Nasa carried a pocket calculator on Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 as a backup for rendezvous calculations; 37 years later, it reached the Smithsonian |
In 1975, Nasa sent an unusual piece of technology into orbit: a pocket-sized Hewlett-Packard HP-65 programmable calculator carried aboard the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. It was not the spacecraft’s main computer, but a backup device programmed with rendezvous and guidance equations in case the Apollo Guidance Computer failed. The calculator travelled during a landmark mission that…
