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If you were flying into out-of-space, you would expect to travel in a space shuttle powered by tons of fancy and modern computers to ensure a safe journey to and from space. You may assume that the system would have tons of RAM, hard drive space, a superfast processor and much more. However the current space shuttle being used actually only run of 1MB of RAM. The computer’s technological framework is based on models from the 1980’s with a few recent upgrades added.
With no fancy GUI such as that included in Windows 7 or MAC OS X Leopard, the totally UNIX-based system that is command driven, does not require a ton of temporary memory space or a fast processor to monitor data from its sensors, or manage systems controls. Even though the entire code may look very complex, it was made to run on that 1980’s processing system, and still does today. Unlike a regular computer, the programs don’t have to be updated to match today’s needs, since there are no new needs really. It’s been basically the same series of launch events 30 years ago and that has allowed them to work with the older system.
But why not upgrade anyway? Cost and risk are two main reasons for working with the current system. Considering NASA’s tight budget, they would have to spend lots of time and lots of money testing those systems time and time again to ensure a shuttle take of is near fail-safe. Installing and upgrading the software and hardware basically puts them back into a place where they have to rebuild their knowledge base about how the system operates and there would be significant risk of some failure along the line.
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