Missive the Seventeenth
Those Turtle-Footed Computers on the Space Station.
DATELINE: Tuesday, September 12, 2000, at 2030 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
If your primary personal computer is an older IBM ThinkPad running on Windows 95, guess what? You're even-steven with the astronauts floating 'round the International Space Station this very moment.
Many, if not most of you, are far ahead of even-steven, but then we live in an age of rampant relativity. In this case, a relative condition most definitely applies when we compare the apples of our home and office computer systems to the peaches of the Space Station's onboard computers.
Think about this fact: the Brainiac of the Space Station, its hybrid server/hub/bus Station computer system, runs at 1 megabit per second on 16 megahertz processors -- about 100 times slower than your average office or school network and several years behind the Pentium inside your average PC.
Placing Windows 95 on the astronaut's laptops didn't satiate Microsoft's monopolistic octopus, which stretched its tentacles upward about 220 nautical miles from Redmond to the Space Station and loaded Outlook and Office 95 on each 760xe ThinkPad's hard drive.
However, the Windows-based Operating System shell, a few MS Office software applications, and off-the-shelf laptop hardware from Big Blue are about as close as any of us will get to emulating the computing environment of the spacemen.
An astronaut receives her ThinkPad a year before scheduled blastoff so that it becomes an integral part of training. To support the dozen or so laptops that are active on the Space Station at any one time, NASA deploys about 2,000 identically configured ThinkPads throughout its command and support system. The space agency is also proud of its rigorous testing standards, which ensure that each laptop's RAM memory and processor can endure radiation hits.
The relative advantage for the astronauts is twofold: for one, the software on their slow ThinkPads is slimmed-down, tweaked, and optimized by one of the best code-writing teams in the Universe; and secondly, when an astronaut grows weary of studying payload data and flight telemetry on the computer screen, he can look out the window and see Earth floating amid the stars.
"The reason that the onboard General Purpose Computers are able to do so much with comparatively so little capability is that the code for the Flight Software is so well written and maintained," NASA Flight Director Paul Dye wrote. "I never cease to be amazed at the capability of this computer system!"
Amazing, certainly: I've reams of research data to prove its amazingness. (Drop me a line and I'll send you the 339-page .pdf document, International Space Station Familiarization ISS FAM C 21109, which includes an indepth look at the ISS computer system.) However, that's about as deeply as I'm going to pursue this line of inquiry, which I had supposed would be interesting enough to sustain more than 450 words. Now that I've arrived at this point, 450 is more than sufficient.
I'm bored. I realize that boredom comes from within, but I'm bored all the same. I think I'll open Outlook and download some E-mail. I'll use my super-fast Southwestern Bell ADSL LAN link. Those orbiting astronauts will just have to be happy with a turtle-footed satellite uplink for their E-mail delivery. It's the price one pays, I suppose, for being a spaceman.
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