The ability to come up with the right mixture of bold leaps and cautious steps in both the planning of the missions and the design of the launch vehicle and spacecraft made Apollo an unprecedented and unmatched success. The ability to make these compromises accurately made Apollo possible. Not having enough reserve capacity would allow even minor problems to jeopardize the mission, but requiring too much backup would greatly reduce the useful payload. It's also necessary to know what kind of problems could arise and to make the mission robust enough to minimize the impact of these problems. ![]() A good example of this is the trade-off between carrying extra hovering fuel that may be needed to find a safe landing spot and carrying additional scientific equipment. ![]() What made the task challenging was coming up with reasonable compromises between achieving the maximum of mission objectives while keeping the risk to the success of the mission acceptably small and the risk to the astronauts very small. ![]() In fact, any talented person with a little high school physics and a small computer, can fairly accurately compute all the burns of an Apollo mission. Although it requires knowledge of orbital mechanics, planning a flight to the Moon is actually more of an art than a science.
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