That's a great talk idea. I really want at some time to do one called "7 minutes to Tranquility Base" detailing all the stuff that happened in the last 7 minute before Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the moon. A lot of interesting technical stuff work and failed in those critical minutes.
Although this happened during Apollo 12, I love stories [1] like John Aaron's [2] "SCE to AUX". It is a story of how one critical piece of knowledge in a clutch moment can turn failure into success.
And if you can't get enough of me speaking about random stuff, here's my StrataConf talk: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/the-great-railway-caper-big-data...