Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[Mojo]

The original moon-landing hoax crowd claimed it was filmed in a hangar in New Mexico, not Nevada, because Groom Lake was still off the general public's radar. And it's classic CT blundering since all CTs evolve over time. It ignores the basic fact that between the Army, Navy, USAF, and a host of defense contractors there were hundreds of secure locations to use as a sound stage. The other irony is Groom Lake is part of the Nevada test range, only a few miles from where we tested our "crowd pleasers"...so there was probably more radiation in the soil there (depending on the wind) than there ever will be on the moon.

Hence the necessity of decontamination.

 

[Mojo]

I'll admit I was laughing, but for a different reason.

The thing is, a successful joke requires an understanding of reality, so that the (hopefully) unexpected incongruity of the joke is funny. If you don't understand the actual situation, all a joke looks like is a random comment.

This is why Vixen thinks people are angry with her; she doesn't understand why we're laughing.

 

[Trebuchet]

I've just set a new life goal: Make the 10,000th post in this thread, preferrably on page 500. Achievable this year!

 

[PSXer]

We choose to make the 10,000th post in this thread not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

 

[junkshop]

I've just set a new life goal: Make the 10,000th post in this thread, preferrably on page 500. Achievable this year!

Given the current rate of posts per month, reaching that number of posts by the end of the year is not even a challenge* (the page count, however, is based on your personal settings, and so less predictable). That being said, ensuring that the 10,000th post specifically is authored by you may be trickier to acheive.

I wish you luck in your endeavours..

*this is assuming, of course, that Vixen is not overly distracted by/chooses to focus on one or more of her other very silly threads.

 

[Steve]

Just wondering what our resident denier thinks of the work of Margaret Hamilton, leader of the MIT software development team that created the Apollo spacecraft's guidance software. Was she an intelligent and successful woman who made valuable contributions to science and to the safety of the Apollo astronauts? Or was she a scammer?

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Just wondering what our resident denier thinks of the work of Margaret Hamilton, leader of the MIT software development team that created the Apollo spacecraft's guidance software. Was she an intelligent and successful woman who made valuable contributions to science and to the safety of the Apollo astronauts? Or was she a scammer?

Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia, taken in 1969, showing a stack of Apollo guidance software:

The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, 'I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks'; i.e., the ones needed for landing ... Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones ... If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful Moon landing it was.

— Letter from Margaret H. Hamilton, Director of Apollo Flight Computer Programming MIT Draper Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, titled "Computer Got Loaded", published in Datamation, March 1, 1971^[43]​

According to the IEEE Computer Society and others, Margaret Hamilton came up with "Software Engineering" as the name for what she and her peers were doing.

 

[Trebuchet]

Just wondering what our resident denier thinks of the work of Margaret Hamilton, leader of the MIT software development team that created the Apollo spacecraft's guidance software. Was she an intelligent and successful woman who made valuable contributions to science and to the safety of the Apollo astronauts? Or was she a scammer?

The Wicked Witch of the West? Awesome.
Ok, not that one. thank you for today's learning experience.

 

[JayUtah]

Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia, taken in 1969, showing a stack of Apollo guidance software:

As far as I know, one of the most widely reproduced photos in the software sciences.

A bit of context, though. Colossus (command module) and Luminary (lunar module) software loads were around 40,000 lines of code each. Each of those individual binders represents a single version of the software for one spacecraft type. It's not like the entire stack ran on each mission. As expected, the software was improved continually and customized at times for each mission. The version numbers are purely sequential, so we speak of Luminary 99 as the version running on LM-5, Eagle.

According to the IEEE Computer Society and others, Margaret Hamilton came up with "Software Engineering" as the name for what she and her peers were doing.

As far as I'm concerned, her contribution to the field cannot be overestimated. Nor that of the other Margaret Hamilton to her profession.

And as long as we're calling out the notable contributions of women to the Apollo program, here's Frances "Poppy" Northcutt.



Among her many contributions, she and her team wrote ad hoc computer code at MCC to compute the emergency return maneuvers for Apollo 13, for which they collectively were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Just wondering what our resident denier thinks of the work of Margaret Hamilton, leader of the MIT software development team that created the Apollo spacecraft's guidance software. Was she an intelligent and successful woman who made valuable contributions to science and to the safety of the Apollo astronauts? Or was she a scammer?

Well now it could simply be that she was herself scammed because, not being at the cutting edge of human intelligence, like Vixen, but merely a standard boffin, she wasn't quite clever enough to realize that all that code she wrote couldn't actually do anything.

 

[JayUtah]

Well now it could simply be that she was herself scammed because, not being at the cutting edge of human intelligence, like Vixen, but merely a standard boffin, she wasn't quite clever enough to realize that all that code she wrote couldn't actually do anything.

Or, in @Vixen's mental model, she was just told what to do by the small number of men in charge who knew the truth, and she had no basis for understanding that nothing she was inventing would actually accomplish anything.

 

[JayUtah]

Also, as a person of diminutive stature myself I always appreciated that picture of Ms. Hamilton. In aerospace there's a joke that you can't ship a vehicle to the customer until the weight of the paperwork exceeds the weight of the vehicle. I suspect there ought to be a rule in software engineering that you can't release the product until the printout is taller than you are.

 

[Steve]

Well now it could simply be that she was herself scammed because, not being at the cutting edge of human intelligence, like Vixen, but merely a standard boffin, she wasn't quite clever enough to realize that all that code she wrote couldn't actually do anything.

So much like Vixen herself then, being scammed by all those (male ) deniers.

 

[Axxman300]

Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia, taken in 1969, showing a stack of Apollo guidance software:

View attachment 74691



According to the IEEE Computer Society and others, Margaret Hamilton came up with "Software Engineering" as the name for what she and her peers were doing.

Since today, August 17, is her birthday, I'm happy to add to this:

The "Rope Mother" Margaret Hamilton

A few years after graduating, Margaret Hamilton soon found herself in charge of software development and production for the Apollo missions to the Moon at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.

airandspace.si.edu

Our resident antagonist always has an ant-male slant on this topic, calling the astronauts "Macho", and accusing us of blind hero worship. But NASA and Apollo was a team effort made up of people. Vixen tries to crap on them.

 

[Vixen]

Just wondering what our resident denier thinks of the work of Margaret Hamilton, leader of the MIT software development team that created the Apollo spacecraft's guidance software. Was she an intelligent and successful woman who made valuable contributions to science and to the safety of the Apollo astronauts? Or was she a scammer?

As I said, I am not into personalities and hero worship but good for her.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

There is respect for someone's abilities and contributions, especially when these are advancing human knowledge...

And then there is making things up...And I don't mean writing fiction, given I have cited several actual authors of fiction in this very thread.

 

[wollery]

As I said, I am not into personalities and hero worship but good for her.

All the substantive responses to your posts over the last couple of days, and THAT is what you choose to respond to and say about it?

Pathetic.

 

[Foster Zygote]

All the substantive responses to your posts over the last couple of days, and THAT is what you choose to respond to and say about it?

Pathetic.

I'm not sure if it's an excuse to dismiss the substance of those responses or simple jealousy of other people being admired for their intellectual achievements, or, as seems most likely to me, a ratio of both.

 

[JayUtah]

As I said, I am not into personalities and hero worship but good for her.

Way to miss literally every point.

 

[Andy_Ross]

As far as I know, one of the most widely reproduced photos in the software sciences.

A bit of context, though. Colossus (command module) and Luminary (lunar module) software loads were around 40,000 lines of code each. Each of those individual binders represents a single version of the software for one spacecraft type. It's not like the entire stack ran on each mission. As expected, the software was improved continually and customized at times for each mission. The version numbers are purely sequential, so we speak of Luminary 99 as the version running on LM-5, Eagle.


As far as I'm concerned, her contribution to the field cannot be overestimated. Nor that of the other Margaret Hamilton to her profession.

And as long as we're calling out the notable contributions of women to the Apollo program, here's Frances "Poppy" Northcutt.

View attachment 74692

Among her many contributions, she and her team wrote ad hoc computer code at MCC to compute the emergency return maneuvers for Apollo 13, for which they collectively were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Don't forget the skills of the sewing machinists at Playtex.