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Good article.

My understanding is that many individuals can completely control the
panic/stress syndrome.  The classic example is of the tapes of test
pilots crashing - most of the time, the pilot keeps on and on trying,
knowing that he has completely lost control and almost certainly about
to die.  And continues reporting what is happening, knowing that even if
he dies, he will provide valuable information that may help the next guy.

The most amazing example that I ever witnessed was one of the moon shots.
(I forget whether it was 11 or 13, I think it was 13.)  A bug had been
detected in the navigation code, that had not been discovered until the
bird was flown.  Unless they debugged it, they were not going to get home,
period.

Houston got them a patch.  They read over the hex codes to punch in (while
millions watch and listen on live TV all over the world.  Unless you were
a programmer, you had no idea how risky this procedure was.  They punched
in about twenty minutes of code, read it all back to confirm, and then
rebooted the computer.

>From the tone of voice used, they could have been counting inventory.  But
every astronaut was a highly trained engineer, and had to know that one
missed byte would likely leave them lost in space - even if the patch
was good (and very often the first patch you get does not fix the bug.)

When they were done, they pushed the button, and the navigational computer
reset.  They made it back.


Wrolf

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