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Feb 18, 2022 · Far from the Shiprock desert, outside of Boston, women employees at Raytheon assembled the Apollo Guidance Computer’s core memory with a process that in this case directly mimicked weaving.
Jun 14, 2019 · And so, like the lunar rover wheels and the parachutes, the circuits and programs of the Apollo flight computers were also woven by hand, by women at a Raytheon factory in Waltham,...
- The Spacesuits
- The Lunar Rover
- The Parachutes
- The Heat Shield
- The Computers
The Apollo spacesuits were high-tech marvels: 21 layers of nested fabric, strong enough to stop a micrometeorite, yet flexible enough to allow the astronauts to do all the work they needed to do on the moon. The spacesuits were the work of Playtex, the company that gave America the “Cross Your Heart” bra in the 1960s. Playtex had sold itself to NAS...
The U.S. sent three electric cars to the moon during the Apollo missions, and those ingenious moon vehicles transformed the experience of lunar exploration. They dramatically expanded the range the astronauts could cover—allowing them to venture many miles from the landing sites, to chase down the most interesting moon features and geology they cou...
The Apollo space capsules relied on parachutes to slow their fall back to earth after going to the moon, and the three main parachutes were huge, each 83.5 feet across. Each one contained 7,200 square feet of fabric—enough to cover all the floor space in three typical U.S. homes. The parachutes were made of fabric strong enough to slow the plunge o...
To get back home from the moon, the Apollo astronauts and their capsule had to come blazing back through the earth’s atmosphere. The capsule was traveling 25,000 m.p.h. as it re-entered the atmosphere, and the friction quickly created temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem: How do you protect the capsule and the astronauts from tempe...
The onboard computers for Apollo—one that flew the command module to the moon and back to earth, and another that flew the lunar module from orbit around the moon to a safe landing, then back up into orbit—were the smallest, fastest, most nimble computers ever created for their era. Designed and programmed by scientists, engineers and programmers a...
- Charles Fishman
- 1 min
Feb 4, 2020 · During the first Apollo missions, the software of the Apollo Guidance Computer was physically weaved into a high-density storage called “core rope memory”, which was similar to magnetic core memories.
Apr 9, 2022 · In the 1960s and 1970s, Navajo women played a critical role in technological achievements key to the successes of the Apollo missions and computer chip design. Their work as electrical weavers was crucial to these performances, yet they receive very little credit or historical acknowledgment.
Photographs of weavers, many of them women of colour, who played a pivotal role in creating the core memory that took Apollo spacecraft to the moon, reveal a counterhistory long hidden in archives. Text by Daniela Rosner and Samantha Shorey.
Did you know girl power helped weave memory into the Apollo computers? In case you needed a reminder of how powerful the mini-computers in our pockets are …..can we talk about a whole bunch of talented ladies who literally built the memory for the Apollo Guidance Computer by weaving thousands of wires by hand?
