NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
"Sunburst and Luminary", Apollo software and navigation
From: Don Seltzer
Date: 2018 Mar 7, 10:52 -0500
From: Don Seltzer
Date: 2018 Mar 7, 10:52 -0500
While on the subject of NASA and navigation, retired software engineer Don Eyles, has just published his autobiographical
account of the Apollo program. Eyles wrote software for the Lunar
Module and achieved his 15 minutes of fame during the Apollo 14 mission
when the Abort switch began to malfuction, threatening the lunar
landing. Eyles was roused out of bed in the middle of the night and
rushed to the laboratory to quickly code up a software patch to bypass
the problem. This was in the days that such software fixes were hand
entered into memory, byte by byte.
From what I have seen of
the book it is both an in depth look at the technology of the day and
the social atmosphere and team engineering culture of the times. I think it covers the space navigation and control methods of that era.Don Seltzer
