Space... A Frontier

As a few of you are aware, I have something of a passing interest in space, be that real space or science fiction space.  However, my birthday can be (however loosely) linked to the two space shuttle disasters*, so I've never aspired to be an astronaut.  On the other hand, I do find it fascinating that people have worked out how space travel works even if a journey to our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, would take more than several lifetimes to complete.  For the curious, it's 4.23 light years away, or just under 25,000,000,000,000 (or 25 trillion) miles, meaning we'd exhaust Earth's supply of Twizzlers on the way... a terrible tragedy**.

Without some massive scientific breakthrough, we cannot ever travel the stars; We'd die before we got there.  The best we can probably hope for is continued exploration of our solar system and even then it's tricky.  Hell, the moon is only 250,000 miles away and only 24 people have ever been there... and only 12 actually walked on it!  Speaking of the moon, by request, I need to explain a long standing argument with my mom about the dark side of it.

I think it's based solely in the words used.  She maintains that the dark side of the moon cannot be seen from Earth...

All that you love...
and all that you hate...

No, not THAT dark side of the moon... though it is one of my favorite albums.  She means the dark side of our satellite, the moon, which constantly presents one side or face to us terrestrial beings.  I maintain that what she's thinking of is the BACK of the moon, because the DARK side of the moon constantly changes.  I define the dark side of the moon as, "The side of the moon that isn't lit by our sun currently," or, "The best selling non compilation/greatest hits album of all time." (see left)  Any time you want to see the dark side of the moon, all you'll need is a sufficiently powerful telescope and the right time of the month, such as when there is a half or less moon***.  Granted, it'll be hard to observe much detail without the light from the sun, but it's certainly there.

Which brings us back to the space program and my more than passing interest in it.  I think the main reason I like studying the space program is that I find it an inspiring source of pure, tangible human achievement.  People, acting through scientific means, have managed great things in the past and are continuing to discover more to this day.  It certainly marked July 20th, 1969 as a day in history everyone ought to remember, the day Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin first set booted foot on the lunar surface.

363 feet of pure rocket

The Apollo 11 moon landing changed the world.  What's staggering is what they had to go through to get there.  Look to your right and you will see the largest rocket ever designed and built by man, the Saturn V.  To give you an idea of scale, if you were to go up the gantry on the side to the equivalent height of 10 stories, you could see that flag painted on it in better detail.  The Saturn V was 363 feet tall and was almost completely filled with the most explosive fuel ever devised; Rocket Fuel (duh), which consisted of a heavily refined form of kerosene and liquid oxygen to help it oxidize and burn better.  People watched the launch from 3 miles away in case the damned thing exploded on take off.  And three men sat on their backs, strapped in so tight they couldn't sit up, ON TOP of this nearly 7 million pound BOMB all so they could get out of Earth's gravity and launch themselves towards the moon.

Though Apollo 13 is fairly well known for it's failures, none of the missions went completely smooth.  Apollos 11 & 14 had issues with the landing computer (more on that in a minute), Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during its lift off and a litany of other problems beset the men of the Apollo space program on their half a million mile round trips to our nearest heavenly body.  Seeing what they had to work with back then, it's amazing what they managed to pull off by navigating using star fields and controlled burns.

As if that wasn't freaky enough, the Apollo Guidance Computer (or AGC) had the equivalent of 4 KB of programmable memory and 72 KB of saved data, a grand total of 76 KB.  To put that into perspective, that is insufficient space to save the following image...

This icon is 78 KB

On the plus side, they could fit 3 full copies of the arcade version of Pac-Man in there, as it was only 24 KB... of course they wouldn't have a screen or even enough space to PUT a screen in the command module or enough power to run it and the game hadn't been invented yet, but I'm rambling...

A kilobyte (KB) is composed of 1024 bytes and a byte is 8 bits.  A bit is essentially a light switch, either on or off.  Got all that?  8 bits = 1 byte, 1024 bytes = 1 KB.  Going up from there, we get to more recognizable abbreviations like megabyte (MB, 1024 KBs), gigabyte (GB, 1024 MBs) and there are currently terabytes (TB, 1024 GBs) available for purchase in large hard drives.  Eventually, petabytes (PB, 1024 TBs) and exabytes (EB, 1024 PBs) will be commercial possibilities.  To put THAT into perspective, it has been estimated that all the words ever spoken by all humans ever could be, theoretically, stored in 5 EB**** and that the entire content of the internet equals about 500 EB.  Look at these numbers we're talking about... let's just consider a terabyte since my computer has half that much storage space.  Here's a comparison:

Terabyte = 1,073,741,824 KB

My iMac = 536,870,912 KB (just hard drive space)

AGC = 76 KB (total)

Now to be fair, there were two AGC's on each lunar mission, one in the command module, one in the lunar module, but the point still stands.  We, as a species, landed on the moon with less computing power than most pocket calculators have today.  Truly amazing.

So that's my latest treatise on space, large numbers, basic computer information and the capabilities of determined humans.  Feel free to comment or suggest topics for me to write about in the future, I love learning new things and then brashly posting my opinion about them.  Also, you're still wrong, Mom.  Tphbbbt.

* My due date was January 28th, 1986, the day Challenger exploded after a 73 second flight and the day before my 17th birthday was February 1st, 2003, the day Columbia burned up on re-entry.  Again, I'm not superstitious, but some things just stick with you.

** Besides, there's only so many times you can say, "I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with S..." before people figure you're going to pick "star" pretty much every time... 

*** Yes, I know "a gibbous or less" would be better, but I'm not confident that everyone knows that a gibbous is not a monkey.  If you do know that and are reading this, my apologies; You're smarter than the average bear.

**** This might be a low estimate though, as it's been counter-theorized that it would take closer to 42 zettabytes (ZB, 1024 EBs).