Computers in Space

NASA was founded in 1957 for the space activities,and at that time Computer was a huge machine full of valves . To take computers in space at that time was very funny and espacially if the space ship is without man as the service people were required to to cool down that Computers.

In 1976 viking used the 1802s in spce were built using Silicon-on-Sapphire which was much more stable in a radiation environment.

In 1981 the Space shuttle uses the APA-101S computer (5 of them for redundancy). They run at about 1.2MIPS and still use a couple megs of ferrite core memory (which is impervious to radiation). The entire control software for the shuttle is less then one meg. The new glass cockpit in the shuttle runs on Intel 80386s.

Now a days the RAD6000 is becoming very popular for space applications.

The versatility of the RAD6000 is demonstrated in the variety of past and current application configurations available,including packaging options,architecture variations,memory
configurations,and I/O selections.