Landing the first two astronauts on the Moon in July of 1969
ranks as one of the great engineering achievements in human
history. 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. 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. 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. 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. More IBM employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center near
Washington, DC, developed the worl