TBT… 53 years ago…

Yesterday…

Yes, I’m old… I was sitting in a bar in Rome on the Via Veneto when this happened. Technically, it was on the 21st over there… It was around 3am when they finally landed and set foot on the moon!

We had hijacked a man and his daughter off the street to translate the Italian TV for us, and they sat there for four or five hours translating for us. I think we gave him something like $200-300 for translating.

The other thing I remember is walking back to the pensione we were staying at early that morning was that every store that had a TV had it in the front window, and we probably saw a thousand people crowding around them.

I picked this paper up July 21, 1969, and somehow have held on to it.

Rome Paper Moon Landing

And no, I didn’t draw the KEDS on the sole of the boot… sigh…

The takeaway for the kids out there is that this was done WITHOUT computers. Slipsticks, elegant math, and skull sweat made it all work.

Sadly, now 53 years later, we can’t get back there, have lost our space capability, and NASA has to fight tooth and nail for maintenance funding… Sigh

Comments

TBT… 53 years ago… — 34 Comments

  1. “NASA has to fight tooth and nail for maintenance funding”

    Well, given what NASA does with most of its funding, I don’t see where giving them more money to piss away helps a great deal.

  2. I think we’ll get back in my lifetime; but it’ll be more the way Heinlein imagined with private companies in the vanguard taking the government as passengers. If SpaceX can get Starship into orbit and back safely, I think a lunar orbit would be their next step, much like NASA did with Apollo 8 after 7 successfully orbited earth.

  3. My father worked for IBM in the 60’s and early 70’s. NASA owned a TON of IBM computers. Computers WERE a major factor in the space program then. Not as big as now but still a major factor. Computers have existed…..and been used for complex math problems….since WW II. The Apollo capsule had a computer on board. It had about as much processing power as a cheap handheld calculator but it was a computer and it ran programs doing calculations much faster and more accurately than a human could…..in a situation where speedy accurate calculations were a life and death issue.

    • Three years ago, there was an article on that computer on the Internet. It is bookmarked on a different computer so I can’t drop a link here. Anyway, one of its attributes was that it could reboot in 1 second. That is a good thing if you are travelling at over 25,000 mph.

    • Back in those days Dan, a “ton” of IBM computers was only ONE 😉

  4. Th LM did have a computer — with a whole 16K (that’s “K” folks) of RAM. It also had a top-notch pilot who ignored it…

    I watched it with my grandmother, in her little house in Marietta, Ohio. She was as excited about it as we were. Talk about progress, or at least change — she had been born in 1880, in a cabin in a holler in West Virginia.

    I still have the Apollo cufflinks everyone on the team got… somewhere.

    • There were a lot of people old enough to remember reading about the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, that lived to watch Apollo 11 on TV.

      For a couple of generations, people would see new wonders every day of their life. Now, people think “progress” is a computer or phone upgrade.

  5. Manual math and design were a huge part of engineering and execution of Apollo, but computers did play a role. Saturn boosters and Apollo command and lunar modules were all equipped with computers, as was mission control. The Apollo Guidance Computer took up about two cubic feet of space, was constructed from a few thousand SSI IC’s and core memory, and roughly equivalent in power and memory to an early Apple or Commodore home computer. The noisy clatter of the mission control teletype terminals inspired a couple engineers to create Computer Terminal Corporation to build more affordable CRT-based terminals – the thermal problems they encountered doing so with SSI and MSI ICs led to Intel’s creation of the first 8 bit microprocessor. Yeah, a lot more was done with pen and paper, sliderule, and drafting board, but computers definitely played a big part, too.

    • Feynman talked about when they got an ENIAC computer at Los Alamos, where they had rooms full of people using calculators and working math equations. They expected the computer would replace them all, but it turned out to be harder to program than they expected… and the programmers wanted to play with it, and their supervisors had to ride herd on them to keep them directed at their assigned problems.

      The biggest problem they were trying to solve involved how the joints in the multi-piece explosive shell of the Fat Man would affect the implosion pattern. It turned out to be hard to model and even harder to solve, so they took the simple route and assigned a demolitions guy to build mockups of the Fat Man’s explosive shell and blow them up. They went through quite a lot of RDX.

      RDX was poured into molds as a thick liquid and then set up into amber-colored blocks. There was a problem with bubbles in the mix; bubbles in the finished product did unpredictable things to the implosion wave, so the sergeant used a dental drill with a long burr to drill into big blocks of explosive and back-fill the holes with a syringe of fresh RDX. He spent much of his time doing that…

      Yes, it takes quite a bit to set RDX off, and obviously the procedure was adequately safe, but even for a demo guy, that was cojones of steel.

  6. I had just graduated High School in May. I was a space geek and followed the Apollo 11 mission from launch to recovery. Our family gathered around an old Black and White TV to watch the Eagle’s landing as well as the Moonwalk.

    Dad had a couple of small parts in that effort, he worked for Boeing converting the Michoud Higgins Boat Plant to manufacture the Saturn S-IC first stage. Later he worked for Rocketdyne on the test stand for the F-1 engine.

  7. And now the Chinese are saying they are going to land people on the moon and will claim it as theirs when they get there … I like the privatization of the space race in some aspects, but our .gov/.mil folks ought to get their ass in gear as well!

  8. Yes, I remember that day. I was stationed in North Carolina having returned from Vietnam in January of 69. My wife and I were watching the moon landing on an old 1950ish TV I had purchased at a yard sale. Just as you said the computers were not in use as they are today. I also remember everyone was told how the more sophisticate the computer advanced it would eliminate the need for all the paperwork that had to be restore. From my perspective in the military and then working in the private sector it has increased the paperwork that must be store for backup in the event of a crash or virus that can shut down the system or even erase all the stored info.

    • LOL. In the old days, generating paper documents was difficult. The computer enables the generation of paper in quantities undreamed of in the old days

  9. If landing on the moon establishes a claim of ownership I’ve got bad news for the Chinese.

    How about applying the Labor Value of Property?

  10. Dad Red was working at a children’s hospital in Houston at the time. A kid’s parents brought him an early “portable” black and white TV, and everyone on the floor crowded around to watch.

    The closest think I can recall is then Columbia took off, then landed. We were all pulled from class and watched it as a group in the music room (big enough to hold everyone).

  11. I think we’re nearing a point where Musk will head out, the government will demand he not and he will reply, “You cannot stop me anymore.”

  12. I was living in Alaska at the time, no live TV hookup in those days, so we had to listen to it on the radio. I was working in the radio station that day. On the AP wire, a story slugged with a priority of “FLASH” was reserved for events of earth-shattering historical importance, like Pearl Harbor, JFK assassination, etc. I saw 3 FLASH notices that day: the go for landing, the touchdown, and the first step. That was the only time in my radio career that I ever saw a “Flash” come down the wire.

  13. All- Thanks for the comments, and yes, I stand corrected. There were ‘computers’ in use. The ones on Apollo were analog computers, very simple and very basic. But I do stand by my statement that slipsticks and elegant math were the reason they succeeded. Yes, computers helped, but without that other work, the computers could not have done it.

    • Apollo Guidance Computer was digital, not analog, largely fabricated from thousands of single (block I) or dual (block II) 3-input NOR gate IC’s. Not sure about the computer for the Apollo booster.

      • To expand your point further, IBM could have built a more advanced set of computers for the Apollo, but deliberately chose to take a step back to a previous generation and use ICs & core memory. The reason was to prevent cosmic rays from changing the data bits in the computer by changing the stored electric charge. IBM also built one-off computers for NASA that had capabilities not seen in the civilian sector for years. Like they did with the SAGE, they used the knowledge they gained in gov’t development, to then build computers for the civilian sector.

        • Core memory was literally tiny rings of ferrite loomed together on a grid of wires, sort of like tiny chain mail. The wires were tiny and finicky to manipulate.

          Early on, IBM put core memory production in the Philippines and hired seamstresses and young women to literally knit the wires and cores together using magnifiers. I assume they eventually built a machine to make core memory cards, but it was an interesting example of how extremely high tech and extremely low tech can sometimes intersect.

          Core memory depending on magnetizing and demagnetizing the tiny core rings. It wasn’t very fast, but the cores retained their magnetism for… well, not permanently, but close enough in Computer Time. If you turned off the power, everything stayed just like you left it, more like a modern thumbdrive or SSD than modern RAM, which goes blank if not continually refreshed.

  14. I was 9 years old, but remember it clearly. Sitting in front of my grandparents’ television, watching, and thinking this was just the beginning of our exploration of space. I was a space geek, even at 9: thought I would work in the space program somehow, and live on the moon after I retired.

  15. TOS- And therein lies the argument… LOL

    SL- Yeah, sorry that ain’t happening, neither has flying cars…

    • As far as I’ve been able to determine the Saturn V was equipped with both analog and digital computers in the IMU, built by Bendix and IBM respectively. If I understand right, the analog flight computer took care of getting it into space, digital computer handled getting the third stage headed for the moon, and then the digital Apollo guidance computers in the capsule and lander took care of getting them to the Moon and back to Earth. Along with the astronauts and the folks back in mission control, of course.

  16. I always considered the moon landing to be a birthday present,72 today, since I was deployed to the other side of the dateline when it happened. I do recall trying to explain the landing to a Vietnamese woman. I don’t think she understood.

  17. You have not seen the press releases about the artemis missions?

    If my recollection is correct, a test flight is happening soon?

  18. If you listen to the recording of the radio communications between Neil Armstrong and mission control, just as he is coming in for the landing, besides the maneuvering commands – “forward”, “forward”, “drifting to the right a little” – you will also hear the words “1201 alarm”. A 1201 alarm was an alarm from the guidance computer that was saying it couldn’t keep, up. Thankfully, the alarm was ignored and the landing was a success.

  19. I remember the day well! Now much later, I am working through the Apollo Flight Journals (a minute-by-minute transcript of each mission with explanations). Contains a lot of history that was not covered by the media, especially in the later missions.

  20. All- Thanks for the comments and the memories! Roy- They knew that was going to happen, according to documents I’ve seen, and yes, he ignored it.

  21. Hell of a cool memory, thanks for sharing it.

    And everyone knows the only reason we made it to the moon was black wimmin or something. The internet told me so it must be true…

  22. Heath- Sigh… Huge contributions, no question. The politics not so much, and largely blown out of proportion, IMHO.

  23. We could be back there next month: just fold NASA, and give the mission to Space-X. And by December, they’d be launching weekly flights.

    Happy Peak Of Western Civilization Day.

  24. Aesop hit it.

    NASA is .Gov and .Gov are the people that fked up perfectly good gas cans.