Moon Machines

Moon Machines is a documentary about how Apollo made his way to the moon with a navigation system made by the MIT people.

The documentary starts showing how the NASA couldn’t successfully send out a rocket ship beyond the atmosphere. So, they put an eye on a guy who was the first to build a navigation system that was used in a flight without pilots, and they called him and asked if he and his crew of the MIT could build a navigation system that could put men in space. Naturally he agreed but he didn’t measure the weight of the work he and his coworkers needed to do to make that possible.

For starters they needed to figure out how to put a computer inside the rocket, because the computers back then were huge ones that could only fit in an empty room and also something that could not help either was the memory that was needed to run all the programs cause the computers did not have so much. The computer disks were not a solution either because this were very fragile and unreliable.

The solution they come around is called rope memory, this kind of programming was implemented by weaving the core rope, the computer programs are made by ones and zeros, and the core rope memory was composed by rings and wires, when the wire goes through the core it represented a one and around the core it represented a zero (well, if you ask me, this is a very ingenious way to program). But this method of programming was extremely slow, and the time was running low.

At the end, the dead line came, and the NASA said that the computer of the MIT was going the be used like a backup, and the navigation system would be transmitted to the astronauts by radio signals.

By the end of hard work years, the MIT people finished the computer completely and was used to help out the landing on the moon, and also the come back to the earth.