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I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game


Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student in Massachusetts, wrote the first Lunar Landing game. By 1973, it had become “by far an…

Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student in Massachusetts, wrote the first Lunar Landing game. “I was skilled at calculus at the time and familiar with concepts like a Taylor series, but also my recollection is that my father, who was a physicist, helped me in the derivation of the equations.” – Jim Storer, personal communication The rocket equation is what gives rise to the suicide burn being optimal, and the five terms he uses of the Taylor series, where the argument is at most 0.1212, makes it accurate to over six decimal places.

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