>>>>> "FZ" == Fred Zellinger <Fred.Zellinger at seagate.com> writes:

    FZ> On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 02:13:11PM -0600, John Scherer wrote:
    >> 
    >> Check out the picture below.  It's of Astronaut Duane Carey, but
    >> that's not what's funny.  Take a closer look at the 3COM pcmcia
    >> network dongle floating above his notebook.  It's thin-net! On the
    >> Shuttle! Who would have thought.
    FZ> http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-109/hires/s109e5059.jpg


    FZ> I looked at the picture in some detail, an the one thing that struck me was
    FZ> the 3-ring binders of schematics, flowcharts, diagrams, etc that these guys
    FZ> have to manually browse through to do their job.  Given that each
    FZ> additional kilo of mass cost $1000+ to get into orbit, wouldn't each of
    FZ> them simply carry around a PDA with all the reference data in a searchable
    FZ> format?

    FZ> No.  Space flight is a nasty business, small accidents can quickly turn
    FZ> deadly.  When some sort of radiation knocks all your transistorized
    FZ> electronics on their butt, you'll be glad that you still have a pen light
    FZ> and paper manuals to get you home again.

    FZ> I have heard people rag on NASA/Space Shuttle for years about their
    FZ> outdated technology...but most of the technology choices where made for
    FZ> reasons of robustness.  It has to be very frustrating for the shuttle
    FZ> crew(mostly PhDs), to have to do so much manual labor in space, when there
    FZ> is a lot of technology which could help them...if it wasn't earthbound for
    FZ> environmental reasons.

It's not just manned space that has this issue.  Hardware and software
for civilian aviation that has to be flight-certified also has this
issue (not biz jets and general aviation --- they're a little more
flexible).  For many such products, the MAJORITY of the development
cost is verification, validation and certification.

Actually, the stuff you see the astronauts carry is WAY MORE ADVANCED
than the stuff that's bolted into the shuttle.  The portable stuff is
almost by definition not flight critical, and doesn't have to go
through years and years of review.

A little technological backwardness is the price you pay for safety.

Another issue about the manuals in binders is that they often were
prepared before the days of document formats that are friendly for
PDAs.  Yeah, you can fit tons of manuals on a PDA --- UNLESS the
manuals have to be scanned as images, because they were generated by
ancient text-processing programs (that may not even exist any more).
If you've gotta carry gifs or jpegs of your manual pages, your PDA
isn't a whole lot of help.  Plus looking things up without text search
makes binders actually more efficient (I can speak to this issue from
personal experience, having downloaded manuals for some of my
obsolete computer hardware!).


R