In 1961, President Kennedy put America’s engineers on notice. They had until the end of the decade to put man on the moon. For Draper Labs, that meant creating the navigation system that would bring astronauts safely to the moon—and home again—at a time when computer memory was still stored on copper wire.
Start from the beginning…
When Draper employees were handed this impossible job, they didn’t know how they’d do it—just that they had to get it done. Building the hardware and software that could get three men safely to the moon and back took enormous intellect and enormous creativity, in an era where failure wasn’t something to be celebrated—it was fatal.
Discover the team
Of the 12 crewed Apollo Missions, only six made it to the moon. Learn more about their achievements—and their setbacks.
Discover more about the context of Apollo, whether you remember where you were in 1969, or joined Earth in this millenium.
Draper’s engineers pioneered Apollo’s navigational system, from the stacks of code that ran it to the computer itself.
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