Thank you so much for this article. We.read about all the amazing technology that was created for Apollo but this explains one in detail.
I worry with all the outsourcing over the past few decades that these and even basic engineering manufacturing technologies are being lost.
kens · 21h ago
Author here for your Apollo questions :-)
_dwt · 20h ago
Great article. I'd never thought about a spacecraft ADI having a third axis. Sadly, a nitpick - Bill Lear's F-5 autopilot was not, as far as I can tell, in any way connected to the Northrop F-5 fighter jet.
kens · 19h ago
Thanks. You are correct about the F-5 autopilot, so I fixed that. It turns out that it was used in planes such as the C-47, C-60, C-45, and B-26, but is unrelated to the F-5.
garaetjjte · 15h ago
>The Command Module for Apollo used a completely different FDAI (flight director-attitude indicator) that was built by Honeywell.
That's surprising. Was there any requirement that necessitated them to be different parts, or it's just because different suppliers were chosen by Grumman/North American?
kens · 13h ago
It's probably a combination of different suppliers being chosen, and everyone wanted a piece of the pie. But it's annoying when I figure out how something works in the Lunar Module and then discover that the Command Module is completely different. Not to mention that the Saturn V is a whole different world.
rbanffy · 20h ago
I remember a similar thing from the, IIRC, F-104.
johng · 21h ago
I mainly remember this because he refers to it as the 'frappin 8 ball' in the Apollo 13 movie, if my memory serves.
kens · 19h ago
Yes, in the movie, Lovell says "What's the frappin' attitude?" as the 8-ball rolls out of control. The actual Apollo 13 transcript has nothing like that, interestingly enough.
We had an article on HN last year about a similar Soviet era device. It was a globe that showed the position of the spacecraft relative to the earth.
kens · 8h ago
The Soviet Globus is similar in some ways, but also has some major differences. As you mentioned, the ball shows the spacecraft's position over the earth, rather than showing the spacecraft's orientation in space, so the ball looks like a globe with landmasses and everything. The ball rotates along two axes, not three. Moreover, the Globus doesn't have any external inputs; it rotates the ball according to a preset track, regardless of where you actually are.
Back in the day, this would be have been a good homework assignment for an EE analog controls class.
wafflemaker · 19h ago
That's a 'kunst' of UI (a gem?). One look and you instantly know the orientation of your craft.
As an amateur astro-pilot (1000h in KSP and 200+ in Flight of Nova, both flight simulators with realistic orbital mechanics) I'd like to say that in modern cockpit of the fusion propelled ships in FoA, the one thing I'm missing from Apollo-style flight instruments of KSP is the Nav-Ball.
The jet-fighter-like "ladder" style attitude meter can't be read with just one look. You need to focus to see the numbers next to the ladder steps. And then another look at the compass for a full reading. 3s of focus (away from controlling the ship) vs. 0.5 (that your subconscious has most likely already interialized).
To put that 3s into perspective, according to ship readings, Apollo 11 had <20s fuel left when it touched down on the moon.
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WillAdams · 20h ago
This was actually mentioned in a recent talk by Freya Holmér --- I believe this one:
Ken once again proves he's one of the greatest publishers on Hacker News.
johnsutor · 18h ago
Brings me back to playing Kerbal Space Program
chiph · 20h ago
kens - Are the collectors of the output transistors on the amplifier boards connected to the metal can? I can see from the photo that the heatsinks don't touch (there's a gap between them for the capacitors). Did they use nylon screws to prevent an electrical path through the frame?
kens · 19h ago
Unfortunately, I don't have the FDAI handy to check this.
CamperBob2 · 19h ago
For TO-5 bipolars, it was common for the collector to be connected to the case. I wouldn't say that's universally true but I don't recall any exceptions off the top of my head.
artemonster · 3h ago
When I see something like this my first thought is: „there is absolutely no way current gen vibe coders and engineers will be able to replicate this“
fifilura · 2h ago
There is still a certain percentile doing clever things.
I bet a car mechanic in the 60s would have a hard time to replicate this too.
There are many different Shuttle simulators. The simulator photo in my post is one of the Shuttle Mission Simulators (SMS), now at Stafford Museum in Oklahoma. The Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL) is a different simulator for avionics testing (rather than astronaut training) and is currently in Houston.
dmd · 17h ago
The strong impression I always get from the entire Apollo program is "they didn't know it couldn't be done at the level of technology available, so they did it anyway".
joshvm · 5h ago
There's a nice lecture from Dan Gelbart that discusses things that people thought were impossible, until they were invented:
And some guys who had previously succeeded at solving difficult problems under time pressure with limited money. Well, the money was more limited on one side of the war.
jsrcout · 16h ago
> 3. The FDAI's signals are more complicated than I described above. Among
> other things, the IMU's gimbal angles use a different coordinate system from
> the FDAI, so an electromechanical unit called GASTA (Gimbal Angle Sequence
> Transformation Assembly) used resolvers and motors to convert the
> coordinates.
I'm so glad I work in software.
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userbinator · 16h ago
1960s technology, designed and made in the USA. It seems that people back then were far more clever at making do with what they had.
I worry with all the outsourcing over the past few decades that these and even basic engineering manufacturing technologies are being lost.
That's surprising. Was there any requirement that necessitated them to be different parts, or it's just because different suppliers were chosen by Grumman/North American?
Links: https://archive.org/details/apollo1319959231994/page/n92/mod... https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/...
My three articles on the Globus had the following HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34468212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35311300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038710
As an amateur astro-pilot (1000h in KSP and 200+ in Flight of Nova, both flight simulators with realistic orbital mechanics) I'd like to say that in modern cockpit of the fusion propelled ships in FoA, the one thing I'm missing from Apollo-style flight instruments of KSP is the Nav-Ball.
The jet-fighter-like "ladder" style attitude meter can't be read with just one look. You need to focus to see the numbers next to the ladder steps. And then another look at the compass for a full reading. 3s of focus (away from controlling the ship) vs. 0.5 (that your subconscious has most likely already interialized).
To put that 3s into perspective, according to ship readings, Apollo 11 had <20s fuel left when it touched down on the moon.
No comments yet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUlvxaQBW78
I bet a car mechanic in the 60s would have a hard time to replicate this too.
https://spaceflightblunders.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/ov-095-...
EDIT: Ah. It almost certainly was:
https://www.superstock.com/asset/oct-astronauts-frederick-ri...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZeBWJLRXqM Creative solutions to impossible engineering problems
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