Date posted: 07/17/2009*

Raytheon celebrates the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo lunar landing this week. Apollo 11 performed the first manned mission to land on the moon and return back to Earth safely on July 20, 1969.

Raytheon Contributions

Raytheon contributed significantly to the Apollo program. More than 40 years ago, Raytheon engineers in Waltham and Sudbury, Mass. facilities, collaborated with the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, today’s Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., to design and manufacture the Apollo Guidance and Navigation system (G&N) for the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

The G&N consisted of three major subsystems:

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) with its associated display and keyboard
The inertial measurement unit
The optical unit

Most Reliable Computer of its Time

The AGC gained a worldwide reputation as the most reliable digital computer of its time. The system was used to guide, navigate, and monitor the movement of the Command and Lunar Landing Modules of the Apollo spacecraft, and there were no reported failures during the mission. Flight and landing calculations were computed before, during and after mission completion through the AGC. The system’s Raytheon microwave tube also transmitted radio and television signals to earth, enabling millions to witness historical moments.

Apollo 11’s returning lunar module was so precise that it “came up from below absolutely as if they were riding on a rail,” according to Command Module Pilot Michael Collins at a post-flight press conference conducted with fellow Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr.

Apollo Guidance and Navigation System was at the Forefront

According to Bob Zagrodnick, former Apollo program manager who now works at Raytheon in Sudbury, Mass., the development of the AGC helped change the current understanding of technology and even had an impact on the company's working environment. “The technology was so new 40 years ago, it was at the forefront of everything,” said Zagrodnick, “Graduate computer architecture classes were just beginning to be offered at universities. But the success of the Apollo 11 mission and of the AGC sparked a new movement in computer architecture.”

The Apollo 11 milestone paved the way for new space technologies and discoveries to come. Today, the team at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo, Calif., continues to work on a number of critical space programs. Raytheon Mini-RF technology, recently activated aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft, is helping pave the way for a new era of lunar discovery. The Mini-RF system will search for evidence of ice at the lunar poles and contribute to LRO's mapping of the lunar surface to identify suitable landing sites for man's next trip to the moon.