Bit-Tech.Net has an article on the computing power of spacecraft. Actually the article is a bit light on the technical details but is a good introduction. They mention that the shuttle has ‘State Of The Art Computers’, pointing out that they are referring to state of the art from the 1970’s and 1980’s! The most powerful computers on the International Space Station are actually the laptops used by the crew. And these are used more for things like Email rather than controlling the spacecraft.

None of this surprises me, since I have friends who build satellites as a hobby. With a budget of $2-3000 in Sydney I could build a satellite, assuming that you wanted redundancy with the hardware. If you don’t care about duplicating hardware the price is halved. This does not include labour, but it would not be that expensive even at consultancy rates.

Washing

I looked at the washing a little while back… And the clothes are clean. All the fibers in the clothes washed off. Thankfully. I still have not worked out why the fabric failed like that. It seems that the individual fibers in the yarn making up the fabric were too short leading to lack of tensile stregth, particularly when wet. Put simply, the fibres would just pull past each other without enough friction to hold them together.

Photo of the Day

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was using Wireless in Albury. I have attached a photo of the wireless router here… I needed to place it in the bathroom above the vanity to get access. The cables were long enough to reach around the corner to a table – but I needed to make sure I didn’t pull the router off the wall and damage it. So that is why I used electrical tape.