Digital Apollo

By David A. Mindell,

Book cover of Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight

Book description

The incredible story of how human pilots and automated systems worked together to achieve the ultimate achievement in flight—the lunar landings of NASA’s Apollo program
 
As Apollo 11’s Lunar Module descended toward the moon under automatic control, a program alarm in the guidance computer’s software nearly caused a mission abort.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Digital Apollo as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The book interweaves the human story of risk and decision-making and the technological account of successes and failures of onboard computing in the Apollo program. It makes a fascinating comparison with the parallel story of techno-human systems in the Soviet space program explored in my book. While Soviet cosmonauts routinely served as a backup for automatics, American astronauts successfully fought to seize control of their missions from the computer and to perform manually each of the lunar landings.

From Slava's list on astronauts and cosmonauts.

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