What happened NASA

    All through my childhood I was fascinated by the moon landing, the space shuttle, and all the things NASA engineers were able to do. Last night I got curious about how my near space balloon computer would stack up against the Apollo 11 computer. Apollo 11 was the first manned moon landing for those of you who aren't up on space history. Seeing as my iPhone has roughly 10 times more of everything than my first PC, I figure my balloon computer should come pretty close to what Apollo 11 had. The specs for both are below.

Luke's Near Space Balloon Computer:

• 2 ATMega128 microcontrollers
• 8 MHz clock
• 128k flash memory
• 4k SRAM memory
• 2 uM-FPU co-processors
• 29 MHz clock
• ~2k flash memory
• Telit GM862 Cellular Module
• Python script interpreter
• 2MB flash memory
• 1.2MB RAM

Apollo 11 Command Module Computer:

• Custom Made Integrated Circuits
• 1 MHz clock
• 72k ROM
• 4K RAM

    To be fair the Apollo command module also had the worlds best computer built-in...the human brain. My balloon will be unmanned so it must handle all the problems itself. It's still incredible that NASA was able to keep track of so many sensors and control systems with the equivalent of a $1 microcontroller in today's world. Be careful if you're thinking NASA's budget is way overinflated, though. The sensors, actuators, testing, and development are where the expensive stuff is. Take for example my balloon. The microcontrollers cost me about $15 each, but the IPT temperature/pressure sensor will cost $500. My components aren't rated to handle the large amounts of radiation that circle just outside our atmosphere either. Ionizing radiation will erase the contents of flash memory and that's where the computer's programming is stored!