- Holy mackerel, nothing went wrong! ➶
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Michael Collins, the astronaut who orbited the moon aboard Apollo 11 command module Columbia while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface:
That’s unusual; all those little bits and pieces — pieces of machinery here, that little bit of it up over there — all the things that could have gone wrong. The flight to the moon and back is a long and fragile daisy chain. Any tiny break in the chain and and the whole venture is screwed…
…I just couldn’t believe that our equipment, down to the last little nut and bolt, that there wasn’t something, somewhere in it that had been overlooked, something that was going to malfunction and when it went wrong, something we might or might not be able to cope with.
So I salute the designers, engineers, the mechanics and the maintenance people, all of them who made that equipment so reliable.
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