Yesterday, May 5, as NASA celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first U.S. manned spaceflight at an event at the Kennedy Space Center, IBM commemorated its team of mathematicians and technologists who supported the Project Mercury missions in the 1960s.In a video released by IBM, Professor Arthur Cohen, the mathematician who led IBM’s team that supported Project Mercury, recounts Alan Shepard‘s flight into space and the role of technology in the mission.

While people around the world were on the edge of their seats on May 5, 1961, the IBM team was counting on the technology they had developed to track the spacecraft and provide real-time information to Mission Control. IBM worked to address the unique data processing challenges presented by the real-time information requirements of NASA’s Mercury mission.

The team developed a ‘real-time channel’ called the IBM 7281, which could receive up to 1,000 bits of data per second—a breakthrough innovation at the time. They also developed advanced programs and mathematics to analyze incoming data and provide ‘mission critical’ information to NASA flight controllers throughout the space flight for evaluation and necessary action. Their work represented the early days of real-time and predictive analytics, which today is a major growth initiative for IBM.

As IBM celebrates its Centennial this year, the company’s work with the U.S. Space program is being celebrated as one of the top 100 milestones in its 100-year history. IBM’s involvement in helping to progress the exploration of space has spanned nearly six decades. IBM acquired the skills and invented the tools needed for space flight over a 30 year period stretching back to the 1940s. In the late 1950s, the Naval Research Laboratory employed an IBM 650 computer to solve the orbital math needed to launch small satellites. Helping humankind make it to the moon, 4,000 IBM employees built the computers and wrote many of the complex software programs that launched the Apollo missions and guided astronauts safely back to Earth.