Hugh Blair-Smith - Left Brains for the Right Stuff: Computers, Space, and History

Left Brains for the Right Stuff

Computers, Space, and History

Hugh Blair-Smith

Left Brains for the Right Stuff, Published November, 2015

Copyright 2015, Hugh Blair-Smith

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Published by SDP Publishing, an imprint of SDP Publishing Solutions, LLC.

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ISBN-13 (print): 978-0-9964345-3-9

ISBN-13 (ebook): 978-0-9964345-4-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015947856

For the many individuals around the world who cooperated gladly, generously, and passionately to add rocket science, navigation science, and especially computer science ( electronic Left Brains ) to the Right Stuff. They answered the long-sought quest for a moral equivalent to war and changed the world.

Table of Contents

Invocation

Creator of the Universe,

Creator of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars,

Creator also of the elegant and beautiful laws

That govern the motions of all these,

Creator, finally, of our combination of intelligence and curiosity

Enabling us to find our way around this universe:

We have but little understanding and less agreement

As to who and what You are,

But we do know what has been created, and we can agree

That its only natural to feel and express gratitude.

And so we do.

Amen.

Hugh Blair-Smith, 2014

Prologue

The Starting Gun: 1961

The telephone rang with what seemed to be a special urgency, as if it too had been galvanized by President John F. Kennedys words to Congress on May 25, 1961 only a few days before.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

The Presidents bold eloquence rose precisely to the significance of the moment. Over the past four years, the Congressand the nation they representedhad been shocked by the launch of Sputnik, encouraged by President Eisenhowers creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, embarrassed by repeated failures of rocket launchers, frustrated by delays in the manned Mercury program, and now humiliated by the Soviet propaganda machines trumpeting of the triumphant orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12. It was time to pick up the Goett committees 1960 concept called Apollo and make it a program.

The telephone sat on a corner of a cluttered desk on the fourth floor of an old wood-framed, brick-faced factory building in the gritty industrial heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The hand that reached out to it belonged to a sixty-year-old man with a nearly full head of graying hair, a still-robust build, steel-rimmed glasses over blue-gray eyesaviators eyes, restless, missing nothingin a ruddy face that showed his preference for keeping the top down on his Morgan Plus 4. Professor Charles Stark Doc Draper of MITs Aeronautics and Astronautics Department was founder and director of the Instrumentation Laboratory, which had recently delivered computer-centered inertial guidance, navigation, and control ( GN&C ) systems to the United States Navy for the ultimate deterrent, the Fleet Ballistic Missile ( FBM ) system. Each FBM unit was a nuclear-powered submarine capable of roaming the undersea world indefinitely, kept informed of its position by inertial navigation without reference to any external signals. An FBM sub carried sixteen Polaris missiles, each with its own GN&C system operated by a micro-miniaturized digital differential analyzer, a hybrid type of digital device dressed up as an analog computer. No air defense could jam guidance signals to a self-contained system that didnt need any. And no aggressor could be sure of taking out all such submarines in a first strike; enough would be left to exact an unacceptable price.

Stark Draper. The voice was clear and confident.

Hi Stark, its Jim. James Edwin Webb had been Docs colleague at Sperry Gyroscope years ago, and had taken over as NASAs second administrator three months earlier. Doc had no trouble guessing what the call was about.

Hi Jim. What can I do for you?

Webb knew well enough what Doc would say, but he had to put the questions and the answers on the record. Can you build a GN&C system for Apollo?

Yes.

When will it be ready?

When you need it.

How do I know it will work?

Ill go along and operate it for you.

Jim Webb was amused by this last sally, and not a bit surprised. Doc had always preferred to take the hands-on approach, personally fitting airplanes with innovative instruments and then flying them himself. But everyone knew astronauts had to be test pilots, physical and psychological supermen in the prime of life, made of what Tom Wolfe called the Right Stuff in his 1979 book. Docs way of expressing unshakable confidence in what his Lab would achieve was typical, but not to be taken literally.

Or was it? A couple of months later, Doc wrote a long letter to NASA Associate Administrator Robert Channing Bob Seamans, Jr., insisting that his age should not be an obstacle and spelling out several reasons why his role as crew would be beneficial. A nonplussed Seamans wrote a prompt and courteous reply, taking note of Docs offer and promising to pass it along the proper channels.

Thats how the deal with Docs Instrumentation Laboratory was done. No RFP ( request for proposal ) , no bidding cycle, no catfights among congressmen to shift torrents of federal funding into their districts. It was the first of many occasions in which the urgency of JFKs commitment made people say, in effect, We dont have time to mess around being bureaucrats in the usual wayweve got to get this thing going!

The Labs main buildinga factory long since vacated by the Whittemore Shoe Polish Companyhad been repurposed as one part of MITs gradual encroachment on parts of Cambridge where Lever Brothers manufactured soap, Necco turned out rolls of sugary wafers, Squirrel Brand packed peanuts, and a hundred miscellaneous products were stamped Made in Cambridge, Mass . and shipped around the world. I had been working there as an engineering staff member for a year and a half, a very junior member in a staff of hundreds. But I carved out a nearly unique role for myself, with one foot in the digital computer hardware engineering side of the house and one foot in the programming side. Though officially in the Digital Computation Group that wrote programs for the house mainframe computer, I had also been working with the Digital Development Group that was creating a compact, low-power guidance computer to go in an Air Force space probe to Mars. The third of that series, the first to bear my design thumbprint, was instantly repurposed as the prototype Apollo Guidance Computer. Hence, my claim to have begun working on Apollo several months before it began.