The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle was really unstable--Neil Armstrong actually almost crashed in it, but was able to eject just in time, before it crashed into the ground.
Armstrong was always known for being cool under pressure, and people were amazed that he just kept on working that day after nearly being killed.
Everytime I see things like this, it amazes me. The things they were able to do with the little technology they had is incredible. To think that a lot of this happened 30-40 years ago really blows my mind.
Apart from the sheer awe of landing on the moon with that era's technology and the resulting scientific harvest, I am fascinated by the engineering process. I can't settle on whether it was methodically safe or recklessly dangerous. Consider the manned missions timeline:
Oct 1968 Apollo 7: earth orbit
Dec 1968 Apollo 8: lunar orbit
Mar 1969 Apollo 9: earth orbit lunar module docking
May 1969 Apollo 10: lunar descent test (no landing)
Jul 1969 Apollo 11: lunar landing
It seems so composed and laid-out, and at the same time so daring. There is a clearly logical progression there, each mission building on the previous one. But each new mission followed so soon after the previous, and each new mission involved so many new goals. It's wondrous that it just worked out that way with so few missteps. Could they really internalize the lessons? With so many moving parts and subsystems, so many hundreds of thousands of workers, spread across the country in goverment offices and subcontractors, I imagine the safety mindset varied wildly. I know more than a few astronauts certainly conducted themselves recklessly on the ground and in training, and there were large swathes of folk who were fanatical about safety.
Perhaps if we had an increased sample size, we'd know which way the Apollo project leaned on safety and methodology. Records show that the NASA administrators were anxious about losing a crew and were all too happy to cancel the missions after Apollo 17 (in addition to saving money for future projects).
I heartily recommend Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon for an excellent account of the Apollo program.
Apollo came dangerously close to losing a crew in several ways. There's Apollo 13 of course. There's also the POGO oscillation problem in the Saturn V which came close to destroying the launch vehicle. Then there's the lightning strike on Apollo 12 that came fairly close to catastrophe.
But aside from all that the biggest danger was a large solar flare while the astronauts were on the surface of the Moon. That could have quite easily exposed them to lethal radiation levels.
I may have made a mistake: risky and methodical are orthogonal. Space flight is inherently dangerous and the thousands of smart NASA workers were surely aware of the natural dangers, but their jobs were to minimize them. Thus, the apparent orderliness.
It's still incredible to me that Apollo 13 was the worst outcome and that the Apollo program, overall, ran "on schedule".
It usually depresses me, because it reminds of the kind of progress we could of made in the next 30-40 years, if we had only put forth the same kind of effort.
We have. If nothing else, look at what's happened with communication. We have 3G cell service on the top of Everest. We have internet access to almost everywhere in the world. Every civilian can have a device which tells him his exact location down a couple feet.
We've put landers on Mars. We've deployed the Hubble space telescope. We're on the path to having commercial space travel.
Maybe these things aren't as breathtaking as a video of a man walking on the moon. That doesn't mean there hasn't been progress.
"I got the signatures of everybody in that room and in the back room. Every time I did that I would ask them their age. Well, I sat down and ran it out. The average age the night we had splashdown was 28."
Pretty disappointed on the comments here (this was written when people were saying moon landing was fake)... The training had to be exhaustive, there was no retrying. Each Apollo mission was an important step from the previous. They had to be prepared for just about anything and know how to do each step of the mission in their sleep. This kind of redundancy has always been there in manned spaceflight including the shuttle. One cool thing they have to assist in training these days is virtual reality training. Here is an image: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/gallery...
I think you're overreacting - at least I simply interpreted the comment as being amazed at the amount of preparation - and that they could have faked it, had they wanted to (even though s/he doesn't think they actually did). Of course my interpretation may be wrong...
Armstrong was always known for being cool under pressure, and people were amazed that he just kept on working that day after nearly being killed.