9 ms·

Some Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Moon (2002)

94 points by quaresma 10y ago

imglorp 10y ago
Today I learned APOLLO := America's Program for Orbital and Lunar Landing Operations. So the Greek god thing was a nice intersect?
- grzm 10y ago
  Naming things that have nice properties like this are often designed. Very unlikely that it just happened that way.
- ganduG 10y ago
  Probably a backronym.
- kej 10y ago
  It has always bothered me that they named the moon missions after the god of the sun.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    It has always bothered me that we insist on calling our space farers "astronauts" when they don't go anywhere near the Sun or stars, vs the entirely accurate "cosmonaut".
    - Rooster61 10y ago
      Well, the same is true of astronomy. One could spend their entire life looking through a telescope at only planets, and still be considered an astronomer.
    - cgriswald 10y ago
      Given the number and scope of misnomers in astronomy, astronaut seems downright sensical. Those dark patches on the moon? They're bone dry, but we call them seas. Those beautiful planetary nebulae? They're the tombs of dead stars; any planets there are coincidental. Those small, mountain sized rocks floating in space? We say call them starlike. If it helps, I think of an astronaut as someone who sails among the stars, rather than to the stars. In that sense, it's just as accurate as cosmonaut. But, given that every living thing on Earth can rightfully be called an astronaut or cosmonaut, neither term is very precise. It is more precise to identify a person as human than to identify him as a cosmonaut, since cosmonaut can also refer to monkeys, rabbits, dogs, insects... :)
      - kobeya 10y ago
        Well it's the political origin of the term that is bothersome. The Russians came up with the perfectly sensible and accurate term 'cosmonaut' and the USA refused to use it.
        cgriswald 10y ago
        I'm really curious if it's usage was political. I did find this forum post[0], but it didn't really shed any light on the question. It does, however, suggest that the term was chosen in ignorance of it already existing in fiction for (at least) decades by the time the space race had started. So, if the forum post is to be believed (I couldn't find the cited first source), a defense suggesting it was already in the lexicon couldn't be supported since the selectors of the term themselves admit their ignorance of the term previously being used. Cosmonaut, I believe, more literally translates to "spacenaut", which sounds terrible, because of the Russian word for space, which, like our cosmos, is derived from the word kosmos. The English term cosmonaut is not through the greek kosmos and nautis, but just an Anglicization of the Russian word. [0] - http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000108.html http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000108.html
    - twic 10y ago
      Whereas in British English, they're just "spacemen"!
  - gwern 10y ago
    Also the god of truth/order/reason, projectile weapons (bow & arrow), and colonies...
- kobeya 10y ago
  These are always backronyms.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Just like it was a coincidence how the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act conveniently shortened to USA PATRIOT Act.
sosuke 10y ago
For anyone else looking for a flat PDF http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechanics/Battin.pdf http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechan...
- bluedino 10y ago
  What in the heck is the reader on that page called? Couldn't zoom, fonts looked terrible, very slow...
  - gpvos 10y ago
    https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX
  - ReverseCold 10y ago
    Site works great on my Nexus 5X. Works almost as well as a regular PDF opened in a native app.
  - csours 10y ago
    It absolutely murders ligatures (fl, fi, etc)
- maho 10y ago
  Thank you. The site is pretty unusable on my iPhone.
pokemon-trainer 10y ago
>I still remember the  rst time I told my wife that I was in chargeof “Apollo Software.” She exh orted me: “ Please don’t tell any ofour friends!”I suppose real men do “Hardware” just as real men don’t eatquiche.It was an attitude that prevailed a long time in many organiza-tions. Salaries fo r computer programmers did not keep up with thesalaries of engineers.Engineers did engineering.The programming(or coding)was more menial work and should be left to others. It's funny how much this attitude has changed so much over the years. Now engineering is seen as menial work and the programmers are the real men and rockstars.
- akiselev 10y ago
  It may have changed in the Silicon Valley/tech startup bubble but definitely not in the rest of the world. Engineers still receive far more prestige than IT workers (which is what programmers are largely seen as, technicians) and in most countries, it's as prestigious a career path as being a doctor, lawyer, or professor. The vast majority of companies that work with physical things, like silicon designers/fabricators, auto makers, manufacturers of capital equipment like machining tools and lab equipment, energy companies, agricultural machine suppliers, hardware conglomerates like GE and Samsung, and on and on, still view (for the most part) software as the red headed stepchild, a necessary evil because their hardware has gotten so complex.
  - ashark 10y ago
    It may just be my own hang-ups, but in the company of unequivocal members of the "professional" class I definitely get the sense that as a software developer I sit somewhere above blue-collar, but barely, and that largely due to salary rather than the work I do. I'd imagine it's a bit different for the (giving a very generous estimate) 1% of developers who do work that is all of: challenging, difficult, and important, on a regular basis, but that's not me, or the overwhelming majority of people making pretty damn good money writing software.
    - paganel 10y ago
      For the artsy-intelligentsia folks all the people who do technical stuff (no matter if HW,SW, civil engineering) are just "engineers", i.e. people who have never heard about Stendhal or Vermeer. On top of that my ex-mother-in-law, an accomplished theater actress, used to call us non-actors as "civilians", so there's also that. I for myself don't care one bit how my work is seen by others(I'm a programmer) as long as it's reasonably well paid (meaning I can pay rent, food + some other stuff) and it's not that physically demanding.
Rooster61 10y ago
Great article, but it should probably be marked 2002. I love reading old stories about how the final frontier was (and is) being won.
- apetresc 10y ago
  It's generally understood that Fermat's Library deals with very old papers.
bergoid 10y ago
A treasure trove of great anecdotes. Just one example: A few weeks before the launch, the Navigator Command Module Pilot, Jim Lovell, spent a few hours practicing on the earth-horizon sextant simulator at MIT. He consistently identified the “horizon” about 20 miles above the real horizon. Great! Jim Lovell could be calibrated and his bias number loaded in the flight computer. In the same vein as this article, I am always deeply moved watching Dr. William Widnall's lecture on Apollo's guidance, navigation, and control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vf6Y98ZjwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vf6Y98ZjwQ
crispyambulance 10y ago
> I have at my fingertips several orders of magnitude more computing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer which was carried onboard the Apollo spacecraft. And this marvel of modern technology sits on my desk at home... Yeah, but one has to admit, the Apollo Guidance Computer had way more gravitas any other computer since or before!
Rooster61 10y ago
Something that just struck me. There is absolutely no mention of Margaret Hamilton in this article. Didn't she lead the team that wrote the Apollo software? Her name is the very first one in the original documentation: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
- swsieber 10y ago
  Sort of. Only right at the end: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993945
  - Rooster61 10y ago
    Well, maybe she didn't lead the team during the whole process, but she certainly wrote code for it. You'd think she'd be mentioned, especially in the part about the AGC alarms that went off during Apollo 11's landing sequence.
    - thewonderidiot 10y ago
      If I recall correctly, over the course of the program some 300-400 people wrote code for the AGC, so it's not surprising that not everybody gets mentioned. Don Eyles (who saved Apollo 14) has an MIT org chart from the time of Apollo 11 on his website: http://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html http://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html That only includes people at MIT that worked on it -- there were also many at Raytheon, AC Electronics, and various other contractors (like Adams Associates) that we don't know the names of. The code that kept Apollo 11 going was Hal Laning's, and he's mentioned a lot in the article.
      - Sharlin 10y ago
        > who saved Apollo 14 For reference, I presume you're referring to how the LM computer was monkey-patched to ignore an abort signal from a faulty switch? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent
sethish 10y ago
This is great, the article starts out discussing TeX and then proceeds to screw up every instance of `fi` and `fl` by replacing it with terrible ligatures.
- csours 10y ago
  This is not the original format. This PDF is formatted much better. http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechanics/Battin.pdf http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechan...

94 points by quaresma 10y ago

Today I learned APOLLO := America's Program for Orbital and Lunar Landing Operations. So the Greek god thing was a nice intersect?

grzm 10y ago
Naming things that have nice properties like this are often designed. Very unlikely that it just happened that way.
ganduG 10y ago
Probably a backronym.
kej 10y ago
It has always bothered me that they named the moon missions after the god of the sun.
- kobeya 10y ago
  It has always bothered me that we insist on calling our space farers "astronauts" when they don't go anywhere near the Sun or stars, vs the entirely accurate "cosmonaut".
  - Rooster61 10y ago
    Well, the same is true of astronomy. One could spend their entire life looking through a telescope at only planets, and still be considered an astronomer.
  - cgriswald 10y ago
    Given the number and scope of misnomers in astronomy, astronaut seems downright sensical. Those dark patches on the moon? They're bone dry, but we call them seas. Those beautiful planetary nebulae? They're the tombs of dead stars; any planets there are coincidental. Those small, mountain sized rocks floating in space? We say call them starlike. If it helps, I think of an astronaut as someone who sails among the stars, rather than to the stars. In that sense, it's just as accurate as cosmonaut. But, given that every living thing on Earth can rightfully be called an astronaut or cosmonaut, neither term is very precise. It is more precise to identify a person as human than to identify him as a cosmonaut, since cosmonaut can also refer to monkeys, rabbits, dogs, insects... :)
    - kobeya 10y ago
      Well it's the political origin of the term that is bothersome. The Russians came up with the perfectly sensible and accurate term 'cosmonaut' and the USA refused to use it.
      - cgriswald 10y ago
        I'm really curious if it's usage was political. I did find this forum post[0], but it didn't really shed any light on the question. It does, however, suggest that the term was chosen in ignorance of it already existing in fiction for (at least) decades by the time the space race had started. So, if the forum post is to be believed (I couldn't find the cited first source), a defense suggesting it was already in the lexicon couldn't be supported since the selectors of the term themselves admit their ignorance of the term previously being used. Cosmonaut, I believe, more literally translates to "spacenaut", which sounds terrible, because of the Russian word for space, which, like our cosmos, is derived from the word kosmos. The English term cosmonaut is not through the greek kosmos and nautis, but just an Anglicization of the Russian word. [0] - http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000108.html http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000108.html
  - twic 10y ago
    Whereas in British English, they're just "spacemen"!
- gwern 10y ago
  Also the god of truth/order/reason, projectile weapons (bow & arrow), and colonies...
kobeya 10y ago
These are always backronyms.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Just like it was a coincidence how the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act conveniently shortened to USA PATRIOT Act.

sosuke 10y ago

For anyone else looking for a flat PDF http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechanics/Battin.pdf http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechan...

bluedino 10y ago
What in the heck is the reader on that page called? Couldn't zoom, fonts looked terrible, very slow...
- gpvos 10y ago
  https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX
- ReverseCold 10y ago
  Site works great on my Nexus 5X. Works almost as well as a regular PDF opened in a native app.
- csours 10y ago
  It absolutely murders ligatures (fl, fi, etc)
maho 10y ago
Thank you. The site is pretty unusable on my iPhone.

pokemon-trainer 10y ago

>I still remember the  rst time I told my wife that I was in chargeof “Apollo Software.” She exh orted me: “ Please don’t tell any ofour friends!”I suppose real men do “Hardware” just as real men don’t eatquiche.It was an attitude that prevailed a long time in many organiza-tions. Salaries fo r computer programmers did not keep up with thesalaries of engineers.Engineers did engineering.The programming(or coding)was more menial work and should be left to others. It's funny how much this attitude has changed so much over the years. Now engineering is seen as menial work and the programmers are the real men and rockstars.

akiselev 10y ago
It may have changed in the Silicon Valley/tech startup bubble but definitely not in the rest of the world. Engineers still receive far more prestige than IT workers (which is what programmers are largely seen as, technicians) and in most countries, it's as prestigious a career path as being a doctor, lawyer, or professor. The vast majority of companies that work with physical things, like silicon designers/fabricators, auto makers, manufacturers of capital equipment like machining tools and lab equipment, energy companies, agricultural machine suppliers, hardware conglomerates like GE and Samsung, and on and on, still view (for the most part) software as the red headed stepchild, a necessary evil because their hardware has gotten so complex.
- ashark 10y ago
  It may just be my own hang-ups, but in the company of unequivocal members of the "professional" class I definitely get the sense that as a software developer I sit somewhere above blue-collar, but barely, and that largely due to salary rather than the work I do. I'd imagine it's a bit different for the (giving a very generous estimate) 1% of developers who do work that is all of: challenging, difficult, and important, on a regular basis, but that's not me, or the overwhelming majority of people making pretty damn good money writing software.
  - paganel 10y ago
    For the artsy-intelligentsia folks all the people who do technical stuff (no matter if HW,SW, civil engineering) are just "engineers", i.e. people who have never heard about Stendhal or Vermeer. On top of that my ex-mother-in-law, an accomplished theater actress, used to call us non-actors as "civilians", so there's also that. I for myself don't care one bit how my work is seen by others(I'm a programmer) as long as it's reasonably well paid (meaning I can pay rent, food + some other stuff) and it's not that physically demanding.

Rooster61 10y ago

Great article, but it should probably be marked 2002. I love reading old stories about how the final frontier was (and is) being won.

apetresc 10y ago
It's generally understood that Fermat's Library deals with very old papers.

bergoid 10y ago

A treasure trove of great anecdotes. Just one example: A few weeks before the launch, the Navigator Command Module Pilot, Jim Lovell, spent a few hours practicing on the earth-horizon sextant simulator at MIT. He consistently identified the “horizon” about 20 miles above the real horizon. Great! Jim Lovell could be calibrated and his bias number loaded in the flight computer. In the same vein as this article, I am always deeply moved watching Dr. William Widnall's lecture on Apollo's guidance, navigation, and control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vf6Y98ZjwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vf6Y98ZjwQ

crispyambulance 10y ago

> I have at my fingertips several orders of magnitude more computing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer which was carried onboard the Apollo spacecraft. And this marvel of modern technology sits on my desk at home... Yeah, but one has to admit, the Apollo Guidance Computer had way more gravitas any other computer since or before!

Rooster61 10y ago

Something that just struck me. There is absolutely no mention of Margaret Hamilton in this article. Didn't she lead the team that wrote the Apollo software? Her name is the very first one in the original documentation: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

swsieber 10y ago
Sort of. Only right at the end: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993945
- Rooster61 10y ago
  Well, maybe she didn't lead the team during the whole process, but she certainly wrote code for it. You'd think she'd be mentioned, especially in the part about the AGC alarms that went off during Apollo 11's landing sequence.
  - thewonderidiot 10y ago
    If I recall correctly, over the course of the program some 300-400 people wrote code for the AGC, so it's not surprising that not everybody gets mentioned. Don Eyles (who saved Apollo 14) has an MIT org chart from the time of Apollo 11 on his website: http://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html http://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html That only includes people at MIT that worked on it -- there were also many at Raytheon, AC Electronics, and various other contractors (like Adams Associates) that we don't know the names of. The code that kept Apollo 11 going was Hal Laning's, and he's mentioned a lot in the article.
    - Sharlin 10y ago
      > who saved Apollo 14 For reference, I presume you're referring to how the LM computer was monkey-patched to ignore an abort signal from a faulty switch? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent

sethish 10y ago

This is great, the article starts out discussing TeX and then proceeds to screw up every instance of `fi` and `fl` by replacing it with terrible ligatures.

csours 10y ago
This is not the original format. This PDF is formatted much better. http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechanics/Battin.pdf http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~psingla/Teaching/CelestialMechan...