EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009 - 43

R e ad e r F or um When Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, I was in Romania (then a Communist country). I was with friends; we were listening to the “illegal” Voice of America, mesmerized. Perhaps it was that event that triggered me to want to be here [Silicon Valley] and work in science. The lunar landing was a monumental moment for science and technology. It demonstrated that everything is possible, if pursued in a systematic and scientific way. — George Haber, founder and CEO of CrestaTech, a developer of programmable broadband technology. Haber, a serial entrepreneur, formerly led chip companies GigPixel and Mobilygen, and IP company CompCore Multimedia. I vividly remember the moon landing. That summer, as a child, I was participating in a competition of model airplanes that operated on gas engines. After having already won a regional event, I was invited to a national competition, held at the U.S. Navy base in Lakehurst, N.J. The competition was held in a setup like a summer camp. On that day, I remember sitting on the floor, along with a whole bunch of kids, in front of a blackand-white TV. We all gaped at the screen and watched the landing. It was magical. Sometimes I feel that we need to get back to the moon again so that we can show the kids today what we can do. Did I win the national model airplane contest? I might have got- ten second or third place; I can’t even remember. I do remember the lunar landing, though. — Lothar Maier, CEO, Linear Technology two-dimensional simulation of the restricted three-body problem and later a 3-D, exact simulation. In those days, we didn’t have spreadsheet programs to draw graphs for us; we had to draw them ourselves. As low man on the TMD totem pole, I got elected to run parametric studies on the computer and plot the results. That task worked in my favor, though, because I gained an understanding of the physics of the problem, and the relationship between parameters, that I don’t think I would have gotten otherwise. I wasn’t content to just make runs and plot curves; I wanted to understand what was going on. At the time, we weren’t thinking of Project Apollo. In fact, I had never heard of it. We had plans to send a Brownie camera around the moon before 1965 using NASA’s solidfuel, Scout research vehicle. All of my work on Apollo came in a frenetic four-year period, from 1959 through 1963. It was in 1959 that I began work for the Theoretical Mechanics Division [TMD] of NASA, at Langley Research Center. This was just shortly after NASA was formed. Shortly after I arrived there, a paper came out of the think tank Rand Inc., describing a class of lunar trajectories called free-return, circumlunar trajectories—the now-familiar figure-eight paths. It was immediately obvious that this class of trajectories was the only reasonable way to go to the moon and back. We began studying them intensely, using first a 43 EE Times | Apollo | July 20, 2009

EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009

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