Hacker News Reader

Comment by schtinky | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely crazy to think about how NASA got to the moon in freakin' 1969. Ten years ago, we didn't have FB, YouTube, widespread WiFi, flatscreen TVs, smartphones, LTE... That we landed a spaceship on the moon 4.5 times longer ago (45 years) when the state of the art was a photocopy machine is truly mindblowing.

View on HN

What's even more mind blowing is the amount of time we've wasted by pumping money, time and resources into useless wars and spying infrastructures. Imagine what mankind could have accomplished if WW2 truly was the last war and all energy could have gone into getting of this planet. I'm sure we would have had "real" hover boards by now..

The majority of rocket technology was fuelled by and developed because of WWII and the Cold War.

And there were people alive at the time who remembered the airplane being invented. Today, we can tell astounding stories to our snapchatting kids of the time when men walked on the moon.

I was lucky enough to once see a Mitsubishi "Zero" fighter in Japan once being spun up and taxi'ing about. I later found out from the company the owns it that they knew the pilot who flew it in WWII Personally.

That pilot had started his career on biplanes and ended it (in a crash, unfortunately) flying F-4 Phantom Jets (Commonly called Third generation Jets).

In my mind these eras of flight have been so ... seperated that I could not really imagine one man flying basically such a wide range of technology (and of course, he saw the moon landings).

Yeah, the delta in technology that bookends a life is getting bigger fast.

My Dad told me that his first airplane ride was as a kid when a barnstormer put on a show at his town in Utah. The pilot/showman took him up in his Jenny:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_JN-4

The kicker is that Dad told me this when he, Mom, and I were at flight level 350 about halfway to Hawaii for their 61st wedding anniversary, flying in a Boeing 757.

From an iffy ragwing biplane to a routine miracle world-spanning machine in his lifetime. Wonder if I'll get to see the equivalent of 757 service to Mars before I shuffle off...

I have just finished reading the Command and Control book about nuclear weapons development in the US. The differences in technology are even more striking than the space race. That until quite recently nuclear weapons had less security than the lock screen on a smart phone. That the early warning/firing systems had less communication reliability than sending an email. So much of the modern world seems to be derived in significant part from the cold war arms race.

Consider in 1969--much less going back to when many of the design decisions were made. (And by "no" here, I mean no in anything approaching mainstream.) No electronic calculators, just barely color television, mostly rotary dial telephones. Moore's Law had only recently been coined. No PCs of course. No Internet in any meaningful sense.

Hmmm... at what point do we start questioning the veracity of those moon landing photos and videos? :)

"By the late 1960s they did the technical ability, not to mention the requisite madness, to send three guys to the moon and back. They did not have the technology to fake it on video." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU

Great video. For others wondering, it's a video that debunks conspiracy theories about faking the moon landing by saying it was technically possible to fly to the moon but not to fake it. It goes into the logistics of how a moon landing would be faked (film capacity and technical capabilities of cameras in the 60's).

Fun explanation. "he did the math"

All of what you say is true, however it's not as bad as you might think. Once upon a time were these magical devices called "mainframes" [1], and in the 1960s they were quite powerful (for that era).

Most engineering work was done in FORTRAN, and it ran very efficiently on the hardware. There were (usually) no CPU cycle sucking GUIs to slow down the computers.

As a high school student in the early 1970s I was privileged to take a summer course at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies [2] where they had an IBM 360/95 mainframe [3] for the scientists to take turns using (job entry by punched cards, job output by paper printout).

It's been so many years, and it was only casually explained to me, but I think NASA used three other 360/95 mainframes (the IBM top of the line at the time) located at the Goddard Space Flight Center [4] in Greenbelt MD to track the Apollo missions. I think these ran the same program more-or-less in triplicate (but there was no hardware for syncing). I think NASA also had an IBM 7094 [5] running an independently written program as a backup in case something went wrong with the S/360 computers.

Trust me, these computers were very very capable for the time. It's not like the primitive computer onboard the Apollo LEM. Mainframes were quite up to the task.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer#History [2] bonus points for whoever looks up that institution in Wikipedia and checks the picture to see what's located on the ground floor [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360#Table_of_System.... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddard_Space_Flight_Center [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7090#Notable_applications

I've programmed on an IBM 360 in FORTRAN :-) so I knew they had computers. NASA has always been one of the big US government buyers of computer technology. The technology they had to work with on the ground was certainly relatively more sophisticated than what they could fit into the spacecraft and expect to run reliably.

There were (quite capable) desktop calculators, but just barely (1968): http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9100.htm

But color TV had been widely available for about a decade. In fact, I watched the 1969 moon landings on my parents 1961 color Zenith. (They had rotary phone well into the 80s, however.)

My mother had one of the early SCM Marchant electronic calculators in her lab http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/scm240sr.html. I don't remember the exact date but looks like it looks like it would have been late 1960s as well. I remember how laughably slow it was doing square roots; you could watch it going through some sort of successive approximation algorithm.

I think the moral is that you work with what you got. And that a lot of modern technology makes us more efficient in terms of personnel numbers, but if your personnel isn't constrained, that's not overall that much more efficient. Like, if you can't easily change drawings in a CAD program, that's a pain, but the solution is to hire dozens of drafters to redraw them.

What's more crazy to me is that 50 years later, we have not built an air-breathing aircraft that surpasses the SR-71 in speed or altitude. We clearly have the capacity to achieve great feats of technological ingenuity, but that doesn't mean those feats get done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com