Apollo 11’s guidance software couldn’t be patched at the last minute. It was woven with copper wire by women at Raytheon, where one mistake could mean starting again

Apollo 11’s guidance software couldn’t be patched at the last minute. It was woven with copper wire by women at Raytheon, where one mistake could mean starting again

Apollo 11 launched on 16 July 1969 with a 70-pound guidance computer and a flight program that was already physically committed to copper wire. The computer used integrated circuits for its logic, but its flight program was not stored on a modern-style chip. It lived in core rope memory at a Raytheon factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, where wires were threaded through or around tiny magnetic cores to encode the flight software. Once a rope modul…