Entry #2: Moon Machines

"Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer" is a documentary produced by the Science Channel in 2009. The documentary shows how NASA created the navigation system which helped the astronauts to land in the moon with the Apollo 11 mission.

In the 1960s, during the administration of President John F. Kennedy, the United States of America focused on winning the “space race” against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), so the government invested many resources in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 

The "space race" began with the objective to explore outer space with artificial satellites and send humans to explore it. After some missions that ended in failures, NASA started to hire engineers and technicians from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop the navigation system of the Saturn V spacecraft that would take them to reach the moon.

Charles Draper, the Instrumentation Laboratory founder worked with them to build the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). Margaret Hamilton was the only female engineer that helped NASA with the project and she also invented the modern concept of software.

They finally succeeded to create the system using only just 64KB of storage. This system was able to guide astronauts across 356,000 km of space from the Earth to the Moon and return them safely. The AGC worked with simple commands that the astronauts typed in pairs of nouns and verbs in order to control the spacecraft.

NASA took a great risk with the Apollo Program as they invested a lot in the logistics, resources, and money. Inside this investment, it is included the software for the navigation system and all the maths involved in the calculations for the landings, ignition, trajectory, etc. This is an example of how important is software in our lives and in researching.

Science Channel. (2009). Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer. Recovered from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ1O0XR_cA0