“The software that controls that rocket has to bring the solutions of five or six differential equations all to zero at exactly the same instant in time. “
Like Neil Armstrong did when he landed Apollo 11 with a watch’s worth of computer helping him?
Willing to give them more time but gotta admit I’m not impressed by Falcon.
Willing to give them more time but gotta admit I’m not impressed by Falcon.
I take a back seat to no one in my admiration of Neil Armstrong and the job he did landing Eagle on the surface of the moon.
Neil Armstrong was almost literally a superman. He was the product of a rigorous selection program. Among test pilots he was superstar, similar in talent level to an Olympic athlete or a Carnegie Hall level musician.
That said, Cdr. Armstrong didn't have to deal with wind as he approach the moon, and the lunar surface wasn't pitching and rolling as he did so. Also, the center of gravity of Eagle was much closer to the spacecraft's landing plane than was the SpaceX rocket.
But no doubt in my mound that Neil Armstrong was an amazing pilot, an amazingly good master of man-in-the-loop control systems, of which he had been a designer if I'm not mistaken.
Here is one of Neil's training flights before he landed on the moon:
Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong Lunar Landing Test Vehicle (LLTV) Crash (May 6, 1968)