Originally posted by NGC2736
Originally posted by Vandermast
And the thing about their computers, back then they were about as powerful as a childs play computer or a regular calculator.
I think the need for computers is over rated. Most of the job could have been plotted out before the flight ever left, so finding the Moon itself wasn't that hard. Tedious, I'm sure, but it was just a matter of following directions.
The actual landing could have been carried out by a rather unsophisticated program, once a spot was picked. Maintaining a "level" approach would have been the hardest part, since the countering of the Moon's gravity could have been established pretty accurately beforehand.
Sure, it was risky, but very much doable. It is a failing of the younger generation to think that computers are the only sure way to arrive at precision. You would be surprised at how good the unaided human mind can be, when it doesn't have that crutch to use all the time.
(Believe it or not, but there was once a time when school children learned the multiplication tables, and used a thing called addition and subtraction, to arrive at accurate answers to math questions. Eight year olds were expected to do *gasp* long division in their heads! These calculators were called Brain Cells.)
Actually, the Apollo spacecraft were a lot more automated than you might think. The entire launch sequence, including orbital insertion, was pretty much automatic. (Ever wonder why right after taking off the astronauts would say "we've got a roll programmed" and not "we're doing a roll..."?) Burn times and durations for trans-lunar/trans-earth injection, orbital insertion, course corrections, etc. were also automatically calculated. Lunar landing was automatic too. I'm pretty sure attitude control was automatic as well. Of course, most things had manual fallbacks, and those were used in some cases.
The brain is a useful tool, but the fact is that orbital calculations aren't very easy, and doing them on-the-fly with reasonable accuracy isn't very easy at all.
As for why such a weak computer was able to do such complicated calculations, there are two reasons I can give:
1. The computer was built from the ground up to do its job, since this was before the advent of general-purpose microprocessors. Thus, the computer's architecture could be optimized for the exact job that it was doing.
2. The computer was not that slow; it ran at around 1 MHz. Many people have a distorted view of what computers can and cannot do just because, say, their 2GHz laptops feels a bit sluggish when making a Word document with the latest version of Windows. If you look in the aerospace field, though, you'll see that the computers used even today are pitifully slow compared to what you can get on your desktop. Look at the Mars rovers, for example. Day after day, they return many high-resolution pictures of their surface, perform internal maintenance, and are even able to process the images they take in order to autonomously work their way around obstacles. They manage to do this using 33MHz processors. 1 MHz may seem slow by today's standards, but it's still a million clock cycles every single second.
And if u look at the pic it seems they have planned to have a lazer on top of it to pew pew
all the other orbiters 
