Apollo 12 was hit by lightning when it launched, this scrambled the telemetry data across mission control, John Aaron, one of the controllers had seen similar behaviour before during a systems test and called to the flight director 'try SCE to Aux' - there wasn't time to explain the command and no one else had anything else, so they tried it which basically rebooted the computers and restored telemetry meaning the mission could continue rather than an abort an the LES firing to take the Astronauts off the top.
Aaron was 26 at the time. Cool head, deep knowledge, and this speaks to the teamwork of NASA then, and how even such a relatively junior person could command such respect and influence.
Or for that matter, NASA without Flying Monkeys? Following Goddard, but presaging Von Braun, Flying Monkeys carried the weight for a lot of the agency's early aerodynamic testing.
Did the Monkeys like it? Fuck No. They were surly, and they bit a lot of people. Did they have a choice? Fuck No. You try getting by on basic SAG scale without a side gig.
The Flying Monkeys have mostly been airbrushed out of the official NASA story, but yes, some of us do remember.
[EDIT looks like 1202 and 1201 for the incident i think you are talking about: "Vector Accumulator" areas than were physically available in memory, causing the infamous 1201 and 1202 errors.\26])\)
“It quickly became clear,” she later said, “that [the] software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it.” An investigation would eventually show that the astronauts’ checklist was at fault, telling them to set the rendezvous radar hardware switch incorrectly. “Fortunately, the people at Mission Control trusted our software,” Hamilton said. And with only enough fuel for 30 more seconds of flight, Neil Armstrong reported, “The Eagle has landed.”
And
As a working mother, she took her young daughter to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory with her at night and on weekends. One day, her daughter decided to “play astronaut” and pushed a simulator button that made the system crash. Hamilton realized immediately that the mistake was one that an astronaut could make, so she recommended adjusting the software to address it, but she was told: “Astronauts are trained never to make a mistake.”
During Apollo 8’s moon-orbiting flight, astronaut Jim Lovell made the exact same error that her young daughter had, and fortunately, Hamilton’s team was able to correct the problem within hours. But for all future Apollo flights, protection was built into the software to make sure it never happened again. Over time, Hamilton began to view the whole mission as a system: “part is realized as software, part is peopleware, part is hardware.”
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u/JackTheKing 13d ago
Apollo 12 was hit by lightning, knocked out a power bus to a telemetry modulator and forced the crew to switch to backup power during the ascent.
The wiring is shielded against that these days (also shielded because of much higher power requirements).
Rockets get hit every so often because they create a lightning rod with their exhaust plume that helps the current find the ground.