
Some Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Moon (2002) - quaresma
http://fermatslibrary.com/s/some-funny-things-happened-on-the-way-to-the-moon
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sosuke
For anyone else looking for a flat PDF
[http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechan...](http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechanics/Battin.pdf)

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bluedino
What in the heck is the reader on that page called? Couldn't zoom, fonts
looked terrible, very slow...

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gpvos
[https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX](https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX)

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Rooster61
Something that just struck me. There is absolutely no mention of Margaret
Hamilton in this article. Didn't she lead the team that wrote the Apollo
software?

Her name is the very first one in the original documentation:
[https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11](https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11)

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swsieber
Sort of. Only right at the end:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993945)

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Rooster61
Well, maybe she didn't lead the team during the whole process, but she
certainly wrote code for it. You'd think she'd be mentioned, especially in the
part about the AGC alarms that went off during Apollo 11's landing sequence.

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thewonderidiot
If I recall correctly, over the course of the program some 300-400 people
wrote code for the AGC, so it's not surprising that not everybody gets
mentioned. Don Eyles (who saved Apollo 14) has an MIT org chart from the time
of Apollo 11 on his website:
[http://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html](http://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html)
That only includes people at MIT that worked on it -- there were also many at
Raytheon, AC Electronics, and various other contractors (like Adams
Associates) that we don't know the names of.

The code that kept Apollo 11 going was Hal Laning's, and he's mentioned a lot
in the article.

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Sharlin
> who saved Apollo 14

For reference, I presume you're referring to how the LM computer was monkey-
patched to ignore an abort signal from a faulty switch? [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent)

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thewonderidiot
Yep, that's right -- Don was the guy who came up with that procedure.

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pokemon-trainer
>I still remember the  rst time I told my wife that I was in chargeof “Apollo
Software.” She exh orted me: “ Please don’t tell any ofour friends!”I suppose
real men do “Hardware” just as real men don’t eatquiche.It was an attitude
that prevailed a long time in many organiza-tions. Salaries fo r computer
programmers did not keep up with thesalaries of engineers.Engineers did
engineering.The programming(or coding)was more menial work and should be left
to others.

It's funny how much this attitude has changed so much over the years. Now
engineering is seen as menial work and the programmers are the real men and
rockstars.

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akiselev
It may have changed in the Silicon Valley/tech startup bubble but definitely
not in the rest of the world. Engineers still receive far more prestige than
IT workers (which is what programmers are largely seen as, technicians) and in
most countries, it's as prestigious a career path as being a doctor, lawyer,
or professor.

The vast majority of companies that work with physical things, like silicon
designers/fabricators, auto makers, manufacturers of capital equipment like
machining tools and lab equipment, energy companies, agricultural machine
suppliers, hardware conglomerates like GE and Samsung, and on and on, still
view (for the most part) software as the red headed stepchild, a necessary
evil because their hardware has gotten so complex.

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ashark
It may just be my own hang-ups, but in the company of unequivocal members of
the "professional" class I definitely get the sense that as a software
developer I sit somewhere above blue-collar, but _barely_ , and that largely
due to salary rather than the work I do.

I'd imagine it's a bit different for the (giving a very generous estimate) 1%
of developers who do work that is all of: challenging, difficult, and
important, on a regular basis, but that's not me, or the overwhelming majority
of people making pretty damn good money writing software.

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paganel
For the artsy-intelligentsia folks all the people who do technical stuff (no
matter if HW,SW, civil engineering) are just "engineers", i.e. people who have
never heard about Stendhal or Vermeer. On top of that my ex-mother-in-law, an
accomplished theater actress, used to call us non-actors as "civilians", so
there's also that.

I for myself don't care one bit how my work is seen by others(I'm a
programmer) as long as it's reasonably well paid (meaning I can pay rent, food
+ some other stuff) and it's not that physically demanding.

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bergoid
A treasure trove of great anecdotes.

Just one example:

 _A few weeks before the launch, the Navigator Command Module Pilot, Jim
Lovell, spent a few hours practicing on the earth-horizon sextant simulator at
MIT. He consistently identified the “horizon” about 20 miles above the real
horizon. Great! Jim Lovell could be calibrated and his bias number loaded in
the flight computer._

In the same vein as this article, I am always deeply moved watching Dr.
William Widnall's lecture on Apollo's guidance, navigation, and control:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vf6Y98ZjwQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vf6Y98ZjwQ)

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crispyambulance
> I have at my fingertips several orders of magnitude more computing power
> than the Apollo Guidance Computer which was carried onboard the Apollo
> spacecraft. And this marvel of modern technology sits on my desk at home...

Yeah, but one has to admit, the Apollo Guidance Computer had way more gravitas
any other computer since or before!

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imglorp
Today I learned APOLLO := America's Program for Orbital and Lunar Landing
Operations. So the Greek god thing was a nice intersect?

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kej
It has always bothered me that they named the moon missions after the god of
the sun.

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kobeya
It has always bothered me that we insist on calling our space farers
"astronauts" when they don't go anywhere near the Sun or stars, vs the
entirely accurate "cosmonaut".

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cgriswald
Given the number and scope of misnomers in astronomy, astronaut seems
downright sensical. Those dark patches on the moon? They're bone dry, but we
call them seas. Those beautiful planetary nebulae? They're the tombs of dead
stars; any planets there are coincidental. Those small, mountain sized rocks
floating in space? We say call them starlike.

If it helps, I think of an astronaut as someone who sails _among_ the stars,
rather than _to_ the stars. In that sense, it's just as accurate as cosmonaut.
But, given that every living thing on Earth can rightfully be called an
astronaut or cosmonaut, neither term is very precise. It is more precise to
identify a person as human than to identify him as a cosmonaut, since
cosmonaut can also refer to monkeys, rabbits, dogs, insects... :)

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kobeya
Well it's the political origin of the term that is bothersome. The Russians
came up with the perfectly sensible and accurate term 'cosmonaut' and the USA
refused to use it.

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cgriswald
I'm really curious if it's usage was political. I did find this forum post[0],
but it didn't really shed any light on the question. It does, however, suggest
that the term was chosen in ignorance of it already existing in fiction for
(at least) decades by the time the space race had started. So, if the forum
post is to be believed (I couldn't find the cited first source), a defense
suggesting it was already in the lexicon couldn't be supported since the
selectors of the term themselves admit their ignorance of the term previously
being used.

Cosmonaut, I believe, more literally translates to "spacenaut", which sounds
terrible, because of the Russian word for space, which, like our cosmos, is
derived from the word _kosmos_. The English term cosmonaut is not through the
greek _kosmos_ and _nautis_ , but just an Anglicization of the Russian word.

[0] -
[http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000108.html](http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000108.html)

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sethish
This is great, the article starts out discussing TeX and then proceeds to
screw up every instance of `fi` and `fl` by replacing it with terrible
ligatures.

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csours
This is not the original format. This PDF is formatted much better.
[http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechan...](http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechanics/Battin.pdf)

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Rooster61
Great article, but it should probably be marked 2002.

I love reading old stories about how the final frontier was (and is) being
won.

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apetresc
It's generally understood that Fermat's Library deals with very old papers.

