Moon Machines

As the cold war was warming up during the second half of the twentieth century, american and soviet scientists and engineers were under so much pressure that they had to come up to solutions to problems that sis not exist at that point in history. 

Perhaps there was a bare idea of what software was at most a decade before the events shown in the documentary, however a project as challenging and big as space exploration forced the creation of different modules of this navigation computer, hence the differentiation between the logical and the physical parts of the system. Even in the software creation the documentary shows how it was divided into the teams of people who wrote the program with a pencil and the people who "compiled" it into this crazy wire based structure for representing the program. It is very interesting how engineers were able to recognize the problems that astronauts would stumble upon regarding the navigation system on their shuttle, and then creating different modules of software for resource management as well for alarms. 

Looking to the problems they faced during the construction of this machine, I believe most of them were based upon the design and organization of each team as the documentary shows that in the end for every challenge they stumbled upon they found an already existent technology such as the early versions of the silicon chips or the wevable programs. and in the bug picture this computer was only on of the challenges that the Apollo program encountered, each of the projects had to deal with aerodynamics, ballistics, communications, medical concerns, supply chains, etc. 

The navigation systems were only one of the many necessary building blocks for the whole space wandering machines. In the end, as it has happened in Ariane 5, a single mistake in the design, a single 0 filled as a 1 in the code wire could have resulted in turning an Apollo mission into ashes.