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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."
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.
Living With a Nerd
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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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.
I agree 100%! I'd go with something more time proven like Windows ME. They didn't call it "Millenium Edition" for nothing!
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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.
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.
See that glowing thing in front of you? The thing you're reading this on? It's just like little pictures of cats and pyramids scratched onto stone tablets, only we fixed it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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
My car uses 100 year old internal combustion technology.
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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.
Yes but the other priority concern for space travel is size. Every square inch of space is critical. Space agencies must balance old-but-proven technology with newer but way smaller technology. My cell phone contains more processing power, memory, and data storage space than the entirety of 1960's era Mission Control.
Don't forget about heat, either. Heat dissipation in space is a pain in the ass, and throwing a few hundred extra watts of heat at every data problem is a lot less viable than it is under your desk.
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.
It's slightly different in space, because radiation hardening is also an important factor. ESA uses a lot of SPARC32 chips, in the form of the (GPL'd) LEON, which was designed to be able to be created in rad-hardened versions by anyone, cheaply. Intel periodically produces rad-hardened versions of their chips, but they certainly don't do it for the latest versions (the transistor density for the hardened process isn't has high as for the consumer-grade process), so you have longer upgrade cycles, and you also need rad-hardened versions of all of the support chips, so it's worth skipping a few generations if something works.
And, really, there's nothing wrong with using a 386, if it's fast enough. Upgrading from a chip that is twice as fast as you need to one that is a hundred times as fast as you need is not an easy decision to make.
The military was still buying Z80s until a few years ago for a lot of things. They had Z80 code that worked, and had been very well tested. Hopefully everyone involved in space learned from Arianne that upgrading something requires (expensive) revalidation and testing of everything that interfaces with it.
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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...