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Moon Machines


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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