[QUOTE=Chronos]
NASA had, maybe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the engineers in NASA had. Slide rules remained popular for a while.
[/QUOTE]
To continue the slipstick hijack, did you ever see Failure is Not an Option on the Hitler Channel? They were asking the various members of Mission Control about their slide rules and pocket protectors. Most of them had pretty fancy sliderules, and all but one of them denied ever having pocket protectors (which was immediately followed by a shot of them in the 1970s, clearly wearing one :D).
[QUOTE=Dorjän]
D’oh! :smack:
I just remembered, I wrote that ballistic calculator in FORTRAN, not Excel! My bad. If you still want it tho, I’ll still look for it.
(FORTRAN, man I feel really old now. They were still teaching it to engineering students in 1994, honest!)
[/QUOTE]
Oh, well, I wouldn’t know what the hell to do with anything in FORTRAN, but thank you though!
Tripler
::sigh::
[QUOTE=Tuckerfan]
Dover Publications sells inexpensive copies of textbooks used by NASA and the Air Force on the subject you might find interesting.
[/QUOTE]
Shoot! That’s one of the textbooks I used for the class! I think I still have it, too.
Tripler
If I sold it (I don’t think I did): :smack:
I had to calculate the ballistics and burn times, trajectories, etc for an Apollo style moonshot in Astrodynamics class in college as well.
As I recall, I had put off doing the moon mission until the night before (typical for college), so I wrote completely sleazy algorithms to do the calculating just to get it done.
Took about five minutes on the old 486 back then for the “real math” to figure the orbits - mostly me going back and tweaking data though to get the lunar insertion burn to come out right… Totally accurate in the end though. 
Thing was, it was kind of an anticlimax. Wow, we’re going to the moon in class!!! But as it turns out it’s just a few pages of boring numbers and orbit parameters.