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The ‘Fourth Astronaut’: The story of the Apollo Guidance Computer
On April 12, 1961, Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard the Vostok 1 capsule, executed one orbit around the Earth in 108 minutes, in history’s first manned space flight — leaving the world stunned and the Americans (already shocked by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957) feeling left far behind in the space race.
In the aftermath of the event, on April 20 of the same year, President John F. Kennedy asked Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to draft a report about the status of America’s space program, and to offer suggestions about how NASA could catch up.
About one week later he received Johnson’s memo, which concluded that a manned space flight landing on the Moon would provide the United States leadership in the space race and that the Americans were capable of achieving it before the Russians.
On May 25, 1961, in a special session of Congress, President Kennedy announced the Apollo Program — a project to land men on the moon.
NASA understood early on that massive computing power would be required to perform navigation and control the project. In 1961, NASA contracted MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory to develop the Apollo program’s guidance system, to provide real-time computing power and unique control capabilities. The team included Eldon…
