It’s extraordinary that people haven’t been back to the Moon in my lifetime. I can only imagine the excitement of the first Moon landing, although from what I’ve read the later missions the general public wasn’t that interested in it. Still, the Apollo missions were an amazing feat of engineering, science and bravery.
Over the last few days I’ve been listening to two episodes of the Omega Tau Podcast:
Both episodes are interviews with David Woods, author of the book How Apollo Flew to the Moon and full of fascinating detail. They’re well worth a listen.
If you thought flying to the Mun in Kerbal Space Program was hard just wait ’til you hear about everything they accomplished using 1960’s technology. While they did have computer assisted landing procedures when they got to their destination I bet it was no Mechjeb! There is the FASA mod for the game, adding 300 new parts, including a Lunar lander! Here’s a video (and Reddit thread) of it in action, although I’m upset that he left someone on the Mun..
As luck would have it, last night I saw that Ars Technica published 45 years after Apollo 13: Ars looks at what went wrong and why a few days ago. Another interesting read, contrasting what the film “Apollo 13” showed to reality. Useful and insightful comments too, including more book recommendations. I have plenty of reading ahead of me.
(Thanks to Adam Heckler’s post I found out about Omega Tau, it’s quickly turning out to be one of my favourite podcasts!)
Edit: Here’s episode 218, Life in Apollo. Worth listening to that too!
And there’s also episode 167 dedicated to the Apollo guidance computer. It’s a great discussion about an archaic, minimal computer system that still managed to do some amazing things internally.
Their talking about using the interpreter to do high level functions reminded me of my attempts to directly call BASIC routines from my ASM code. Their integration worked a lot better!
The Wikipedia page for the Apollo guidance computer is full of details and photos too and worth reading too!
Or episode 218, A Life in Apollo. Another excellent interview about the US space programme.
Thanks for the good words on the podcasts. I’ll be recording another with Omegatau soon – this on the Gemini spacecraft.