(dramatic music)
October 4, 1957,
the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I,
the world's first satellite, and the space race was on.
After jettisoning the nose faring
and last stage of the carrier rocket,
the Sputnik started circling the earth.
Now, Sputnik was only the size of a volleyball
and you could not see that with the naked eye.
But what you did see very vividly
was the booster rocket that put that satellite into orbit.
And at 4:00 a.m. I walked out on my back porch
with my daughter in my arms,
and much to my utter amazement,
that satellite came virtually over my house.
In the early '60s there were the two superpowers,
the Soviet Union and the U.S.
There was a lot of anxiety or uncertainty,
and the feeling at that time was that this was somehow
a judgment of which was the better system.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade
and do the other things.
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
When Kennedy started the program, for the first two years,
we didn't know how we'd land on the moon.
I was younger, I was a beginner to them,
and they said, "Let's do it."
We all had the confidence that we were just gonna do it.
It was never really a question of failing.
(flourishing music)
In 1961, JFK began a dramatic expansion
of the U.S. Space Program,
partly in response to the Russians and Sputnik,
and partly to inspire a nation to achieve greatness.
Now it is time to take longer strides.
Time for a great new American enterprise.
Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role
in space achievement,
which in many ways may hold the key
to our future on Earth.
Kennedy's enthusiasm was joined
by an elite team who shared his vision.
Werner von Braun was a German aerospace engineer,
known as the father of rocket science.
Bob Siemens at NASA had the vision
to bring the right team together.
And Dr. Charles Stark Draper,
who had pioneered inertial guidance.
The Apollo program was born.
(dramatic music)
12, 11, 10, nine, ignition sequence start.
Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
Liftoff, we have a liftoff.
Liftoff on Apollo 11.
Four forward, drifting to the right a little.
As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
prepared to go to the moon,
they knew this mission was made possible
by thousands of engineers, scientists, and technicians.
At the height of the Apollo program,
there were over 400,000 engineers, technicians,
and scientists working around the country
and around the clock to develop and invent
all the new technology required
to make a moon landing possible.
Among the unsung heroes of Apollo
are the engineers from Draper,
formerly the MIT Instrumentation Lab.
They designed the onboard computers
and invented the software that made it technically possible
to send men to the moon,
and bring the crew safely back to earth.
Eagle, Houston we see you on the steerable, over.
Roger, how does it look?
Roger.
Landing, 3,000 feet.
You're looking great.
The lab's founder, Charles Stark Draper,
went to great lengths to figure out
how to guide a spacecraft to the moon.
Draper, known as a navigational pioneer,
had just proven his new inertial guidance technology
for the military.
He was now looking to space.
It all started in World War II under fire control,
which is what Doc Draper originally started
in the instrumentation world,
and from that was spawned the inertial
navigation concept and systems.
Everyone talks about Doc, he was a legend at the lab.
The culture was kind of fluid
and we were pretty free to work
what hours were comfortable for us.
Having that fluidity allowed us to be
more productive, I think.
Doc used to come down to almost
every part of the laboratory.
He was involved.
He'd talk to each individual.
He'd come down with his little green visor.
And if there was an important job in the lane,
he'd go over, look over the man's shoulder,
comment, ask how it was going.
(dramatic music)
The 1960s marked a giant leap
in technology firsts.
This was the Apollo decade,
and it would take a series of firsts
to get man to the moon.
NASA was inventing the whole mission, everything was new.
And these actual animations from the time
helped to explain this whole new concept
of lunar orbit rendezvous.
The computer was the the top of the list.
A computer to provide guidance, navigation, and control.
Without these three words, Neil Armstrong
and the Apollo 11 crew would never have made it to the moon.
Draper's probably most famous for
the development of advanced guidance,
navigation, and control systems,
or as we shortened it down to GNC.
Navigation is something that tells you where you are.
And guidance tells you where you want to go.
Control enables you to get there.
It was actually a critical key element for us
getting the Apollo contract.
The job of designing the guidance system
to take man to the moon was awarded to Draper.
This was the very first Apollo contract,
and the good news came via telegraph.
This computer had to be able to withstand
the rigors of space flight, including extreme temperatures
and intense vibrations.
It had to be perfect because human lives were at stake.
Computer engineer Hal Lanning invented the code
that was an easy to use new language
for entering complex math equations into a computer.
With so little available memory
for the Apollo computer, and so many commands,
it was Lanning's genius idea to create
a priority system.
The computer would prioritize and run
the most important commands first.
The less important jobs could run in the background.
Lanning's unique computer language, ironically called MAC,
or Machine Aided Cognition,
turned the moon landing concept into reality.
It was the MAC language that was developed
here at the laboratory, an exquisite engineering language.
It was critical that both the command module and the LM
be able to compute solutions for maneuvers.
We wanted to make sure that either
the command module could get the LM,
or the LM could get back to the command module.
It was a breakthrough in all of computing
for what was going on,
both the hardware and the software.
People today can't believe it.
It was all done with punch cards and key punches.
Most kids today don't know what a punch card looks like.
You program, you go in and you punched it on a key punch
and put a batch of cards and ran it through a card reader
into those big IBM computers.
So you had to make sure they were done right,
no little errors, no cards out of order and so on.
The result was the Apollo Guidance Computer.
The first portable computer that guided man to the moon.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was no more powerful
than a calculator, but used a real-time operating system
to control the spacecraft.
Apollo Guidance Computer, at that day it was replacing
banks of computers that filled the whole room.
The Guidance Computer was really an advance.
And the only way to get the weight and the size down
was to go to integrated circuits.
That's something that hadn't been done before.
You could not build a computer out of transistors
to do the job that was needed to be done
without filling up the whole command module.
Integrated circuits were the way to go,
and one time we were testing 1/3 of all
the integrated circuits that were being
manufactured in the United States.
We were pretty closely linked
to the real beginning of computing.
The heart of the Apollo Guidance System
was the IMU, or Inertial Measurement Unit.
The IMU was a three gimbled system
containing three gyroscopes and three accelerometers.
And the purpose of it was to provide a stabilized platform
with accelerometers that would measure the acceleration
and be used in the guidance equations.
Data was fed to the Guidance Computer
so that the crew could control and navigate the spacecraft.
The system was so precise, that no matter what
the position of the spacecraft was,
hurdling through space, the orientation was always stable.
While primary navigation of the spacecraft
would be done from the ground,
an onboard inertial navigation system with a sextant
was developed for the crews.
Operating independently from all other navigational systems,
the sextant consists of two lines of sight:
a wide-angle scanning telescope
and a 28-hour narrow field of view space sextant.
This made it possible for the astronauts
to check their navigation settings and stay on course.
The IMU was packaged in a spherical case,
a ball of wizardry and magic conceived by Doc Draper.
For the first time ever, pilots would fly a craft
with all digital controls.
The software that we developed to control these vehicles,
the command module, the lunar module,
and the combinations of those things,
that had never been done with a digital computer
up to that point in time.
Simulators tested the software end to end.
It's an enormous amount of testing to do
because at that point you were testing
the complete sequence, say from the lunar orbit,
the descent, to landing on the moon.
We simulated the dickens out of that thing.
The Apollo spacecraft would travel to the moon
with revolutionary technology.
The first ever digital flight control system,
known as digital fly-by-wire.
Fly-by-wire is how we got to the moon and back.
There was no manual stick.
You had to let the computer do all the process for you.
The computer controlled the hydraulics
and controlled jets that you turned on to rotate.
Turned on engines, it was all very cutting edge.
(dramatic music)
As the Apollo 11 team are just months away
from a moon landing, we are reminded of the man
who set the challenge and who sadly not be present
for the historic moment.
This remarkable footage shows JFK's last visit
to Cape Canaveral in 1963,
just one week shy of his assassination.
No single space project in this period
will be more impressive to mankind
or more important for the long range exploration of space.
And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
He would never see man walk on the moon.
But the team of visionaries he assembled
risked all to fulfill his dream.
(intense music)
July 16, 1969, with over a half billion people
around the world watching,
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin
are set to leave Earth.
And for the first time in history
set down on another planetary body.
The defining moment of the Apollo program
was the moon landing.
Yet, it almost didn't happen.
Apollo 11 was our first attempt at landing
on the moon.
The guidance and navigation system was probably
one of the most complex subsystems
the flight crews had to work with.
One evening, after a long's days work,
I cam out of my office and walked outside
and there in the sky above me
was the real full moon itself.
It just kind of overwhelmed me to think
that's where we're going.
And I have a part in it.
Ignition sequence start.
Three, two, one, zero, all engine running.
Liftoff, we have a liftoff.
Liftoff on Apollo 11.
There it is, the Earth, see it?
Just beautiful.
After a two day journey to the moon
the crew of three are captured into lunar orbit.
During this critical phase,
called trans-lunar injection, or TLI,
the crew loses communication with Mission Control.
(dramatic music)
During the blackout, Mission Control awaits anxiously
as the spacecraft makes its critical burns
to get into the exact trajectory necessary
for a successful lunar landing.
Armstrong and Aldrin move to the lunar module
and prepare for separation from the mothership
and their descent to the lunar surface.
Two minutes 53 seconds from reacquiring
the spacecraft.
Collins will remain solo in lunar orbit
awaiting their return.
Leaving the moon and going back to lunar orbit
is actually a relatively easy maneuver.
It didn't place really great demands
on the Guidance Computer.
But the lunar landing did.
It was by far the busiest phase of the mission
for either spacecraft.
The lunar landscape is comprised
mostly of craters and rocks.
Picking the spot where man would land
required a great deal of calculation.
Risks varied from landing on a boulder and tipping over
to sinking into a soft crater
and disappearing forever into a dust cloud.
With the help of lunar scientists
and images from a lunar surveyor
sent just before the Apollo missions,
NASA selected several suitable sites
with minimal boulders and craters.
The lunar orbiter mission took a lot of photography
of the lunar surface that was so valuable
to the Apollo planning.
Not only photography, but it began to define
the gravitational field around the moon,
which was also very important to guidance and navigation.
It was critical that the guidance
and navigation could determine the position
and flight path of the lunar lander
before descent to the surface.
On Apollo 11 the landing was divided into three phases.
There was the breaking phase, the visibility phase,
and then there was the semi-manual landing phase.
This is Apollo Control.
Armstrong and Aldrin began checking out
activating the lunar module.
Both spacecraft looking very good at this time.
During the breaking phase one of the main tasks
was to get the landing radar locked onto the surface.
After the radar had locked on,
Buzz Aldrin keyed in a special display
in order to watch the landing radar data.
Houston, you're looking at our Delta H.
That's affirmative.
And as soon as he did that.
1202.
(dramatic music)
The alarm light lit up and we heard from
the spacecraft's program alarm.
[Computerized Voice] Program alarm.
1202.
(static drowns out speech)
Apollo 11, this is Houston, how do you read?
It's a 1202 alarm, which was an alarm
we never expected to see in flight.
It was an emergency, it was scary.
I can still remember looking across the room
at a couple of the guys saying, "Oh my god, 1202.
"What's going on?"
A problem with the rendezvous radar electronics
is stealing precious computer time.
Aldrin's special display tips the computer into overload.
Columbia, Houston, over.
1202 alarm is the statement that says
we ran out of space and we're taking care of it.
Columbia, Houston, we're standing by, over.
There was priority system set up
in the Apollo Guidance Computer
so that priority tasks could interrupt
tasks with less priority.
If we had waited a second to do the next full calculation
it would have gone unstable.
The priority display said I'm more important
than any of you, so it interrupts everything
that's been set up to go.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was trying
to process too many computer commands at once
during the landing sequence.
The exhausted computer sounded its 1202 alarm,
signaling an overload.
If you're talking about the landing,
there's nothing you can do.
You can't complete the landing
so your only option now is to just go back
to the command module.
NASA's Jack Garmin had a cheat sheet
and was confident the computer could be trusted.
Margaret Hamilton and a team of software engineers
had programmed the computer for such a scenario.
So through the whole period of that alarm
the spacecraft was still under control.
Had it been capable of stealing the cycles
it would have been a disaster.
The computer worked exactly as it was designed.
Columbia reading you loud and clear.
It was a combination of hardware, the software,
an amazing system of systems.
Operating system that was designed by Hal Lanning
really was a blessing to that
because when it got to overload situation
it just did the important jobs and landed.
Attitude control is good.
Manual altitude controllable.
The ruling was that the landing could continue
unless there were further signs of problems,
and therefor the call was a go.
Roger, understand, go for landing.
Years of preparation and testing
paved the way for the historic landing.
In the final seconds of the descent,
flying faster than anticipated,
Armstrong and Aldrin overshoot
their intended landing site.
They are heading for a hazardous rocky area,
and manually fly the lunar module
to a safe landing spot with just seconds of fuel to spare.
The alarm showing in this case
was the pilot was flying the vehicle manually
and he was picking out a spot to try to hover over
and then descend to land.
He had to find a spot that wasn't so rocky.
Pretty rocky area.
Worst of all worlds would be to tip it over.
They did in fact come within about 30 seconds
of running out of fuel, which would have been
very dangerous if you're close to the moon.
And then Buzz Aldrin said.
40 Feet down, 2 /12, picking up some dust.
And at that point I knew this was different.
Okay, engine stop.
We copy you down, Eagle.
Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed.
Roger, Tranquility, we copy
you're on the ground.
You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.
We're breathing again.
One small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
The Apollo program, to me, was the most exciting.
A lot of the other things we've done,
with the Shuttle for instance,
have been technically very challenging
but it didn't have the backdrop
of landing on the moon.
It's almost hard to believe
that we were doing all of those things.
The Saturn V worked every time we asked it to,
and the computer system worked every time we asked it to.
It just was a remarkable period in time.
The amount of memory that was on
the Apollo Guidance Computer
is a couple of orders of magnitudes less
than what you carry around as a smartphone in your pocket.
That's absolutely mind blowing.
(helicopter blades whirring)
(crowd applauding)
It is kind of miraculous to me
that we actually did it.
Doc's attitude is what brought the best
out of these groups of people.
He liked to say that his lab
builds things that work.
And it sounds so fundamental,
but it actually is very key
to why Draper's been successful.
And it's a very good legacy to leave behind.
(gentle music)
I can't presume to predict
what the future's going to hold,
but I'm sure it's going to be different
from anything we've imagined.
The human race is certainly gonna go out into the stars.
I thank you very much.