WORLDS ENOUGH by Charlie Martin
Once upon a time, we were building moon ships with the technology of the Edsel. Forty years ago this week, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. You may have heard something about it.
There certainly has been a lot of retrospective coverage of something my old friend Ray Bradbury called, with characteristic understatement, “the most important night in the history of mankind.” Hard to follow that, but there is an interesting project that got some well-deserved attention this week.
Interested computerists can see an example on their desktops today with the Virtual Apollo Guidance System project. It is an emulator that will run on a Mac, Linux, Solaris, or even Windows machine, and let you experiment with a simulation of the original Apollo Guidance System computer, right down to a point-and-click simulation of the original user interface — all 16 buttons, 21 7-segment digits and 18 lights of it. You can use the very same programs the Apollo astronauts used, copied laboriously from photocopies of the original program listings, entered into the emulator, and made to run. For example, to have the AGS display the internal clock, you enter “V16N36E”. That is, you click the VERB key, enter 1, 6, click the NOUN key, enter 3, 6, and click ENTR. Of course, if you want to set the clock, you have to enter the time. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to figure out how to do that.
So be honest. Isn’t your first reaction “My God! It’d be suicide to go up in a crate like that!”
One recent story about the AGS project compared the AGS computer to the IBM PC XT, and that’s wildly overstating it: the AGS wouldn’t make a good digital watch, and the user interface makes programming a VCR seem simple by comparison. Of course, this wasn’t their only computing available. The Apollo astronauts carried a slide rule.
Give birth to an 8 pound baby without pain pills, drugs or a hospital. There’s your risk-takin’!
HA!
Give birth to an 8 pound baby without pain pills, drugs or a hospital. There’s your risk-takin’!
HA!
Until the development of anesthesia, C-section, and antiseptics in the 19th century, every act of sexual intercourse was a death-defying act (at least for the woman). I’m sometimes amazed that any of our great-great-great-grandparents procreated!
3. Clayton E. Cramer:
“I’m sometimes amazed that any of our great-great-great-grandparents procreated!”
he-he-he
Nature always ‘finds a way’
P.S. It was actually a lot safer and healthier for me to give birth to my daughter at home in my own ‘germ’ environment and have my mid-wives scrub down rather than be in a supposedly ‘sterile’ environment where there are foreign ‘germs’ that I could be exposed to.
By the way, for anyone interested, the Virtual AGS program is here.
5. Charlie (Colorado),
Thank you for the link, Charlie.
Sorry for veering off-topic.
Charlie is right. Procreating on Mars would be an act of supreme courage, maybe the kind of sacrifice we need to see again in this world of suicide bombers. And yet, I don’t think there will be a shortage of volunteers.
Actually, Clayton, the C-section was invented rather before either anesthesia or antiseptics.
Regards
Pedants Я Us
The Chinese have a serious manned space program, and national ambition, but they’re not going to get to the Moon by 2020.
Roderick, why not? It only took 8 years to do it the first time.
Roderick, I wouldn’t underestimate them. Among other things the Chinese currently have a lot higher acceptance of risk than the US. And I think that’s part of the point. The US, especially our space program, has become so risk averse that we’re almost paralyzed by it.
Space is truly the last frontier. Where else can those who need that pushing of limits, that ultimate test of self, the real honest-to-god danger really go? I say to hell with OSHA and all the other safety nazi’s, and let’s go. Where do I sign up?
#10 Charlie:
It didn’t take eight years. We got there eight years after JFK’s pronouncement. Prior to that, work on the giant F-1 engine that powered the 1st stage of the Saturn 5 had already been in progress since the last year of the Eisenhower administration, and the Saturn 1B was laready being built. JFK would not have made his speech without being given those asurances first.
China has a good manned program, but they are moving more slowly than either the Soviets or the U.S. at the dawn of the space age, and they are doing so despite the fact that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel (the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have done that for them). If they do have serious Moon ambitions, they will get there several years later than 2020. But then, if we manage to keep going, so will we. Our 2020 goal is not likely to be met either.
Since we’re already off topic,
The C-section (Cesarean, as in Caesar) was, indeed from Roman times. It was performed to save the baby’s life; it was assumed that the mother would die. They knew how to save the baby, they didn’t know how to save the mother.
Much later, the “craniotomy” was devised. This would save the mother at the expense of the baby.
Then antisepsis was developed. This allowed the C-section to be performed in a way where the mother’s survival was virtually guaranteed. This, with antibiotics and a few other things makes complications from a C-section almost nonexistent. The craniotomy is at this point almost never medically indicated.
We have a new name for craniotomy these days. It’s more commonly called partial birth abortion.
Yep, and Strawman, “almost never” != “never ever”.
I’ve been reading technical summaries of the Rover program, the US nuclear rocket engine development efforts. As a nuclear engineer, I was struck by how the tools we engineers would apply today would be such a big help – computational fluid dynamics, structural finite element modeling, digital control algorithms,materials sciences, etc, etc. We could calculat what they had to test for, saving lots of time and money and reducing radioactive emissions at the Nevada Test Site.
I’m sure the other engineering disciplines are in the same situation.
We can do it better, cheaper, and safer now compared to 40 years ago. But that should be obvious.
Let’s GO!
The other day I was watching the History Channel program tapes and re-creations of the first moon landing. I then visited NASA’s web site and browsed through the various Apollo mission pictures.
It struck me then that we sent these brave men up there in junk heaps. There is far more technology packed into the average car these days.
We can go back to the Moon then to Mars and beyond if we do it right. A REAL orbiting space station that serves as a construction yard would be a good start along with a Space Elevator. From there, real spacecraft constructed in space can be built. Enough of the tin cans.
The problem with getting back into outer space is the bureaucracy and institutionalized lack of ambition that’s entered into the program over the last forty years.
Besides, there really are people out there who consider, not Apollo 11, but Woodstock to be Mankind’s finest hour.
Your article shows why a lot of people just did not believe in the Moon landing. The computers described would have been state of the art stuff in the 1950s but by the time of the Apollo mission Control Data were building eary supercomuters for number crunching work, IBM had launched the 360 mainframe and languages such as Fortran and Assembler for systems programming tasks had been available since the 1950s.
On any of those, typing “Time?” would have displayed the time, not that anyone needed to, every event on the log was time stamped. We operators used to amuse ourselves by printing off imaged that looked vaguely like Raquel Welch.
I guess the problem with scientists is they can’t just do a thing, they have to do it the geekiest way possible. If those guys had just learned it was smater to buy a decent computer than build your own and then hire professionals to program it we might have been back to the moon many times.
Y’know, there’s a monetary incentive to develop space capability, manned or otherwise.
A run-of-the-mill nickle-iron asteroid, 1km-1mi diameter, in Earth orbit, could readily be mined (especially as the components tend to be pre-separated in great measure) for the equal of all the precious metals, and most of the base metals, ever extracted from the Earth’s crust. The approximate value would be about $1million per capita, for the planet. Say $7 quadrillion.
Even makes Obugabe’s debt machine look small.
Jake;
Much of the timidity comes from having Congressional micro-managing and micro-funding shoved down its throat. NASA proposes, Congress disposes.
Anyhow, check out SpaceX for a private outfit with dreams and balls.
Whitehall, I suspect you may have given me a topic for next week. I’ve got a box on my desk here, about 6 inches square and 4 tall, with gigabytes of memory, terabytes of hard disk, and 4 CPUs capable of operating in parallel or independently to perform millions or billions of floating point operations a second.
But then, it’s just a Mac Mini, it’s nothing compared to a serious gamer system.
This thing alone would perform in minutes computations the old Xerox Sigmas needed days for at NASA.
We ought to have more leverage, we ought to be able to get farther, faster. Somehow, NASA can’t.
The fundamental limitation is rocket technology can only get you into space, but you need another method of propulsion to take a ship further. Ion engines? A nuclear reactor doesn’t seem safe to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_engine#Lifetime
Until we can overcome this limiting factor, there is not going to be manned space missions to Mars or beyond. Even if we can solve propulsion, and get to Mars then come logistical issues. How do you survive on Mars? Can you unlock potable water? I know sci-fi writers have dealt with this. Anyone can recommend a novel that goes into great details?
We should do the moon first; it`s closer, settlers would be in real-time contact (well, close enough) with Earth, and it would give us some practice. Oh, and they can always go home if things go sour.
Charlie, you’re making a classic geek mistake. All the CPU power in the universe won’t make but modest improvements in the basic physics. Our current generation of twin jets are somewhat more fuel efficient than the 727s that were in common use then, but not by much. The basic 747 frame in use today has much better avionics and winglets, but aside from that, it’s the same basic bird that was flying back in the Apollo days.
I don’t get why so many people think more gigaflops will turn water into wine. We’re still glued to the same basic physics that we were working with then, and Moore’s law doesn’t do diddly for macro technologies.
Well, I guess that settles that.
Houston we have a problem. When people are getting their technical information from novels, umm… is it just me, or does anyone else see a problem with this picture?
I think NASA’s risk aversion just reflects that of many, if perhaps not a majority, of the American people and is of a part with their inability to tolerate 5,0000 casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan–which would’ve been a light day for the Romans, or, for that matter, a light day for us in the Civil War or WWII–and psychologically linked to the inveterate need to put out kids in virtual suits of armor before letting them ride a bike. If we Americans don’t get over our wimpifying risk aversion the future will belong to the Chinese or some other civilization with more cojones.
Excuse me: that number would be FIVE THOUSAND. Hey, it’s Saturday night.
Houston we have a problem. When people are getting their technical information from novels, umm… is it just me, or does anyone else see a problem with this picture?
Well, no, actually. I got a lot from the old Heinlein juveniles; it’s an interesting exercise to work out the details of the RS Rolling Stone, for example.