EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009 - 45

R ead e r F or um I was 13 and had arrived at Camp Buffalo, a Boy Scout camp in central Indiana. I didn’t know if we would be able to see anything or not. I remember the excitement, while we were in line to take our swimming test, when the word went out: “The Eagle has landed!” After dinner, they brought a TV outside the dining hall and set it on a picnic table for those who wanted to see it. I was amazed at the telemetry and communications, the ability to transmit and receive video from the moon. I had a 13-transistor Magnavox pocket AM/FM radio that barely pulled in 50-kW WLS from Chicago. Not much later, I went on a family vacation to Disney World in Florida, but I think touring the NASA facility was as awe-inspiring as the theme park. They had Mercury and Gemini capsules on display, and we saw the massive Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where the Saturn Vs 45 EE Times | Apollo | July 20 2009 were assembled. I went into electrical engineering and the Army Signal Corps, then into automotive and now medical devices. I recently saw the display at the LBJ library in Austin with some of the hardware; those guys had a lot of guts to take on such an endeavor. While at GM, I had the opportunity to work with an engineer who had been on the Lunar Rover project. — Stuart Sullivan moon, how the LM landed then separated from its base to return to the orbiter, and then [I explained] the return to Earth, with the command module separating from the service module to reenter. What fun! It helped keep me on a path that ended up as an ASIC designer and design project manager at Hewlett-Packard working on chips for calculators, workstations, cameras, printers and more. — Daryl Anderson I was in graduate school at MIT at the time of first Apollo landing. I was working at the Instrumentation Laboratory (now Draper Lab), where the Apollo computers were designed, although I was not working on that project. On the day of the first moonsteps, it was announced well in advance when the event would happen, so we (four grad students) arranged to rent a large TV and got a keg to have a big party in celebration. It was a grand time. Several days later, the I-Lab had a great splashdown party at the MIT Faculty Club when the Apollo returned. I also got to witness live the night launch of Apollo 17, the last lunar voyage—spectacular. I started out in chemical engineering but moved to electrical after a couple years. It all served me well at Analog Devices, where I have been designing, building and mar- When the Apollo 11 mission was I was 10 at the time of the landing. I kept a small chalkboard above the head of my bed where I mapped out the Earth, moon and path of each mission. I built a model of the Apollo rocket out of Legos that was about 30 inches tall. I took it to school, and at show-and-tell time I showed the class how each stage separated: how the command/service/lunar modules went on toward the approaching, I read everything I could get my hands on about it. I think I comprehended that, along with the sheer audacity of it all, the engineering challenge bordered on the impossible. And that understanding—that the impossible can be accomplished by smart people figuring hard stuff out—has unquestionably stayed with me throughout my career in technology. — Stephen Schuster

EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009

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