[ExI] Why space tech isn't cutting edge

[Sandra K Arjona]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 12:11 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> ** **
>
> *>…* *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****
>
> ** **
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>


-- 

Sandra K. Arjona, M.L.S.
Journal Manager
Academic Emergency Medicine
sandrak.arjona at gmail.com
Tel:  412 772 1190
Fax:  412 772 1190



-- 
Sandra K. Arjona, M.L.S.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20121119/4ecf5553/attachment.html>