The Apollo Mission Programs

October 8, 2009

I note with some interest the recent release of some of the lunar module code in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.

This is related to the Virtual AGC project, which is an effort to build an emulator for the Apollo Guidance Computer.

I’m fascinated by the constraints placed on computing resources in outer space environments, so I find this all quite interesting.

I’ll also take the opportunity to plug James Tomayko‘s book “Computers In Space: Journeys With NASA” – the content should be obvious from the title. I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Tomayko speak on this topic when he was on the ACM lecture circuit in the early 1990s and found his talk fascinating.