Moon Machines

The race to the moon was so representative in the human history, but it is also an example of what competitiveness and self-challenging can make when we want to achieve something, instead of focusing the technological development creating weapons. As a future computer scientist I’m really interested in how the processing power keeps breaking the last records year by year.

This documentary attends a very important leap in computer science, because of the resolution of the non-trivial problem of making a navigation system to go for the uncharted.

First of all, the actual problem of creating a device capable of getting the sense of position where there is no up or down, back or forward, was the first challenge, but the inventiveness and the use of the most straightforward solutions such as the ones the humanity had been using since many centuries ago like the gyroscope and the sextant.

On the other hand, they had the massive problem of making all the calculations needed to keep all the systems up and running since the word reliability was an extremely important concern to the scientists in charge of all the project, being that there were going to be actual people’s lives involved. Not only in the case of the sensors but the actual computers that was another big problem.

With the tech from those times the resolution of the needed operations wasn't trivial but possible. The real deal was that it was impractical and mostly impossible to carry those big computers in the spaceship, so they encountered a dead end in terms of technology and miniaturization, because computers in that time where valuable because of the memory they can use to store the information and process it.

Finally, I have to say that the really fascinating thing to me about the whole journey to the moon regarding computer science was the code it had to be developed to be perfectly reliable and completely optimized to really take advantage of the “miniaturized” hardware with all the limitations it had, even when there where lives involved which is mostly common today when we use computers to transportation medicine and more.