We’re Number One on the Runway

“We’re number one on the runway.”

That’s what Buzz Aldrin said while sitting in a spacecraft on the Moon, hoping it would take off so they could go home.

I heard those words while watching an Apollo documentary on Netflix.

And when I heard them, I paused.

What if the launch malfunctioned?

What if the upward thrust wasn’t strong enough?

What if there was a mechanical failure?

What if a valve didn’t open?

What if a wire had come loose?

What if the engine simply didn’t start?

The people who built this machine built it on Earth. They could test individual systems and simulate the mission, but they could never test the real thing. They didn’t have access to the moon.

To make matters worse, this delicate spacecraft had already endured a violent launch from Earth, traveled roughly 240,000 miles through space, separated from another spacecraft, descended to the Moon, and landed.

So many things that could go wrong.

When we take a commercial flight from London to Chicago, sometimes the pilot comes on and says, “We’re number four for takeoff.”

We understand what that means. Three airplanes are ahead of us.

Of course, there was no runway on the Moon.

And Armstrong and Aldrin were number one because nobody had ever needed to take off from the Moon before.

Landing on the Moon is one of the most famous events in human history.

But after landing on the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin still had to return. And nobody had ever done that before.

Apollo 11 didn’t land the entire spacecraft on the Moon. Three astronauts had left Earth together: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.

When they reached the Moon, however, only Armstrong and Aldrin went down to the surface.

NASA had built a separate, much smaller spacecraft specifically for landing on the Moon. It was called the Lunar Module, and the Lunar Module used for Apollo 11 was named Eagle.

Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into Eagle and separated from the main spacecraft.

Michael Collins stayed behind in Columbia, the Command Module, orbiting the Moon above them.

So three men traveled roughly 240,000 miles from Earth to the Moon.

But only two landed.

While Armstrong and Aldrin descended toward the Moon, Collins continued circling the Moon alone.

When Eagle finally touched down, Armstrong radioed the words that became famous:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The hardest part seemed to be over.

Except it wasn’t.

Now they had to get back.

Eagle was really two spacecraft stacked on top of each other

The Lunar Module itself was built in two sections.

The bottom was called the descent stage.

It had the engine and equipment needed to take Armstrong and Aldrin from lunar orbit down to the surface.

Once Eagle landed, the descent stage’s job was finished.

It wasn’t coming home.

It would remain on the Moon.

Sitting on top of it was the ascent stage.

That was Armstrong and Aldrin’s ride back.

When it was time to leave, the ascent stage would separate from the bottom half of Eagle.

Its engine would ignite.

And this little spacecraft would have to launch two human beings from the surface of another world.

There was just one rather important problem.

The engine had to start.

There was no Plan B

No backup spacecraft sitting somewhere else on the Moon.

There was no rescue crew.

NASA couldn’t send somebody over to repair it.

If something prevented Eagle’s ascent stage from launching, Armstrong and Aldrin would be stranded.

Forever.

Michael Collins would continue orbiting above them in Columbia. But there would be nothing he could do. Eventually, Collins would have to come home.

Alone.

This is the part that hit me when I heard Aldrin say:

“We’re number one on the runway.”

Imagine sitting inside that tiny spacecraft.

You are 240,000 miles from home.

You are about to start an engine. And if it doesn’t work, nobody is coming to get you.

NASA obviously understood this risk. So did the White House.

Before Apollo 11 landed, presidential speechwriter William Safire prepared a statement for President Richard Nixon.

It was titled:

“In Event of Moon Disaster.”

It began:

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”

The rest of the contingency plan was equally chilling.

President Nixon would telephone Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s wives.

Eventually, communication with the stranded astronauts on the moon would have to end.

That part is difficult to even think about.

Who would make that call?

Who would be the one to tell Neil and Buzz, "This will be our last communication with you"?

After that, they would never hear another human voice. They are being left to die. A slow, painful death from starvation.

Two human beings would be alive on the Moon, looking back at Earth, knowing that everyone they had ever known was there — and that they would never speak to any of them again.

Think about that.

Humanity had figured out how to send two people to the surface of the Moon.

But if their engine didn’t start, humanity had no way to bring them back.

Even if Eagle took off successfully, Armstrong and Aldrin still weren’t safe.

Michael Collins was circling the Moon in Columbia.

Eagle had to launch from the lunar surface and enter the right orbit.

Then Armstrong and Aldrin had to find Collins.

Two spacecraft traveling thousands of miles per hour above the Moon had to come close.

Then they had to dock.

Armstrong and Aldrin had to transfer from Eagle into Columbia.

Only then could the three astronauts begin their journey back to Earth.

We know the ending, so it’s easy to compress all of this into a simple story:

They went to the Moon.

They landed.

They walked around.

They came home.

But imagine experiencing it without knowing the ending.

Every step depended on the previous step working.

And look at the tools they had.

This is the other part of Apollo that I find difficult to comprehend.

The Apollo Guidance Computer had roughly 4 KB of RAM and 72 KB of read-only memory.

Kilobytes.

Not gigabytes.

Not even megabytes.

There was no GPS around the Moon.

No internet.

No cloud computing.

No Google.

No GitHub.

And, of course, no AI.

Many of the technologies required to accomplish the mission simply didn’t exist when the Apollo program began.

So NASA built them.

And even then, things went wrong. But they fixed all those issues somehow.

In the end, it all worked. They landed.

It’s one of the greatest moments in human history.

But after everything they had just survived, they eventually had to climb back inside Eagle and trust another engine.

“We’re number one on the runway.”

Time to leave the Moon

On July 21, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin prepared to leave.

The bottom half of Eagle would remain on the Moon.

The ascent stage would use it almost like a launchpad.

Then the moment came. The button was pressed.

The ascent engine ignited.

The engine worked.

Eagle lifted away from the lunar surface.

Eagle reached lunar orbit.

Armstrong and Aldrin rendezvoused with Collins.

They docked with Columbia.

Armstrong and Aldrin climbed aboard.

For the first time since approaching the Moon, all three Apollo 11 astronauts were together again.

And then they headed home.

Today, AI has put unprecedented power in ordinary people’s hands

Things that belonged to science fiction not long ago are suddenly within reach.

And yet, a large swath of people working in technology are not exactly in high spirits.

And for good reason.

Jobs are changing. Skills that took years to acquire suddenly feel less valuable. Nobody knows exactly what the next five or ten years will look like. There is plenty of uncertainty, anxiety, and doom and gloom.

But the genie is out of the bottle.

AI is here. It is not going away.

So what do we do?

We find our runway.

By that I mean finding something difficult that you believe is worth pursuing.

Something you might have been thinking about for years.

Something that, at first, feels a little beyond your reach.

You don’t need to know exactly how you are going to do it.

You just need to see enough of the runway in front of you to start moving.

Then you figure out the rest as you go.

I found my runway roughly six years ago, long before the current AI wave.

Build software that is affordable.

Simple premise.

Hard to execute.

Six years later, we are still figuring it out at Neeto.

How much should we spend on engineering? How much on marketing?

Which product to build. Which product to shut down. What new avenues to follow.

We are still figuring it out.

Building dozens of products with no full-time PM is challenging.

Competing against companies with more money, bigger teams, and established brands is challenging. Startups sound sexy but execution is hard.

Some things work.

Some don’t.

Some ideas that look great on paper fail completely.

But we keep moving down the runway.

Every day, new customers show up.

They use our products. They ask for features. They tell us what is broken.

We build.

We fix.

We learn.

And we keep moving.

Six years later, it is still fun. Still exciting. And still feels directionally right.

If anything, I believe even more strongly today that software is too expensive.

And AI makes this more interesting, not less.

AI is supposed to make software dramatically cheaper to build.

But ask yourself: how many established software companies have reduced their prices because AI made them more productive?

I can’t think of many.

Instead, many are adding AI to their products and charging even more.

Mostly newcomers are taking advantage of these new tools to build faster and offer software at radically lower prices.

That makes me even more excited about what we are doing at Neeto.

This is my runway.

What’s yours?

Maybe you want to start a company.

Maybe you want to write a book.

Maybe you want to change careers.

Maybe there is a product you’ve wanted to build for years.

Maybe you are sick of using a product which is charging high and you are not getting enough value out of it.

Maybe you want to solve a problem everyone around you has accepted as unsolvable.

Maybe you already know exactly what your runway is.

You’ve just been waiting.

Waiting for the right time.

Waiting for better tools.

Waiting until you know more.

Waiting until things become less uncertain.

Waiting for someone to tell you that you’re ready.

The Apollo engineers didn’t have all the tools they wanted.

They built with what they had.

Armstrong and Aldrin didn’t have another spacecraft waiting on the Moon in case something went wrong.

There was one runway.

And they were number one on it.

That’s what find your runway means to me.

Find something worth attempting.

Something difficult enough that you’re not entirely sure you can pull it off.

Break it down until the impossible starts looking possible.

Then stop waiting for permission.

Own your runway.

Be number one on it.

And start the engine.

Wishing everyone a violent and steady takeoff.

P.S. If you’re trying to find your runway and need someone to talk to, reply to me. I’d love to help.

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Videos and references

After watching the Netflix documentary, I spent some time on YouTube trying to understand how the Lunar Module actually worked. I watched a lot of videos, but these are some of the ones I found most useful.

Building the Lunar Module

What’s Inside the Lunar Module?

How the Apollo Spacecraft Works — Part 1

How the Apollo Spacecraft Works — Part 2

How the Apollo Spacecraft Works — Part 3