Neil Armstrong: Those who do not take risks do not progress

Transcript of astronaut Neil Armstrong's lecture, July 10, 2007, Gan Oranim in Tel Aviv, at an event of Ishir Beit Investment Company, during which he talked about the consequences of the space race

In this article is the transcript of Neil Armstrong's lecture as it took place this evening (July 10, 2007) at Gan Oranim in Tel Aviv to an audience of investment consultants, at an event organized by Ishir Beit Investment Company to launch the transfer of the International Bank's provident funds. Therefore, the context of his words about risks must be seen in the role of the pension consultants - who seek to predict the distant future and make pension decisions in the present in preparation for it.

Due to the speed, you are welcome to make comments on inaccuracies, if these were accidentally mixed into the translation.

Here are Armstrong's words:

I am excited to be here with you and welcome the participants of the conference. I know the subject of launches (in English also launches). As my history there were some good launches and some less successful launches. For example, almost fifty years ago in the first flight of a supersonic plane - X15, which had a flight control system. I was supposed to rise to a height of 13 thousand meters, I was supposed to get off the plane that was carrying me and develop a high speed. The control system was designed to work continuously for 256 thousand hours and the flight was supposed to last ten minutes. When I reached the desired height I checked the sequence of tests I was supposed to check and signaled to my friends on the mother ship to drop me as planned. I watched as all the red lights flashed, that highly reliable control system completely failed after no more than 13 milliseconds. Somehow I took control of the plane and landed safely.

NASA is famous for having procedures for everything possible. The same was true of Apollo's investment. All engines, navigation systems were supposed to be working and most of the equipment such as the cameras, scientific recording devices and sensors were in working order. Most of the parameters were supposed to be within the safe range. There was a way to make sure we didn't go over the speed limit. In advance we took into account the system of limitations and in fact every scenario was supposed to be written in a thick binder. On November 14, 1969 Apollo 12 under the command of my friend Pete Cunard was a machine to take off. Everything was perfectly fine. All the rules were respected, all the rules in the thick binder. There were clouds and there was light rain, but there was no regulation that forbade us to continue in such a situation. Apollo 12, which had 2,500 tons of liquid hydrogen on it, was launched. I still don't know what exactly happened, it could be that the exhaust gases were ionized and acted as a kind of lightning. It was probably the first time we saw lightning from the inside. Pete said everything is falling apart, there's an electrical system failure. The next day, a new rule was introduced in the same binder - not to take off in the rain. Both X15 and Apollo 12 had previously unaccounted for malfunctions, and in both cases, quick thinking saved the day. At X15 the control system was reoriented and the flight was completed as planned. Even in Apollo 12, the electrical system was turned on in the end and this was the second manned mission to the moon and is considered a successful mission. Not every launch failure is a lost situation, he said.

Today we are six years into the 21st century, and so far the situation is not exactly perfect but there are some promising signs. We would like to know what this century will bring us, but I will actually start and talk about the last century, the century in which most of us spent our years. It was the best of times and the worst of times. There were wars and disasters that we remember with great sadness, but it was also a period of unprecedented scientific development, a century that began with the first radio transmission across the ocean and the first airplane flight. And at the end of the century we reached unprecedented progress in information technology. During the XNUMXth century we were blessed with the fission of the atom, the invention of television, the almost complete elimination of a number of serious diseases. The development of the computer, the solution of the DNA mystery, the development of genetic engineering and the beginning of the journey into space. The interesting thing about all these developments is that they were not observed, no one planned them. No one watched them. In most cases, they were also not the result of a response to customer demand. To be honest, the client only rarely has really good ideas. Where do good ideas come from? Where do they come from? Here and there there is some eureka - a sudden discovery out of nowhere. But usually it's about human curiosity, a creative mind and determination and of course endless experimentation and tinkering.

US President Kelvin Coolidge said 80 years ago - there is nothing in the world that will take the place of perseverance. Talent is not enough. Geniuses don't always succeed. The world is full of needy people who are geniuses, what matters is determination and perseverance. They are the decisive force.

Human history is full of stories about Edison who tried thousands of wires until he succeeded in inventing the successful light bulb. Shackleton was trapped in the ice of an icy ocean in a sailing ship. Again one of the best stories about the importance of persistence. Actress Elizabeth Taylor exercised unprecedented perseverance in her search for the perfect husband.

I greatly enjoyed the friendship of Sir Peter Scott, an Englishman who was a biologist, pilot, artist and oceanographer. He was the son of Robert Falcon Scott who, just over a century ago, was the first person to reach the plateau on which the South Pole is located. In 1910 he set sail from New Zealand in an attempt to become the first person to reach the South Pole itself. His group reached Ross Island, and set up camp there. They then set off in a caravan of horse-drawn sledges, up the road to the top of the Arctic Plateau. The temperatures were between 40 and 70 degrees below zero. In extremely difficult conditions they passed through snow and ice month after month after month and finally on January 18, 1912 they reached their destination - and what did they think they found there - they found Amundsen's tent that had arrived there a month before. They were disappointed of course, and began the 1,300 kilometer journey back to the northern end of Antarctica to the camp they had set up. Scott and his group have almost reached the safe zone of North Antarctica. But the whole expedition perished on the ice. My friend Peter who was a baby never knew his father who left letters on the ice. In one of the letters he wrote it was said we took risks, we knew we were taking risks, the situation deteriorated and therefore we have no basis to complain but this is God's will and yet we are determined to make an effort and do our best until the last moment.

Risk is part of our lives. You can't move forward without taking risks. Progress was the goal of a very large international program 50 years ago, I mean the program known as the International Geophysical Year. 66 countries joined together to analyze the earth - oceanography, meteorology, solar activity, the earth's magnetism, the atmosphere. Meteoric activity. All kinds of factors, some familiar and some esoteric. The event was planned from July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958. This period of a year and a half was chosen because it was the period of maximum activity of the sun and all kinds of meteorological phenomena, interference to radio transmissions, magnetic field, were somehow related to the activity of the sun. There were Russian and American scientists who recognized the fact that if it were possible to use a spaceship to place the fruit of a person's hand in an extraterrestrial orbit with scientific instruments, it would be possible to measure things precisely in a special perspective and perhaps also reveal some of the secrets of the earth.

At the time they didn't know but they actually started a new competition - the space race. The Soviet Union won the gold and silver medals in Sputnik 1 and Sputnik-2. The Americans tried and failed at first. They called it Capotenik. But in the end the Americans won the bronze medal anyway thanks to Explorer 1. The Soviet Union had a history of using dogs in space. The first living creature to be launched into space was the Russian dog Laika, who died a week after her launch (*opinions are divided on this, according to news from recent years she did not even survive a few hours after launch AB) She contributed her life to the space race. Both the Americans and the Russians had an obsession with sending a man into space. None of the powers knew who the person was that could be persuaded to embark on such a journey. At first they thought of taking prisoners, maybe soldiers who could be commanded, maybe doctors who are well versed in physiology. Finally the two powers chose the pilots. Apparently this seems to be a good choice because pilots are able to live for a long time in a closed place, and enjoy the fact that they can stay away from the ground.

At the same time they started building large spaceships that could carry people. The Russians won again when Yuri Gagarin was the first to fly into space and German Titov was the second. Once again it was America who won the bronze medal when they sent John Glenn. The Americans started to make some progress with the Gemini spacecraft, it was a spacecraft that had two people in it - a pilot and a navigator. It was the first guided vehicle - you could look out the window and say here is Australia.... Gemini was also the first spaceship to have a propeller that made it possible to correct the orbit and a radar that made it possible to meet with another spaceship. Something that preceded the next flights into space. Gemini was a particularly successful vehicle. I was able to meet for the first time with another spacecraft from the Gemini series and move from spacecraft to spacecraft. Another record we landed in the ocean with a parachute. We were hoping a ship would come by and pick us up. Using our navigation system we were confident that we landed close to the aircraft carrier. But I landed in Okinawa and the aircraft carrier was actually in the Caribbean.

Gemini was the first spacecraft to have a computer on board. It didn't have 4 gigabit, not even 4 megabytes. It had 4 kilobytes - 4,096 bytes. It is important to remember how important it was - it could be used to calculate things that previously could not be calculated such as route changes. We were never disappointed.

Around the same time Around the same time astronomers developed an experiment. The idea was simply to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Moon based on the time it would take for a ray of light to travel from the Earth to the Moon, and be returned through a series of mirrors to the Earth. I was not one of the scientists in this project. I was the technician, my role in the experiment was to install the mirrors. This is a series of small mirrors, the diameter of each of which is about half an orange. They are similar to the reflectors that are on the roads for marking. Many of them will remember that on the surface of the moon day and night take a month. 300 hours are required for the sun to rise in the east, cross the sky and set in the west. The Earth on the other hand stays in one place in the sky all the time. The Earth was above me 23 degrees west of the zenith and was actually suspended against the background of the purple sky. I was supposed to set the sights so that they would point at the Earth, which does not move. There was talk of a laser beam that the timing of the beam's return to Earth was supposed to be measured with a particularly precise clock. The plan was to measure the distance exactly 28-43 centimeters. It may not be clear to you why someone needs to measure an exact distance from the waters of the Serenity to the Earth with an accuracy of 28 centimeters. They started the experiment at the Mount Hamilton Observatory in California. And as soon as the mirrors were aimed the scientists launched the laser beam. I thought it would have been good if they had informed me, but I was not informed. When the horn didn't come back they started to worry, they sent another horn and another horn and finally bingo - they got one return and they tuned again and got a return of horns. This required a very precise direction of the telescope that was used to launch the beam. It's like hitting a coin with a rifle from a distance of 3 kilometers. The problem they encountered was that they used the wrong location - the wrong longitude and latitude of the observatory from which they launched the laser beam - the same longitude and latitude they thought were correct because the observatory was built in 1888. One of the first results of the experiment on the moon was to find the location The exact Mount Hamilton on Earth.

One of the things that was well planned was our flight path to the moon and back. We didn't take the fastest way or the one that would save fuel, but we chose the free return route. This way uses the Earth's gravitational field to allow us to return to Earth in the event of a malfunction. This arrangement worked great for Apollo 13 after their oxygen tank exploded and they lived to tell about it. Before the flight, NASA was asked why they use the number 13, which is a lucky number, and NASA said that they are scientists and do not believe in superstitions, but since then they have not repeated the number 13 and have not given this number to any flight since. (I attribute this statement to his sense of humor, I don't believe he believes in such nonsense. AB)

There are many problems with accessing the moon that should trouble the people. In the case of Apollo 13, the malfunction did not happen during the launch or in one of the problematic sections, but in one of the sections that were considered easy. The experience is that you always run into problems when you least expect it, and so he read in Apollo 13.

After World War II, Werner von Braun he and his men immigrated to America and worked on modifications and improvements in their work on the German V2 rocket. They started putting animals on these flights. This was the beginning of life in space. The commander of Apollo 13, Jim Lovell, tells about how in White Sands, New Mexico, an old V2 rocket was standing above the launch pad and inside it were two mice, one of them is anxious and looks at his friend and tells him I'm afraid the rocket might explode and the parachute might not open and the mouse can kill in a job like this . His friend asked him then why do you do this job - and he said it's easier than doing cancer research.

Let's go back 400 years to a city in the Netherlands called Middelburg. An apprentice of an expert in the manufacture of spectacles and magnifying glasses, Hans Lifshin, lives there. They say that across the street from his glasses shop was an egg and meat shop. Above this shop was the bedroom of the milkmaid's daughter, which he found yes in his eyes and he looked at it, he had time to think about the implications of the affair but if it hadn't, you wouldn't have heard of Armstrong and I wouldn't have been invited to be here tonight. What happened - the apprentice, in his effort to see the girl without risk, arranged the lenses in such a way that distant objects appeared closer. This is how the telescope was born and it was a strange anecdote. At first they created the telescope as a toy, and only after the idea crossed the Alps and reached Galileo Galilei and he pointed his telescope to the sky only then did they recognize that the human eye had obtained a new perspective on the universe.

Galileo's observation of the moon revealed facts that changed the face of science, he discovered that the moon is a planet with valleys and mountains, and that Jupiter has moons and that the sun has spots that disappear behind the edges of the sun and appear on the other side and that the sun may be a rotating body. Our entire conception of the universe was wrong and Copernicus who claimed that the earth is not at the center of the universe may have been right.

The church did not like what Galileo Galilei claimed. His ideas could have brought him to the limelight, he had to freeze them. When the church changed its strategy regarding Galileo they set up observatories in several monasteries. It was clean and quiet work, but it was done at night and the monks did not receive a bonus for working at night, therefore some of them came up with the idea of ​​astronomical work for a few days. sunspots In the 11th century we already knew that sunspots are dangerous and they create magnetic storms and radiation.

Here on Earth we are protected by the magnetic field and the atmosphere but in space you are naked. When the young American president John Kennedy tried to find a way to compete with the Russians in space, he announced in 1961 that the United States should reach the moon by the end of the decade. He had no idea that he was in for a complete surprise for the space travelers. The end of the decade will bring us right to the peak of the sunspot cycle. The United States was in competition with the Soviet Union and neither side agreed to back down because of a few sunspots.

Each wanted intelligence about the other side, to know what he was doing and how he was doing what he was doing. The space race was a diversion that prevented war but it was an intense distraction that allowed both sides to follow the right path with goals of science, exploration and learning. In the end, this created a mechanism for cooperation between entities in both countries. In these trajectories of reaching the moon, the sunspots were not the important things but the solar eruptions, huge storms, each one emitting energy equivalent to dozens of hydrogen bombs. This radiation of protons, gamma rays and more is dangerous. Such flares usually happen at the peak of the solar cycle. At Apollo we were concerned about the level of high-energy protons emanating from these storms that we were supposed to expect at the peak of the cycle. We were limited in terms of weight and could not afford the luxury of armoring our spacecraft. Actually what protected us was the fuel in our tanks. Astronomers volunteered to check these sunspots and storms and they were to immediately report their observations to flight control. We got help from people who watched the sun all over the world. If a major storm occurs at night according to the Western Hemisphere and no one can watch from Alaska to Argentina. And it was just cloudy over the Mediterranean so no one could watch it from there. But in Scandinavia the sky was blue and soon the flight control received a call from Ander Svensen from Sweden 'We have seen a solar flare and let people know. Air traffic control did just that. The high energy protons are traveling at 43 percent of the speed of light and that gave us 10 minutes to protect ourselves from the impending storm. We could readjust the spacecraft, put the fuel tanks between us and the sun and hope we were protecting the crew. It was an imperfect solution but it was the only solution available to us. I am happy to say that we were never hit by a major solar storm despite the fact that it was at the height of the sunspot cycle and no flight recorded a high level of radiation. 11 years after Apollo, at the next peak of the sunspot cycle such a storm erupted that exposed a crew to 2,600 grams of the lethal dose and when people travel to Mars and other places in the solar system they will need better protection from radiation than we have today. In 1989 the storm left half a million people without electricity. And another year such a storm caused the disruption of the telephone system.

When we were sleeping in Apollo 11 we sometimes saw microscopic flashes or flashes of lightning. We attributed this to high-energy particles hitting the structure inside the spacecraft. The analysis after the fact showed that it was indeed radiation from high-energy particles, but they did not hit the spaceship, but passed through the retina of the eye. There is a risk involved, but the results are worth the risk.

As for the mirrors on the moon - the experiment I told you about - it is still working. 38 years have passed and the mirrors still reflect laser beams from observatories all over the world. Accuracy improved from 43 centimeters to less than 2 centimeters. And we now know that the moon is moving away from the earth at a rate of 3.8 centimeters per year. And it is possible to test the tectonic plates through this experiment and see that Hawaii is moving away from the USA and that the moon has a liquid core and that there are changes in the length of our days due to fluctuations in the earth's core, of milliseconds. The mirrors confirmed Einstein's principle of relativity but cast doubt on the importance of relativity on the relative motions between the Earth and the Moon. The mirrors will continue to operate for many years and this gives me great satisfaction as a technician who worked on this project.

Understanding the world around us is more than important. It is an essential thing. The safety of all the inhabitants of the planet is involved in this. We need to understand the mechanisms of asteroids, earthquakes and other natural phenomena that threaten our existence.

We are in the middle of a storm of changes, we are changing our lifestyles, wholesalers, retailers, all people are changing the way they do their work. The way you manage your work. States are changing the way they serve their citizens. Many times these changes introduce new risks and you as the gatekeepers in charge of predicting the unexpected consequences must correct this. The results of all these changes charge a premium on the decision-making process, new product development, decisions to purchase new systems, decisions on how to change the organizational structure of organizations to maximize the benefits from these new investments. Leaders recognize the importance of these decisions. They don't want to be left behind but they want to make sure they are riding the right horse, technology is racing forward at breakneck speed and it's hard to catch up but you must not lag behind it.

In ancient times, the power of the states was through fleets or armies. During the industrial revolution, the degree of success was the economic strength, the engines were the natural resources and the labor force and the ability to transport and share good things. Today the power goes to those who can accumulate knowledge and control the flow of information. This is an exceptional time, in the Apollo program we believed that we could implement what was thought to be impossible. We understood the risk involved in this, we agreed on the risk because we believed that the goal was important - to travel to the moon and explore it.

The Swiss physicist who completed the first flight around the world in a hot air balloon said at the end of the flight, about six years ago, that we should accept the uncertainty, accept the doubt, prepare as best we can and then jump. It's a metaphor for life. Risk is part of your life and ours. Chosen have their own dangers. Commanders in the army have their own dangers. You have legal dangers of image, of perception. Each of us has a radiation that needs to be dealt with in his life, in his work. Like the galactic radiation, these are things that can be predicted, but sometimes there are unexpected events like solar flares that bombard our defense mechanisms, challenging them to reach the peak of our ability, to exhaust the peak of our ability. It is the spice that makes our lives worth living. We need resistance to succeed. There is little satisfaction in succeeding in easy things. Little satisfaction of desire if we win a prize for something we did not deserve. Problems should be treated as opportunities and risks should be welcomed and dealt with.

Launching is just the beginning, launching in my case has always been a very exciting thing. Sometimes it wasn't as I expected but I remember each launch fondly. Launches or launches are a first look into the future and give us the opportunity to predict for ourselves where the world is headed if we want to be part of that direction. And right now I'm facing a risk - the risk that I've talked too much, so I'll finish my words and thank you for giving me a great gift. your time

Neil Armstrong's answers to children's questions at the Madatech Museum in Haifa