Reddit Reddit reviews Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (The MIT Press)

We found 10 Reddit comments about Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (The MIT Press). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (The MIT Press)
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10 Reddit comments about Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (The MIT Press):

u/gangli0n · 14 pointsr/talesfromtechsupport

> He also worked on the guidance system for Polaris missiles, which was later adapted for use in the Apollo program!

MIT Instrumentation Laboratory? That was – worldwide! – probably one of the coolest places to work at until the 1970s or so. (At that point, the AI lab perhaps took a little bit over over. Also, PARC happened at that time.)

Also, required reading.

u/someuname · 7 pointsr/cableporn

If you haven't read it already I highly recommend the book [Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight] (https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spaceflight/dp/0262516101). Really fascinating and detailed read. It delves in detail of the development of the Apollo digital computer. It also talks extensively about the tension between analog and digital and control from a pilot's perspective verses the engineers.

u/dgriffith · 6 pointsr/SpaceXLounge

If you've got the time, go read the book "Digital Apollo" (Amazon Link) which details a lot of the political and technical problems they had with early space development.

Basically astronauts came over from test pilots and they were very much against automatic controls and taking a back seat to computers. When engineers realised that they needed fly-by-wire at the very minimum to make spaceflight happen, there was much protesting from test pilots who still wanted to have manual actuation of control surfaces and attitude jets "just in case".

When they developed the Saturn V, even though it was obvious that the reaction speed of a human being was in no way going to cut it, it still took a huge amount of convincing for them to finally get the idea that the pilots were going to be just passengers until they reached orbit. A few of the pioneer astronauts (Glenn and Armstrong most notably) knew the deal and knew they needed computer assistance, but there were quite a few holdouts. Even Armstrong's "manual override of the computer" on Apollo 11 still resulted in him using fly-by-wire to make a landing - he was basically just directing the computer to "move over here a bit, and descend at this rate" and it did all the hard work of balancing the spacecraft on its one engine.

This undercurrent of manual control still existed in the Astronaut corps when the Shuttle came along and they still wanted a guy in the seat flicking switches.

u/Lars0 · 5 pointsr/space

NASA definitely did not develop the microprocessor, but they did play a huge role in spurring their advance.

The choice for apollo to have a transistor based, all digital computer was a very risky one. It ended up consuming a huge amount of resources and became a very critical aspect of the mission.

The advancements that were made in the speed and reliability, as well as pushing the state of the art in programming, had a huge affect on computation. To read an excellent book on the apollo digital computer and its development, read Digital Apollo

u/lowspeedlowdrag · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

Have you read "Digital Apollo"? If not you should.

u/ObnoxiousFactczecher · 2 pointsr/space
  1. The Apollo 11 issues are described here in detail.

  2. The terminal phase of landing was semi-automatic at best, not really manual. It was performed mostly because of the computer's inability to read the terrain details, and inadequacy of orbital maps. It simply couldn't have known how suitable the surface was in the point in which it would have landed automatically.

  3. Read the book Digital Apollo, you'll probably find pretty much all details you'll want to know in it.
u/liverandeggsandmore · 1 pointr/Demotivational

David Mindell's "Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight" and Frank O'Brien's "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" give us a wealth of useful detail about all of the computer technology used in the Apollo program.

They include the details of the computers that ran on the orbiting and landing craft, as well as those on the ground.

u/thetrueonion · 1 pointr/books

It's not one of these ebooks. It's just a different book about NASA. So it's also not free, unfortunately. But still a great book!

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spaceflight/dp/0262516101

I got this book from randomly reading an online reddit post, so I'll spread the word myself.

u/orbat · 1 pointr/geek

If Apollo tech geekery is your thing, the book Digital Apollo is a really interesting look at the human-machine interface of the moon missions

u/gngl · 0 pointsr/todayilearned

> "It was the most accurate landing to that point in history."

Given the fact that the descent was uncontrolled, this was a mere coincidence. Generally, people have sucked at controlling spacecrafts manually since the very beginnings of spaceflight, and will continue to do so. (I'd like to remind you of the fine book Digital Apollo at this point.)