ACTION TIP "Are you Planning a Trip to the Moon?"
"On its way to landing astronauts safely on the surface of the moon, the miracle of modern
engineering that was an Apollo rocket was actually on course only 2 to 3 percent of the time. Which means that for at least 97 percent of the time it took to get from the Earth to the moon it was off course. In a journey of nearly a quarter of a million miles, the vehicle was actually on track for only 7,500 miles. Or to put it another way, for every half-hour the ship was in flight, it was on course for less than one minute. And it reached the moon—safely—and returned to tell
the tale."
How was such a thing possible? Because modern space travel is a masterful example of slight edge course-correction in action.
If this machine, at the time one of the most sophisticated, expensive, and finely calibrated pieces of technology ever devised, was correcting its own off-course errors twenty-nine minutes out of every thirty, is it reasonable to expect that you could do better than that?
Let’s say you were able to match an Apollo rocket’s degree of accuracy in the pursuit of your own goals: that would mean that you’d be perfectly on target and on course no more than ten days in any given year.
The
next time you’re giving yourself a hard time because you feel like you’ve gotten off track, think about the Apollo program, and give yourself a break.”
~ By Brian Johnson, Optimize
