically interesting and on the other side there are the astronauts and the rocket scientists kind of bored saying yeah okay what's scientifically interesting and the geologists and the scientists are like the bottom of a valley would be good but you know it would be better you know it would be better but the bottom of a canyon the very bottom of a can no no even better the top of a mountain the summit of a mountain but you have to get all the way at the top no no even better the rim of a crater right right there on the rim to which the astronauts and the rocket scientists say yeah no we're not landing anywhere near any of those places and so in the end it's the rocket scientists who win the and so Apollo 11 is aimed at the flattest dullest most geologically uninteresting spot that NASA can possibly find the computers flying them there it is 1610 five minutes into that 10 minute flight down to the moon Armstrong and Aldrin are down to 11,000 meters they've gone through about 50% of their fuel and good news the radio is working nobody knows why the radio wasn't working but now it's working great and you got to believe that Armstrong and Aldrin or maybe taking a breath and thinking well maybe it's gonna go well from here you know maybe that was our problem when a display in front of them lights up and it says 1202 1202 is a message from their computer now I know none of us here are really that familiar with those old computers so let me see if I can translate 1202 and there's something just a little more modern or maybe this right bunch of programmers their computer is glitching Armstrong radios down to Mission Control 1202 what's 1202 because there's hundreds of these error codes the people in Mission Control they have this moment a frozen horror what's 1202 there's hundreds of these codes and there's one guy in that room he's in his twenties his name is Steve bales and he is an expert on Margaret Hamilton software and he knows that 1202 means that the program that the software is falling behind it's being called on the do more stuff than it can get to but he also knows that when that happens the programs do the most important things first and right now there's only one important thing fly the darn spaceship so they he has maybe three seconds to make this decision and he just says just ignored the 1202 it's just keep going just don't pay no attention so they radiate this up to the astronauts but the astronauts they just can't quite ignore the 1202 z-- for one thing there's a bad user interface design there's a bad user interface design they have to the 1202 appears and they have to physically push a button the clear and if they don't it just sits there and they kind of want to see what the next error code is because she ignored the 1202 s but what if the next ones 867 which means the engine fell off or something right so they both have their heads down and they're pushing these buttons clearing the error codes it is sixteen twelve seven minutes into that last ten minute of flight they're down to 600 meters they've gone through four-fifths of their fuel and good news the twelve or twos go away nobody knows why they came nobody knows why they're gone but they're gone and finally finally finally Armstrong has a chance to look up and look out the window right he's got these this little triangular window in front of them now if you're flying into Berlin or New York or London and your airplanes at 600 meters that means you're getting ready to land right your tray table is up your seatbelt is fastened you can look out the window and see individual cars you can see people and you can see if those people are carrying their shopping right at 600 meters Berlin or London or New York it's not the place on the map it's not you know where the conference is next week it's not that place you're going to at 600 meters Berlin or New York or London it's a place it's all around you Armstrong looks out the window at 600 meters and for the first time in human history the moon is not that light up in the sky it's not this geopolitical we're gonna kick the Russians butts by getting there first thing it is a place it's all around them he can look down and they can see the ground scrolling beneath them and there's rocks and hills and things like that he can look in the distance and he can see a mountain on the horizon and the mountain is higher than he is six hundred meters the moon is a place now nobody really knows what went through Armstrong's mind at that moment right only you would know like imagine if you were him what would go through your mind I know exactly how I would feel looking out that window and the word what I would feel feel and the word is fear the moon is a place it's the wrong place Armstrong has been studying maps and photographs they've made little plaster models he knows exactly what he should see when he looks out that window and this is not it and then it gets worse because on that window there is this scale and Armstrong can kind of use the scales like a gunsight you Linus I up and look down at the ground and he can see where the computer is taking them the land so he does that he lines us I where's this thing taking us and he sees that a very geologically interesting crater and even where the crater is not that big craters about the size of a football stadium yours or mine is a matter but the crater is surrounded by a huge debris field of boulders river right what's a crater big rock comes down from the sky boom right there stuff all over the place and so there's this huge debris field of boulders Armstrong looks at that for a few seconds and he makes a very Neil Armstrong decision he turns off the autopilot and he does two things he kills most of their downward the sin and he starts zooming forward he does that because he thinks he can see in the distance past the boulder field it looks like there's a reasonably flat place to land and he's got to get there before they run out of fuel meanwhile back at Mission Control right they can see Armstrong turn off the autopilot and they can see them kill most of the downward descent they can see him zooming forward the one thing they cannot see is the crater there's no live video feed but there is something else they can see they can see aren't strong heart rate he's got heart monitors and things all over his body and they're watching this heart monitor and at the beginning of the powered descent Armstrong's heart was beating at about 80 beats per second probably slower than right now he's only landing on the moon right and it slowly has crept up to about a hundred and now in the last few seconds as he turns off the autopilot and start zooming forward it spikes up to one hundred and fifty clearly something is up the reaction of the people in that room in Mission Control to whatever emergency is going on they don't know what it is but something is clearly up their reaction is extraordinary what they do is nothing and in fact they shut up the guy running the show in Mission Control towles tells everyone in that room he doesn't want anybody talking to the astronauts anymore he only wants to send up one bit of information periodically how much time do they have left how much time before they run out of fuel it is sixteen fourteen nine minutes into that last 10-minute flight Armstrong and Aldrin are down to five percent of their fuel they're down to a hundred meters and they are it's zooming over the boulder field and the edge of the boulder field is getting closer and closer and it really does look like there's a decent place to land out there they don't know how fast they're going no one ever imagined they'd be going this fast this close to the ground so their speedometer is off the scale high with the edge of the boulder field is coming up and they feel like maybe they can make it it is 16 16 11 minutes into that 10-minute flight Armstrong and Aldrin are down to 10 meters they're down to 3 percent of their fuel and they're past the boulders and this does look like a decent place and Armstrong is jamming on the brakes to get the things stopped so we can lower it like a helicopter and it's right around now that the first ominous warning comes up from the earth it's just two words 60 seconds you have one minute of fuel left Armstrong barely hears him because now he has screeched to a halt and he's luring the thing down he's trying to find the ground he's trying to find the ground and at some point they lose sight of the ground because their rocket engine is now blowing up the huge cloud of dust but he knows the ground is down there and it's right around now that the get the second warning 30 seconds for God's sake land this thing Armstrong barely hear some cuss Kenny's just trying to find the ground Aldrin looks out the window and he reports that he can see a shadow on the ground it's the shadow of the spaceship they are really close now and then our Aldrin looks at the instrument panel and there's a little amber light and it's labeled contact and as he looks at if the astronauts call it the contact light and as he looks at it it comes on contact light means that the sensors on the landing gear of this weird-looking thing if touched something hard contact light means they've landed contact light means that these two guys are not gonna die and better they're not going to fail contact light means that Armstrong and Aldrin that those people at Mission Control that the United States of America that humanity has arrived but Armstrong and Aldrin are not quite done the plan had been to fly the thing to about half a meter over the surface and turn off the rocket engine and let it fall the rest of the way but Armstrong and Aldrin you know they were too busy not dying to do that so now they're sitting on the surface burning the last of their rocket fuel and they need to turn off this complicated dangerous machine full of explosives very carefully and so they have a shutdown checklist that they go through and they do it together one of them will you know do the step and the other one will read it and check the pair astronaut and so Armstrong starts he says shut down and then Aldrin says okay engine stop ACA out of detent and they go through this long chain of mumbo-jumbo as they're shutting all the systems down meanwhile the people back on earth right they can see that the spaceship is stopped moving data is streaming down they can see that they can watch the system's get shut off and they get here Armstrong a tall drink going through the shutdown checklist and you would think that at this moment somebody would say something momentous something historical it's not really how people are guy on the ground radios up the completely obvious statement we think he landed right Armstrong really doesn't respond to that he gets the last step on the shutdown checklist he says engine arm off and then he says the words they had made up the words that he had practiced the words that he wanted to be the first words spoken from another world he says Houston that's where Mission Control is tranquility base here I'm sharing an alternate land in the place on the moon called The Sea of Tranquility the Eagle that's the name of the little spaceship has landed and with those words there's highly disciplined nerdy engineers and Mission Control with their white shirts and their black ties and their crew cuts as a group stand up and start shouting you can imagine this some shouting going on in those cars right remember the cars pulled off to the side of the road right what would you do if you're sitting on that car listening to this right steering wheel shout look around see if anybody's watching you you know certainly they're shouting going on in that house in Philadelphia takes a ten-year-old boy just a few seconds to realize hey they've done that they've done this this is really did it and then he realizes that his dad is no longer down in that crouch but his dad is jumping up and down is shouting and shouting louder he's never heard his dad shell and then the boy realized it's not just this dad who's shouting it's the people next door it's the people on the other side some people across the street the whole neighborhood is shouting and it's the kind of noise that you don't exactly hear if you feel in your stomach and it comes in waves so it'll be really layout and then a little trail off and you think it's gonna stop it no it gets really loud again and amidst all the shouting the boy focuses back on the television and he sees the second incredible thing of the day it's there on TV it was just for a second the camera cut away just for a second but he saw it he did saw it just for a second there was Walter Cronkite prying that is my story um I say that I say it's my story it's not really it's your story if you think about that story everything that was done in that story was done by people like you if you roll out of bed in the morning and you just want to build the next cool thing story belongs to you right it is part of our common cultural heritage and I don't care if you grew up in the United States like I did or the old Soviet Union here in Germany elsewhere in Europe Asia it doesn't matter if you're one of us this story belongs to you but I did say that this story had lessons to teach us things to teach us so let me try and make the case that other than just being kind of a fun story it has things that teach us and it has little things to teach us in great big things to teach us so let me start with the little things you know what this story teaches us about little things in a complicated technical project like either software or going to the moon little things can kill you right let's talk about the things that went wrong in that last 10 minutes right why did their radio stopped working right for five minutes their radio didn't really work why was that well it turns out that has to do with the steering rockets from steering rockets well the problem wasn't that the steering rockets on this thing didn't function the problem was that the engineers behind this weird-looking spaceship a few months before it took off got worried that the steering rockets would actually burn through the skin of the spaceship some of these steering rockets were kind of pointed close to parts of the skin so they put these shields on it they keep the steering deflect the rocket exhaust so if they can get you know burn through the skin and those shields worked really well at the flexing the rocket exhaust it also worked really well at reflecting the radio signals and at certain angles it would screw up the radio communications guess which angles the earth is like right here when you're trying to land on the moon they had never done that before right little things can kill you a couple of pieces of sheet metal can kill you and you know here's a here's a machine that has two million parts somebody puts a couple of pieces of sheet metal on it and it almost fails why did their computer crash their computer crashed because I had a couple of different modes one mode was tracked the ground that's the mode it should have been in right pay no attention anything else tracked the grounds the mode it was actually in there was a switch you could select the mode the mode it was actually in was tracked the ground and the mothership at the same time well it turned out it couldn't actually do that and started fall behind because the switch was in the wrong place right switch is in the wrong place that can kill you couple of pieces of sheet metal can kill you why were they off course they had this pinpoint landing picked out how did they get off course for that we need to go a few hours before the landing when these two spaceships were hooked together when they were hooked together there was like a tunnel that ran between them so the people could go back and forth and when they were getting ready to separate they closed the hatch at one end of the tunnel close the hatch at the other end and what they were supposed to do was pump all the air out of that tunnel well maybe they're in a hurry maybe their minds were on other things didn't quite get all of the air out of the tunnel so when they separated there was a puff of air that changed the speed of the lander by one kilometer per hour thing is going 1,700 kilometers per hour and it gets bumped and so that speed changes by one kilometer per hour what possible difference could one kilometer per hour make over two hours two kilometers the distance between a nice flat boring landing site and the crater of death right little things can kill you but you know what else the reason they overcame the thing the little things that almost killed this effort was trust think about the people in Mission Control when Armstrong he turned off the autopilot they did not radio up to him Neal you've turned off your targeting computer what's the matter they simply they simply you know went trusted him when the computer crashed Armstrong asked Mission Control Mission Control asked Steve bales Steve bales basically trusted Margaret Hamilton and our software this was a chain of trust a quarter of a million miles long right Trust is what overcame the little things that went wrong there's also I think something we can learn about leadership you need real leadership to do something like this you need real leadership to do the kind of stuff we do but in particular you need to know the difference between a leader and a hero I think we in the software industry we spend too much of our time worrying about heroes and heroics and what we really need are leaders like take this picture as an American I got to tell you I look at this picture every time and it grabs me right it's very heroic and that's the problem with it it looks like it was perfect it looks like there was this guy and he flew this perfect trip to the moon and he got out and he took this lovely picture and it was all flawless we know that's not the case we know that this was thing was a struggle every step of the way I like instead of this picture you know what I like I like the shutdown checklist I like the shutdown checklist because it speaks to me of leadership right these are the words of two guys trying to get the job done at the end of a really bad day I like these words especially it makes me feel closer to this thing because these are the kind of thing this is the kind of mumbo-jumbo jargon that we speak to each other with all the time right our jargon is a little different than this jargon but it's the same kind of incomprehensible nonsense right I could be saying something almost this incomprehensible bit as this when I go to work you you to these are the words of people like us you know what else these are these are the first word spoken from another world I like that they're real words I like that they're people trying to finish the job that's something to remember that's leadership and that that kind of brings me to the bigger lessons I think of the moon landing and I think the big lesson of the moon landing starts with the idea that when you do something technically difficult something technically cool you cannot predict the outcome right and so for example we went to the moon to win the cold war and kick the Russians butts and a funny thing happened on the way to the moon funny thing happened on the way to the moon we look back we looked over our shoulder and we saw that we see ourselves we saw a place in the universe now I know for maybe everybody here most of you anyway pictures like this they're just kind of part of the wallpaper you seen them a thousand times right they don't even register anymore people put them on t-shirts they're the backgrounds on computers I would like for you to try to imagine that you have gotten to a certain point in your life having never seen a picture like this before and then one day somebody comes and slaps it down in front of you how would it make you feel what would you say I can tell you you say holy mother of God that's everything that's all of us it's all we've ever known that is every birthday it's every first day of school it's every graduation it's every first date it's every love-affair - every marriage it's every wedding anniversary it's every funeral it's every birthday so all we are it's everything we've ever known it's beautiful it's tiny it's out there in the black and then you think for a second and you think maybe we should take care of it it's no coincidence in my opinion that pictures like this coincide almost exactly with modern environmentalism as a mass political movement you look at the picture and it just comes to you right do something difficult you do something technically sweet and you cannot predict the outcome which and that kind of brings me to what I think of is the big lesson kind of the why lesson of the story and it's something I have a hard time putting into words and mostly I think of it as a conversation I think of it as maybe you and I go out and have a beer you think we could find a beer in Berlin you and I go out and have a beer and maybe one of us it doesn't matter which has an idea and it doesn't matter what the idea is maybe you want to get rich selling pet food on the internet maybe I want to create a new programming language or a database or something doesn't matter right now maybe you're against the idea and so you're trying to argue me out of the idea and you could tell me it's a bad idea you know no one will be interested or it won't you know it won't make any money and sure we could talk about that you could tell me that maybe they'll just make society more unfair that it'll be bad for people and sure you know we could talk about that or it'll make your hair fall out of your teeth right I don't know you know and we're gonna talk about all these things the one thing you can't tell me one thing I just won't believe is that it is not possible I just won't believe you see I'm familiar with the impossible I saw it on a TV when I was a kid for me the ultimate lesson of Apollo is that when you do something hard when you do something technically sweet well congratulations you have the thing great but there's this other effect that goes out from it it's like a wave it's a wave of belief if she can do that maybe I can do that it's a it makes people believe in the possibilities if he can do that maybe I can do something like that makes people believe in themselves I can do it I know this for a fact I know this for a fact because I am the result of one of those ways I am a child of Apollo I sat on that couch and my life changed it got off of whatever path have had been on and it got on a different path a path that led me to the University and to engineering and programming a little while after that to writing books and a little while after that to being here with you this morning for me the ultimate lesson of Apollo really has very little to do with space travel or astronauts or any of that stuff and it has everything to do with belief now I said that the story belongs to you and it does but the story comes with a challenge and challenge is to do the best thing to build the best thing that you possibly can you build it because it's worth building you build it because it will inspire your co-workers you build it because it will inspire the people coming up through the profession behind you you build it for the next bunch of 10 year olds so for me the ultimate lesson of Apollo is all the way back so the words that started it all all those decades ago we choose to go to the moon not because it's easy but because it's hard go do something hard thank you you

Channel: GOTO Conferences

Views: 7,793

Rating: 4.9532166 out of 5

Keywords: GOTO, GOTOcon, GOTO Conference, GOTO (Software Conference), GOTOber, GOTO Berlin, Russ Olsen, To the Moon, Moon Landing, NASA, Keynote, Inspiring, Computer Science, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins

Id: l3XwpSKqNZw

Length: 52min 44sec (3164 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2016