Final Flight

This picture was taken out of the window of a flight from Florida to Chicago and is a great picture of the last flight of Discovery.

It marks an interesting point in time whereby the future of the American space program is still to be decided and it asks interesting questions about the amount of money spent on such programmes.

I found a list of the top 10 NASA inventions you might use every day. Invisible braces, scratch resistant lenses, ear thermometers, cordless tools and even water filters have their roots in the NASA R&D department.
The question remains though, was the amount of money spent in the last 50 years of space exploration worth it?

A related question is; given that Apollo 11 had a 1MHz processor with 4 x 16 bit registers to guide it to the moon (for the non-geeks, that is an extremely small amount of processing power, a standard modern computer is over 10000 times as powerful) , would/could we send men to the moon with an iphone?

Surprisingly though, if you were to compare the computer currently helping pilot Discovery to perhaps your xbox, you’d be amazed to learn that you’d need 2000 of said pilot computers to rival the processing power of your console. The reason behind such a counter intuitive fact is that the shuttle doesn’t have to do anywhere near the number of calculations of a modern computer.

Most of the processing power in your PC is tied up doing fancy graphical wizardry and to make complicated programs run. Shuttle computers don’t need this functionality and are designed simply to do lots of mathematical calculations, something that computers are generally pretty efficient at.

Before this slightly lengthy tangent started I was asking whether or not space exploration was worth it, which my point about computers has kind of put in perspective. Whilst the computational requirements of the shuttle haven’t changed too much over the last 20 years, the technological age in which we live has evolved rapidly.

The space race was a result of big investment in technological development to try and stimulate economic growth, and whilst it did these things to some extent the context now is very different. The technology boom has made the world smaller, bringing us much more in touch with the issues faced by so many across the globe. In some ways the growth of technology is starting to bring a changing social perspective where spending the amount of money we have to compete for control and power of the sky is less important than international unity and peace.



As we see Discovery docking for the final time with the ISS, increasingly I feel that we should look to solve the problems we have on Earth rather than investing in the luxury of exploring the skies.