Think about the Apollo missions for a second: we took men over 200,000 miles to the Moon and brought them back safely using rockets that had less computing power than the smartphone in your pocket. During the frantic Space Race, engineers were forced to rely on primitive technology, slide rules, and sheer genius. The rockets themselves were monumental feats of brute-force engineering, and the guidance systems were often analog, backed up by human calculation. The margin for error was almost non-