55 years ago today, the mighty Saturn V roared to life and launched Apollo 11 skyward. Neil Armstrong sat in the left seat with the translational controller T-handle in his left hand and the rotational controller at his right — the control joysticks for the spacecraft.
But the left handle has a special function at launch: if catastrophe struck on the pad or during ascent, a counterclockwise crank of the handle would initiate the solid rocket engines in the escape tower, pulling the Command Module away from the rest of the rocket, to return separately by parachute.
For the entirely of the Apollo program, that handle was never twisted, even on Apollo 12 when lighting strikes disabled the entire control deck of the Command Module and lit up almost all of the alarms.
The user interface continues to the present day, with a similar T-handle at the center of the SpaceX Dragon display deck. The handle felt the same to me, with a similar twist to the left.
Errata: escape tower was memorably red on Mercury, not Apollo. And Buzz started in the center seat and then moved around. At launch, Armstrong sat on the left side, Aldrin at center, and Collins on the right; during parking orbit and trans-lunar insertion, Aldrin and Collins switched places; during transposition, docking, and extraction, Collins and Armstrong switched places, putting Collins on the left side and Armstrong at center.
