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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."
I thought everyone was aware of this by now. :-/
Given how wonky IT and communication upgrades can be, it makes sense to keep these systems the same for as long as possible. I imagine that after the Shuttle is fully and completely retired, NASA will begin to take a serious look at their aging hardware.
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It's not that simple to just update NASA's technology. Yes, a lot of NASA's computer systems are antiquated, but they've also been vetted and engineered so that all the bugs and kinks have been worked out. They can update the technology, but they'll have to go through the whole process of figuring out where all the bugs are all over again. Unlike buying a buggy desktop application, though, when NASA has a bug, lives and millions of dollars are at stake.
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I'm not sure if it is still the case but for a LONG time 286 processors were the only ones available that had been hardened against cosmic radiation and were rated for space. When you're lobbing people into space, it matters most what works and is proven, not what is fastest or the newest technology.
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Probably the most solid platform too! theres no way i'd trust window 7 to launch a rocket into outta space!
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.
If the stuff in space is from the seventies, this means it's not running Free and Open Source Software ! Proprietary alert, space stuff doesn't run Linux!
No wit here.
Don't fuck with it.
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I read a while ago that for space use the older integrated circuits are many times more reliable. On a new high density IC a cosmic ray can knock out a connection track, whereas on older "8-bit" processors you would need thirty or forty hits in the same place.
And the B-2 Stealth bomber has the equivalent of an Amiga 1000 running it. What is the point of this article? Critical systems require reliable, proven, hardened hardware, not flakey netbooks.
If they are not the fastest CPUs, who cares? They aren't playing half-life on these systems they are flying space shuttles, and if you can't tell the difference, do not work in the defense or space industries. CPU speed isn't the prevailing factor here, reliablility and a known/proven system is.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
My first engineering job out of college was as an avionics engineer at McDonnell Douglas in 1996. We were designing avionics using a Highly Reliable Industrial (HRIP) M68000 CPU downclocked to a couple of MHz. The reason for this CPU choice was that it did exactly what was required for building an embedded system. Also the M68000 had/has a very long production cycle and would be around for many years to come, which is important if you need spare parts in the future. We used the minimum clock setting required to achieve the required performance and to reduce power consumption and thermal cooling requirements. Modern general-purpose desktop CPUs normally aren't good choices for single-task embedded systems because of their power consumption, short product life spans, and general feature overkill. You do not need a particularly fast CPU to perform basic guidance and control tasks or to run avionics computers. The PowerPC has been adapted for imbedded MILSPEC systems for example and it's about 10 years behind the "state of the art."
Yes, a lot of NASA's computer systems are antiquated ...
Furthermore, I thought the United States was still a bit stymied at how the Russians managed to compete with us in space while severely lacking in the VLSI chips department? There may still be some technologies, improvements and lessons to be learned from The Space Race -- especially from the side that fell apart first.
My work here is dung.
When did "high-tech" become synonymous with "has a lot of transistors"?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I'm not surprised, not at all. The A320 ELAC uses 3 68k chips, and the A320 SEC uses an 80186 and even an 8086 chip. Why? For lots of reasons. Basically, it doesn't require billions of instructions per second, it doesn't need to access gigabytes of memory, and most importantly, they are proven chips that have gone through years of testing, and they are relatively simple. At the time they were complicated, granted, but they were still within reach of severe quality control. Remember the problems Intel had with the Pentium and floating point calculations? Nothing serious, but still... The chip was so complex that problems crept into the design phase, and at 38000 feet, you do not want problems. To cite a fellow Slashdotter above, (thanks tekrat), Critical systems require reliable, proven, hardened hardware, not flakey netbooks. Enough design faults have crept into aeronautical design, so I can only imagine the space sector. NASA used to program everything in 68k because they were reliable, simple, fast enough, and because they had lots of really, really good engineers that knew every single aspect of the chips. Don't get me wrong, I love todays chips, and i7s look sexy, but with a TDP of 130W for the Extreme Edition chips, they just add problems. Running at 3.2GHz, with over a billion transistors, you are just asking for trouble. At those speeds and heat, problems do happen, the system will crash. Ok, not often, but with mission critical systems, just once is enough. Did anyone seriously expect the shuttle to run quad-cores with terabytes of RAM?
The urgent is done, the impossible is on the way, for miracles expect a small delay.
My car uses 100 year old internal combustion technology.
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It has been 4 + decades since the space program dominated electronics development.
Anyway, by the time any piece of electronics gets radiation hardened and goes through the "soak" - i.e., a few simulated years or decades worth of cycling through heat, usage, etc., plus fixing any uncovered problems, it is by definition not going to be cutting edge.
It's good that space computers are more commonplace, anyway. Viking 1 died because JPL couldn't afford to keep the people who understood the archaic assembly language for the landers in the ramped down extended mission team.
Virtually anything related to space has a huge development cycle. Contract bid to delivery is easily 5+ years. One of the first things you do is source your suppliers so you will never deliver anything state of the art. It'll be at least 5-10 years old. At pretty much the same time you have to also deliver most of your spares for the near or distant future. And there probably is no money in the contract for hardware upgrades. It is what it is until it's replaced.
... much of the flying hardware designs are decades old too - but this is IMO due to so much of it relying on govt funding or govt being a primary customer. It seems that there might be progress on this front, though - with the like of Musk, Bigelow and perhaps even Branson (suborbital now - but it's a good start). Guidance computers do not need to be terribly powerful - they need to be reliable. Witness what happened to the first Ariane 5 launch. It wasn't very long ago that the venerable COSMAC 1802 gave way in space platforms to more recent CPU/MCU designs. While quirky, it was well understood and inherently resistant to radiation upset.
I worked on guidance and control systems for the USAF. When I got the chance to look at the shuttles inertial nav systems, I wasn't really that shocked to see they were basically the same as the systems I was working on that were designed in the '60s and modified only slightly through the '70s. The systems work, and with redundancy provide an incredibly accurate system.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
While the article is quite right to highlight the proven, reliable technology in manned space missions, it is a mistake to infer that all space electronics technology used today is from the 70s and 80s. There is a vibrant design community for space electronics and a lot of quite whiz-bang stuff goes up in comms, scientific and recon sats. Someone mentioned the space industry hasn't dominated the electronics business for 40 years. That's true, but there are still niches that are absolutely dominated by space. For example, there are some incredibly high-performance millimeter-wave circuits, amazingly sensitive photodetectors and bolometers, and extremely fast Indium-Phosphide digital circuits (not full-on processors) going up in missions every year. Modern CMOS technology (deep submicron) is inherently radiation-tolerant, so rad hardening isn't as important commercially as it used to be, because there is an acceptable level of risk. Manned missions have a MUCH lower acceptable level of risk so mission planners are loathe to deploy anything new.
If we had as many dedicated virus writers coding viruses specifically for NASA, as we do coding viruses for windows, this would not likely hold true. Viruses affect only systems they were DESIGNED for. On the other hand, the BSG fan in me wants to wholeheartedly agree.
also, Why does the Space shuttle or international space station even need that much processing power? even a 386 should be able to sample the air system a hundred times a second, while simultaneously playing solitaire. if they need processing power Nasa owns the #6, 84, 171, 172, and 221 supercomputers according to the top 500 list from june.
Nasa has no shortage of computational power. so send a reliable processor into space, then use a terminal connection down to the ground to do anything that requires any true processing power...of which nasa has more at their disposal than most of the rest of the world.
Don't fix it. Really, except for the aging of some discreet components why should this even be a concern. SO the tech is old? It has been well engineered and proven time and time again.
Man, the article makes it sound like NASA is allergic to tech. There's no reason not to bring up kick ass laptops and other non-essential tech that runs hella fast. But don't fuck with what works. It's kept a lot of NASA problems from becoming NASA disasters. Hyperbole will get you nowhere fast.
Damn right - I'd rather be using a chip that has a 20-year errata and proven silicon revision than ANYTHING produced in the last five years. Every single processor ever made has errata and when you're talking about a sole life support for the astronauts, damn right it should be from the "old, tried, tested, we know all it's quirks" bin than the local Intel shop.
People never understand this, and I can't understand why. If you tell me that my car's airbags runs on a Dual-core processor, I will be extremely worried for several reasons (unnecessary amount of state-of-the-art technology, unnecessary complications with timing, unnecessary amount of power to do a simple job, etc.) but tell me that it uses a Pentium with an FDIV bug, or even a Z80 with uncorrected "Z80A" original silicon and I'll feel as safe as houses.
Bugs take a while to find. Every extra transistor makes bugs more likely. Every day in ordinary production use makes bugs less likely (because you'll experience them and work around them). And if you NEED 2GHz of processor to do some of these tasks, the astronauts are stuff if their machine ever breaks. If you keep things simple, so that you CAN go to human/paper backup like some of the moon missions did, then you have much less to worry about. Plus the cost is cheaper of course.
It worries me EVERY time I see some modern, state-of-the-art revamp of a critical system (air-traffic control, road traffic signalling, in-car braking systems, etc.)
OK, later ones aren't exactly non-deterministic, but the 386 was the last of the straightforward microprocessors, that simply executed one instruction aftr another. No microcode, out-of-order execution, crazy on-chip L2/L3 caches, etc.
Wonder if that leads to easier "verification" at a very low level, if NASA cares about that...
I have watched, sometimes in horror, sometimes in great amusement, as employer after employer decided that hardware and/or software "upgrades" are necessary. And why were these decisions made? Certainly not because of a lack of functionality in the existing software. No, the decision to "upgrade" was made because the existing software was "out of date", or "not written in "C" or "Java" or whatever flavor-of-the-moment programming language was current at the time. And users and user management were never smart - or ballsy - enough to say "Whoa, we're happy with what we have - it works and fits our business model just fine" (you'd be amazed at how many businesses change their business processes to fit software). So keep those old warhorse systems that work just fine and fit your business needs, and get rid of those people who keep saying "Well, we need new/updated/improved software". Put in new software and you'll start down the same old bug-fix/enhancement road all over again, only this time with a system that you don't understand nearly as well as the one you replaced. Good for IT types, bad for the business. MK
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