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Thursday, November 13, 2025

NASA's two-spacecraft ESCAPADE Mars mission is now en route to the Red Planet, thanks to a successful liftoff today (Nov. 13) of New Glenn, Blue Origin's next-generation heavy-lift launch vehicle. The countdown clock hit zero at 3:45 p.m. EST (2045 GMT) this afternoon, as the rocket began rising off its Blue Origin pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on Florida's Space Coast.

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About seven minutes into flight, as the New Glenn booster fell through Earth's atmosphere, the rocket relit three of its seven BE-4 engines. Two minutes after that, the booster performed a propulsive touchdown, landing vertically on Jacklyn, which was named after company founder Jeff Bezos' mom. "A landed orbital rocket!" Blue Origin's Ariane Cornell said during the company's launch webcast today. "What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry."

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I remember when NASA's launches back in the late 1960's would preempt all network TV shows for full and uninterrupted coverage of the events.

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-11-13 09:04 PM | Reply

NASA's launches back in the late 1960's would preempt all network TV shows

Most of those were manned, and using pretty iffy technology.

#2 | Posted by REDIAL at 2025-11-13 09:07 PM | Reply

@#2 ... Most of those were manned, and using pretty iffy technology. ...

Iffy? I'm not yet there. We got to the moon and back.

But under-powered compared to today?

Well, yeah.

How the IBM 7094 Gave NASA and the Air Force Computing Superiority in the 1960s (2016)
fedtechmagazine.com

... The IBM 7094 is regarded as one of the most powerful and advanced mainframe computers of the early 1960s. NASA and the Air Force used the 7094 for critical operations, and the mainframe played a large role in the Gemini and Apollo space program, as well as early missile defense systems to guard against intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. ...

he 7094 had a basic machine operating cycle of 2 microseconds, and a new processing unit that improved transfer instructions and let it compare operations. It also allowed for two instructions per core storage cycle, substantially reducing instruction cycle time.

A physically large device that used a cabinet to house its processing circuits, the 7094 had an amount of core memory that seems unbelievably miniscule today: 150 kilobytes, just enough to manage a handful of Microsoft Word documents.

Still, it is regarded as "the classic mainframe because of its combination of architecture, performance, and financial success: hundreds of machines were installed at a price of around $2 million," according to the book A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi. ...



150kB of memory?

Wow.

#3 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-11-13 09:19 PM | Reply

@#3

I remember my first PC here. It was an IMSAI 8080, circa late 1970's for me.

It was assembled from a kit. Assembled, as in, soldering components onto a circuit board, not assembling pre-made circuit boards.

It had 64KB of memory, with an Intel 8080 CPU running at a whopping speed of 2MHz.

It ran CP/M with a word processor and a spreadsheet (VisiCalc).

It booted up from a paper-tape copy of CP/M. In order to boot it up, I had to enter a 100 or so binary instructions via the switches on the front panel.

Image from Wikipedia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080



#4 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-11-13 09:34 PM | Reply

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