Explorations

Explorations: Landing on the Moon

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Microsoft Flight Simulator virtually buckles you in the pilot seat without having to shell out $100 an hour to rent a Cessna.  Orbiter has taken the trail blazed by the long-since discontinued Microsoft Space Simulator (1994), and paved it into a multi-lane expressway.  With Orbiter and its add-ons, you can (virtually) strap yourself into the astronaut's couch for $20 million less than it costs to fly along on a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station.  In some ways, it's better.  You can get a flying license and actually control a plane, but even the billionaire space tourists are mostly just sightseeing.  This is truly a geeky thrill that will not be available for decades to come.

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Such is the power of Moore's Law.  In Apollo 13, Tom Hanks proudly describes a computer that fits in a single room and has a megabyte of memory.  Film critic Roger Ebert remarked that he was typing his review on a more powerful computer than the one that guided a spacecraft to the moon.  Well, now, we have so much computer power that we can calculate trajectories, render realistic 1280x1024 images of the spacecraft at over 25 fps, and emulate every hardware function of the Apollo Guidance Computer, fast enough for the original software to run in real time.  That's progress.

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