ESD.30J Engineering Apollo: The Moon Project as a Complex System

This is the kind of class you attend MIT for. It is all about the history of the NASA Apollo project with a focus on the complex systems issue they faced. It is being taught by Historian David Mindell who is currently writing a comprehensive book on the subject and Professor Laurence Young of the MIT Aero/Astro dept.

The reason this class is significant at MIT is because MIT was the lone university involved with developing Apollo (the dozens of other organizations were either research labs or corporations). MIT was in charge of developing the guidance and control systems (the software) for Apollo. There have also been several astronauts that attended MIT. In fact, on the first day of class, ex-astronaut Jeff Hoffman came in to present NASA's next generation space vehicle called the CEV - Crew Exploraratory Vehicle.

Several people that worked on the Apollo project will be brought in over the course of the semester to give talks. Our big project for the course is to redesign a component of the Apollo rocket and present it to the class. My friend Yoav questioned the utility of spending a semester looking at a project that was shut down over 20 years ago. I think there are several reasons. It offers an in-depth look at one of the seminal events of the 20th century. We'll get insight into how such a huge project and complex system was pulled off. And lastly, we'll get to hear directly from astronauts :-) Did I mention that toward the end of class, Buzz Aldrin will be coming in to speak to us?

There is a lot of reading involved with the course, but it isn't boring reading. Just to keep this course on track with my degree, I'm going to focus on the software side of the project and probably do my final project on one of the control systems.