You can automate control of your craft in KSP with a mod. All you need is to have it send the data to the Apollo computer and then send the output to the craft. It should probably work with the real solar system mod.

Now that I saw this though, I swear I saw this exact video already. Scott Manley or someone may have already done this.

Finally! An expansion pack for Lunar Lander(1979).

Reentry is pretty darn close to 100% realistic

https://store.steampowered.com/app/882140/Reentry__A_Space_Flight_Simulator/

Lunar Lander wasn’t good enough for you?

It will be vibecoded with six-fingered physics

/s everywhere making the jokes less funny, its funny to see people not getting the jokes anyway.

To be fair, there was only one moon lander, not 27 different ones that all worked slightly differently.

I get what you mean, but programmers in 1969 would have had their minds absolutely fucking blown by a GUI in general, let alone modern websites.

import MoonPy

MoonPy.LandOnMoon()

while MoonPy.OnMoon:
    print("john madden")

Very efficiently.

Or for a less cheeky answer, I believe the method they used at a high level was pointing a camera at a few guide stars, so the 30 lines of assembly might have been a loop that checked those cameras for any drift of those stars and did a correction pulse of the rotation boosters to keep them centered. Oh, one of the references might have been the signal strength from home, too (signal gets weaker if the antenna isn’t aligned).

Unless it was an emergency, it might only need to look at 5 pixels to determine alignment and correction.

Also, just because it’s assembly doesn’t mean it can’t call subroutines and functions, so that 30 lines might be misleading in the way those several lines in the other reply have way more going on. That said, if it’s just doing a pixel brightness comparison, that’s one line to read the central pixel, then for each direction one line to read that pixel, one more to compare, one line to jump to next comparison if center is brighter, one instruction to initiate correction burn, one instruction to stop it immediately after, then one instruction to return to the start of the loop… Which comes to 22 lines total, leaving 8 for logging or maybe timing the burn. And that’s assuming their instruction set didn’t have anything fancy like read and compare, compare and jump, or a single instruction burn pulse.

I mean, the math required is basically first year college level stuff.

Making a machine that will accurately follow that trajectory and not kill you is the hard part.