Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer

How did the man get to the moon?, What challenges came up with it?, What impact made in history?... those are some question that we usually don't do, we are used to travel to the moon nowadays. This 5 episodes miniseries explain us how was the preparation for the moon landing.

It was somewhere in the 1970's and the big countries were fighting about who achieve more things in less time. Most of the challenges were already done except for one: reach the moon. USA and Russia headed to this goal, they already had space stations around the Earth so they were confident to achieve the goal.

After the president John F. Kennedy gave NASA a due date they began planning the entire project. First they thought of creating a navigation system which will control the machine the entire process. For that purpose they contacted MIT principal who worked with some similar technology in airplanes. 

And so the series go through all the steps needed to put the man on the moon.

We should focus in all the process made in order to create a functional system. Maybe system's architecture wasn't consider that important back in those days. Thankfully we now know how systems must be constructed, we are more efficient in building efficient algorithms. Of course in the documentary they already had the description of the structure, behavior and most views the system had.

So, why is system architecture so important? Well a system architecture can compromise system components and features, so it has to be well planned. Making a good connection between software and hardware needed several shots in order to get the man in space, and a lot more to land it on the moon. What I'm trying to say is that we should test a system as many times as necessary so that we learn the most we can before using a system in any task.

Source:

Documentary video titled “Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer” produced by the Science Channel