Over the next few days I will be profiling several posts related to the Apollo 11 takeoff, lunar landing and splashdown 50 years ago. My personal celebration, however, started much earlier in the year.
During SAP's event Sapphire in May, BirlaSoft invited me to join a group of their client executives for dinner at the Atlantis Zone at the Kennedy Space Center.
Then on Father's Day last month, my daughter took me to a "Lunch with an Astronaut" - Jon McBride who flew one of the early shuttle missions. Both visits were awe-inspiring - when you think of the boundaries NASA pushes when it comes to rockets, computers, even the diet of astronomers in zero-gravity.
But even more inspiring was the Apollo 11 documentary I saw in March. The amazing production mined "65-millimeter and 70-mm film preserved at the National Archives, as well as 18,000 hours of audio that was largely uncataloged before the documentary's creation." When you think about how primitive computing and communications were in the 1960s (the Apollo 11's onboard guidance computer had a processing speed of 1 MHz, and had about 4 kilobytes of reusable memory) you are even more impressed with the accomplishment.
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