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[i]...the mission planners saved five seconds of descent engine burn time at full throttle to loft them to a safer altitude. During those five seconds, they would have time for staging, pressurizing of the ascent tanks, and ignition of the ascent engine. Five seconds of thrust at full throttle corresponds to twenty seconds of thrust at 25% of full throttle. ...that adds another twenty seconds to the mythical twenty seconds, getting us to forty seconds of flight time left at landing. The remaining part of that "more than a minute" is a tale of slosh in the propellant tanks. ...after the flight, engineers concluded the low-propellant-level light was turned on between 30 to 45 seconds early! So we now know that Armstrong had at least 20 + 20 + 30 = 70 seconds of flight time remaining (even though the LM crew and Houston could only count on 40 of them) before he would have crashed into the Moon in an Eagle LM starved of vital fuel.[/i]
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