How inspiring. Reading this manual gives an idea of the magnificent effort involved, covering so many disciplines.
Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#43It 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.
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.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#44244 pages? Modern car user manulas are often thicker.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#45It 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.
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.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#46Fascinating. And 45 years later, here we are building photo-sharing apps.
Back then, a whole lot of people (women) working on Apollo were typing up memos.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#47It 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.
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.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#48I'd love to learn more about the Emergency Egress System described on pg192. It seems to me the chances of reaching the rubber vestibule or the coil-spring-cushioned blast room are fairly slim.
Saturn Emergency system demo by James Burke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLiAwSKkm6k
Also, command module and spacesuit demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re0F-DgNQTA
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#49It 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.
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.
Re: Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]
#50For those interested, there is also a fascinating book The Apollo Guidance Computer : Architecture and Operation http://www.apolloguidancecomputer.com/index.html http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architect...
Incidentally, the publisher of the AGC book, Praxis Publishing, has a whole collection of well-written, engaging, and technically deep books in their space exploration category, namely, 'How Apollo Flew to the Moon'. http://www.praxis-publishing.co.uk/books.php