Go for TLI: How NASA put Astronauts on the Moon and Returned Them Safely to Earth

Eric Ward is giving a talk at The Linda Hall: Science Library and Arboretum on Saturday, October 10, titled Go for TLI: How NASA put Astronauts on the Moon and Returned Them Safely to Earth. It runs from 9:30 to 10:30 AM, so it's a morning thing rather than an evening one.

The title comes from the Apollo 8 mission. At 8:30 PM on December 21, 1968, Mission Control in Houston told the crew they were "go for TLI"—Translunar Injection. That was the engine burn that sent humans out of Earth orbit and toward the moon for the first time in history. The talk takes that moment as a starting point to explain how NASA actually pulled off the lunar landings.

One of the main things Ward gets into is how NASA didn't rely on raw processing speed. Instead, they combined Isaac Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation with Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion to map "cosmic highways," letting the universe's own gravity do the heavy lifting. IBM mainframes and a global network of antenna stations tracked the spacecraft, the Apollo Guidance Computer handled critical on-board tasks, and the astronauts carried a space-age sextant to sight physical stars as the ultimate backup.

Ward also spends time debunking the myth that Apollo's minimal computing power made the Moon landings impossible. He shows how NASA engineers achieved them through centuries-old math, cutting-edge engineering, and human eyesight. It's a look at how they worked with the tools they had—and the laws of physics they'd known for hundreds of years—to get people to the moon and back. The talk is an hour long, from 9:30 to 10:30 AM on Saturday, October 10, at The Linda Hall: Science Library and Arboretum, 5109 Cherry Street, Kansas City, MO, 64110.