Wired reporter Sarah Scoles spotlights how graduate students Thomas Abitante and Rachel Bellisle, both Draper Scholars, are developing new spacesuits and muscle toning devices that could help keep astronauts healthy while in space. “We need to make sure they're as healthy as possible,” says Abitante. “But we can't really add more exercise. So what else can we add?”
Fast Company contributor Charles Fishman explores the late Prof. Charles Draper’s instrumental contributions to making space flight possible, noting that Draper was so committed to his work that he volunteered to train as an astronaut so he could join an Apollo mission. “Space travel wouldn’t have been possible without Draper’s work and that of his group at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab,” writes Fishman.
Margaret Hamilton is included on National Geographic’s list of female coders “whose careful calculations led to many of the world's greatest technological advances,” writes Catherine Zuckerman. Hamilton “led the team at MIT whose software systems were critical to the success of the Apollo 11 mission.”
Cristina Quinn writes for WGBH about the MIT Instrumentation Lab, which was “tasked with creating code the astronauts would use to navigate the moon without the help of ground control in Houston” for NASA’s 1968 Apollo 8 mission. “The Apollo Guidance Computer was a milestone in computing technology in many ways,” explains Debbie Douglas, director of collections at the MIT Museum.
David Hoag, an MIT alumnus and aeronautical engineer for the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Draper Laboratory) who led the development of the guidance, navigation and control systems for several Apollo systems, died on Jan. 19, reports Jasper Craven for The Boston Globe. “Technically, he was about as gifted a person as I have ever encountered,” said former colleague Norman Sears.