I want to pick at your “moon rovers” comment because I think it’s somewhat misguided (although, yes, it does apply specifically to Chinese government officials).
One of the reasons that the United States won the race to the moon (while definitively losing the race to space and manned space flight) was because we were the first to dump exorbitant sums of money into the hot (and extremely expensive) new kid on the computing block: integrated circuits.
Before ICs, computer parts were often hand-welded, which NASA determined was too failure-prone to reliably control the lunar lander, as such a device had to be able to handle shaking, cosmic radiation, temperature shifts, extreme G-forces from liftoff, and so on. For that same reason, the Soviets were also unable to complete a reliable lunar lander before the Americans, regardless of their past successes with spaceflight.
NASA’s immense investment in integrated circuits greatly accelerated their adoption, and as a result, computers became much faster, and much cheaper, than ever before.
The history of computing goes straight through the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which does not get nearly as much credit as it deserves.
Wow “chip guy” is understatement of the year. I just looked up vathys.ai from your profile. Very excited to see what comes from that! My personal focus is in embedded computing (Arduino/Pi), and seeing all of these amazing AI-focused chip startups makes me really excited for the days once SBCs can handle heavy-duty machine learning - THEN we’ll get to see the future we were promised in the 90’s!
One of the reasons that the United States won the race to the moon (while definitively losing the race to space and manned space flight) was because we were the first to dump exorbitant sums of money into the hot (and extremely expensive) new kid on the computing block: integrated circuits.
Before ICs, computer parts were often hand-welded, which NASA determined was too failure-prone to reliably control the lunar lander, as such a device had to be able to handle shaking, cosmic radiation, temperature shifts, extreme G-forces from liftoff, and so on. For that same reason, the Soviets were also unable to complete a reliable lunar lander before the Americans, regardless of their past successes with spaceflight.
NASA’s immense investment in integrated circuits greatly accelerated their adoption, and as a result, computers became much faster, and much cheaper, than ever before.
The history of computing goes straight through the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which does not get nearly as much credit as it deserves.