Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc
Some friends and I went to an open meeting in Barcelona Fòrum about the future european-japanese-usa-russian space projects. The four agencies are now working closely together and even we could see american astronauts using Russian space vehicles in the inpasse beetween the retreat from service of the Shuttles and the the entering into service of the new Ares/Orion. After the conference we went to our mandatory pub chat and we concluded that, most probably the Chineses would play an important role in two ways: Embarking themselves in more ambitous objectives and (indirectly) acting as a revulsive for the other space agencies. The government of China is wishing to sell his country as the new leader in the space career and they are trying to transmit this hope to their people in the same way that USA and the Soviet Union did during the Cold War.
The arrival to the moon in 1969 using a computer with less memory than one of our present day washing machines could seem a miracle. From my point of view, money, inventiveness, ambition, illusion and true valour were important parts in the formula. Some of these parts are at low-level when talking about our western governments and their interest in the space. But democratic governments are the desire of the people (or it must be in this way). And sadly, a lot of people prefer conspiracy theories instead to believe that we are able to do amazing things too.
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I get into fights about that too. I keep hearing the argument, "look how backwards the cars of 1969 are compared to today." Well, yeah, you have those engine control computers, but sometimes they are more of a problem IMHO. Most of these are from people who were born after the Moon landings, some from the late 1970's and beyond.
I think the reason could be is that they grew up with all these hi-tech items like computers, I-Pods and so on and just cannot see 1960's technology being able to accomplish that. In some way, the old tech is better, due to the limits of the computer technology, you had to find ways to fit programs in the small ROMs at the time as well as run with the small RAM memories. I work with an old timer who was in IT in those days and he had to write programs that would run in 2K or 4K of RAM. Even in the early 1980's, we had computers that had only 16K of RAM and we had to watch how much of it we were using and find ways to fit more into less space. when we had 48K to 64K, it was like a gift from God but even so, there were times we reached the limit and had to find alternate means. Think of the old Atari games, they were written for 2K to 4K of ROM, the early ones, and used 128 BYTES, not K, BYTES of RAM. I like Adventure, it was so basic but given that it was stored in 4K of ROM and made in 1978, it was amazing. Same with Superman, 4K of RAM, yet, you even see a semi-realistic, blocky looking Superman in the game.
I think had you had the rocket thrust, you could get to the Moon with 1950's or even 1930's technology.
Chuck