Do you know the step-by-step process of how human beings for landed on the moon? It is an astonishing feat of engineering, kludging together different ideas and systems, held together with what now seem like absurdly low-tech tools. Here’s more from the American Academy of Mechanical Engineers:

While the IMU’s design challenged the lab’s engineers, the real unknown was how to build the digital computer the astronauts would use to interface with the IMU to receive and input information. In the early 1960s, even the most compact advanced digital computers were large enough to fill several rooms—much larger than the size of the proposed spaceship. When the engineers working on designing what would become the Apollo command module asked how much room to reserve for the computer, there was no immediate answer because such a computer had never been built.

Dick Battin, the lab’s technical director, conferred with his colleagues. Their estimate: “1 cubic foot.”

Then they had to build it to that spec.

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