The Bytes of Apollo

The Marvels of Technical Spinoff

IN the years leading up to the Moon landings, many people urged the project's cancellation on the grounds of economy or because they could not see the point of it. Had their plea been heeded we might be living today in a very different world. Electronics would have gone off in an entirely different direction. Much of present-day technology would not exist. Personal computers and mobile phones would be unknown. Computers would have grown larger rather than smaller, eventually reaching the situation predicted by Isaac Asimov in which the world's largest supercomputer, powered by zillions of vacuum tubes, would be the size of a small country. I believe the opposite trend, towards miniaturisation, was set in motion by a remark made by a TV commentator, during Apollo 11's descent toward Tranquillity Bay, that the lunar module's on-board computer was "in a dither".

The effect of this remark on certain people was electrifying. What? They have a computer on that tiny spacecraft? They had carried them course since the beginning of the Apollo programme, but very few realised it. It sounded just too unlikely. Computers were huge contraptions that occupied large rooms and needed a permanent staff of experts to maintain them. In retrospect, it was inevitable that moon-ships should carry on-board computers. Since the Moon is a quarter of a million miles from Earth, the round trip time for messages between Houston and the lunar astronauts was two and a half seconds, long enough for a fatal accident to occur while landing. Computers had come a long way since the ENIAC of 1944, "a veritable dinosaur of wires and tubes" that was 100 feet long, 10 feet high and three feet deep, with more than 100,000 parts including 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 toggle switches. Whenever this pioneering machine was switched on it dimmed the lights all over town, and its inventor John von Neumann joked that keeping it going was "like fighting the Battle of the Bulge every day". Still, the pre-Apollo computers, although much smaller and more efficient than the ENIAC (some of them can be seen in the London Science Museum), were only affordable by rich companies and government departments, and could never have evolved over time to a form that could sell to ordinary people. What tremendous new technical advances will come from manned expeditions to Mars? It is impossible to tell; one knows only, judging from the precedent of the Moon, that they will be tremendous. Some people might ask: would it not be much cheaper to create these advances without the expense of going to Mars? But this is not possible. Perhaps fortunately, history does not work that way. So many new advances on Earth come from the machinery built for space, just as Black and Decker's cordless powered hand tools came from the battery powered drills that the astronauts used to drill the lunar surface; optical scratch-proof lenses and safety goggles came from Apollo space cameras; and the ultra light fabric of the lunar spacecraft yielded a huge array of new hospital devices. Perhaps the most valuable gift of space travel is its technical spin-off.