The US Navy used an early IBM electromechanical calculator to compute the ballistic trajectories of artillery shells. IBM acquired the skills and invented the tools needed for space flight over a 30-year span stretching back to the 1940s. Without IBM and the systems they provided, we would not have landed on the Moon.”

“The systems information that we used to make the go, no-go decisions was developed by IBM, and the ultimate go, no-go decision was provided to me by computers operated by IBM engineers within NASA’s Mission Control Center. Gene Kranz was the flight director on duty on July 20, 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin separated Apollo’s lunar module from the command/service module and began their successful descent to the surface of the moon.

® System/360 mainframe down from the size of a refrigerator to that of a suitcase-and made it rugged enough to blast into space. Employees at IBM in Owego, NY, and other locations invented and built the miniaturized integrated circuitry used to shrink the equivalent of an More IBM employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, DC, developed the worldwide network of relay stations and ships to track and communicate with the spacecraft. And at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now called the Johnson Space Center) in Houston, Texas, they sat at consoles beside the NASA flight directors, making the minute-by-minute analyses needed to navigate the spacecraft from Earth orbit to lunar orbit and back. At Cape Kennedy, now Cape Canaveral, in Florida, they performed final system tests and helped launch the 3000-ton rocket with its 40-ton payload. IBM engineers and technicians at the George Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, built the guiding instrument unit embedded in the giant Saturn rockets. Four thousand IBM employees, most of them from the company’s Federal Systems Division, built the computers and wrote many of the complex software programs that launched the Apollo missions and guided them safely to Earth.

Man on the moon history