Apollo era space navigation is not that complex,  mainly a matter of (i) pointing the ship in the right direction,  (ii) firing the engines until a certain velocity change had happened,  and (iii) assessing the result.  (ii) in particular is a one-dimensional problem,  and (iii) can be done by the guys on the ground via radar.<p>What the shuttle did was much more complex because it was an unstable aircraft that required many &quot;frames per second&quot; applied to the control surfaces to keep it stable during reentry and landing.<p>Back around 2006 or so I wrote a simple software 3-d rendering engine in Javascript that was 8k in size without much effort towards minimizing size other being (a) maybe the only AJAX application that actually used XML (to represent 3d models) and (b) using XML element and attribute names that were just one character long.<p>Not long after that,  libraries such as Prototype and JQuery were becoming popular and these were all many times bigger than my 3d engine before you even started coding the app.