Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer

Nowadays, we have a great capacity to find solutions to problems through computers, which have a lot of memory, processing capacity and which give us results in a minimum amount of time. However, this was not always the case. In the beginning, computers were very big and did not have the capacity they have today.

That's why this documentary surprised me a lot, to see how the process went so that the engineers could do the calculations for the Apollo to reach the moon. In the beginning this process looked quite complicated for the engineers and professionals to do by hand, but with the help of a computer, which didn't have much memory, it made the process easier for them.

One of the scenes that I really liked was when you see the computer printing out calculation results and that it was large amounts of paper to be able to visualize those results. I admire the great effort that was made at that time, because with the tools they had, they obtained a satisfactory result, since a small error in those calculations would have become a disaster and would have cost the lives of the astronauts on board the Apollo.

In conclusion, I think that the advance of technology and the capacity of computers has been for the better, it has helped humanity to solve problems in a more efficient way, to discover and explore the world more. If I had been one of those engineers at that time, I would have felt a great responsibility and guilt if something had gone wrong, but fortunately the tools that they had at that time, helped a lot to decrease the risk of this project and of course to decrease the risk of losing human lives, which I imagine had to go through errors like that in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the computers.