Crowdfunding for a satellite is nice, but ...

[Swampy]

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on how an entrepreneur is using crowdfunding to launch a small satellite into orbit. The satellite will be a cube about 10 cm on each side, cost $200,000.00 to build, and, once in orbit, send tweets back to users on Earth.

That's nice, and I'm envious that someone can do it and I can't. But society now needs the big changes, the paradigm shifts that will transform us into a 21st Century society, and that isn't happening. All we see now faster microchips, more memory storage, and so on. This will require large investments with no payoff for years if not decades, but that will be needed.

Forbes magazine actually had an article awhile ago on how innovation has stalled since the 1970's. I'm not convinced that's true, because the moon landing was followed by the space shuttle and the international space station, and we're getting ever closer to a bionic eye, but the point is made that we need the big breaks that will bring us to a higher level.

[boxcar]

I fail to see any economic advantage in the space shuttle. While it may be fascinating to watch a rose bloom in zero gravity, I fail to see any monetary or scientific advantage to be gained.. I see the Space Shuttle as a waste of time, talent and money. The money and effort could be put to better use.

As far as our moon landing, it was just another piece of one-up-manship after the Russian Sputnik stunt. Let the Russians throw away their money on all that junk in the sky.

There is one exception that I can think of. (of which I can think) . The Hughes family of satellites required a space shuttle to launch, because the shuttle gave the satellite a spin when it tossed it out of the craft. All other satellites required separate spin engines which added to the weight and cost. The spins were required for stability of motion. One other use of the satellite program was to repair the Hubble telescope, a few years back. Other than those two uses, ithe program was just so much publicity.

[Swampy]

The space program gave us a lot of spin-off technology, not the last of which was the advances in the microprocessor.

[boxcar]

Taken from Microprocessor History (Part 1, The Basics)
By Roy Davis - 22.NOV.05

>>In the '40s, mathematicians John Von Neumann, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly came up with the concept of the stored instruction digital computer. Before then, computers were programmed by rewiring their circuits to perform a certain calculation over and over. By having a memory and storing a set of instructions that can be performed over and over, as well as logic to vary the path of instruction, execution programmable computers were possible

The CPU has a program counter that points to the next instruction to be executed. It goes through a cycle where it retrieves, from memory, the instructions in the program counter. It then retrieves the required data from memory, performs the calculation indicated by the instruction and stores the result. The program counter is incremented to point to the next instruction and the cycle starts all over.

In 1971 when the heavy iron mainframe computers still ruled, a small Silicon Valley company was contracted to design an integrated circuit for a business calculator for Busicom. Instead of hardwired calculations like other calculator chips of the day, this one was designed as a tiny CPU that could be programmed to perform almost any calculation.

The expensive and time-consuming work of designing a custom wired chip was replaced by the flexible 4004 microprocessor and the instructions stored in a separate ROM (Read Only Memory) chip. A new calculator with entirely new features can be created simply by programming a new ROM chip. The company that started this revolution was Intel Corporation. The concept of a general purpose CPU chip grew up to be the microprocessor that is the heart of your powerful PC.<<

Now where does outer space enter the equation. This work was not done for NASSA.

[Swampy]

I could be mistaken, but the Wiki entry on microprocessor refers to Nasa using a custom processor called the Apollo Guidance Computer, which was a customized chip. I presume the money that went into developing that and other Nasa chips had spinoff effects.

[boxcar]

That could well be. I am not disputing that, BUT the microprocessor was already invented and in use. Had Nasa been smart they would have just written a program and utilized the existing cpu arrangement.That seems to come down to, where do you want to put your data and guidance, in a software program or on ROM? In the later case, all one is doing is replacing ROM and making a one task computer. (come to think of it, that does sound like Nasa)