Moon Machines

Moon Machines

The struggle to take the man to the moon

So, tonight I just finished watching this documentary called "Moon Machines EP3: Navigation Computer" in Youtube. To be honest, I've never been too keen into space and aeronautics, so my knowledge about spaceraft technology and history is not great. I've always supposed that aerospacial engineering ought to be quite a challenge, and probably Apollo 11's mission to put a man in the moon is the peak representation of years of research and development of hundreds of engineers and scientists. However, I cannot help but to state I am completely astonished by the content of this documentary, as it relates one of many obstacles that engineers had to face in order to achieve the mission in time and quality: the navigation system in space. 

The first thing that caught my attention is the fact that the US government chose a university as the main development centre (MIT) to achieve the mission, even when there were already navigation-tech entreprises that had applied to obtain the same position. It is encouraging for a student to know that not always big organizations with specialized technology and facilites have what it takes to complete a task or develop new tech.

And then comes the limitations of computers in the 60's. Adjusting and adapting the sizes of computers in order to fit into a spaceship sure sounds quite ponderous, however, as a programmer, what I couldn't help to imagine was the pain it surely was to program by hand and then print it in hundreds of different holed cards in order for the computer to be able to process it, and don't even mention the hours it took to give an output, and the possibility of this output not being correct. I mean, I've commited plenty of mistakes while programming, and by itself it's often quite frustrating and desperating when you cannot manage to get the desired performance of your program. Now add to that frustration the hours of processing data that took to a giant machine that could barely stand 72Kb. It's unbareable.

However it's intrguing how nevertheless the limitations of their decade, they successfully managed the objective and took the man to the moon in 1969. Many persons say that the amount of work and effort was such that they lost family and marriages in the process. I do think this is a shame, because they gave everything to achieve the purpose and many of their loved ones didn't seem to have the ability to stand up with them.

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