Of all the technological revolutions of the twentieth century, Dr. Herbert Grosch, a professor at U of T’s Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, was involved in two of the greatest. He was there, in the midst of things, at the dawn of both the space and computer ages.
To him, rocketry and computers went hand-in-hand. “Neither one stood alone,” he said at this year’s first Sigma Xi distinguished lecture series, held on Sept. 14. Grosch’s long career includes time as president of the American Rocket Society (now the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), and the first manager of IBM’s space program, in the 50s.
Grosch professed a particular “fondness” for the work done at the Jet Propulsion Lab, in California. The JPL is the central nerve in NASA’s robotic space missions. There, he saw mankind’s first steps into space, powered by the computing revolution, and he sees an even greater use for computers in the future.
“What we need is man’s intelligence in space but … we insist on bringing their bodies along,” he said.
While teaching at Columbia University, in 1946, Grosch designed and taught one of the world’s first computer science courses. But for someone with so much experience with computers, knows both their power as well as their limitations.
“Space travel is limited not just by fuels, not just by the number of stages, … but perhaps more than anything else by the complexity of debugging the software.”
