The twelve astronauts who walked on the Moon are the best-known faces of the Apollo program, but in numbers they were also the smallest part of the program. About 400,000 men and women worked on Apollo, building the vehicles, calculating trajectories, even making and packing food for the crews. Many of them worked on solving a deceptively simple question: how to we guide astronauts to the moon and back safely? Draper, formerly the MIT Instrumentation Lab, addressed several aspects of that question, including how to develop a computer that could guide a spacecraft on a journey to the moon and then home. In doing so, they helped lead the computing revolution from transistors to integrated circuits and provided NASA with software that worked exactly as it was supposed to every time.

Find out more about Draper's contribution to Apollo at wehackthemoon.com