Tag Archives: Apollo

Apollo: The Alignment Optical Telescope

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The Apollo program is a constant reminder that we just don’t need so much to get the job done. Sure it’s easier with today’s tools, but hard work can do it too. [Bill Hammack] elaborates on one such piece of engineering: The Alignment Optical Telescope.

The telescope was used to find the position of the Lunar Module in space so that its guidance computer could do the calculations needed to bring the module home. It does this using techniques that we’ve been using for centuries on land and still use today in space; although now it’s done with computer vision. …read more

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Decoding Rediscovered Rope Memory From the Apollo Guidance Computer

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On August 25th, 1966, an Apollo Command Module was launched aboard a Saturn IB rocket in mission AS-202. This mission was intended to immediately precede the ill-fated Apollo 1 mission, the AS-202 was unmanned, serving as a test of flight hardware, fuel cells, and the guidance and navigation control systems. This mission used the first Apollo Guidance Computer ever flown, and this mission was vital to testing the computer that would take men to the moon.

While the software from the later missions exists and is available on Github, the earlier Block I spacecraft, including the unmanned Apollo 4 and …read more

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Rackspace to go private after $4.3B acquisition by private equity firm Apollo

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rackspace-earnings Rackspace, which is still best known as a hosting company even as it has expanded aggressively into offering services for businesses that use other platforms, went public in 2008. Now, however, it’s going private again after accepting a $4.3 billion offer (or $32 per share) in cash from private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval and… Read More Continue reading Rackspace to go private after $4.3B acquisition by private equity firm Apollo→

Hackaday Links: August 14, 2016

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Hey London peeps! Hackaday and Tindie are doing a London meetup! It’s this Wednesday, the 17th.

What do you do if you need Gigabytes of storages in the 80s? You get tape drives. What do you do if you need Terabytes of storage in the year 2000? You get tape. The IBM Totalstorage 3584 is an automated tape storage unit made sometime around the year 2000. It held Terabytes of data, and [Stephen] picked up two of them from a local university. Here’s the teardown. Unfortunately, there’s no footage from a GoPro stuck inside the machine when it’s changing tapes, …read more

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Riding Shotgun In The Apollo 12 Lunar Lander

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Last week we had a walk through of the Lunar Module’s source code with Don Eyles, who wrote the landing programs. Now you can take a rather thrilling ride to see Don’s code in action.

Below is an annotated video of the Apollo 12 landing, in real-time. It’s worth setting aside a quarter-hour to check it out. In an age where everyone is carrying around an HD (or way better) camera in their pocket, following along with radio broadcasts, still images, and small slivers of video might not sound that awesome. But it is!

The video takes us from …read more

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