• How computers got us into space

    Retired IBM scientist Arthur Cohen reflects on the beginnings of human spaceflight in 1961.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    When you look back at the past 50 years of human spaceflight, don't forget the computer scientists who helped make it all possible.

    That's the message Arthur Cohen wants to pass along on the golden anniversary of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 spaceflight, a 15-minute suborbital outing that marked one not-so-small step on the way to the moon. The successful flights made by Shepard and other members of the Mercury 7 depended on the work done by Cohen and thousands of other workers behind the scenes.

    "There was a lot of attention given to the seven astronauts," Cohen recalled in an interview this week. "The thing that was hardly mentioned was the fact that there were computers that were doing the work."

    Today, Cohen is an adjunct professor of mathematics at Nassau Community College in New York, but back in the early 1960s he was manager for the IBM Space Computer Center in Washington, where he directed the development of all computing support for Project Mercury. Two IBM 7090 computer systems at NASA's nearby Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, plus a backup IBM 709 computer in the Bahamas, provided all the raw number-crunching power to plot the trajectories of those early spacecraft. Western Electric and Bell Labs provided the supporting communication network.

    "In those days, 1,000 bits per second was high speed," the 83-year-old Cohen told me.

    The data streaming down from space was funneled through Goddard and then onward to Cape Canaveral, where mission controllers kept watch on the real-time channel. "All the displays at the Cape were actually provided by us," Cohen said. Somewhere around 75 to 100 people were on IBM's team to make sure the computers were in sync.

    A picture from the old days shows Cohen and members of his team gathered around the computer center, with Mercury astronauts Deke Slayton and Gus Grissom in their midst. "We did wear white shirts — that's the way IBM was back then, right? — but maybe our sleeves were rolled up," Cohen joked.

    IBM

    The IBM computer team mixes it up with Mercury astronauts Gus Grissom (fifth from the right) and Deke Slayton (second from the right). Arthur Cohen is fourth from the left.

    After Project Mercury, Cohen turned to other, more down-to-Earth projects at IBM in New York, and retired from the company in 1988. But he says the spaceflight experience set the tone for his career and those of a whole generation of engineers. "The people who worked on the project did go on to Gemini and Apollo, and some of the people went on to the airline reservation system. One of my guys went on to the air traffic control system and managed that.," he said. "There was a lot of fallout from this stuff."

    IBM

    Arthur Cohen is now an adjunct professor of mathematics at Nassau Community College.

    Today, almost everything about spaceflight and its computing requirements is different.

    "Things have improved, but it's basically the same kind of stuff. You still have to check data, edit data, smooth data," he said. "You're still driving displays. But I think the space game is going to be much more about understanding something about deep space. It'll be a different challenge. Here, you're talking about doing an orbit in 88 minutes. There, you may be talking about years [of orbital calculations], so things may be going somewhat slower in terms of feedback about what's happening."

    Despite all those diferences, Cohen suspects that the level of dedication among computer scientists will be as high as ever.

    "The future for them can't be any brighter," he said. "Computers are going to be behind everything that can help mankind, whether it be medicine, or crop yields, or space. Whatever it might be, computers are going to be important. Who knows what we need to do?"

    To learn more about Cohen and the contributions made by Project Mercury's "unsung computers," check out IBM's news release and this report from the DVICE blog. Do you have some behind-the-scenes stories about the past 50 years of spaceflight? If so, feel free to share your tales in the comment section below.

    More on spaceflight history:

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

  • NASA / JPL-Caltech

    NASA's Opportunity rover recorded this stereo view of a Martian crater informally named Freedom 7. The mosaic image has been processed to fill gaps in coverage of the Martian sky. Use red-blue glasses to see the stereo effect, and click here for a bigger version.

    Martian crater honors milestone in spaceflight

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    On its way to the monster Endeavour Crater on Mars, NASA's Opportunity rover passed by a somewhat smaller divot in Meridiani Planum that now bears a highly symbolic name: Freedom 7.

    The informal moniker for the 82-foot-wide (25-meter-wide) crater pays tribute to America's first human spaceflight, piloted by Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard 50 years ago today. Shepard's suborbita trip in the Freedom 7 capsule lasted only 15 minutes, but it signaled that the United States was still in the space race, three weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in orbit. Shepard's success was quickly followed by President John Kennedy's campaign to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade.

    That goal was achieved in 1969, and Shepard himself walked on the moon (and took a golf swing or two) during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 — capping an adventure that started with that first Project Mercury flight 10 years earlier.

    "Many of the people currently involved with the robotic investigations of Mars were first inspired by the astronauts of the Mercury Project who paveds the way for the exploration of our solar system" Scott McLennan of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, this week's long-term planning leader for the rover science team, said in a NASA news release.

    Freedom 7 is the largest of a cluster of about eight craters which are thought to have formed after sand ripples in the area last migrated, which would be about 200,000 years ago. "They're from an impactor that broke up in the atmosphere, which is quite common," said Matt Golombek, a rover team member from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

    The crater might seem like small potatoes compared with the 13-mile-wide Endeavour Crater, Opportunity's prime destination. But there's a bit of symbolism behind that width of 82 feet: That's almost exactly the length of the Mercury-Redstone rocket and spacecraft that Shepard rode to outer space.

    More about Alan Shepard's historic flight:

    You can join the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.