When slide rulers and mimeographs ruled the heavens

It was 42 years ago today. I must have missed it since it was not a major anniversary and NASA is busy closing down the Shuttle program and all that, but it was July 20, 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their spacecraft on the moon in a nail-biting approach and landing that, if done by the book, should have been aborted. Computer glitches and inadvertent warning lights telling them there were problems, seasoned flight crew in Houston saying ignore it. It's a false signal. Neil Armstrong switching to manual on an approach that was too fast with a spacecraft almost out of their allotted fuel supply yet bringing his ship into land in a first-ever, never been done before, test-pilot type of bravado move. And there you have it.

My wife will tell you how fascinated I am with Space. Ever since I was a little boy staring up at a towering Apollo 11 in the cavernous assembly building at Cape Kennedy (before it was Cape Canaveral) I have had a longing to go into space. Children in the US, and around the world, were fascinated by the Apollo program and launches were live TV extravaganzas. When Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins launched for the Moon that summer long ago, I was with my family at a vacation lodge in Estes Park, Colorado. Four days later, when the Eagle was ready to land, the entire lodge was full of families crowded around a small black & white television in the common room, watching breathlessly as the moment unfolded from an alien surface far, far away. A moment I will never forget.

My mother came to visit yesterday and I posted a picture of her to Facebook and inadvertently wrote a posting for my family to know she had arrived safely: "The Eagle has landed." Funny as I had not even thought about Apollo 11 nor the significance of what I was writing. Just a phrase from history that lies close to my heart.

Today I stumbled upon a story in Atlantic Wire which linked to some Tumblr posts by the National Archive. They have unearthed (no pun intended) the original flight plan documents for Apollo 11.

Original Flight Plan 

While it is historically interesting, it also sort of makes the mind boggle to look at that mimeographed document (yes, mimeograph - a form of duplication before xerox machines and electronic printers). There it is, in all of its 1960's crudeness. Sort of quaint actually with its activity checklist, timeline, and little drawings of capsules, lunar landers and the like. It just makes me marvel at how amazing a feat it was.

They say our smartphones have more computing power than an Apollo spacecraft. No doubt about it. And it is just fantastic that mankind, without the aid of laptops, clusters, super computers, iPads, or other portable items, put together a paper copy of a highly technical flight plan, emergency procedure manuals, and other documentation, packed it into a small capsule and sent 3 men into space to land an unproven 4-legged, wingless, rocket propelled machine onto the surface of the Moon. They used slide rulers to do their computations! Jeez. Makes my brain hurt.

So hats off to you guys, again. You captured and fueled the imagination of a generation. Someday maybe we'll go back.