Do you want to know something I just realised when you said you worked with the government?

A good portion (I'm talking 40%+) of libertarians I know have worked with the government at some point. I wonder if there is some correlation?

(answer:yes)

Amazing I still can not believe they got to the moon with what they had. I really do not get why we have not went back with so much advancement.

I’m far more of a libertarian than a conservative and, while I didn’t work for the government, my father worked for the government for decades. All I can say is that the more you know about "how the sausage is made" the less likely you’re going to "eat it". There are few private organizations which can ever become as corrupt as the least corrupt of government; and few private organizations which could ever get away with being as inefficient as the government.

I don't see how this is groundbreaking news the space shuttle is old technology the basic design of it goes back to the late 60's.  The space shuttle is the 747 of spacecrafts its old technology that's still being used.

I also worked for the government, and am libertarian. So I can vouch for the answer to be 'yes'.

It really depends on your outlook:

• If you enjoy your paycheck, don't care about your work ethic, and simply don't care about most of the people you serve, you typically will trend in that direction - more government services to ensure your job is sustained.
• If you do care about work ethic, and care about the people you serve, you probably will become a libertarian or some sort of other anti-government idealist because as said, 'You know how the sausage is made'. I saw tenure kill efficency at one of my jobs. We had people working there simply because they put in X amount of years, so they were entitled to earn Y paycheck, despite the fact that a new hire could do 2-3 times the work. Stuff like that weighs on you, but is commonplace in the US government. Look at our senators and congressmen.

And as HappySquirrel said, the government has a great non-compete monopoly in many different services, so corruption can be much more commonplace versus private entites because there is always the threat that a private entity may lose out to another entity if they become inefficent and corrupt. Yes, in government the parties may change, but you rarely see people (and I'm talking about your common to mid-management government workers) get fired over a new administration. When was the last time you saw a state fire a hoard of teachers because they had pledge to 'better your education' - yet at the same time, we see private entities field totally new teams in efforts to get other teams fired or removed if they are not good at what they do.

I'll end by asking this: if tomorrow, UPS was given the entire US postal service, and FedEx, nor anyone else was allowed to compete in that field, do you think that it would be better or worse in 25 years? I'd bank on 'much worse'.

@OP - The shuttle may have old tech, but that doesn't mean that anything remotely new is using such ancient tools. The shuttle already has a defined role, and the tools to accomplish it...Why upgrade it when it would not prove advantageous? On the other end, just take a look at probes that do use pretty modern tech (like cameras on deep-space probes that are just launched. Usually, the tech is pretty good).

Why does that sound so dubious?

If the equipment was installed in '80 it's been 360 months or 20 iterations of 18 month increments.

By Moore's law computers should be around 1,048,576x faster today than they were then.  Obviously it's not exactly that simple, but it's a good enough ballpark figure, and large enough that a laptop today could easily rival (or surpass) a supercomputer then.

Luckily for modern society, reptitous doubling gets out of hand rather quickly =)

 The only thing I disagree with here is on the subject of power.  You can reduce the power requirements of the electronics with modern components without actually changing the specs.  The reduction in size is typically accompanied by necessary amperage reductions and thus wattage reductions. 

Oh I have to add that I heard a lot of the hardware in planes is based off 386/486. Next time you take a flight, think about how old the guidance hardware running the autopilot is!

I suspect the other reason is that with a less dense chip you've got a much simpler and more robust chip by nature and you have to consider the complexity of the metalic interconnects as well as the relative size of the transistors and how vulnerable they are to cosmic rays etc. With larger transistors the energy required to 'flip a bit' is likely much higher than say if you put a modern Core i7 in orbit which was made using a 32nm process node vs several hundred/thousand nm back in the day.

You misunderstood my post...

Don't worry, I understand Moore's law. But I wasn't talking about the 1980's, I was talking about the 1960's Apollo mission. Yes a super computer in the 1980's would rival or even surpass a modern laptop; but in the 1960's, computing was a completely different game.

When the Apollo mission was launched in the late 1960's, the highest spec. computer in the world was the CPC7600, which could deliver 36MFlops, which is not a lot when you consider our modern laptops work with Gflops.

So either NASA had some secret super computer that massively outperformed the most powerful super computer of the day, or, as I think, the story has been romanticised by documentaries.

Sounds like it could be a case of the difference between coding efficiency then VS now.  As HappySqrl pointed out earlier the calculations on what has more $$ value has changed substantially since the 60's.  It used to be that the computer time was far and away worth more than the programmers time because the computers were ungodly expensive and the programmers usually worked for free or very little (depending on whether it was a business or university machine).  Now a programmer makes a tidy salary and the computer could be purchased out of the petty cash of most businesses.  Coding practices and what is and isn't acceptable efficiency change a lot to suit the standards of the day.

Then on top of pure incentive to have coding efficiency they had the advantage of being able to program for a specific architecture which gave them another advantage (not to mention not having to run some Albatross of an OS).

There is no way to determine how much any of those factors makes a difference, or if together they could make up the entire difference you're talking about, but I think they could go a long ways towards closing the gap.

If it ain't broke....