Quote:
Originally Posted by 777 geek
Ken,
The difference between technology then and now is that technology then was engineered to go to the Moon, while technology technology is not because until recently, no-one with the power to write cheques has written cheques for such a purpose. Even now, they're writing the cheques with less zeroes (in real terms of course adjusting for inflation) so the process of development takes longer.
There is a common misconception among lay people that our technology level is somehow generic. All our capability can be graded with a single number and all we can achieve is implied directly from that number. That is of course nonsense. Technology varies hugely from field to field and will vary depending on what we want to do.
An obvious example is that there is no aircraft capable of supercruising. We did however have one a few years ago. It was called Concorde. As a whole were we more technologically advanced when we had supersonic transport? No. Technology overall continues to move forward. It's just that in the particular field of the SST, we abandoned it so our capability have disappeared.
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I'm glad someone finally brought this up. The technology to go to the Moon was SPECIFICALLY designed and build to do so. MIT built and designed the Apollo Guidance Computer for the sole job of navigation and that is all it had to do.
Take the Hubble Space Telescope. It is completely operated by a 486 computer. That is ancient by todays standards, but, it has sucessfully operated the HST for all these years, and is expected to do so for years to come.
The space shuttles were designed in the '70's and are still serving our space program very well, despite the fact that we are more advanced in many areas of technology now than we were then.