Welcome, everyone. This is imagination inaction. And every Tuesday, we bring imaginators people that are doing extraordinary things that can Role Model X, how they're using their action to make things happen. And they also can show how they're plotting society's future. And tonight, I can't think of two better people to represent on our show. These are two really stretch from people. But for those who haven't been on imagination, action, welcome, is a conversation with some of the most compelling people. It's a dynamic mix of imaginators. You can look at our website, you can see the 250 that are listed. And these are all people who we've already either spoken to or will speak to. And it's imagination inaction Co. And these are people who will re re envisioning the nature of their industries, and driving the action that will power our futures. These are some of the most successful creative minds. And tonight we have Don and teasle tiesto. I want to make sure I'm saying your name correctly. It's a It's a unique name, but I love it. Thanks. Yeah, it's just like diesel but with the tea. Yeah. All right. Well, well, welcome. So in a minute, I'm going to introduce the two of you, but I thought I'd just start off by asking, Don, Don, did you ever sit in a room with any of the Apollo astronauts? Do you ever have conversations with any Apollo astronauts? Can you retell some of the stories? I knew there were a number of them. Many people know Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but I'm just curious. You know, what's your what's your experience with with those astronauts Tonight, we're going to be talking a lot about the landing on the moon and the artifacts that we treasure from that journey, and talk about the space race. But let's just kick us off. Don, any interactions with those astronauts?
Well, yes, john. As you know, by the way, I was a very junior person. This was my first job right out of school. But the fact that computer science and the idea of having an onboard computer or controlling the spacecraft was so new, I think it was that that led a junior person like me have access to the higher level than you might think. And I was in the same room with astronauts and a number of occasions. And I even had the fun of flying shoulder to shoulder with an astronaut in the LMS. That was the limb lunar module mission simulator at Cape Canaveral. That was not a simulator that flies or that moves in any respect. But it did have a cockpit that was realistic, that was correct to the last detail, and an extremely good optical display out the window of the lunar surface that was good enough to allow the astronauts to train to land at a particular spot. And since my assignment at MIT, by the way, I did not work directly for NASA. I worked for MIT, where the contract for the guidance system was it was a rare treat for me to do that.
Don, maybe get specific. Did Neil Armstrong ever interact with you in a meeting? Alan Shepard, who is the third guy to land on them to walk on the moon?
Probably tell any stories? Yeah. Pete Conrad. I've met his wife a number of times, Nancy. Well, big Conrad was really one of the best loved astronauts, I would say among the people who knew him because he came across as sort of a happy go lucky guy. But of course, extremely competent at the same time. You know, I don't usually like to play the game of comparing people to movie stars, but to me, he was a cross between slim pickins and Richard Widmark, if you can imagine that sort of steely efficiency on one side, and a very fun person to be with on the other. And my first contact with him, Well, I was in a room with him in November of 1967, the sixth of November, I remember the date very well, because that night, I broke my femur. But during the day, I was called into a meeting of a team called The Pussycat team that was looking at things that still needed to be added to the lunar landing software to assist the astronauts in flying the LEM down to the surface. And as I walked into the room, there was this sort of Bantam weight guy and I Glen plaid suit who seemed to be running the meeting. And I assumed at first that he was a particularly buoyant NASA manager. But it turned out to be Pete Conrad, and Neil Armstrong. And Jim Lovell, were also at the table that day. I remember Armstrong was very interested in what was going through his head had to do with one of the instruments that was in the lunar module cockpit.
As you probably know, the astronauts stood in the, in the lab, and faced a, essentially a vertical instrument panel with a big window on each side, big for a spacecraft that is, but one of the instruments was called the cross pointer. And it was meant to indicate, during the very last stage of the landing, it was meant to indicate the horizontal velocity across the surface relative to the surface. And of course, when you were landing, you wanted that to be very low. You didn't want to skin in you want to come down vertically. And Armstrong was bemused by the fact that this instrument that was meant to represent horizontal velocities was mounted in a vertical position. And the fact that there could possibly be some ambiguity created by that. And that for me, at this exposure, first exposure to astronauts was sort of a window into the way astronauts thought. I only talked to Neil, a couple of times during the crew training meeting for a lot, Apollo 11, which was our opportunity as the coders to actually talk to the astronauts in a formal setting. Although the crew training for Apollo 11 was so formal that they were that there were no informal interchanges, shall we say, except in the Carter, and I did have a brief chat with Armstrong at that point.
The software provided a way for the astronauts to look out the window and see an indication of where they were being taken by the automatic guidance. And it gave them the ability using a joystick to shift that point to the left or right or closer or further. But I'm strong. And remember, he was going to make the first attempt to have a landing, he said that he did not intend to use it. In other words, he didn't want to make things more complicated than they needed to be. His goal was just to get to the surface anywhere. He was not trying to hit a exact mark.
So when I saw him standing myself in the corridor, I made bold to walk over and basically I touted the resignation logic, the fact that we had thoroughly tested it, and that he could really improve his prospects. If he did use it. I said, if you see anything interesting, on the moon that you want to go to, which in retrospect was a little bit of a nice, naive way of putting it in his answer was that anywhere I can land on the moon will be interesting. And you know, if if that were on stage, I think it would get a laugh, because I talked about it now when he said that.
But as we know, he did have some problems. He was distracted, we were all distracted by the fact that the computer for fairly arcane reasons was started issuing a bunch of alarms, Houston had to be involved to figure out what they can still proceed. And that was a second reason that he didn't use the read designator. But if he had, he could probably have made it easier on himself by avoiding some of that last minute maneuvering that we have, that we think about with a Bible 11 with the fuel running very low.
So that was that was about all I can report about Neil Armstrong, except that following the mission, there was a whole series of debriefing sessions with the crew. This was while they were in the lunar receiving laboratory, I believe it was called which was where the samples from the moon as well as the astronauts were housed for at least several weeks, in sort of, just in case, there might be some microbes or some other form of lunacy that they picked up on the moon that they needed to be quarantined for
And let it go at that. But when it came towards the end of the meeting, and the whole room was open for questions. I asked him, Well, Neil, what would you rather see him that display, and he said, forward velocity, Don. And that, of course, shot a little thrill up my backbone, because I hadn't really understood that he knew where I was at that point. Great, Don, thank thank you. So in a few moments, I want to come back to you. And I want to ask you about the alarms during the Apollo 11, landing, the challenge of making a pinpoint landing on Apollo 12. And the abort button problem on Alan Shepards, flight Apollo 14, which I think you, you know, people know that you did something remarkable that if you hadn't done it, they wouldn't have landed and probably would have come back and I know you're part of a team, but I'm excited for you to kind of relive those moments a little over 50 years ago, some of them.
Thanks so much. That's a great question. So I'm the curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. And ahead of the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing, I wanted to do a book that told the story of Apollo. And it's such a, such a complex program, there's so many elements to it, that I thought that a good way to, to touch on some of those stories would be to select artifacts, that that represents sort of different organ, you know, tell different different aspects of the Apollo story. And then all together, they would paint a picture. So it's a few, you know, 50, deep dives into particular artifacts. And it was extremely difficult up with which artifacts to select in the book. So at the Smithsonian, we have 1000s of artifacts related to the Apollo program. And it was hard, I asked my colleagues, I surveyed all the artifacts in the collection. And but I had this goal of really wanting to explore different dimensions of Apollo. So of course, they're the big sort of ticket items. So the there's a command module from Apollo 11. There's the lunar module we have in our collection. So as you might expect that materials in there but I also wanted to tell some of the social and cultural and political aspects of Apollo so I get into things like I talk about civil rights and its relationship to Apollo the protests at the Apollo 11. Launch, I talk about the NASA art collection, and NASA had an art program where they invited artists to come and to meet people at NASA witness launches, create art.
Inspired by space exploration, so I wanted to weave in all those stories. And hopefully I achieved it. And it gives you a sense of how complex the program was and how many people were involved. And how many different areas of cultural society in politics that it touched on. Great. And can you tell us? How does the government safeguard these artifacts? Is there a special place where they're kept? I know you have a number on display at the Air and Space Museum. I just just curious, maybe you could tell us a little bit about I mean, we've seen the movie national treasure and, and how they, you know, look after important documents, but I'm curious about these Apollo artifacts.
So we Yeah, as you mentioned, we exhibit we exhibit some of the artifacts, we have two locations as a museum, the Air and Space Museum, so one down at the National Mall, and then one near the Dulles Airport. We also loan out many of the artifacts as well to museum games across the country and across the world. And then we also have a fair amount of storage. So we have multiple storage facilities with these 1000s of artifacts. And I will say that the Apollo program is really well represented in the Smithsonian collection, because in the mid 1960s, NASA and the Smithsonian entered into an agreement, and that when NASA was done with any hardware, the Smithsonian would have the opportunity to collect it. And so early on the Smithsonian collected a huge amount of Apollo related artifacts. And this is also at a time when Michael Collins, who is the Command Module Pilot on Apollo 11. So he was the director of the Air and Space Museum in the 1970s, after his mission, and so he was involved in that process of collecting. So we have sort of an incredible collection when it comes to early human spaceflight.
Don, and his team developed the sequencing system, the timeline, or Did I say that right, done? Yes, timeline, and apply that to the moon mission, anywhere and Don worked on software programming team that was responsible for the onboard computer, a computer designed to be one cubic foot. So you know, many people have heard of any act when it was turned on, the lights went down in Philadelphia, because they were, you know, took so much energy to get to the moon, they couldn't take that same computer. So there were definitely constraints, limited memory, to program a piece of equipment that would prove to be extremely important, because if you missed the moon, you got a problem. And then there was Apollo 14, which Don is famous for, and I'm excited for you to tell us a little bit about that. And, and teasle, as, as, as you mentioned, you're a historian and a curator, PhD from MIT, you curate the Apollo collection, and the National Air and Space Museum. For those of you who aren't aware, that's part of the Smithsonian, it's one of the crown jewels of museums around the world. And you've authored many books, and, you know, thank you for all your work on understanding the space race, and we're looking forward to getting into this. So Don,
Well, of course, I was not at home, would you be at home if your wife were about to give birth. And it was a little bit like that, knowing that my software was about to be in control of the spacecraft for, you know, 1213 minutes out software, I had a big hand in, as you've pointed out. And as I always point out, it was a team effort. But team principally with men named Alan klump, I was responsible for the software that was specific to the lunar landing. And it was very exciting, especially during Apollo 11, because of the problem that occurred then. But let me go backwards in time a little bit first, because, as you alluded to, you know, there was a foundation for what I did, what I did related very much to the mission planning to the needs of the astronauts as they flew the vehicle.
Two changes we could make in the software that would make it easier to meet the mission objectives, such as the Apollo 12 pinpoint landing. But of course, that built on a foundation of the the hardware. And you describe that as the machine and language designers. And that's the way I think of it because the machine has to be designed to obey a certain set of very simple instructions. And that's the the base of the pyramid, so to speak, in terms of the software. And those functions, those types of operation are very much built into the circuitry. So that's where the language the the literary language, if you will, of the software, and the hard machine with its electrons and integrated circuits and so forth. Meet. And Elden Hall was the lead designer of the computer hardware out in I believe, is in Florida now. Mike Stewart, who may be on the line tonight, spearheaded a group that was able to restore an Apollo computer of 50 or 60 years of vintage back into operation. And they were able to demonstrate that to the eldan which was very much I would say a proof of the x expertise of that design.
And when I mentioned the language, I'm thinking of people like you Blair Smith, who may also be listening. Ramon Alonzo and our Hopkins, I think were some of the leading figures there. And designing the language in a machine with an instruction length or word length of 15 bits. It was a challenge to provide a rich repertory of operations. And that was done using various techniques and dodges. And was very successful. The the best paper on the language is, which is available online is E blast Smith memo nine that was an unpretentious staple memo of, I believe 50 or 60 pages that describe the language in detail. And that in a sense was our Bible as programmers.
But on top of that, of course, there was what these days we would call the operating system. Remember, this was a computer that in real time, in other words, while the action was going on, was controlling the spacecraft. And when I say control, I mean it was navigating, guiding and controlling. And those were three distinct disciplines for us navigating was knowing where we were, how fast we were moving, and what direction we were pointing. Guidance was using that information which we call the state vector to derive commands to the engines and the maneuvering jets to make the spacecraft purposeful to make it go to a particular place that could be a particular orbit around the Earth, the moon or anywhere else I suppose or it could be to land in a given spot.
But underlying that, and what that implies to have all these things going on at the same time was that there needed to be some structure into which the software functions that the of which there was a variety could be packaged, that allowed them to do their thing with the right timing. And we'll call that an operating system. And there, I need to mention how laning and there are many aspects of the Apollo job that we did at MIT that come back to how Lanning and I'll go back and mention mentioned a couple of them actually, how in 1952 own MIT is whirlwind computer, which was a pioneering vacuum to computer when they got it to run seven hours once without a failure. That was, that was considered a huge achievement. But in many ways that computer which took up a whole building at 211 Massachusetts Avenue and Cambridge, had to be reduced, as john said, to one cubic foot. But at any rate, in order using the world when Howe invented the very first compiler in Computer History, as he described it, that put a computer inside of a community computer that's quoting I believe, from 1953 paper. And I would argue that a great deal of computer science since that time, derives from that statement computer inside a computer, while also at another point was studying trajectories. In fact, it was that that motivated him to build the first compiler, because he wanted to make it easier for himself to program the whirlwind. Instead of using the very fine grain instructions, which is what I was talking about before, the instructions that the machine directly understands. And what our compiler did was it took a description of what the programmer wanted the machine to do. And of course, that description was mathematical. And it's then built a string of the more primitive instructions, the machine language instructions, that would do the operation that had been described. That's what a compiler is, and how developed the first one, you may think Fortran was the first compiler. And of course, it was the first popular one. But Baucus himself, who led the team that developed Fortran acknowledged that laning was there before him. But I was about to say when it was studying trajectories, he was looking and this was in reaction to Sputnik, Sputnik sort of galvanize things at MIT. This is why I while I was still in high school, by the way, as I say, galvanize things and how and big baton traigo, sir, started looking at interesting trajectories that would allow a photo reconnaissance of Mars and wrote a paper about it, and identified the main elements except for the crew interface that would be required for the Apollo job. So that was another landing contribution that that underlies the success of Apollo.
Yeah, and back. Yes, john. Yeah, no, I want to just jump in here, Don. So 12 people walked on the moon. And it was 64 years ago, you just mentioned that Sputnik curled around the Earth in 1957. That was, I guess, the beginning of the space race, JFK had that call to action. Over 400,000 people worked on Apollo including new dawn, mostly contractors and subcontractors, Mission Control, which is depicted in Hidden Figures. The average age in mission control for Apollo was 27 years old, mostly white men, and $25 billion were were spent in that quest, and today that would be $280 billion. I want to turn to you teasle. What was the space race as a historian, as someone who is, you know, the the curator for our archives at the Smithsonian, at the Air and Space Museum? What was the space race? How did it start? Who is involved? And how is it similar or different than today's races? in space? I know we have a lot of news about Mars and, and, you know, Jeff Bezos and, and Branson. I'm curious on your take, and, and I know you teach a class at Georgetown, what are millennials? What or Gen Z? You know? How are they looking at this race? That may be different than than baby boomers and Gen X.
A space program that promise dramatic results that the US could win. And that's how we framed it. And so he proposed in May of 61, sending humans to the moon, landing them there and returning them safely back to the earth before the end of the decade. And he also, when he was proposing Apollo, he also talked about its impact. He said, on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road to take, which was a way to talk about that larger Cold War context. And so, throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union and the United States both achieved a lot of really important first in spaceflight, and especially the Soviet Union early on, and then eventually, as we're talking about today, the US achieved that that first landing on the moon. But when we talk about the space race today, I think, sometimes what gets lost when we when we talk about a billionaire Space Race, for instance, is that important context of the larger Cold War context, this idea that spaceflight was going to be essential to good geopolitical influence, so perhaps shaping the political and social trajectories of other nations. And and when you talk about the billionaire Space Race, it's unclear where the audience comes in is, is it about the audience? Is it about influencing people? Or is it about something else, and I think there are important differences today than there were back in the 1960s. Or sometimes people talk about a space race today between the United States and China, for instance. But that larger context is so different. And there's different motivations. And then also, spaceflight is no longer extremely brand new. When Kennedy proposed Apollo, NASA was established in 1958. He had proposed it in 1961, the US only had 15 minutes of human spaceflight experience at that point. So it was just so different in so many contexts. But and then the last question about students today, and I will say at Georgetown, there's a lot of interest in spaceflight among the students, they've created a student group and they're interested in getting more spaceflight related courses offered in the school and they're very active. And there's a lot of interest especially in space industry, and, and so explorations part of their interest. But I think a lot of the private space industry is catching a lot of attention of, of students today. Great, thank you. And I'm so excited, Allison, for you to ask some questions. And Esther, I know Esker, your father, I think came up with some strategies to get to the moon that I don't think we're used. I don't know if you have any commentary, or any questions you want to ask now. And I know you trained to be an astronaut. So we have done who, you know, worked on the software side of things. And we have a curator of the history and one of the top historians on this. Yeah, love to see. Alison, Esther, any questions?
Actually Esther before you before we answer that, do you can you summarize your dad's idea to get to the moon? And how did he feel that it wasn't the ultimate way? The Apollo mission went?
Well, that's, that's really complicated. It was a very clever, but sort of like my dad in general, kind of heretical and, you know, not very cognizant of public opinion, it use small nuclear explosions.
usable, small packages moving around waving at small satellites, rather than this huge rockets and ice. You need good propulsion. So the stuff you're hearing the stuff that theories it gets better. But he was kind of ahead of his time. But he was watching all this stuff with great delight. I assure you, john, you know, there was a time when Europeans were mystified by what happens to the birds in the wintertime. Where did the birds go? And one of the theories theories was that the birds went to the moon. And one way of getting to the moon would be to hitch some sort of spacecraft to a bunch of birds and have them carry it there. What a great idea.
Don, I'll let you start.
Oh, about the future.
Future? Yeah.
Well, I must say we're living in a very interesting time. Now that it has become practical for a company to aspire to Mars, as SpaceX does. I think it is very much a new era, because now that we have several ways are about to have either have or are about to have several ways of reaching low Earth orbit. That sort of establishes low Earth orbit as the launching pad for ambitious spaceflight, and how in fact that will be used. I'll be very interested to see, I believe
What might impact people differently today than it did in the past? Just because we're so used to having virtual presence now. I'm not sure it'll, it'll be interesting to see. The human spaceflight still seems to capture the most attention. And so I don't see that changing anytime soon. But it'll be interesting to see as technology evolves, evolves, and as we get more used to virtual reality, and augmented reality, whether or not that'll change, spaceflight
Super excited about the show, but tonight. So I'm sorry, can you hear me?
Yes, I think you were breaking up, john. But just repeat what you said.
Yep. So I guess I'd like to ask keizo before I turn to you, Alison, he's a what? What's going on with Air and Space Museum? People love it. It makes an indelible mark on kids, when they go there in their youth, and young and old. What's going on? Now? I know that there's some things afoot.
Yes, we're, we have a massive renovation project right now. So we're completely redoing the downtown location of the museum, the museum on the Mall. So this opened in 1976. And it was time for it to have sort of a complete redo. So working on the structure and you know, improving the you know, air system and things like that, but also redoing every single exhibit. And this is a multi year project. It's projected to take eight years in total. So currently have the museum is closed and new exhibits will start opening up in the fall of 2022, including a new exhibit on lunar exploration. But it's a it's a multi year project. We're really excited because every single exhibit will be redone. So it's been a big, a big amount of work, but it'll it'll be a great result. And fortunately, it's only you know, it's it's getting closer and closer to 2022, which I'm thankful about because we've been working on this for years. Have you traveled to the equivalent in Russia? museum? No, I would love to someday but I haven't. I think there might have been some question in people's heads at that point, too. But we had simulated every part of the mission. Or the failure of an engine to light up, because there were at least two spots in an Apollo mission, where it was down to a single engine. And in fact engine which, of course, was designed with as much reliability as possible. If that engine had failed to ignite, then they would not have made it home. One of the first of those times being when they needed to leave the moon, I remember at the Apollo 12 crew training session, for some reason Pete Conrad sort of went through the steps he would take, if in fact, the essent engine failed to operate. And I can't remember all those steps. And in the last analysis, it might have been taking the engine cover off and whacking it with a hammer. But at any rate, his final words were and if that didn't work, it would ruin our whole day. For an astronaut, renting your whole day was the most serious thing that can happen. Meaning not surviving.
you know, it would be okay, but they'd have to abort the mission, at some point that they wouldn't do the orbital mission, they wouldn't achieve it at oil a third of a chance that they they might not come back. And they're No, I don't think there's any real way of telling you know, what the probability was, but there was,
Apollo project in terms of the way the computer system worked. And I think I would talk for the next hour and have a good bit left over if I really tried to go through it in the greatest detail. And this during the, this was a condition that occurred was president throughout the mission. But only during the lunar landing was the computer is so tightly programmed was so busy so to speak, that the margin of idle time was not big enough to accommodate that 13% of missing CPU time. As a result of that, the executive system, the operating system, how landings creation, the name comes up again, but the queues and the operating system filled up. In other words, more activity was being scheduled than was able to complete and therefore the queues didn't empty properly. And the operating system at some point, when it was unable to schedule a new activity had to do something. And what it did was issue an alarm and do something that we called a software restart. That basically meant rebooting rebooting the computer on the fly. So during Apollo 11, during the first phase of the landing that we call the braking phase, it's very important to get data from the landing radar. This is the right arrow that points down at the surface that gives you a correction for altitude and also a correction for velocity. Now, inertial navigation is a wonderful thing. And if you're not near some planet, very accurate. But as soon as you come into the influence of a planet, the security art is that that planet enter in. And the moon gravitationally speaking is a lumpy piece of rock, shall we say. And so you're a national navigation is influenced by factors that you can't predict and becomes imperfect. And without the landing radar, it's not safe to come down and try to do a landing. Now, when the radar first was able to get a signal back from the surface, there was a figure of merit can decide whether or not to accept the radar data. And this number, this figure of merit, there was called delta H Delta height was available in an own call display. After the radar locked own Aldrin key, then verb 16. Now 68 to call up that display, that added a further burden in terms of CPU time. And the first alarm occurred. A little while later, he did the same thing. And the second alarm occurred because the code was being pushed to the point where the margin did not accommodate the 13% that was being taken away. And then when we reach the next phase of the mission, the so called visibility phase, when extra calculations were performed.
This was the phase during which lasted about a minute or a bit more when the astronauts could look out the window and the lunar module was in a posture that allowed them to actually look ahead. Some fairly abstruse alarms occurring. So armed with that knowledge, they gave the go after each of those alarms. And the crew almost gotten blood say about it after a while. And they were able to accomplish the landing on Apollo 11. When Charlie Duke, the Capcom says you got to get a bunch of guys about to turn blue. He was, he was describing Mission Control, but he was also describing the room I was in in Cambridge. So I'm not sure how long that took. But that's the lite version of Apollo 11, I would say, Apollo 12 is I believe I said, every mission had to accomplish more than the previous mission. And Apollo 11, because of some of those navigational errors that I mentioned, landed about four miles from the spot where it wanted to land. Now, it didn't matter. As Armstrong said, any spot on the moon, I can land will be interesting. And of course it was. But that had to be improved if we were ever going to be able to land at a particular spot that might have had geological interest or any other interest. And so the goal set for the next mission. Pete Conrad's Apollo 12 was the land close enough to a unmanned spacecraft, a surveyor that had landed on the moon a year or two previously. And he would literally bring home a part of the surveyor which might have had some interest in terms of how it had stood up to the lunar environment. And that required a software change. It was one of the times when we were able in the software to provide a capability that directly assisted the mission goals.
It turned out that, as I say, Apollo 11, was off by about four miles downrange because of those altitude. I mean, because of those navigation errors. Those were caused by things like the lumpy gravitational field of the moon, also caused by propulsive aspects of the spacecraft that were not sensed and compensated for, I believe there was a water boiler that consistently created a small amount of thrust really micro thrust, but enough to over a certain amount of time over the course of a couple of lunar orbits enough to affect the navigation. But the advantage Apollo 12 had was that the landing site was further to the west. That meant that when the spacecraft came around, from behind the moon, on the right side of the moon, if you're looking at the moon from the northern hemisphere, or what you perceive as the right side, there was more time between that moment, and when the landing had to occur. And as it came around the moon, when it was moving towards Earth, that was sort of the ideal setup for gathering navigation data using using ground tracking. someone's not muted, wet, but you don't matter Penza, you no matter what you'd want. Yeah. I'm hearing another crossfeed from another conversation, apparently, at any rate, the software change that we added that made Apollo 11 able to land where it wanted to, was that we created the ability to at the last minute input that data that came from ground tracking into the computer to make the the correction such that, at the beginning of the visibility phase with the spacecraft pitched forward, and gave the crew a view of the surface I had. The important thing was that at that moment, the astronauts, especially the commander who stood on the left, that he was able to recognize the pattern of craters that even he had been training for. Because once he recognized that pattern, then using the re designation capability that I already described, and using the ability, you know, the sort of the ability to do some sort of stick and rudder flying at the end, he knew he would be able to reach the spot are close enough to the spot. The central thing was putting them close enough that they can see it when they pitched over. And we've succeeded in doing that on Apollo 12. And every successful landing after that was able to land quite precisely where it wanted to.
So to me, Apollo 13 is a really interesting chapter in human endurance and human success despite adversity. The the innovation was to create the false signal inside the computer, the abort was already in progress. And if an abort was already in progress, we didn't check the switch. So for a brief period, we allowed erroneous information in the computer in order to fool the aborts monitor into not looking at the faulty switch.
The thing that happened after that I spoke about the landing radar, the necessity to have the information from the landing art radar in order to make a safe landing, the landing the next thing that happened once we got to end of the descent, and we were past the abort switch problem. The radar failed to lock on to the surface. And we were approaching the spacecraft was approaching the altitude. And when I say we like that, I guess that's a symptom of the fact that we did identify with the computer when it was flying. At any rate, we were approaching the attitude where they would have had to be an abort if the radar did not work. And again, Mission Control save the day because someone had the inspiration to say okay cycle the breaker.
it was mainly obviously dominated by an incredible group of males in the control room? But were women doing Critical Role somewhere behind the scene?
The specific thing portrayed in Hidden Figures was the day before the computers came along. And I wasn't there then. But in fact, in MIT, apparently, there was a core of the soak these so called computers, who I believe were mostly if not entirely women, who sat with their clunky adding machines, although of course, the best machines did way more than add, I joined the project in the summer of 1966, which was a fairly late point. Although at that point, the mission coding for the lunar module was just beginning. So it was also an opportune time to start.
I can add that there were women involved in these programs and working at NASA, but very, they're a very small percentage when it came to working as engineers or scientists. So it's something like two to 3% of engineers at NASA were women in the 1960s. And that number didn't, didn't grow very rapidly, I guess you could say so. But by the end of the Apollo program, in terms of all NASA employees, it was it was less than 20%. Today, it's it's still relatively low. So it's about a third of NASA staff, I believe, I think that's changing over time. But you had women in it working as secretaries and assistants, but when it came to opportunities in, in engineering, and in science, they were really limited at this time, and also as astronauts even more limited.
It was the sort of the beginning of the field of failure tolerance when it came to computers. The fact that based on how landings work, the computer could be made to tolerate a certain class of errors by doing a reboot, and the system is ation of that logic was an important contribution by Margaret.
I'll add one thing about the field of space history which is really exciting is this increase into attention on everyone who contributed to the Apollo program. And the stories are getting richer and we're having a bit we have a better sense now of of who contributed when it comes to the books that are being written about Apollo and the important role that that everyone played for for many years, there's a lot of attention focused on the astronauts, and they're exciting stories. But But now there's more work being done on the history of computing, for instance, which is really exciting the role of women and minorities in spaceflight. And so the we're getting more and more of these stories, as more and more research has been done as more, you know, more books and articles and things like that are being written and at the Air and Space Museum and our new lunar exploration exhibit. It's a great update from 1976. But it opened because it tells a story that's much more inclusive, and, and it looks at the role of, of all these different people have the engineers and have the scientists who participated, in addition to the astronauts, and the politicians. And there, there are so many people involved in spaceflight. And so fortunately, now those stories are becoming a larger part of the way that we think about and remember space exploration.
You know, that's obviously from what they've accomplished, a great team with a great deal of ambition. But at that stage in my life, I wasn't necessarily compelled to space flight. And I sometimes do ask myself that if, if I had been some, instead of being lucky enough to get a job doing this work, if I had had the good or bad fortune to be offered a job, much more mundane and less creative sort, I probably would have taken it. I certainly hope and think that I would have found some other field that would have fascinated me. What what sort of has the same magnitude as land demand on on the moon? Well, certainly climate change, I would certainly agree with that disruption, and climate changes. But climate change is something that really encompasses all the different disciplines we're talking about from, from carpentry to space, travel to another state and so on those all their own or offer some avenue to work on with respect to climate change. I can can't escape the feeling that there are way too many unsustainable trends operating these days. And I mean, everything from politics, to the global warming. to, to the, to what I as an old foggy, as foggy as I am now, I tend to think of his educational challenges. I sort of feel like I mean, I was, I was a liberal arts major, I wanted to be a liberal arts major, you know, I enjoyed history, I've, I've enjoyed reading and writing.
And I have a feeling now, and I'm not really qualified to make this generalization, perhaps, but I have the feeling now that school and especially college, is looked at more now as training for job training, shall we say. And the lesson I took from the varied path that my parents had taken, varied in some ways. My father started a botanist as a botanist and became a parasitologist. But I think I understood as I went to college, that there was a certain amount of randomness and what you ended up getting attracted by.
And I'm not so sure that same feeling exists. Now. I think. And again, I'm pulling my long beard and probably talking nonsense, but I feel that many young people grow up now with more fear, more economic anxiety, more fear in other respects, as well. And that perhaps that's a handicap. I may have gotten away from your question, and I invite somebody to argue with me
to what it what do you think Teasel, in terms of, you know, having put the 50 objects together and the magnitude of the Apollo missions? I mean, where do you think if you were building the next wing of the Smithsonian, what what's the talent of today,
we're working on a new exhibit right now, actually, that speaks to this. And it's in a temporary exhibit space called innovations. And so it is a rotating exhibit that will focus on innovations in aerospace. And the first one we're doing is on climate change. So much like Don was saying, looking at that challenge, but through the lens of aerospace, and I think that that is one of these areas that is his demands attention, probably more than anything else. And it is it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to address.
And, and so what we're doing at the museum is is helping sort of tell that story through aerospace and the presentation of the role of aerospace in in understanding climate change, but then also in helping mitigate the problem. And I think that that'll be an important exhibit. And, but I think that that's probably the area that that I can see. Getting more attention at the museum and hopefully becoming a part of people's day to day conversations and choices. They're making their lives and because that seems like it It's not only a challenge that we can choose to do, as Kennedy said, so famously at Rice University, but it's a it's a challenge that demands that we do everything we can to address it.
That's a perfect, that's a great lead in to my last question. And then I want to open up to Jim Davey, Dr. Rao and others in the audience who have questions and give them a moment to, to ask, given their incredibly rich knowledge. But I wanted to follow on on what you both are saying in terms of the climate change challenge to ask you, what is it you you've learned on from what it took NASA to succeed over all the Apollo missions, sort of who was in the control room? How top technology was combined with human power? I mean, what are diversity of skill sets? Like what would be the lessons, you withdraw from all those great learnings into the climate change challenge? And then teasle, I'd ask you the same thing in terms of all that you've curated at the Smithsonian? I mean, what what would you put into that Hall of innovations to give us a chance at success?
Well, I think that on Apollo, they had to trust the young people. If they didn't, there was no way they could have succeeded. And I have the feeling that was realized. And as a result, they took the chance of trusting kids like me, and the young people who were in the control room, and throughout the whole program, the management culture, was to get out of the way, and to protect those, those innovators, those imaginators, if you will, to protect them from the distractions, and to give them the tools. And I would say that that plus the the sort of management structures that were in a place that were in place during Apollo were largely successful.
So I think those structures plus trust, plus trusting the young people would have to be the way forward.
I agree. I like that that theme of trusting the young people for addressing these future problems. And
there's been some already some incredible work done by people who are teenagers and an elementary school. And it's really exciting to see when it comes to addressing climate change. And I'll also add that with the Apollo program. It, it wasn't just about, it wasn't just about developing the hardware and the software. It wasn't just the technology, but it was also a managerial challenge. It was a political challenge. It really took coordination on all these different levels. And I think that there are great lessons to be learned from that.
Super, so let me ask Jim, do you have a question for the panels? If so, you'll have to unmute Jim. Let me let me go to Davy, do you have a question? I'll keep going down the list and see who has a question. Dr. Raul, do you have a question? If you have a question you You do have to unmute. And we also have rose on stage rose. Do you have a question?
Oh, yeah. Oh, Jim, and we could go ahead.
Okay, I finally have unmuted I've got I have a very poor connection today. So for that, I apologize. But my question is, back in the day of the the Apollo program,
it was it was driven with a with a one cubic foot computer these days where we're walking around with, with lists something in our pocket. That's several orders of magnitude more powerful than that. Then Then what was used in the Apollo program. What would we do differently with that?
Yes. Yeah, the, the Apollo computer had something like 30,000 lines of code. Microsoft's micros Save off Microsoft Office has something on the order of 300 million lines of code, which would you trust to get you to the moon? And the point I'm making is that there were some virtues in simplicity. Yes. I, yes, there, there are great many sort of gee whiz comparisons between the Apollo computer and what's in your phone, for that matter what's in your microwave, or your refrigerator in some cases, and the Apollo computer comes out. On the bad side, on the other hand, the Apollo computer never experienced a failure. It had enough power to navigate to the moon and back. And by the way, although it never actually did it. You it's certainly arguable from the experience of Apollo eight, and Apollo 11. That the system, the guidance system, the guidance, navigation and control system, could have gotten accomplished the entire mission. What it could not have done without ground help was land accurately. But to go to the moon, orbit and land, take off orbit and come back to Earth. That could all have been done by own with own board resources, meaning the optics, the inertial sensor, the computer, and of course, the vital role of the human, the humans that are on board.
Don't just sit quick note, someone recently made a calculation that you don't be more than Apple chargers, the commodity as well as this. So these chargers now have chips that are more powerful than the ADC.
I don't doubt it. Yeah, that's it's
it's incredible. What was done with ADC is a marvel of engineering. Sorry,
I'm not sure the technology exists to make such a small memory.
I would also say like one of the miracles of the AGC is that it didn't suffer from single event upsets, or anything else, because it was far more resilient to radiation than our current.
And I think
yes, and I think that that that lesson was learned. And I think for that reason, the computers own space station, and probably in future spacecraft, the computers that are really vital in terms of controlling the, the spacecraft and in terms of maintaining the environment that humans can live in the, the central computers may tend to be of a slower and less compact type format. that very reason, of course, that can be supplemented as, as is the case today on space station that can be supplemented by any number of laptops that use the very latest chips, which I assume would be effectively backed up in such a way that the single event upset can be tolerated, as it might not be in the computer that was controlling an engine burn.
Although my question would was about, you know, specifically about computers, it seems to me you could apply the same kind of thinking, though, to the staff. In other words, it was all white guys are primarily old white guys, getting this stuff back in those days. And now there's a lot more diversity available.
That Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And you know, you want you want the people with the highest merit to be doing the work. But there's an irony here. You know, I was hired at a time when the people doing the hiring, were not being especially discriminating in terms of ability. They were trying to staff up and they they had to round up people. So the opportunity was there even then. And just as I came across the job because I happen to be walking by the building one day, and said, Okay, why don't I walk in cold and ask for a job? Anyone could have done done that. So really, what we're talking about is the fact that people are more empowered now. To ask for a job like that people are more empowered now to aspire to a job like that. And that sort of advantage that we have now, if it can be employed properly.
Super. So I'm going to see Thomas or Davey, if you have a question or if anyone else in the audience are asked or if you have a question. And then I'd love to just ask each speaker for any wrap up comments. So, Thomas rose Davy, Esther is in the audience.
I guess I have a question. First, it's a pleasure to be to be able to call, john and after. I'd love to do your room with y'all in small steps and giant leaps. But that aside, my question is, feel about the future. So one of the most fast, one of the most hotshot we should have been paying for it more diplomatically. For me, it's disturbing. It's profoundly disturbing that there is no joystick. There were no control mechanisms, like there's an a direct control line on the Crew Dragon. Right. And the SpaceX is Crew Dragon doesn't actually have a joystick. It's all controlled by a by a touch screens, which are actually terrible insects, medical environment. And it is and that touchscreen runs on a browser on a chromium instance, running react. I could do not, it's just not, I can't imagine using something like that in a safety critical environment. It feels like we've gotten used to this idea that we can just throw compute at problems, and that they will magically resolve themselves. And that throwing compute at problems is always preferable as compared to having smart people along the way. So my question is, is deep deep? Do you feel like they will really learn the hard fought and hard won lessons of Apollo and like, the simplicity, modularity in design, having that human backup as well, because if I remember correctly, y'all also did a study of the second five, were compared the manual trajectory in a simulation by an astronaut and the computer trajectory, and the astral trajectory was only off by 2050 kilograms of fuel at the end. So it's like it was a cracking infection. So what I'm trying to ask is, do you do you think they'll not really learn But will we learn these hardcourt lessons? Or do you think it's going to be?
Oh, I think so. I mean, I think those sort of when going into the unknown, you know, the the proper combination of the man and the machine. This is the topic of David Mandela's book, digital Apollo, which is an excellent senator known Apollo. And I think when that becomes necessary, the people who figure it out who imagined it will, we'll see that that's necessary. You know, the, the fact that there's no joystick is sticking their Crew Dragon. It does certainly seem strange to me, as an old timer. But what's being built there is meant to be routine and transportation to orbit. You know, if you imagine it as something more akin to, you know, one of those trains they have in an airport, where there's no driver where it's totally automated, you get on it, and it takes you there. If you imagine it like that, then maybe it doesn't seem so strange. I don't know enough about that system to understand whether they're in a failure modes or abort modes, where not having the joystick and not being set up for really good crew visibility. Whether that would or would not make a difference, but I do respect their decisions. And so I don't take it, I don't take it too badly.
Super. So let me ask DB Thomas mozila. Esther, any last questions and then I'll ask Don and T cell to wrap up.
And I don't necessarily have a question, but I did come across a really interesting series of videos, maybe in 2019, where these four gentlemen had gotten their hands on some bolc or NASA equipment and in There was an old Guidance Computer and they did I think like a maybe 20 to 30 part video series of kind of breaking it down and actually restoring it and getting it to run again and so I just want to suggest to if people haven't seen that yet it's a really interesting video series and they go in you get to see them you get to see how the the memories thread it you know, wrapped and stuff. It's really cool. So I just wanted to bring that that up in case people in the audience that necessarily seen it.
Yeah, I second the motion to definitely. Look at that. I did mention that earlier I mentioned on my mike Stewart, who was instrumental in that effort to restore the computer. I mentioned it as a brag about how reliable the computer was. And that's, that's definitely worth seeing. There are various books that I think I can recommend, you know, the David Mendell book that I already mentioned, is excellent about the decisions about man machine interaction teasels book of courses is fascinating with the the photographs, you Blair Smith, who was one of the people who designed the language, I mentioned him earlier, he has a book out called left brains for the right stuff, which is very good as it describes the evolution of the computer, a computer first designed for the Mars flight that I mentioned, but after a great deal of further development was able to do the power job. The the part of his book that deals with that is extremely interesting and is definitely the best source on that part of the history. And I would be remiss if I didn't also mention my book, sunburst and luminary which is named after two of the flight computer programs that I helped build, sunburst for the unmanned Apollo five flight. And luminary which in various revisions was the program that flew all the lunar landings.
That's absolutely incredible. I'm definitely going to read that.
I'm done. It looks like Mike just joined us on stage. So Mike, if you unmute yourself, love to know if you have comments or question.
Hi. I don't think I really have any questions. But definitely, thanks for the thanks for the shout outs on the restoration project. And if anybody has questions about that, we'd be happy to answer them as well. Oh, wow.
What a coincidence. That's incredible.
Mike, is it true that you haven't been able to I Mike Mike has developed the ability to read the modules in which the flight programs were packed in the form of core rope memory threaded wires, as somebody said, Mike, have you had the opportunity to read the modules that are in possession of the Air and Space Museum?
No, I haven't. We've we've read the modules at the Computer History Museum and the MIT museum. And then, you know, a couple of modules that various other people involved with the program like you and elden had a had a module video, let us read. But we have not done anything with the Smithsonian yet.
So I don't know if that's something you can facilitate. But it would add to your knowledge of what you have in your collection.
Yeah, it's a great point. So this is the computers actually aren't aren't part of my specific collection, we have a position for a curator of computing there. And we're in the process of hiring a new person for that role. Paul's ruzi had been the curator of computing for many years, and he's retired. So this is sort of a funny moment for us. But someone will come in and there might be some possibilities to collaborate there.
Oh, just a quick question. Did I hear elden? Like lvnc Hall?
Yeah. Yeah, when we went to visit him in Florida, he was uh, his his place of residence was our first stop on our tour with a computer. But he while we were there, and we're showing him the computer working again. He had a quarter rote memory module that he let us borrow for, you know, 10 minutes to extract the data off of it.
Oh, wow. I have so many questions. I'm stopped struggling What was he like?
He is still super sharp. I mean, are you know at least he was while we were there. She's been working on a paper about the effects of relativity on the timing of the AGC. Then, you know, he was super fascinated by the whole thing and yeah, it was it was awesome to meet him.
I have a quick question for you, Mike. Were you able to get the electroluminescent displays somehow?
We didn't have a discount for the restoration. But we have since one of our friends got his hands on, adjust the electroluminescent display of a have a disk and we have turned that on and gotten it working.
Oh, wow. Okay. How can we help like how can I and Thomas and like our community health like, Oh, wow. Because I have never seen a scene of working electroluminescent this way. Like I've I've tried to build one day if you know Applied Science on YouTube, he he did a build in for the Apollo anniversary with the backing, he went through the steps of building one. How can we how can we help?
I think just more documentation for us is always better. I think that's that's the biggest thing is access to documentation that we need to restore the stuff
in which Don has been completely instrumental in. But yeah, I think I think that would be the biggest thing. I can down documentation that people still have and getting it stand and available.
There's there's the hardware side of the work. And there's the scanning of the modules, I believe it's Mike's intent to as much as humanly possible to reconstruct all the programs they were ever released for manufacturer, because there was a manufacturer manufacturing phase in adapting one of our programs for use on the spacecraft. And it's a native app that he's eager to be able to scan any modules that may be available.
A little boy, that's incredible. Um, Mike, do you have a working interface between the core rope memory and our modern computers?
Yes, MIT developed for internal use. It was a big rack that was called the the cord rope simulator or the AGC monitor that it plugs into 144 pin test connector on the front of the computer. So as part of the restoration, I built a little board that implements the equivalent of all the hardware in that rack that just plugs into my laptop over USB. So I have if I plug that into a computer, and then plug the USB into my laptop, I have complete control and can read the memory and all that.
That's incredible. Yeah. So do you have the different software releases? Are they priests? Are they like, do we have them somewhere like, don't want it stored on a tape because if they're stored on tape, there's a good chance we might be able to track down the physical tapes and read them, you know?
Maybe, maybe, you know, some of them still exist on paper, you know, packrat that I am I was I saved quite a few listings of various programs at various stages, which had been of assistance to Mike in this effort. And about the tapes, I'm not so sure. tapes were created when when it came to the manufacturing stage, paid for also creative programs, magnetic tapes to be able to take to the national simulators to be able to run the actual software. In those simulators. I'm referring to the the CMS and limb LMS, the command mission Command Module mission simulator, and the limb mission simulator. They are they are one of the chapters in diesel's book as a matter of fact, with a picture of one of the command module simulators. And oh, I forget exactly where I was going with that. I was saying the question again.
So if so, just to restore them if it can take we can track the time the tea And that should still be theoretically stable enough to read. But
some of them are. Some of them exist on paper. Yes. And all the ones that I know of that exist on paper have been scanned, and are available on the virtual AGC website, which is a storehouse of information about Apollo.
Do y'all need any help translating the paper stuff into code? Or has it already been done?
I think those techniques exist, Mike.
Yeah, at this point, all of the listings that we have scanned, have have been translated to code, through, you know, big volunteer efforts that people staring at each one of these listings is about 1700 pages long. So it's a big effort to sit down and, you know, go through line by line and figure out what's different from the version that we already have, and get it all typed out. But that work has already been done. We have, we have some ongoing projects that we called reconstructions. We found in the National Archives is a really fascinating set of drawings that list out the memory bank checksums, or all of the programs that got manufactured. And using using these memory bank check sums and the software for which we have listings or for which we've, you know, successfully been able to read the court rote memory modules for in conjunction with memos describing the changes between all the programs. And there's a fellow named john Norton who put together these really, really, really detailed pseudocode descriptions. He called them program guidance equations for programs. Using all of these sources than a lot of cases, we've been able to sort of connect all the dots and put together a version of software that implements all of the changes described in the memos and all these other sources and comes out to be the right memory bank checksums. So it was a lot of effort, it's possible to sort of piece together programs that were lost to history. We have a couple of projects of those going on. So that's probably the biggest place to phn at the moment if you're interested in trying to recover some loss software.
We are and we'd love to help Mike if Mike and Dawn if you'd like to connect with me, Thomas, we'd love to help like.
So you guys. This is imagination and action. And I see Cory is here. He's been to many continents and has won championships for the accordion, the world record holder in the accordion, he played for 32 hours and 14 minutes. But in addition to that he's really a talented musician. He went to the NDC, which is the Juilliard of Boston. And they said, We don't teach accordion. He said Teach me music. And he designed his own accordion. I bet if he had his way, he would have designed one to go on the Apollo mission. And if you could play a musical interlude for like a minute or two, to celebrate this, this important conversation about space and where we've come from and where we're going. Don is someone one of the 400,000 that worked on the Apollo program. Many were contractors, but he wrote the software and you know, if we had missed the moon, you know, there was a big problem. And thank you for all that you've done since then. I know you stayed with NASA for years and, and you're also a great storyteller telling your life story. And then we have a modern day. hero in in curating the work for the Air and Space Museum and T Sol rhymes with diesel. So Cory Can you play something to celebrate tonight's conversation?
Hey guys, absolutely would love to do that. I will create a basically kind of a space vibe here with the electric accordion you will hear an accordion and even though it won't quite sound like an accordion. Everything in here is coming from an electric accordion.
Great thank you, Cory. And then in a moment, Allison is going to summarize some of the things discussed today. But I'd like to ask teasle and then dunk on to maybe share some closing thoughts. And also, you know, I was just thinking, I know, in some of the documentaries about the Apollo space program, they talked about the protests that went on, while the space program was going on, as a historian teasle I also wonder if maybe you might comment on that, in addition to your closing thought, oh, and then Don, can you tell us what it was like working with punch cards? And for those who don't know what a punch card is? Maybe you can explain it?
Should I go ahead with that? Are
you do your closing comments? And then done? And yeah, Don maybe mentioned the punch cards? That would be great.
Well, I'll just say, thank you so much for inviting me to join the conversation this evening. It's been a real pleasure. And I'll also mention that there were there were people throughout the 1960s, who, who questioned whether or not the United States should be invested in spaceflight, and sending humans to the moon. And the protest was mentioned that the launch of Apollo 11. So this was, you know, a critique of the government's investment in lunar exploration. And there was a, there was concern that things like, like suitable housing should be should be invested in, and there were protests at multiple Apollo launches. And they're also protests around the world and related to critiquing both the Vietnam War and, and the Apollo program as well. And so it was, you know, I think, when we think back to it, we tend to think of it as as sort of the shining moment in in American history. And sometimes we sort of smooth around the edges of some of the critique and the questions about, you know, why we send humans to space, but there's some really important issues that were were brought up then. And a great story from the Apollo 11 launch where there was a protest at the launch site, and there was an awareness that there would be media attention. So this is from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and and the NASA Administrator, invited them to attend the launch and said, you know, if I could solve Earth problems by not sending humans into space, I would, but that won't do it. But we should work together. And I think that that was a a great gesture and, and NASA started looking more and more into applying what was learned through spaceflight to issues on Earth. So that's that that story about protests, sort of a happy ending when it comes to that protest. But
actually, I just thought of one other thing before you share your closing comment. I know the Volpi Center, the Transportation Center in Cambridge was supposed to be Mission Control. And I think they they began to clear the space 70 acres right next to MIT to build it. And then suddenly, that didn't happen. And I think it was during the Nixon administration that ended up in Houston. But I also know that, you know, President Kennedy from Massachusetts, was assassinated, and then LBJ became president and his base was in Texas. I'm wondering is there in your as a historian of that period, is there anything more to that story or any anything that you know might be interesting to share?
Sure, so Lyndon Johnson was somewhat instrumental and establishment of some of the NASA centers in the American South, he saw this as a sort of tied to the the New Deal idea that, you know, the application of science and technology to issues could help help people in jet in general. And he thought that the building of NASA centers within the American South could sort of raise the standard of living there and be important to what he would have thought of the modernization of the self. But it was also then important when it came to civil rights. And and Bobby Kennedy actually had a hand in that was interested in sort of integrating the workforce. And as a federal agency and federal employer, NASA became sort of part of the story of integration and the hiring of, of African Americans in particular at that time. It's still a small part of the workforce. But it's an important part of that story, and really essential contributions were made. And there are more and more fantastic studies on that that area. So there's a recent book from national long civil rights movement. Ryan Odom is one of the editors of it. And he's the chief historian at NASA right now. And they're handful of other great books on that topic. And I'm so pleased that the more that the more of those contributions are being noted, now, it's for the greater awareness.
Yeah, I'm not sure I believe that the Mission Control Center would have been in Cambridge, my recollection of the timing is that that electronic Research Center, or whatever it was to be cold, happened as a later point. So I don't necessarily without further checking, go along with that notion. teasle. May may know for sure, but I'm not sure. I think that, you know, in terms of protests, What I remember most is the fact that I mean, we were not in a vacuum, we were not sealed in a, in a compound. When we were doing this work, we were very much part of the life around us. And of course, we came even though we were mostly white, and predominantly male, that didn't imply any real homogeneity in in many other respects. And many of us were strongly against the Vietnam War. And I can remember going to several demonstrations with colleagues, including, I believe, it was called the mobilization to end the war in the spring of 1967. And, you know, the, at one time, the, there were also protests, centered on the fact that MIT was doing military work. Because, in fact, the laboratory where I work the MIT instrumentation lab, at the same time, as it was designing and programming, the guidance system for Apollo was also striving to make intercontinental missiles more accurate. And I always thought that if you were an engineer in that field, you would rather be working on something that you wanted to be able to see an action without regret, you know, if you have regrets, and I kind of thought that perhaps one of the benefits of an organization like ours was to pump technology from one side to the other. In other words, technology developed primarily for military purposes to sort of pump that into the civilian sector and into the non classified sector. Because, as you may not know, and may not believe NASA was extremely unclassified. There was very, you know, in my entire time, working on the Apollo project, I saw one classified document. One secret document, I should say, the debriefing notes were classified as confidential for a short time before they were declassified. It was an extremely open project. So technology that was able to make that jump did come into the private sector of the non military sector, if you want to look at it that way. The inertial sensor on Apollo was quite similar to the inertial sensor for the Polaris submarine launched missile. That was all So I designed at the MIT instrumentation lab. But at any rate, because of that work, and some other things that I don't know that much about, there was a sense that MIT was somehow assisting the war effort, the Vietnam war effort, and that calls protests. And the result of that was that the, the MIT instrumentation lab, became the Draper lab as it is now. It's a funny organization, if you ask who owns that? There's no answer. It is a nonprofit organization in Cambridge, that still has a relationship with MIT. But it is completely in the paper.
Hey, Donald, let me interrupt for a second, I want to make sure that you share your closing thought and then dawn, share your closing thought. And then Alison, love to hear your summary of the show. And, you know, we're recording this, there'll be a transcript. And I think we did justice to what happened a few decades ago. And thank you for tonight's long form journalism. And next week, we have the first engineer who helped create Twitter. Coming in, we also have a show on immigration the following week. And then the following week, we have Jamie Hayward on on precision medicine. And then the following week, we have we have some great shows coming up. So check out our website, imagination action.co. Bye.
So I'll just say thank you for inviting me, it's been a real pleasure. I'll pass it over to Don.
Well, thank you, john, I appreciate your you're putting this together and your your expertise as a connector, if that's the right word of getting people together and creating discussions. And I appreciate the opportunity. I could talk about punch cards, if you really want me to, that would be sort of a sidelight, if you if if you didn't know, the actual place where our hands touched the clay, if you will, was at the IBM zero 26 key punch machine. Because that's how we that's how we wrote the programs in the sense of writing them in a way the machine could understand.
I could listen to you for hours.
it done. I was wondering if we could talk to you more about that maybe in another clubhouse room at some point. Maybe we have a huge audience, we have over 74,000 members in the small steps group. And there's so many people that couldn't be here today that would love to hear some of these stories. So there's one thing there's one part of clubhouse that some of the new people might not know yet, but there's it's called the back channel. And if you look down at the bottom right of your screen, there's a little paper airplane. And if you click that, you can send messages to people directly. So I might reach out to some of you and just see if you're interested in it's okay if you don't have time, but I figured I'd put that out there. Thank you.
Yes, no, I wouldn't be be happy to do that. If the question is always win, but I'm certainly open to it.
Thank you so much. I'll reach out to you,
man. Super Well, thank you guys. So so much. I'm gonna give a attempt to wrap up this amazingly rich show, which I it's very hard to do justice to in about 30 seconds. And then thank you, and then just invite you to join us next Tuesday. And lots of other parts of clubhouse are very, very active in the space discussion. So we're so honored to have you here. So just to wrap up a little bit, the topic tonight was 67 kilobytes to the moon 76 Thank you kilobyte to the moon. We had two amazing presenters, Don and T soul. The topic was really the amazing men machines, software planning, and all the rich work that brought us to the series of powerful Apollo missions. The diesel reminded us that we were animated at the time by a Cold War context. And john reminded us of the magnitude of the Apollo missions with 400,000 employees and the average age in Mission Control of 27 and spending 25 billions for what was easily the most challenging mission I think of of mankind up until that point. We heard about the daisy chains of risks that were constantly present and overcome including fires, alarms, docking challenges and potential for ex explosions. I think a lot of the movies seem to have picked up on some of these points. Don told us that after the Apollo one fire, not many would have bet on it. Two successful landings by the end of that decade, Apollo 11, and 12. And we also heard a lot more about the detailed simulation of every part of the mission, the individuals who were involved, the challenges people took on and the incredible technologies, sort of a lot of learning on the go. One, one impression I came away with was how often Mission Control really was, I guess, is what they now call agile, but kind of save the day and learn teachable moments from challenges like Apollo 11. But really, you know, regrouping, answering alarms figuring out what was going wrong. Dan reminded us that success in the Apollo series came from trusting young people, a management culture to get out of the way and protect innovators or imaginators, from distraction and to give them tools to succeed. Something every organization now needs to learn. I think people now have more and more bureaucracy. And he also reminded us that it was a very open context, there were not a lot of secrets. And that's part of what allowed all the space technology to move into the private sector. Both Donnan and TCL talked about the new era of space exploration we're in now, we're not only Russia and China are active, but also India and many other countries where billionaires are leading a space race. But as Don pointed out fighting for different goals. And we have multiple ways to reach low or if or low Earth orbit. And we're flying missions as rose reminded us without joysticks. So sometimes without human intervention, and very much relying on the machine part. Donna diesel talked about today's moon landing challenge could be argued to be climate change, which requires skills from carpentry to astronomy, to oceanography to Intel and computer science, which Don described as more difficult in his view than spaceflights. So let's hope for a similar coming together of the diverse skill sets with men machines, maybe a few women needed to make life on this planet more secure for the future. And thank you so much done. teasel, our amazing audience, Rose Thomas and Mike for joining us on stage. And just for bringing the the just depth and richness of the Apollo mission to our clubhouse group tonight. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for being such accommodating hosts. We are so sorry. We're just so passionate about this. I grew up with stories of what you did.
We love that we this this whole channel, which is, as john would remind you is his imagination and action series. It's all about passion. And come join us any Tuesday from six to eight and sometimes nine, Eastern and we're just really, really glad you could join us tonight. Thank you.
