Moon machines

We had the pleasure to watch the documentary video titled Moon Machines produced by the Science Channel in the year 2009. Personally, I have always been very curious about space exploration, planets, and anything related to space (astronomy). When I was a kid, I was always wondering about life in other planets and the search for organic components through the entire universe. 

Ever since we were able to have classes of history, we were all told that the United States won the space race by placing the first man in the moon and bringing him back safely. Or that the URSS was the first country to put a man and a satellite in space. Or even if we dive more into a political aspect (some might consider it conspirative theories), the USA and URSS started building rockets because it was more easier for weapons (for not saying missiles) to travel through space than in the air...There a thousand approaches we can have for this topic, but the purpose of this blog is to talk about how humanity was able to succeed in a project with this magnitude by having a defficient (today we would say that) computational and hardware resources. 

If we looked back at a problem of the past years, maybe we have a better solution than the one used back then. And that's thank to all the advances and contributions of our fellow computer scientists, programmers and engineers. What really amazed me is that the bigger the projects, the more complex they become, so we need a more organized code which do not waste resources. Amazing how code must fit a certain amount of memory. Inspiring story for all future programmers around the world, I hope that for this class we can work on a project not as big as the one mentioned on the video, but one which makes us reflex about the importance of software design, teamwork and imagination.

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