David Mindell - Digital Apollo

Fascinating book and definitely an engineer's look back at the landing of man on the moon. I believe I read about one or two books a year detailing man's only visit to our Earth's traveling partner. (Would life have emerged from our world without the moon? I digress...). Reading about one little aspect of the project and seeing how millions of these projects were put together to build a space ship is just awe inspiring. I mean for the computers they used little old ladies with years of sewing experience to make the computer cores for the Apollo Guidance computer! That is just crazy. Overall a wonderful little book, would have loved to taken the MIT course the Mindell taught. In the end the part of a book that I thought was the best was the part about the six actual moon landing and how each and every command pilot took over from the guidance system and actually took control of where the landing occurred. I mean every landing could have been done automatically by the guidance computer but in every debrief every command pilot related an almost identical story that when the LM rolled over and the pilot got a view of the landing site they claimed the "computer" was taking them into a an undesirable landing site. Reading their own claims you always gathered their superiority but to read an engineer's view and truly understanding their ego. An interesting viewpoint that I have never read...