Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Astrum" channel.

Go watch the series on the resurrected Apollo AGC they did as part of the 50th anniversary. (its all on YouTube) Its extraordinary what that thing did. The most incredible thing was how efficient the operating system was. There's a whole video on how it worked and its amazing. Everything in computers is usually a power of 2 (as in 8, 16, 32, 64 bit processing). The AGC was 15bit and used the 16th bit for parity checking. All through out the early personal computer era systems were single task not multi-tasking. The AGC was not only multi-tasking but it was also incredibly efficient with the time it gave tasks. The program where they resurrected an AGC has lit parts of the computing world up. Its an ongoing argument among engineers that the rise on processing power and memory has made programmers lazy and their software is less efficient. The Apollo AGC has thrown buckets of fuel on that fire.
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Your right that is NOT an R-7 in the footage, unless its one of the very first test vehicles. But to say the R-7 launches Soyuz isn't strictly true. Vostok, Voshkod and Soyuz all use the same stage 1 with RD-107 boosters and RD-108 on the main core. But those engines have been slowly modified over and over. They still have the basics but its like trying to compare Chevrolet V-8s from the 1960s to todays LS series V-8s. Its one of the great lessons the Americans never seem to learn from. The Russians take what they have and make it better bit by bit. The Americans take what they have, throw it all away and start with a clean sheet. Its very costly, takes huge amounts of time and never seems to end well. Its also one of the main reasons why they haven't been back to the moon for 50 years. Go look at how much money they spent on SLS and related projects. Its one of the arguments you have to be very careful with when discussing Space-X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. How much have they spent reinventing things they didn't need to. If Jeff Bezos just wanted to go into space he could have paid the Russians like Dennis Tito did. If Richard Branson just wanted to get flown to the edge of space he could have simply had Scaled Composites build him a version of space ship 1 and gone 10 years ago. If Elon just wanted to go to space on his own rocket did he really need to reinvent EVERYTHING. Lots of 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️ in those discussions. Good pickup on the footage.
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NOBODY Should forget that Australia was involved and was equally stupid in these decisions. As an Australian with a degree in aerospace engineering the capability that we threw away for no other reason than political ignorance and cowardice was ridiculous.
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@ewan.cartwright Yeah but the current beetle has fuel injection, more power, lower emissions, and literally dozens of accessories. And that's before we cover the basic quality issues. It might still be a beetle but its not the same car. Similar Soyuz might still be based on 1960s tech and layout but its simply not the same rocket. In engineering there's a methodology called lessons learned. Its a post project or pre-project step AND ITS NEVER DONE WELL ENOUGH but some do it less worse than others. The Russians are sort of Ok at it, but NASA are almost totally hopeless at it. NASA's rover program being one of the few exceptions. In fact in that program they are outstanding.
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