In the final minutes of Apollo 11’s descent to the lunar surface, five 1201 and 1202 alarms blared in the lunar module. The computer was overloaded with data, and for a brief moment it looked like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t land on the Moon. As we know, they did; Apollo 11 got a GO to land in spite of the alarms. What we don’t know is the man whose work allowed the crew reboot the computer and save the landing: Hal Laning.
In April of 1961, NASA first approached the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now called Draper) to develop the guidance computer for the Apollo lunar missions. Among the engineers who eventually joined the program was J. Halcombe Laning, who went by Hal. A veteran of missile control systems, Laning had previous worked on a simple guidance system for a Mars satellite. Though this Mars mission was never launched, ...
