<story><title>July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)</title><url>http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/apollo11_40th.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tdicola</author><text>The thing that really shocked me about the Apollo missions was how quickly they jumped from testing the hardware to actual mission to the moon.  The _second_ manned launch of Apollo (and _first_ manned launch of the incredible Saturn V rocket) went straight out to the moon and orbited before returning back to Earth!  The next missions did a few tests of the lunar lander in space, and the fifth manned mission was Apollo 11 which finally landed.  Crazy to think of all the systems, hardware, etc. that just had a couple shakedown flights before the real deal.  Incredibly impressive engineering to pull off such a feat without more problems.</text></comment>
<story><title>July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)</title><url>http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/apollo11_40th.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>trothamel</author><text>Perhaps of relevance to Hacker News:&lt;p&gt;Four minutes before the moon landing, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing 1202 and 1201 alarms - indicating that it wasn&amp;#x27;t completing its processing loop in time.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s the audio from the flight director and guidance loops, as they troubleshooted the problem in real time, clearing Apollo 11 to land.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35230.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;forum.nasaspaceflight.com&amp;#x2F;index.php?topic=35230.0&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>