[HN Gopher] Part of Wright brothers' first airplane on NASA's Ma...
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Part of Wright brothers' first airplane on NASA's Mars chopper
Author : pseudolus
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-03-24 10:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The overhyping of the Wright brothers for a hundred+ years and
| the writing everyone else out of history is a top notch job!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Someone's gotta be first. They were it.
| stadium wrote:
| First to launch with an assist from a rail and dolly.
| Dumont's was likely the first unassisted launch.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That is an underappreciated aspect to their efforts. The
| Wright flyer, if built today, would not qualify for many
| flight records as it could not fly unassisted.
|
| More current controversy: Should Chuck Yeager be called the
| first to break the sound barrier if his aircraft couldn't
| takeoff unassisted? Should records count if mid-air
| refueling was used while breaking them (SR-71)?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The real issue is in how the Wrights are portrayed. They are
| touted as isolated geniuses who _invented flying_. In reality
| they were part of a large community of people all attacking
| the problem. The various techs were coming together,
| specifically IC engines and the understanding of aero /fluid
| dynamics. The Wrights were indeed first, but had they not
| existed any number of other teams would have achieved the
| same thing at almost the same time in history.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The idolisation of the lucky geniuses who made that one
| final leap is unfortunately necessary because this inspires
| and motivates not just the people doing the work but
| children and public alike. Humans are attracted to
| celebrity, I'd much rather it's the wright brothers than
| the Jenner sisters.
| eej71 wrote:
| I used to share that viewpoint until I read The Wright
| Brothers by David McCullough.
| holoduke wrote:
| Almost everything is a collaborative process. Even the
| papers from Albert Einstein are in the end a collection of
| many inputs from many people.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The wrights weren't really collaborative. They operated
| largely alone. Most of the teams operated alone, but all
| pulled from developments that were evolving regardless of
| the aviation drive. Fluid/propeller dynamics was evolving
| for naval purposes, engines for ground-based transport.
| Had the wrights not been first, any number of others
| would have cobbled together these techs into a working
| aircraft.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Agreed. The "collaborative process being attributed to a
| lone genius" is the rule; the Wright brothers were not
| exceptional in this regard. We almost _always_ fail to
| recognize collaboration. I would actually argue that
| Einstein is the exception to the rule in that, while no
| doubt he did collaborate especially once he became
| somewhat established, he did much innovation on problems
| that no one was even thinking about at various times.
| Einstein was among the lone geniuses to the extent that
| there have ever been lone geniuses. See also Ramanujan.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| His wife might disagree:
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-
| forgotte...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| First for what? Adding a motor to something that everyone
| else did? Putting a motor to a plane? To an helicopter (done
| before a plane) And one was first for adding the tail. One
| was first for figuring out the aerodynamics of plane wings.
| One was first to use metal. One was first to trying to fly
| with wings and killing himself. One was first for trying to
| fly and gliding for a hundred meters. Because we don't use
| jets today in modern planes, one was first to use jets on a
| plane.
|
| Yes, someone's gotta be first.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Yeah, but they built their own engine after they didn't
| find one light and powerful enough. Building ones own
| engine in that time was not trivial.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| First to achieve _actual powered human flight_.
|
| Pretending that's not a milestone is silly.
| anderber wrote:
| It sure is, but we need to keep in mind that between them
| and the next guy was a somewhat short amount of time (and
| the next guy didn't know anything about them). They
| happened to be first but with the technology at the time
| it was bound to happen soon.
| qudat wrote:
| I think this is true for any advancement in technology.
| No one does it in a vacuum. From my perspective you are
| not illustrating anything novel. I also think this is
| true for advancements in science as well. If Einstein
| didn't figure out general relativity someone else would
| have.
| anderber wrote:
| I think what I illustrated was a more specific thing.
| Santos-Dumont thought he invented the airplane because
| not many had knowledge of what the Wright Brothers did.
| So this is a unique situation where 2 different people
| did invent at around the same time. Not to take anything
| away from the Brothers, they were first and deserve to be
| known.
| Stupulous wrote:
| I don't doubt you're already aware, but for context:
| Surprisingly, this is not a unique phenomenon. Calculus,
| evolution, magnetism, the telegraph, and the lightbulb,
| among very many[1] others, all were discovered or
| invented at the same time independently. It isn't the
| rule, but it's definitely significant enough that single
| inventors aren't the rule either.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discov
| eries
| bbarnett wrote:
| Plus, how did one find anything out?
|
| Even when telegraph, the phone, and wireless first
| existed, how would you transmit thousands upon thousands
| of scientific papers? News?
|
| And who would pay the incredible cost of doing so?
| Imagine transcribing by hand, via Morris code, or
| reading/writing, via phone?
|
| How would Bob in Asia, know what Tom in the UK was
| working on? Even mail often did not exist reliably.
|
| Some stuff could be shipped, sure, but it isn't as if
| sail was speedy.
|
| People have been in the dark for most of history.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I mean, sorta. In 1906 he was claiming the Wrights were
| lying about their ability to fly 30 miles.
|
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12816410
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _They happened to be first but with the technology at
| the time it was bound to happen soon._
|
| Whittle patented the concept of a turbojet engine in
| 1930. The first prototype wasn't created until 1937. The
| first British production jet plane (Gloster Meteor)
| didn't fly until 1943.
|
| Some things turn on capital and access to facilities.
| itomato wrote:
| "Bound to happen" = "didn't happen"
| anderber wrote:
| That's the thing, it did happen. Alberto Santos-Dumont
| thought he was the first (most of the world thought so
| too) to invent the airplane. So even if the Wright
| Brothers never existed this would've happen.
| jecel wrote:
| Actually, at a 1905 dinner in Washington DC Santos-Dumont
| got to talk with a man who had been at the Wright's 1903
| flight. So there is a chance that his sudden change from
| the 14 (lighter than air) to the 14-bis (airplane) might
| have been influenced by this talk.
|
| Note that Santos-Dumont did get the prize for the first
| flight that required that the flight happen in Paris.
| Just like today there is a prize for the best solar power
| car in Australia and if I build one and drive it around
| in Africa I won't get that prize.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| So? We can still reward people who take the ambition and
| risk to push humanity forward.
|
| They so happened to get recognition before anyone else,
| someone has to, that's part of romanticizing what they
| did to influence future pioneers.
| anderber wrote:
| I'm not taking anything away from the Wright Brothers,
| they were first and deserve to be know as such. But
| Santos-Dumont invented the airplane (or so he thought)
| without any knowledge of the brothers since they did it
| in secret. So they weren't that influential for him. A
| lot of people never heard of him but he gave his designs
| away for free which helped bring more innovation at a
| break neck speed.
|
| > The Demoiselle could be constructed in only 15 days.
| Possessing a good performance, flying at a speed of more
| than 100 km/h, the Demoiselle was the last aircraft
| designed by Santos-Dumont. The June 1910 edition of the
| Popular Mechanics magazine published drawings of the
| Demoiselle and stated, "This machine is better than any
| other which has ever been built, for those who wish to
| reach results with the least possible expense and with a
| minimum of experimenting." American companies sold
| drawings and parts for Demoiselles for several years
| afterward.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| Fair enough, TIL.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| It's the same with everything. Who invented the electrical
| battery? The light bulb? Wireless communication? etc.
| josefresco wrote:
| I say this half-jokingly... are any parts of these missions
| _insignificant_? I feel like every component and mechanism has
| some sort of Easter egg or hidden meaning.
|
| If someone is like "hey I need screw" do I first have to start
| with melted down metal from the door frame of the first space
| mission ever or can I just go down to parts and grab a screw?
| weatherlight wrote:
| human narratives matter :)
| hikerclimb wrote:
| Hopefully this doesn't work.
| twiclo wrote:
| Why would they wait till now to reveal this?
| NortySpock wrote:
| Also, if Perseverance had slammed into Mars at 200 mph, they
| wouldn't have "Part of Wright Brothers' plane now in toxic
| radioactive junk heap on Mars; Thanks NASA!" plastered over the
| daily headlines.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| To keep the rover in the news during a fairly boring period of
| checking everything out post-landing.
|
| NASA's press strategy has gotten dramatically more competent in
| the last 20 years or so.
| rtkwe wrote:
| They're also working on deploying Ingenuity right now but
| yeah they're also probably using it to not fall completely
| off the radar during the relatively slow initial checkout
| period.
| viro wrote:
| Overall public option of these programs have a huge effect on
| funding. So I'm glad their press strategy has gotten so much
| better.
| isolli wrote:
| It's crazy that only 120 years elapsed between these two events.
| It's a short time to go from flying on earth for the first time
| to flying on Mars for the first time.
| vecter wrote:
| Dark forest. Technological explosion.
|
| (All kidding aside, I don't believe in the dark forest theory
| one bit)
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Dark Forest theory: https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-
| stockton/2021/02/heres-...
|
| _Imagine you are alone walking through a dark forest. You
| hear a noise. Is it your inclination to be friendly to anyone
| or anything you happen to stumble across while exploring the
| unknown?_
|
| I bet many of us sometimes think that, some advanced
| civilization is playing SIMs iRL :)
|
| For the Trekkies (such as myself), we may be part of a bet of
| four Qs, each one started a 'SIM' game in each quadrant of
| our galaxy. The first one to find someone else, wins! Plot
| twist, one of the Qs made the Borgs.
| usrusr wrote:
| But the progress of those 120 years completely pales in
| comparison to the progress during their first 70. Make it 75
| and you go from rudimentary cars and the occasional glider
| experiments all the way to Apollo and the Concorde. After
| that... not much. We moved on to information I guess, far more
| scalable wrt natural resources.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Watching 2001 again pains me endlessly for what could have
| been. What was just background technology in that movie
| (Skype and iPads) is the best we've managed from it.
| eecc wrote:
| Well, there's an energy wall we still haven't figured out
| how to work around.
| scottLobster wrote:
| And have no real desire to figure out, if you look at the
| relatively paltry funding given to energy research
| compared to other endeavors.
| scottLobster wrote:
| All comes down to economics. I grew up with the sunny
| optimistic notion of the human drive for exploration,
| projected onto everything from Paleolithic Tribes
| populating the world to Christopher Columbus to Oregon
| Trail Pioneers to Star Trek. The older I get and the more
| history I read, well the paleolithic tribes were probably
| chasing prey or trying to get away from other hostile
| tribes, no one was interested in Columbus's findings until
| he told them there was gold/other valuables in the new
| world. The western pioneers largely had so little economic
| opportunity on the east coast that going thousands of miles
| over hostile terrain just to perhaps start a successful
| farm/mine gold seemed like a good idea. Star Trek is
| predicated on a post-scarcity, participation-based society
| (where "doing your best" is tracked and rewarded) which is
| basically enlightened communism but with open-source
| algorithms replacing the corrupt humans for
| pricing/resource allocation. So sure, once we figure that
| little thing out maybe we can move up Maslow's hierarchy to
| the "human spirit of exploration". Until then most people
| are just trying to not go bankrupt, minimize their own
| misery and perhaps have something left for their kids.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think Peter Thiel hit the nail on the head when he wrote
| that America went from being led by definite optimists ("I am
| going to invent the future and it's going to be great"), to
| being led by indefinite optimists ("the future's probably
| going to be great, but I'm going to focus on my investment
| portfolio"). The social capital shifted from inventors and
| innovators to bean counters at some point after the 60s.
|
| FWIW I'm from the UK and we haven't been definite optimists
| since the 1800s.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Barbara Tuckman is more famous for writing the Guns of
| August, but she also wrote the the Proud Tower[0] about the
| (European) world in the 25 years leading up to WWI, and in
| the concluding chapter she talks about how before the war
| the people thought they were good, they were proud of the
| society they had built, but that didn't survive the war,
| and it /never/ came back at least of Europe. And I mean the
| book was written in 1996, so any memories of the war are
| both eclipsed by WWII and burried with a few old people.
|
| I don't think the social capital shifted so much in the US,
| certainly there are more people being administrators than
| there was before, but notice how much people like Elon
| Musk, or the flowers left outside Apple Stores when Steve
| Jobs died.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Proud-Tower-Portrait-
| Before-1890-1914...
| runarberg wrote:
| Did it really? Or is this a bias in favor of private
| investment. There has been a lot of investments to
| government programs such as NASA and NOAA (as well as the
| military for better or worse). Also universities continue
| to innovate with plenty of new innovation to show for it.
|
| Perhaps it is more accurate to say that _the American
| private sector has moved from being led by..._
| beaconstudios wrote:
| perhaps it is - but it's a cultural thing, and culture
| tends to affect both the private and public sectors.
|
| DARPA is still doing impressive things though as far as
| I'm aware. NASA is once again doing cool things, but I
| can't help but suspect that interest in space was
| reignited by SpaceX, and Elon Musk is the archetypal
| definite optimist.
| jackfoxy wrote:
| WWI, FDR, and then WW2 ushered in the age of big
| government, academic-government collaboration, and
| bureaucracy over all.
|
| Everything gets done according to _process_. Elon Musk is a
| rare iconoclast.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Our biggest growth happened after those times. I believe
| the bend in the curve happened closer to the 70s in the
| US.
| usrusr wrote:
| Well, that _process_ was an important innovation as a
| damage control tool for the cost plus thing. I never
| really understood the cost plus thing, at least not how
| it can survive the tiniest excursion out of wishful
| thinking. Not until the pandemic hit. Then it suddenly
| became clear to me that in exceptional situations the
| cost plus model, even with all its failing damage control
| band-aids, is far superior to waiting for The Market to
| reach an equilibrium. You wouldn 't win a war by giving
| each soldier a budget and then unleashing them to outbid
| each other for ammunition and medical support, to put it
| bluntly. The failure of course is when you stick to that
| model for too long ("F35").
|
| (sorry for bringing the pandemic into a discussion about
| _Wright Flyer bits flying on Mars_ )
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Bureaucracy stifles innovation as the cost of increased
| risk management. Being incredibly risk adverse can often
| be a very short sighted attitude because you surrender
| the opportunity cost of taking calculated risks like
| trying new approaches and tools.
|
| Successful organisations are able to adapt over time,
| where bureaucracies only stagnate.
|
| Markets are orthogonal to that trade off because both
| bureaucracies and adaptive organisations operate within
| the market. It's just a tool, you can use it well or
| poorly.
| usrusr wrote:
| Markets are not orthogonal in so far as that certain
| forms of bureaucracy exist solely for dealing with non-
| market scenarios ("wartime cost plus"). You want either
| one or the other, never both at once (a market stifled by
| redundant bureaucracy) or none at all (decisionmakers
| just wiring the money to family members for vague
| promises of maybe trying to deliver, perhaps)
|
| Unfortunately it gets a bit murky in that there is
| another form of bureaucracy to tame markets while they
| are not circumvented and there's a severe lack of
| separation between those two forms of bureaucracies.
| Usually neither critics nor advocates seem to care about
| the distinction (which plays out _much_ better for
| critics I suppose).
| qqqwerty wrote:
| This is just recency bias. We remember those that did great
| things and we forget those that did not. In 100 years,
| folks will look back on our time and remember Elon Musk,
| Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc... and will wonder why we were
| blessed with such great visionaries and will complain about
| how their generation is nothing but bean counters and
| bureaucrats.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Musk stands out in that crowd for being an actual old-
| school innovator. Bezos, Jobs and Gates have made huge
| impacts, but those impacts are evolutionary rather than
| revolutionary.
|
| That's the difference; the rate of actual invention, or
| as Thiel puts it, going from 0 to 1, has dropped off a
| cliff.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and has
| the potential to radically change biotech. mRNA was just
| used to roll out a novel vaccine in a record amount of
| time. Solid state batteries will be a game changer in the
| EV space.
|
| You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative
| that you have built. It is easy to glorify the past when
| you did not live through it. For every Wright Brother,
| there were hundreds if not thousands of hucksters and
| shysters. If anything, a close reading of history will
| illuminate how little has changed regarding the human
| condition in the last 200 years.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > No it hasn't. CRISPR was a very recent invention and
| has the potential to radically change biotech.
|
| > You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a
| narrative that you have built.
|
| lol
|
| less innovation != no innovation.
|
| the human condition may not change, but culture does.
| Just look to the economy and how many companies are
| primarily focused on rent extraction or incremental
| improvements to existing concepts as opposed to inventing
| new things. How many new inventions did we get in the
| 50s-60s alone?
| qqqwerty wrote:
| lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent
| extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent
| invention?
|
| I agree, the culture has changed. Right now, I can now
| apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for
| my idea or invention. Back in the day, you needed to be
| either very well connected or from a wealthy family.
| Today, I have a 3d printer sitting on my desk, and I can
| hack together a little self driving robot in a weekend.
| Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine
| shop and a ton of capital.
|
| If anything there are too many people trying to innovate.
| I work in the energy sector, and literally every idea
| with a shred of plausibility has multiple startups
| working in the space.
| evgen wrote:
| You are wasting your time. It seems quite apparent the
| person you are arguing with has a rather poor grasp of
| the history of science and technology and has also bought
| in big-time to the 'great man' theory of history.
|
| Reality is much messier. It is going 1000 different
| directions all at once, mostly composed of regular people
| each working on a small thing and most of those small
| things are useless, and no one knows 99.9999% of what
| happened or is actually happening now. In the same way
| that 5 years from now is going to mostly be like today
| and 25 years from now will be almost unrecognizable for
| most people, if people cherry pick bits of the past they
| can imagine almost no progress with current practices but
| they also imagine themselves to be in the 0.1% in the
| past who might have had access to this proto-technology
| but today it costs less than a days labour.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > lol, do you seriously think no one was focused on rent
| extraction in the 50 and 60s? As if that was a recent
| invention?
|
| No, obviously I don't believe that. You seem to keep
| going back to black and white arguments, which I didn't
| make.
|
| > Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup
| incubators to get funding for my idea or invention
|
| The biggest, most successful startup examples are
| incremental. Uber, stripe, Airbnb. Google I would
| probably argue was a serious innovation over the status
| quo, but still on an incremental subject.
|
| > Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine
| shop and a ton of capital.
|
| I do agree that consumer access to capital, both
| financial and manufacturing has improved.
|
| But my point in general is that ambition has shrunk and
| there's less of what Thiel calls 0 to 1 innovation and
| more energy is going into incremental improvement and
| rent extraction.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| lol, and just to nit pick. Musk is probably the least
| innovative on this list. He did not found Tesla, he took
| it over. And SpaceX is using designs that had existed for
| decades. His main "innovation" was betting large sums of
| money on existing technologies on the hopes that the
| market was finally ready for them. I will give him credit
| for starlink and autopilot, but it is too early to judge
| the impact of either of those yet.
|
| Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire
| retail sector. The logistics required to operate at that
| scale required healthy amounts of innovation. And AWS is
| a relatively original and transformative product.
|
| And whatever you think about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates,
| they were both instrumental in defining the shift to
| personal computing, among many other impacts. Billions of
| people have been impacted by their work.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > Musk is probably the least innovative on this list.
|
| > Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the
| entire retail sector
|
| Who cares whether you're doing innovation if your goals
| are lame? I'd much rather we had more people trying to
| colonise the stars than people trying to make high
| availability shopping websites. That's exactly what I've
| been trying to say this whole time.
|
| I suppose ambition is a better word for it than
| innovation.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Fair enough. I still think there are no shortage of folks
| with ambition in this generation compared to previous
| ones. But the one thing that I do think missing is a "new
| frontier". Previous generations had oceans to sail,
| mountains to climb, etc... If definitely feels like there
| are fewer frontiers to explore in this era. But that is
| largely due to how much ground was already covered by
| previous generations and not really the fault of the
| current one.
|
| The stars are basically the last frontier, but
| unfortunately, exploring those requires budgets that only
| big governments can afford. Well out of the realm of your
| garage-scale inventor.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think there are more frontiers than we are generally
| aware of but for sure the lowest hanging fruit are
| already picked.
|
| Frontiers generally have to be invented by people willing
| to go out into the unknown, and I guess the willingness
| to try completely new things with no obvious benefit is
| what is missing. Startups are everywhere for those whose
| ambition is primarily "become wealthy", but most are
| funded and investors want a credible route to market.
|
| The clearest image that portrays this for me is the 60s
| scifi images where people were imagining robot butlers,
| flying cars and cities on the moon and under the sea, all
| by the year 2000. It really captures what's missing
| nowadays, and what Elon represents to a lot of people.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't think that's correct. PEW data shows that there
| is a huge increase in skepticism and pessimism
| characterized by contemporary America
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah, and there's a bit of a bucket crab effect where
| trying to be a definite optimist in a world of indefinite
| optimists is much harder.
|
| Reminds of me of "The General" from Asimov's Foundation and
| Empire (spoiler alert for an amazing book from 1952). In a
| time where the galactic empire is collapsing/shrinking,
| General Bel Riose makes it his mission to restore the
| empire militarily and re-conquer the lost territory. He's
| actually a good commander, has overwhelming force, and
| looks to be in the process of achieving complete victory in
| the style of historical military commanders that made the
| empire great. In light of his achievements, the Emperor
| sees him as a potential rival, despite the fact that he
| never appears to have any ambitions to the throne (he's
| presented as an Imperial True Believer), recalls him right
| on the cusp of complete victory over the Foundation, and
| the Foundation survives being snuffed out in its infancy.
|
| Even trying to emulate the old greats with the best of
| intentions will fail if you don't account for your
| environment. If everyone else is more concerned about their
| portfolio, to some degree you have to be as well, even if
| it distracts from the greater goals.
| LaMarseillaise wrote:
| A helicopter... on Mars. That is not much? Also, over one
| hundred space shuttle flights, a space station, a space
| telescope, GPS, and public satellite photos.
| cletus wrote:
| Apollo was a political endeavor. It was rivalry with the
| Soviet Union. The spending on it in modern dollars is as a
| percentage of GDP or the Federal budget just wouldn't happen
| now. Science obviously has value but this was a huge price to
| pay.
|
| What changed since was a poor successor (the Space Shuttle)
| followed by the shift from political to economic motivations
| in space.
|
| As for Concorde, that was a product of the belief in
| supersonic transport bring the future that was just plain
| wrong. Where you can use it is too limited and subsonic jets
| became way more efficient and reliable than anyone predicted.
|
| You may say that not much has changed but air travel 50 years
| ago was massively expensive. Now air travel is ridiculously
| cheap. That might not be as flashy but it has massively
| changed how people live.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Aviation largely reached "good enough" for general use. With
| phones and now video conferencing, there's very little
| legitimate need outside of military purposes to get somewhere
| faster than the speed of sound.
| sneak wrote:
| I have a feeling that the success of the future ballistic
| passenger service on Starship is going to prove this
| statement incorrect.
|
| That is, if they can get over the geopolitical hurdles of
| shooting ICBMs full of people between major world powers.
| There's no way for an early-warning detection system to
| know if there's 40 rich businesspeople on board or 40 MIRV
| warheads. I imagine this challenge will be about on par
| with the difficulty of building starship in the first
| place.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Improving on speed stopped making sense for civil aviation.
| Concorde was technologically cool, but didn't solve a major
| problem.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| The last 50 years went from the amount of computing power
| used to power Apollo to being available hundredfold in
| everyone's pocket, it's as impressive in its own way
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Apollo went to the moon.
|
| My pocket doesn't.
|
| Spaceflight is not compute-bound.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| It was just an example
| jahnu wrote:
| Closer to a hundred million fold :)
| criddell wrote:
| The technology is impressive. How we're using it often is
| not.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Eh, it also often is. Better transportation, better
| medical devices, better energy grids. Aviation was and is
| used to drop bombs on other human beings! Nothing is
| black or white.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| A bit offtopic but I recently saw a surprisingly
| interesting talk about the Apollo board computer[0], and
| it's incredible how carefully they engineered the whole
| thing. Software hardcoded in the wiring, error correction
| for every memory access, ability to restart the whole
| system in any situation without losing state...this thing
| might have been rudimentary in today's standards, but the
| quality of the software was a different beast.
|
| [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM
| isolli wrote:
| True, it's not all about computing cycles :)
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| I wonder if a piece will end up in another solar system one day.
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