Just in case you bought a Saturn V off of ebay and it didn't come with the manual!
Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
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Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#12Fascinating. And 45 years later, here we are building photo-sharing apps.
Just imagine how much good that could be accomplished if the time spent simply on meaningless snark about photo-sharing apps was instead productively deployed.
OK, now I'm curious. Please Show HN your photo-sharing app!
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#13Just in case you bought a Saturn V off of ebay and it didn't come with the manual!
That's almost exactly what Orbital Sciences did with an equivalent Russian rocket engine.
I guess someone lost the PDF for it.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#14SA-507 launched Apollo 12, November 14, 1969.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#15Man, I would have given up some serious allowance money for this back when the Apollo program was active. Reading through the descriptions of some of the flight and launch control systems gives me a high level of respect for the software folk responsible. Sure, the systems were simple compared to today, but there was no room for any of the sloppiness we see passed off as "software engineering" in the interim years. "…
I went to a talk by one of the people responsible for the Apollo guidance software (Dr. Battin from what was in the 1960s the MIT Instrumentation Lab) a few years ago. One of his stories was about how some astronauts visited Raytheon where the code was being effectively "woven" into the core memory. As he explained it, one of the purposes of the visit was to impress upon those (women) who were making the core memories that it was really important not to make a mistake because otherwise these nice young boys would die.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#16Fascinating. And 45 years later, here we are building photo-sharing apps.
Or discussing QE and stocks ad infinitum.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#17It 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.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#18It 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.
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.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#19Apollo documentation:
http://history.nasa.gov/afj/documents.htm
Apollo Lunar Module documentation: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-LMdocs.html
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#20It 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.
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.