At 12:35 AM 8/21/96 -0800, mccoy@communities.com (Jim McCoy) wrote:
You want to avoid moving parts like the plague in orbit. They eventually wear out or fail and once that happens you have a very expensive piece of junk in orbit. Solid-state storage is the _only_ way to go if you want to avoid things like neding to pressurize the drive (eliminating any cost advantage over solid-state.)
Why do you need to pressurize the drive? Most hard disk drives for the last N years have been airtight sealed containers, haven't they? (Removables are different, of course.) I'd worry far more about the stresses of launch bothering the drives.
Its not like you can go up to swap a dead drive out you know...
You do obviously want RAID and/or mirrored drives.
Solid-state
Most government space computer equipment has expensive RAD-hardended RAM; it's much cheaper and probably more effective to just use conventional RAM with ECC and shield it a bit. At least at one time, the most powerful computer on the Space Shuttle was the Compaq 386/25 laptop that one of the astronauts brought along for some non-mission-critical work; most of the built-in computers were 1 MIPS or less.
The big problem is that no one has data that is worth protecting enough to make such a venture pay off.
Yup. Ego would be a good motivation, if you know somebody with enough spare cash :-) While it would be nice to have satellites around all the time, even one or two smallsats could provide services on a several-times-daily basis which would be enough to do private email. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Reassign Authority!