NavList:

Peter, you asked:
"Isn't the iPhone a more powerful computer than the one aboard Apollo spacecraft that landed on the Moon?"

Yes!! By many orders of magnitude. :)

An iPhone (or most any recent Smartphone) actually has far more processing power and capacity than the computers currently used to fly the Space Shuttles, which are themselves much advanced over the Apollo spacecraft computers. Just by a rough check, a first-generation iPhone has a processor about 400 times faster than the shuttle's main computers and has about 4000 times as much storage capacity. Of course, the flight computers are designed to do one thing only and do it as perfectly as possible with as few failure modes as possible. The astronauts on shuttle/station missions also carry modern IBM laptops, Apple iPods, and all sorts of other computing power.

-FER

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