Dan Lickly, Programmer (Apollo), Manager (Apollo and Intermetrics), Professor (Univ of New Hampshire Computer Science)

Dan Lickly's Biography

One of the assignments for my Engineering Apollo class was to interview someone that worked on some aspect of Apollo. After a bit of research I came across Dan Lickly. Dan worked at the MIT Instrumentation Lab (before it was called Draper Labs) and joined the NASA group responsible for the Apollo Guidance and Control computers. Initially he was responsible for the re-entry software and later led a larger team. In 1969 he left the project and started a company called Intermetrics with some of his colleagues. Intermetrics was heavily involved with the space program and wrote some of the software for the shuttle. After a distinguished career at Intermetrics, Dan joined the Computer Science faculty at the University of New Hampshire where he taught classes on C++ among other things.

I met Dan and a companion of his named Sue at the Harvard Science Center. We spent two hours chatting about everything from his time working on Apollo to the future of space travel. Dan even gave me a crash course in orbital re-entry mechanics including chalkboard illustrations! Both Dan and Sue were extremely nice and I believe Dan enjoyed telling the stories as much as I enjoyed hearing them. I had enough material for an 8 page report, which I submitted to my Apollo professor this week. I won't include the report here, but I will list some of the more interesting notes I took during the interview:

Notes:

Most aspects of Apollo were affected greatly when humans were added to the equation but not the re-entry team. Astronauts didn't have much to do during re-entry so all the re-entry team had to do was enhance some of the displays.

They wrote their own assembly language to program Apollo because 1) there weren't many languages to pick from at the time (ie 1960) and 2) they wanted some specialized functions like matrix and vector multiplication.

Astronauts could only change the lift vector of the re-entry vehicle—they couldn't make it go side-to-side. By the time the astronauts were came back to earth (after 1-2 weeks in space), they didn't want to have to control anything—just get them back on the ground!

The astronauts started re-entry at .05g which felt like a lot more because they had been in 0gs for several days. They would experience up to 6.8gs during re-entry. Dan said he can only imagine how that must have felt.

He believes that in 1960 50% (or more) of programmers were female! This was due to the evolution of data entry (which women typically did) to more specialized programming. It wasn't until scientists (mainly men) thought that programming computers was a worthwhile effort that they started pushing woman out of the field (now he thinks 10% or less of Computer Science students is female).

He thinks we are really far away from being able to send a human to Mars (or even the Moon). Referenced the Columbia disaster which occurred during re-entry. He thinks there is nothing to re-entry.

He thinks the "engineering risks" (i.e., the little things) are the biggest hazard to a complex project like Apollo. He gave an example where someone used 22/7 as an approximation for pi in some of their software. Turns out that they needed it to be much more precise. This caused some problems on the early Apollo flights. Another example is the metric mix-up on the Mars Rover. He said it is hard to quantify these types of risks.