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Old August 13th 17, 11:07 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
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Default NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program

JF Mezei wrote:

On 2017-08-13 08:36, Jeff Findley wrote:

Cool goal, but a hell of a lot of work and even more money. If running,
it would take a lot of electricity (which generates heat which
necessitates cooling, which costs more electricity). Laudable goal, but
it would cost a fortune. Things like capacitors will have to be
replaced because they do go bad after that many decades.


Retoring the actual electronics doesn't make sense in my opinion. But
restoring the software and providing an emulated platform to run it on
and drive the displays would be valuable endeavour.


Why?


Since the moon shots have not become routine and may never happen again
in a number of lifetimes, this is something worth preserving. (a time
when the poilitical system could set goals and achieve them).


Why is this something worth preserving as software emulation only?


If you run the mainframe emulation on a PC, it won't be consuming that
much power nor generate lots of heat. Remember that a PC today is orders
of magnitures more power than what an IBM mainframe in the late 60s
early 1970s could do.

One could debate whether the displays in the mission control room should
be updated to energy saving LCDs or kept as old CRTs (consumer more
power etc). But if you could recreate "real time" processing of data as
it happened for each flight, it would be worth doing some "original
equipment" sacrivices such as replacing CRTs with LCDs.


So you change all the hardware, but build a software emulator so that
you can run the old software? What's the point?


--
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