I grew up on space sticks and Tang
When I entered the world, space was full of promise. Four days after I was born Yuri Gagarin completed the first human-crewed space flight circumnavigating the earth. Less than one month later Alan Shepard participated in the first US manned space flight. It all became a male-dominated science and engineering achievement one after the other.
There’s another history that many people are beginning to see uncovered that goes back to even earlier STEM achievements than astronauts gender, but I thought of this the other day when space suits and the #AllFemaleSpacewalk came up.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Everything I experienced was through men’s eyes, and yet with my daughters in mind, I look for the Herstory that is yet to be told with NASA, Spaceflight, and computers.
Ultra-reliable software design
A book I’ve read many times to my daughters.
How about beginning with Margaret Hamilton the lead Apollo flight software designer on the Apollo Guidance Computer. I wonder if a male had been a lead designer if the same considerations and breakthroughs would have happened.
said Dr. Paul Curto, the NASA technologist who nominated her for the award. “Her concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and man-in-the-loop decision capability, such as priority displays, became the foundation for ultra-reliable software design.”
So now all the source code is available on GitHub ,and there are several interesting implications with this.
Below is a software simulator the result of her lead on the Apollo Guidance Computer software. It uses verbs nouns and numbers.
The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I’m overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I’m going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing … Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software’s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones … If the computer hadn’t recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.[28]
— Letter from Margaret H. Hamilton, Director of Apollo Flight Computer Programming MIT Draper Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts[29], titled “Computer Got Loaded”, published in Datamation, March 1, 1971
Go to the simulator at http://svtsim.com/moonjs/agc.html
You can use try some of the codes the astronauts used to call up the software routines:
Some Examples Codes:
- Test the DSKY lamps (digits and indicators) by entering VERB 3 5 ENTR .
- Try VERB 1 6 NOUN 6 5 ENTR . This command monitors the current time. The lower 5-digit display shows seconds, the middle one minutes and the topmost one hours elapsed since AGC powered up.
- Start program P00, the idle program, by entering VERB 3 7 ENTR 0 0 ENTR .
- Enter VERB 9 1 ENTR . It shows the checksum of the first bank of the fixed memory (the so-called core-ropes in AGC terminology). The fixed memory is divided into 38 banks, each containing 1024 (1K) 15-bits words. The top 5-digit display shows the checksum in octal, which should be either the bank number or its 1-complement (e.g., for bank 3 either a value of 00003 or 77774 is acceptable). The middle row is the bank number and the third row is a bugger word appended to the end of each bank to make the checksum the correct value. By entering VERB 3 3 ENTR or pressing PRO , you can get the statistics for the next bank.
- Let’s try some spaceflight related programs! Enter VERB 0 6 NOUN 6 2 ENTR . It shows the current velocity (top row), altitude rate (middle row) and altitude (bottom row). Unfortunately, we are not going to space today, so all three show 00000 and will continue to do so. During an actual launch (or a simulated one), they would update with current values. If instead of Verb 06, we use Verb 16, the same values are shown and updated constantly until a different command is entered. In fact, this program was used during the boost phase of Saturn V launches to allow astronauts monitto or or the progress of the launch vehicle.
Source://futurism.com/margaret-hamilton-the-untold-story-of-the-woman-who-took-us-to-the-moon
Why shouldn’t we imagine a woman behind the reflective helmet shield?
