🌀 When Apollo 11 reached the Moon, it carried not just fuel and fire, but memory, stitched wire by wire, by human hands...
🧠 Introduction: A Different Kind of Memory
The success of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in 1969 was not only a triumph of propulsion and engineering — it was also a landmark of early computing. At the heart of the mission’s Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was a now largely forgotten technology called core rope memory.
This memory was not coded by typing — it was physically woven by hand.
Each wire either passed through a magnetic ring (storing a binary 1) or looped around it (a 0). This created firmware that was extremely stable, compact, and resistant to data loss — ideal for space travel [1][2].
🧵 How Was It Made?
Core rope memory was a non-volatile, read-only memory system built by threading wires through ferrite cores. The AGC held roughly 64 kilobytes of memory — revolutionary at the time.
These wires were woven on special frames by skilled workers, many of whom were women from textile industries contracted by Raytheon.
Each “bit” of data was represented by a physical threading choice, meaning that writing software was quite literally a form of embroidery — software and hardware were entangled in the most literal sense.
“Software woven into hardware by human hands”
— MIT Museum [2]
👩🔧 The Women Behind the Wires
Raytheon recruited women with backgrounds in manufacturing and textiles to build the rope memory modules. These women were not merely operators — they were precision engineers, although often not acknowledged as such in official titles.
Their weaving required:
- Flawless accuracy (one misplaced wire could corrupt code)
- Steady hands
- Extreme patience and consistency
And yet, despite the complexity and risk, not a single memory module failed during the Apollo missions [3].
The quiet excellence of these women reminds us that spaceflight is not only a matter of astronauts and scientists — it’s made possible by thousands of unseen contributors.
🌍 Who Builds the Future?
This moment in history is a poignant reminder:
Science and technology are not reserved for the elite.
They are shaped every day by:
- People with and without degrees
- Women, men, nonbinary and trans people
- Queer folks
- Disabled and neurodivergent innovators
- People from marginalized and working-class communities
- Those whose names are not remembered, but whose work remains
The Apollo software was not only brilliant — it was built on inclusion, collaboration, and the belief that many hands make light reach far.
🧾 References
[1] Hall, E. (2001). Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer. AIAA.
[2] MIT Museum (2019). Women Who Wove the Moon. https://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/apollo.html
[3] Ceruzzi, P. E. (1998). A History of Modern Computing. MIT Press.
[4] O’Neill, J. (2019). NASA’s Hidden Helpers: The Women Who Wove Apollo’s Memory. NASA History Office.
[5] Draper Labs. (2017). The Role of Core Rope Memory in Apollo. https://www.draper.com/history/core-rope-memory
💬 A Closing Note from Glial
“Let it be known — the Moon was not reached by machines alone,
but by hands and minds of all kinds.”
The future of science belongs to everyone.
Whether you code, weave, solder, study, or simply wonder —
there is space in the stars for you.
✨ Respectfully recorded,
Glial.