
Would your mobile phone be powerful enough to get you to the moon? - pseudolus
https://theconversation.com/would-your-mobile-phone-be-powerful-enough-to-get-you-to-the-moon-115933
======
grenoire
"It would almost certainly not have a keyboard, but would use swipe commands
on a touch screen. If that were not possible, due to having to wear gloves,
the interface might be through gestures, eye movement or some other intuitive
interface."

I'm not quite sure, it was only recently here on HN that we discussed Mazda
taking out touchscreens from cars[0]. I don't see any problems with keyboards
or other mechanical input devices; experience and discourse shows it might
even be preferable.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335)

~~~
sillyquiet
Yeah to add to this - I think physical knobs and switches and dials will be
the preferred inputs for the mission critical controls of a space craft (and
probably, anywhere, really).

I think all the movies and tv shows that showcase the fancy future touch
screens and minority-report style gesture displays will feel as quaint and
dated in the next couple decades as Star Trek TOS's incandescent bulb arrays
and paper readouts are to us now.

~~~
naavis
Agreed. I think touchscreens are gaining popularity in consumer devices for a
large part because they are cheap compared to mechanical inputs. Mechanical
switches, dials and buttons are surprisingly expensive. But when it comes to
spacecraft and such, the relative price of these components is insignificant.

~~~
gargravarr
Touchscreens are ideal for consumer devices because it means not having to
commit to a single UI design - you can move buttons around onscreen as needed,
overhaul the software to put things in a new place as you like, and not having
to worry that the dial the user turns is tied to a value box that is now on
the opposite side of the screen. Not only is it cheaper from a component
perspective, but it's cheaper from a design perspective - you don't have to
finalise the design for the UI before it goes to manufacturing, just tell the
factory to stick a large enough touchscreen in the centre and the UI can be
added later, after the various teams have finished arguing.

What they are not, however, is intuitive, much as designers like to say they
are - there is zero consistency in the UX between devices, buttons all look
different, sometimes between updates, and half the time you open an app, it's
a dice roll whether it's going to work the same it did last time. There is
also no inherent tactile feedback - phones have haptic vibrators to simulate a
button press, but there is no other feedback, and you can't feel the buttons
with your fingertips before pushing them. You have to be looking directly at
the screen to find the control you need - when the device is primarily
designed to be in your hand, it's kind of acceptable, but when it's a control
panel for something vital, this simply won't work; your eyes are supposed to
be fixed on what the control panel is controlling. These reasons are why Mazda
has backed out of using them for cars - your eyes need to be on the road. You
can change fan and temperature settings by touch alone once you know where the
controls are. In _Apollo 13_ , if Jim Lovell had to keep looking at a
touchscreen to make sure he was actually pushing the thrust control in the
right direction while keeping his visual fix on the Moon, there's a great
chance he'd have sent the stack spinning off into space.

~~~
seeker61
I agree with this 100.000 percent. UX people in general have crawled up their
own stacks and died.

------
caymanjim
> I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster,
> due to the software development tools that are available today. It would
> have been a lot quicker to write, debug and test the complex code required
> to deliver a man to the moon.

This is a poor assumption. It takes a lot more effort to create any
moderately-complex modern software system today than it did to create software
back then. I'm not saying it wasn't hard to do, and in fact squeezing the most
out of the primitive computer systems back then was challenging, and any life-
critical system requires extensive planning and testing, but having only 32k
to operate in severely limited the complexity of any software.

I've worked on modern spacecraft command and control systems, and I've worked
with non-flight Fortran code from the Apollo era (ground-based image
processing, still in use as recently as 15 years ago, and probably still
today). Everything was much simpler back then.

Modern software complexity makes everything take more effort, not less.
There's a lot more power and a lot more functionality as well, but back in the
60s software was a whole lot simpler. The plethora of tools today exist to
abstract away complexity that wasn't even possible then.

~~~
lisper
There is nothing in the laws of physics that _requires_ software running on
more capable systems to be more complex. It's a choice.

------
moftz
Author mentions the uplink downlink would be the same since the speed of light
hasn't changed. That's not really true. While NASA still has communication
links to spacecraft that use the same waveform that Apollo used back in the
60s, there are much higher speed links available. The uplink was limited to
about 2kbps and that was with 5-to-1 encoding meaning it was more like 400bps.
Downlink was either 1.6kbps or 51.6kbps depending on mode. They also had voice
channels within this waveform along with a ranging code to determine how far
away the spacecraft was. Spacecraft nowadays can use Ka-band communications.
NASA pulled off over 500Mbps using Ka-band in 1997 and today there are
demonstrations of gigabit links.

~~~
mikestew
My reading says the author confuses latency with bandwidth. The speed of light
has nothing to do with the latter.

------
etiam
Anyone here qualified to answer the alternative question "Would your mobile
phone be _robust_ enough to get you to the moon?"

I suspect the much more delicate circuitry may be less than reassuring in its
ability to deal with the environmental conditions in space.

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AndrewOMartin
This article ignores that getting to the moon required a computer that could
be simultaneously monitored by the dozens (hundreds?) of experts in mission
control, and certainly neglects to account for the "processing power" of all
those brains.

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rasz
phone? your PC keyboard alone is more powerful than Apollo Guidance Computer

~~~
cr0sh
Most microcomputers from the 1980s were definitely as or more powerful, at
least from a memory footprint and CPU capability standpoint.

A PC keyboard controller - I guess it depends on what is being used; I suppose
something that can read a matrix and convert the output to USB HID could be
pretty powerful - perhaps at least as much as a PIC or Atmel microcontroller -
so perhaps?

~~~
NikkiA
most keyboards are still 8051s (yes, even USB ones, the 8051 has had a USB
option for a while)

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spookware
Your right itt would. I realised my phone was way more powerful when I bought
my first Nexus. Besides they only used 2 decimal places to get to the moon.

------
_Codemonkeyism
As a rocket engine?

