Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are aware that yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moonwalk. Because of that, a lot of really cool stories have emerged.

One very cool tale is that of a 10-year old boy stationed with his dad in Guam who played a key role in getting Apollo 11 safely back to Earth. Guam was a key communications station with the returning capsule and the only way of communicating with the crew in the critical final moments of descent into the atmosphere. It seems a bearing in the satellite dish failed and the ground crew didn’t have time to replace it. They figured maybe they could get it moving long enough to get the spacecraft down if only they could pack enough grease into it. However, the access hole was too small for any of them to stuff their hands into. The station director sent a team to his house to get his 10-year old son out of bed and bring him to the site. The small boy was able to thread his arm in the hole and get the dish working again. I can only imagine how he beamed telling that story to his friends.

On a different bent, a hobbyist reconstructed the Apollo guidance computer from the original specs and code. While that’s an awesome basement project in its own right, what’s more fascinating are the specs on the system. Keep in mind, this system got guys to the moon and back. It boasted a 1MHz processor, about 1/500th the capability of an average cell phone today. It ran on a total of 12K of code. That means that 100 copies of the software would have fit on one of those old floppy disks you don’t use anymore because it won’t hold the Christmas letter you sent out last year. It’s humbling to think of the ingenuity and creativity that went in to the space program in the ’60s. Think about what they accomplished with a level of technology that seems primitive at just 40 years distance. For an even scarier thought, imagine what technology will be capable of 40 years from now.