Left Brains for the Right Stuff – Hugh Blair-Smith Blair will speak about his new book, “Left Brains for the Right Stuff”. What made the Space Race possible? What made it necessary? How close a race was it? And what did it achieve? Presentation, book purchase, and signing. Hugh Blair-Smith was at MIT Instrumentation (later Draper) Laboratory from 1959 to 1981, designing guidance and navigation hardware/software for Apollo and fault tolerance software for the Space Shuttle. From 1982 to 2004, he joined a variety of small companies developing touch-screen user interfaces and mainframe performance monitors. Coming out of retirement in 2007, he created design verification and runtime diagnostic software for a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter instrument. From 2008 to 2017, he presented papers at Digital Avionics Systems Conferences, two of which appeared in IEEE/AES. His book, Left Brains for the Right Stuff: Computers, Space, and History was published in 2015. He appeared in a Nova show, Apollo’s Daring Mission, in December 2018, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8, the first to place men in orbit around the Moon. His next book, Minot’s Gifts, is under construction: a science fiction novel about the friendliest extraterrestrials ever to touch down at Area 51. Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at House of Chang, 282 Concord Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting.