Today we are going to talk
about a documentary by the SC (Science channel), were it talks about how the NASA
created the APOLLO’s navigation system which helped the astronauts to land in
the moon.
In the 60’s, the United
States went through a difficult time, because it was during the period of the
Vietnam War and the Cold War, the civil rights movements and many other stuff,
and thanks to the tension between the americans and the soviets, along side the
armaments race there was also a race to be the first in space too.
During this period, the president,
John F. Kennedy focused on winning the “space race”, so that he invested many
resources in the NASA, but not everything went like expected. After lots of
failures the NASA started to hire engineers from the MIT to create the navigation
system to reach the moon.
After all of this trial and
error period, they finally succeeded to create the system technically from
scratch using only a storage of 72KB, for us now this may seem quite remarkable
and somewhat incredible because of the simple fact to create a navigation
system of this magnitude in just 72KB, that and the fact that this concept of
system was a term mostly unknown for the people in the time.
I think that the NASA took a great risk with this project, now I know that it was worth it, but at the time it was
a really tough call in matters of money mostly, not because of the creation of
the spaceship itself, but all the logistics, resources and money involved in
the software for the navigation system and all the maths involved in the
creation of it, also the calculations for the landings, ignition, trajectory
and all of that stuff, but now we can really reassure that it was totally worth
it.
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