Hugh Blair-Smith

Left Brains for the Right Stuff: Computers, Space, and History (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Honorable Mention in the Nonfiction/Reference category for the 27th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards.

What made the Space Race possible? What made it necessary? How close a race was it? And what did it achieve? The answers are connected in surprising ways. Left Brains for the Right Stuff briefly summarizes the history of three technologies-rockets, navigation, and computers-and recounts how they were woven into the rise and rivalry of superpowers in the twentieth century. President John F. Kennedy inherited a small Space Race and transformed it into a Moon Race by creating the Apollo program ("... achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon ..."). To make it an "offer" the Soviet Union couldn't refuse, he added, "We choose to go to the moon ... not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard."
Apollo won the Moon Race and, combined with the Space Shuttle, won the Space Race, which did much to win the Cold War and preserve the momentum of American leadership that had been created in World War II. Many big companies worked on those programs, and so did a small academic research laboratory. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Instrumentation Laboratory ("the Lab") was the creation of one man, Charles Stark "Doc" Draper, who invented inertial navigation.
Author Hugh Blair-Smith was a staff engineer at the Lab from 1959 through 1981. Trained as an electronic engineer and computer scientist, his two-pronged expertise contributed to both the hardware of spacecraft computers and the programming that had to make the most of their limited resources. This is a history, an inside story, and a riveting account of the Space Race, studded with startling insights into causes and effects. In those exciting years, Blair-Smith joined many thousands of people in cooperating gladly, generously, and passionately to add electronic left brains to the Right Stuff. Their creations answered the long-sought quest for "a moral equivalent to war."

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: SDPPublishing
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Dezember 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780996434546
• Artikelnr.: 72387921

Autorenporträt

Hugh Blair-Smith grew up in the cities of the Northeastern Megalopolis that stretches from Washington to Boston, always wanting to become an engineerwhich he then understood was about building bridges. Studying electronic engineering and applied physics at Harvard, he learned that computers are much more fun than bridges, and making them do six impossible things before breakfast was even better. As the Space Race began, he joined the engineering staff of MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, founded by Charles Stark "Doc" Draper to develop self-contained inertial navigation for missiles, aircraft, and spacecraft.
That timing gave him a ground-floor spot with Apollo's Primary Guidance, Navigation, and Control system, where he became the software specialist on the Apollo Guidance Computer design team, and the computer hardware specialist on the AGC programming team. Halfway through a 22-year career at MIT, he refocused on fault tolerance logic for the Space Shuttle's onboard computer system. Direct contact with astronauts included Buzz Aldrin (studying rendezvous science at MIT), Dave Scott (among the first to fully embrace the AGC way of flying), and Bob Crippen (a team member on the Shuttle work).
Leaving MIT at the end of 1981, he produced special-purpose software for two startup companies, became a migrant worker (software division), and joined a company founded by an Apollo colleague. One startup (Interactive Images, later Easel Corporation) pioneered touch screens before the world was ready for them.
The other (International Treasury Systems) put touch screens to work in foreign-exchange trading rooms of international banks, which had to be ready for that field's "Big Bang" in the mid-1980s. His final "cubicle farm" (Programart, later bought by Compuware) made a software tool to identify poor performance in mainframe computers caused by inefficient programming.
After retiring to Cape Cod in 2005, he worked a one-year contract with NASA on reliability software for an instrument in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, thereby placing thousands of his own ones and zeros in orbit around the Moon. As this is written, he's looking forward to doing likewise for a spacecraft to make close passes by Jupiter's moon Europa.
Hugh and his wife Vicki, married since 1968, have two grown children, who are successful professionals. There are also two teenaged grandchildren and approximately twenty-five granddogs. When he's not sailing or prepari...