The New NASA

[dlavery]

Originally posted by Nick Seidl
If there are any people currently involved with NASA, I am very interested in hearing your opinions. If any of you are reading this, please jump in.

NASA Watch is an independent "watchdog" web site for news and discussion about NASA stuff. There is a thread that contains many of the comment and replies from NASA insiders and interested observers about the CAIB report. Rather than replicate their comments here, you can go there to check out their comments.

-dave

p.s. a very small nit, not to detract from the topic of this thread:

Originally posted by Anthony Towne
The fastest processors in space are 486 chips. There are no pentium processors in space. They are considered too unstable, not to mention more expensive, and there's nothing you can't do with a whole bunch of 486 processors.

The processors included in the baseline ISS configuration as "infrastructure processors" are space-qualified versions of the 486 chips. However, they are not the fastest processors in space. Missions like Mars Pathfinder and the current Mars Exploration Rovers project fly RAD6000 processors, which are space-qualified (radiation hardened) versions of the IBM RISC 6000 processor. Space Shuttle and ISS crews frequently take nearly-off-the-shelf laptop computers with PowerPC and Pentium processors aboard with them. Apple G4s and even Airport wireless base stations have flown (see the Apple report here). Pentium ThinkPads are used regularly on ISS (see the story from PCMike, but you will have to overlook the fact that Mike is a twit that doesn't know the difference between a Saturn V moon rocket and the Space Shuttle...). Depending on the application and the operational environment, the hardened versions may run at a slower clock speed than the "terrestrial version." But the 486 no longer defines the upper limit of space borne processors.