[ExI] Why space tech isn't cutting edge

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of Dan
Subject: Re: [ExI] Why space tech isn't cutting edge

 

Why is this news? I thought it was widely known that electronics on space
missions is always several years behind what's being done elsewhere.

 

Regards,

 

Dan 

 

 

>.No, this is a common misconception.  The space industry isn't necessarily
*behind* exactly, for if we argue that it is behind, it would imply that we
are trying to get 2002-era processors to work in space, but that isn't the
direction.  We still use early 90s processors, and work instead the
software.  The feature size of microprocessors shrunk steadily, resulting in
vast increases in speed, but it also made the processors more vulnerable to
space radiation.  Furthermore, we ended up with all this speed, and what did
we do with it?  Back in 1990, it took about half a minute to boot up a
computer.  Now, with processors that are a thousand times faster, it only
takes about half a minute to boot up a computer.  Why isn't it 30
milliseconds?  Why is it that you can go into your control panel, look at
system processes and see that your microprocessor is doing basically
nothing, maybe 1 to 2 percent utilization, yet it doesn't really feel much
faster than it did twenty years ago?  With a thousand-fold increase in speed
of processors and a vast increase in memory bus speed, why is it that
computers got so junked up with all those mysterious processes running
alongside what you really need, and even now they STILL crash occasionally,
so that it feels like we made almost no progress at all?

 

Space flight software is stripped down and optimized to where it does
exactly what you need and only what you need, it isn't susceptible to
viruses, it is reliable as an anvil (because the astronauts' lives depend on
it), it has had every line of code tested under every possible input and
when all that expensive testing is done, you have a damn good product.  In
that sense, the space industry isn't behind their commercial counterparts,
it is ahead.  Of course you can't play angry birds up there, and instead of
tweeting to your fellow astronauts, you might need to just talk to them
using your vocal cords, so in that sense they are behind.

 

spike

 

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