If you are into innovation and want to invent something terrific, don’t do it on July 20 because July 20 will always be remembered as the day of the first moon landing. From that day I keep many newspapers of the time from all over the world: Tonight Luna, it was written in large letters in the newspaper of my city.
It is difficult to find unheard anecdotes about that historic enterprise. Since we are on Italian Tech I have chosen two. The first is related to the onboard computer that brought the three Apollo 11 astronauts up there: it was called Agc, Apollo Guidance Computer, and “was the computer installed on the command modules on the lunar modules of the Apollo missions. It controlled the on-board equipment in real time and carried out all the route calculations that could not be carried out from the ground ”. On Apollo 11 there were two, one for the spacecraft, the other for the lunar module, “which functioned correctly for the 195 hours of the mission”: NASA had made them with MIT and the Raytheon company; each weighed “just” 32 kg and used the first still experimental integrated circuits; the software to make it work had been completed two days before take-off, on 14 July, by a team from Mit led by a woman, Margaret Hamilton, now 84, who later received the highest honors for this work.
The second anecdote relates to how the newspapers reported on the enterprise. Always the newspaper of my city the next day did a beautiful first page with only LUNA written, with such large fonts that there were none in the typography and they had to invent tricks to enlarge the writing. Below was a footprint in the sand, Neil Armstrong’s historic “great step for humanity”. A spectacular front page that has also ended up in some design museums. Yet false. That photo was not a photo of the first man’s footprint on the moon, but of a newspaper reporter that the editor had sent to Ostia with the task of trampling the sand wearing fisherman boots and photograph the footprint. A fake news, indeed, a fake photo, but harmless.
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