Code That Took Apollo 11 To The Moon Is Now Available Online

The first moon landing was no easy feat. It was an effort that involved a considerable amount of time and resources. The technology wasn’t as advanced in the 1960s as it is today so creating a software guidance system for the Apollo 11 was easier said than done. History will testify that it was done and now you can peruse that bit of history online. The Apollo 11 guidance computer code is now available online.

A former NASA intern has uploaded the entire Apollo Guidance Computer code to GitHub. It’s not like this was some super-secret code which was never meant to be made public.

Interested researchers have long been able to check out the code and see how it was done back then. However, it wasn’t available just as easily as it’s available now. There are some hilarious strings in the code such as “BURN_BABY_BURN–MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.agc”

One of the coders who worked on this even hid some of Shakespeare’s work in the code. None of this is surprising given that coders still have the same habit of hiding things in the countless lines they write just to get the computer to work. It’s great to see that the folks working on such a major task managed to have a sense of humor and have it reflect in their work.

If you’re interested in checking it out you can access all of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer code on GitHub.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: General
Tags: apollo, code, NASA, Space