I was reminded last night that today is the 45th anniversary of man's landing and walking on the moon. I clicked on a link to a YouTube video of the final descent to the moon's surface and watching made it all come back to me in vivid, stark detail. The sad fact is, the Apollo 11 mission would never happen today. NASA has become so risk-averse that a mission with so many variables and so many opportunities for failure would probably never even get off the drawing board. As it was, the flight to the moon, the landing, and the moon walk all had moments where NASA held their breath. This is especially true of the landing by the Lunar Module on the surface of the moon. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin kept experiencing a computer alarm that basically said there was too much information being fed into the navigation computer. One of NASA's super geeks figured out that the mission could continue because the alarm was due to a relay that inadvertently connected two different...(Read Full Post)