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The Ancient Computers Powering the Space Race
An anonymous reader writes "Think that the exploration of space is a high tech business? Technology dating back to the Apollo moon landings is still used by Nasa mission control for comms and the 1980s 386 processors that keep the International Space Station aloft."
The Ancient Computers Powering the Space Race
From general agreement on the definition of the Space Race:
The Space Race was a mid-to-late twentieth century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in outer space exploration. The term refers to a specific period in human history, 1957-1975, and does not include subsequent efforts by these or other nations to explore space.
Emphasis mine. As to the 'ancient tech', it's stable and still working so what's the problem? People are bitching about rising taxes not the fact that we are stunting ourselves in exploring space. It's not 1975 anymore, people have moved on to other international penis/rocket/missile envy matches.
In related news, the house fails to agree on a meager NASA funding bill while space tourism continues to progress.
My work here is dung.
Adding that the CPU's are also custom made, along with it's embedded operating system, to withstand the operating environment.
http://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html
It's the same in any long-life service, like space and military. For example the Aegis missile system runs on 286s and 386s while the busses run on a sedate 200 kilohertz speed. There have been recent upgrades to "new" PowerPCs or Pentiums, but only for a few select ships.
There are even some strange home users that still run on primitive CPUs from the Seventies! Like 6502, 8088, and 68000
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The last 20MHz RAD6000 flight board we bought was around $250k. A flight FPGA runs about $5k each. 10 times is actually quite an understatement for radiation hardened.
They do. People are constantly making new rad-hardened chips, mostly for commercial satellites. The latest LEON (SPARCv8) chips go up to about 25MHz in the rad-hardened version. It's not just a matter of using a slightly older technology - space is an incredibly IC-hostile environment.
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