40 Years Since Apollo 17 Left the Moon

Started by a2capt, December 17, 2012, 11:02:29 AM

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a2capt

I was 6 and a half at the time, I barely remember it, but I do have visions of sitting on the floor of my grandparents house in front of a huge floor console color TV with an almost running-track shaped CRT, the edges were so rounded it was blatantly obvious from even the technology of 10 years later. I remember the bouncy man on the moon, the moon buggy spewing dust like a rooster tail, and the awe of it all.


An iPhone 5 today has a camera the size of the tip of a kid's pinky. While the Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC) of the era was something to behold, while it may still produce a smoother image than that solid state imager in the iPhone, imagine what the best CCD imager we have now is, and sent it back then.


Or imagine all the video and stills we'd have if we were landing on the Moon this week. The Red Bull jump was multimedia overload, cameras at every angle nearly. Even SpaceShipOne, when I was there that day and I thought wow, this is way cool. Snap snap snap, put another floppy in the camera, snap snap snap some more. As long as I don't run out of disks and batteries, I'm set! I even saved a battery and some disks just incase. We got to go inside afterwards. :)


But imagine what a Moon landing would be like now. In 1991, after coming back from a museum visit and road trip, I might have 50 megs of photos, 10 years later, I was sure to have a CD ROM full in a couple days, if not one aviation museum alone if I went all out.


This last July, I was generating 35 gigs a day in media between the still camera and the POV video mounted on the car snapping frames and streaming.


Yet the Moon is what brought us this technology, the space race lead to innovations that eventually brought video tape based cameras to the masses, instead of having to load a cartridge in the dark and then mail it off because even the local Eckerd Drug, Photomat, etc. Kodak built one of the first digital cameras in 1975. 16 years later they finally had one that was somewhat decent. 1.2 megapixel photos that took about a minute to two each to get off the camera via serial cable. But it was better than the QuickTake introduced just a year earlier, by leaps and bounds. 


I remember the first time I had used a digital camera, "wow, point and scan!", is what I called it. Basically that's what you were doing. 


In 5 years I wonder how many megapixels we'll be pushing, and what technology the private space race will eventually flow to the consumer.

Майор Хаткевич