How Westport resident John E. Miller helped America land on the moon

WESTPORT — On July 20, 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history when they stepped out of the Apollo 11 lunar module onto the surface of the moon. One of the key men behind the historic moment that captured the world’s attention was Westport resident John E. Miller, a mechanical engineer whose MIT team designed the Apollo Guidance Computer.

A couple of months after President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech to Congress issuing his goal of seeing a man walk on the moon by the end of the decade, Miller and his team at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory in the Aeronautics Division got to work to make it happen.

“Nobody had navigated outside the Earth. There was a lot of new math that was employed, a lot of new algorithms that were employed. There was just a lot of creativity,” Miller recalled.

At the time, the Instrumentation Laboratory was working on inertial navigation, a method of navigating that would be used in intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“NASA chose the laboratory as the leading people in navigation to do the guidance navigation control system for both the (lunar) vehicles,” said Miller. “It was the first contract of the Apollo program.”

At first, Miller was in charge of the inertial measurement unit, but over time his scope expanded to the hardware side of the guidance navigation control system. Another team would work on the software for the system.

“This was the first time that there was going to be a real computer boxed up to do a job, and not only that, it was the first one to have integrated circuits. Before that there were all individual transistors,” said Miller. “We took a chance on getting an integrated circuit we could use as a building block to make the whole thing smaller.”

The hardware system had a general central computer, the inertial measurement unit that kept the navigation coordinates fixed, three meters to measure acceleration and two optical instruments: one with a wide field of view and another with a narrower field of view and a telescope to take a citing on a star for navigation. A display and keyboard enabled communication with the computer. “There were nouns and verbs. So you named what you wanted to do and you gave it a verb to get the action done,” said Miller. “All of this had not been done before. The biggest things that had to be done were in the computer. The other parts of the system (inertial navigation) had been done pretty much before.”

Unlike the rest of the country, Miller’s team’s celebration didn’t happen when the astronauts walked on the moon, but when Aldrin and Armstrong arrived safely back on Earth.

“We really waited until they landed," Miller said. "When the parachutes came out we knew they were safe. We were really pleased that things went as well as they did."

Looking back on the historic moment today, Miller said almost everyone he’s talked to who worked on the Apollo program considers it to be the height of their careers.

“It was a wonderful program to work on," Miller said. "It had tremendous support from the American public, Congress. They had the schedule to get it done, they didn’t argue with you, we were able to make decisions really quickly and everyone really worked to get the job done."

On weekends, Miller would take phone calls related to the project at his summer cottage and during the week he was constantly traveling to labs in various parts of the country that were working together on the Apollo project. The people involved were “really competent,” he said. “Everyone worked toward the goal and worked really hard.”

Everyone at the lab embraced this project because it captivated a generation of Americans and the engineers could talk about it because it wasn’t related to weaponry, Miller said.

Before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Miller said he would give talks to the public about how the moon landing would happen.

“I had to describe how we’re going to get around the Earth, how we’re going to leave the Earth and then how we’re going to go to the moon," Miller said. "Most people didn’t have the foggiest idea of how we were going to do it so they really enjoyed it. They were really much better prepared when we started to do the landing, what to look for and how it was going to be done."

Miller said there was never a moment during the work when he thought the moon landing was an impossible idea, but a real setback came when three astronauts died in a fire inside the Apollo 1 command module during a test. “People were in shock over it, but they pulled together and we looked at everything that could possibly burn and changed it,” Miller said. “We didn’t have much in the guidance system that had to be changed. There were more items by the manufacturer of the capsule that had to be fixed.”

In a home bookcase, Miller has a collection of some of the equipment used to make the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. He also has a framed U.S. flag and crew patch that were carried to the moon during the last lunar landing mission in 1972, given by NASA in honor of Miller's contribution to the space program.

As for the technology as compared to today, Miller said there’s more computing power in an Apple Watch than his team had for the Apollo 11 mission. “Now people talk about gigabytes. We were in kilobites,” he said.

Miller left the MIT labs in 1969 to form the engineering company Intermetrics Inc. with some of the people who worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer, but he remained involved with NASA by serving on its advisory council.