Ralph Ragan, Apollo Inertial Division Director

Receipt of NASA's First Contract on Apollo
 “Along in October (1961) Mr. Webb [NASA Administrator] invited Doc and a lot of his people to have dinner with him in his Georgetown mansion, and Bob Seamans [NASA Deputy Administrator] was there, Jerry Weisner [President's Science Advisor], along with the officials from the Boston area. We had a great dinner, and after dinner Webb said, ‘Let’s have some after-dinner drinks in the living room.’ So we all marched into the living room in front of this large fire on this cool October night. Jim Webb motioned to Doc to sit beside him; Jim sat by the fireplace and said, ‘Sit here, Doc.’ Doc grabbed me and plunked me into the chair, and Doc sat on the floor. I think he knew what was coming and I think he wanted to be in a subservient position for what was going to happen.

“After everything was settled, Jim Webb said, ‘Doc, can you design a guidance system that will take men to the moon and back safely?’ Doc said, ‘Yes.’ Quiet. Jim said, ‘Well, when will it be ready?’ Doc said, ‘It’ll be ready when you need it, Mr. Webb.’ Another silence. Jim said, ‘Well, how will I know that it’ll work?’ Doc said, ‘I’ll go along with it.’ That was it. Procurement was a little different in those days.”

David Hoag, Apollo Technical Director

Apollo’s computing achievements
"The Apollo computer was general purpose, but it was very much Apollo-specific. For its time it was very advanced; it had maybe a very early use of integrated circuits, with several transistors on a chip-not millions, but several. Its memory and its speed were maybe something over a thousand times slower and smaller than what you have on your desks at home now. At the time, in the early ‘60s, it was advanced, but as time went on to the time of its use, it was already old in terms of its technology. One thing that was unique with it was that it had over 200 interface circuits, places where parts of the spacecraft could put signals in, and parts where the computer would send signals out. Over 200; it was perhaps a wiring mess, but it really worked.

"On the software we underestimated the task badly. I have a trivia question for you: identify sunrise, corona, solarium, colossus, luminary. There probably aren’t very many people except those people who were responsible for those programs who are here now who’d recognize them,” said Hoag. “We had to handle unmanned and manned missions, Block I and Block II hardware, earth orbit and lunar orbit for lunar missions, command module and landing module-a lot of software. Doing this required a lot of knowledge that was very hard to get.

“It was a single-string system. There was no redundancy when we flew, none. There was no in-flight repair. There were no in-flight hardware problems; I’d like to be able to say that completely, but there was one tiny one that wasn’t really important. There were no in-flight computer anomalies that were not documented ahead of time. And I use the word anomaly because we used that; it was kind of a nicer term than bugs.”

Norm Sears, Apollo Space Guidance Analysis Division Director

Apollo’s legacy at Draper
 “After Apollo of course you all know we had three Skylab missions, and we had the Soyuz rendezvous, which ended the Apollo official program. Since that time we’ve worked with the space shuttle and the space station, and both those programs are still going on today. I just might add two other activities that really were spawned directly from Apollo. One was the digital fly-by-wire program, which was done at the Dryden Flight Research Center. On that program an actual Apollo IMU and computer were put in a Navy F-8 fighter plane. The unique thing about that program was that all the mechanical push rods and cables were removed, so it was truly the first digital fly-by-wire aircraft to actually take off and land. That was a very successful program; it went for 12 years. Today digital flight control systems are very common in both military and commercial aircraft."

Excerpts from speeches given at Draper’s 25th Anniversary Apollo Celebration