Apollo-11: The Original AGC Source Code

TL;DR: chrislgarry/Apollo-11 is a transcription of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source for the command and lunar modules, written in Assembly. At 74,283 stars it is the most starred repository in today’s trending batch, and it has been on GitHub since April 3, 2014.

What it is

The repository describes itself as the “Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code for the command and lunar modules.” GitHub classifies the code as Assembly, which is accurate and unusual. This is not a port, not a simulator, and not a reimplementation. It is the flight-era code, made legible.

Two modules are named in the description, the command module and the lunar module, because the AGC ran different software in the two craft at different points in the mission.

Getting a 1969 machine’s program into a git repository in the 2010s is a transcription project, and that framing matters for everything below. It also means the repository has been continuously touched for over a decade, with the last push on July 15, 2026.

Why it keeps resurfacing

74,283 stars and 8,108 forks put it well ahead of every other repository in today’s batch. Part of that is the subject matter. Part of it is what the repository is convenient as: a fixed program you can read end to end without installing anything.

The public topics are agc, apollo, hacktoberfest, and nasa. The hacktoberfest topic is the revealing one, because it points at how the repository grew: a steady inflow of contributions shaped by an annual event, many from people who came for one small fix and stayed.

Signal	Value
Stars	74,283
Forks	8,108
Open issues	146
Primary language	Assembly
Default branch	master
Created	April 3, 2014
Last push	July 15, 2026
License (SPDX)	NOASSERTION

Reading and running it

You need no toolchain to read it:

git clone https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11.git
cd Apollo-11
ls

The master default branch is a small period detail. It is what the repository has carried since 2014, and it is a reminder that the project predates the current default-branch convention.

The licensing question

GitHub reports the license as NOASSERTION, which is neither “no license” nor a permissive one. It means GitHub did not map the repository to a standard SPDX identifier. If you need terms you can rely on, read what the repository itself states before reusing anything.

This is precisely the case for checking rather than assuming, because a fifty-year-old flight program and a decade of community patches now sit in the same repository.

When it is worth your time

Read it if you want to see what software looks like when it was written against a machine with a fixed amount of memory and no abstraction layers. That is a genuinely different artifact from anything in a modern inference stack.

Skip it if you are looking for something to run or extend today. With 146 open issues and no recognized license identifier, this is an archive that rewards reading more than it rewards depending on.

Source and Accuracy Notes

• Project page: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
• Source repository: chrislgarry/Apollo-11 (verified via GitHub API html_url)
• License: NOASSERTION as reported by the GitHub API, meaning GitHub did not map the repository to a standard SPDX identifier (see the repository for its own terms)
• Stars at time of writing: 74,283