

What we didn’t know about the moonwalk - edw519
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31965108/ns/technology_and_science-space/

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jacquesm
The most interesting thing from that article is in the last bit, it took
400,000 people to put 2 people on the moon, I realized there was quite a team
but that large ?? It baffles me.

Is there a breakdown of that number somewhere ?

~~~
Retric
People where less productive in 1960 because they lacked modern tools. The
most striking example was how the onboard computer’s memory had to be hard
coded by hand. Someone had to literally manually set each bit of program code
by hand. Imagine if you needed to double check that your compiler acctually
wrote the correct bits to disk.

It was also the first trip so R&D took a huge amount of effort.

Finally, everything had to be constantly reviewed so we did not accidently
kill 3 people while the world was watching.

~~~
jcl
Check out the picture of the rope memory used to store the ROM:

[http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a...](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/visual3.htm)

Each ROM word is a wire. If the wire goes through the first magnetic core, its
first bit is a one; if it skips the core, its first bit is zero, and so on.
Each of the 36,000 words of ROM needed to be threaded through these cores _by
hand_. Amazing.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_memory>

(I imagine it was chosen because it's much more resilient to cosmic rays
flipping a bit. But it's pretty much impossible to alter the program without
creating the whole thing from scratch. The ultimate spaghetti code!)

------
Semiapies
Nice to see a mainstream (ish) news outlet include some debunking of moon
denialists.

~~~
jlangenauer
Perhaps it's unfortunate that the media even thinks that these conspiracy
theorists even need to be debunked. They wouldn't waste the column-inches (or
whatever the online equivalent is) debunking claims from people who think the
earth flat, or that cigarette smoking is unrelated to lung cancer.

Yet pose the almost the most fantastic conspiracy theory imaginable, and the
mainstream media will sprinkle it with just enough fairy dust of credibility
that they then have to debunk it.

