[blauditore]

I'm a bit tired of all the sensationalist "look what landed on the moon vs. today's hardware" comparisons. The first airplanes didn't have any sort of computer on board, so computation power is not the single deciding factor on the performance and success of such an endeavor.

The software (and hardware) of the Apollo missions was very well-engineered. We all know computation became ridiculously more powerful in the meantime, but that wouldn't make it easy to do the same nowadays. More performance doesn't render the need for good engineering obsolete (even though some seem to heavily lean on that premise).

[hnlmorg]

I don’t think you’re reading these articles in the right spirit if that’s your take away from them.

What I find more interesting is to compare how complicated the tech we don’t think about has become. It’s amazing that a cable, not a smart device or even 80s digital watch, but a literal cable, has as much technology packed into it as Apollo 11 and we don’t even notice.

Playing devils advocate for your comment, one of the (admittedly many) reasons going to the moon is harder than charging a USB device is because there are not off-the-shelf parts for space travel. If you had to build your USB charger from scratch (including defining the USB specification for the first time) each time you needed to charge your phone, I bet people would quickly talk about USB cables as a “hard problem” too.

That is the biggest takeaway we should get from articles like this. Not that Apollo 11 wasn’t a hugely impressive feat of engineering. But that there is an enormous amount of engineering in our every day lives that is mass produced and we don’t even notice.

[nzach]

Your comment reminded me of this[0] video about the Jerry Can.

A simple looking object, but in reality it had a lot o tought put in to get to this form.

It also goes along the lines of "Simplicity is complicated"[1].

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwUkbGHFAhs

[1] - https://go.dev/talks/2015/simplicity-is-complicated.slide#1

[argiopetech]

This is actually about the wall warts the cable could be plugged into.

Otherwise, I completely agree.

[bryancoxwell]

> The software (and hardware) of the Apollo missions was very well-engineered.

I think this is the whole point of articles like this. I don’t think it’s sensationalist at all to compare older tech with newer and discuss how engineers did more with less.

[stjohnswarts]

I don't think that these types of articles are meant to offend, just to point out how far miniaturization has come along as well as the software tools that support the silicon. That is no insult to the original engineers and scientists who actually sent a mfkn rocket to the mfkn moon. Those same engineers would have zero problems picking up on new hardware if they some how got time shifted to now. we're still the same humans using the same human brains.

[BSDobelix]

>first airplanes didn't have any sort of computer on board,

Sure they had and often still have, it's called wetware.

>so computation power is not the single deciding factor on the performance and success of such an endeavor

The endeavor to charge a phone?