Moon machines

On Monday, we watched the "Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer" documentary, which is about the Apollo program that the NASA put together to take the man to the moon, and how the MIT used the technology they had at the time to create a computer to guide the spacecraft.

All started because John F. Kennedy gave a challenge to the NASA: landing a man on the moon. NASA put the MIT in charge of the system that guided the rocket to the moon.

As a software engineer, I really appreciated the work of Margaret Hamilton, because we’ve seen the photo of Margaret Hamilton standing next to a pile her size of paper, which contained all the necessary code that the computer needed to reach its goal.

Another interesting part of the video for me, was all the work put into creating a gyroscope, which was fairly big instrument which they tested on an airplane and discover some flaws. This sensor is something we take for granted today because we can find one on the phones in our pockets. Sure, it’s not as precise as the one used to take the man to the moon, but it is amazing the kind of work they did with old technology the had at the time

All calculated data needed to be as close to perfect as possible, because one little flaw on any of the systems, could mean a disaster to the program, so the quality control was extraordinary strict, so many components were rejected.

Today, we’ve seen and heard a lot of people saying the moon landing didn’t really happen, so it's good to have all these engineers talk about their experience on the program because this kind of documentaries help us understand how they actually did it and help clear people's doubts, which are part of why didn’t believe in the first place.