Kyle.wbst@XEROX.ARPA (11/20/85)
re: Dale.Amon@fas.ri.cmu.edu's message concerning Phoenix... I missed the earlier reference to this. Can someone explain what Phoenix is and who is spearheading the effort? re: John Redford's comments on spinoffs: ... Teflon was actually invented in the late 1930's (If memory serves me right) not in the 1950's as he states. He states that the beer and cosmetic industries are of similar size to the one or two billion dollar comsat industry, when in actuality these consumer items are an order of magnitude larger than his comment (check out what women spend on eye make up alone in the USA for a mind blowing statistic). If he really wanted to put things in perspective, he would find that we spend more in one year (adjusted for inflation) on advertising in this country than was spent on the entire Apollo program during 10 years of its life. The space program did not set the initial standards for IC makers as he states. When my team designed some of the hardware that flew to the moon on the Apollo program, we used integrated circuit chips that had initially been designed for the Minuteman Missile program. The TI 5202 chip (which included bipolar complementary transistors on the same substrate ..i.e. both pnp and npn types) was used on Apollo as a high gain Operational Amplifier, but that same chip was being used previously on Minuteman as an SSI (small scale integration) digital logic circuit. The Block II Apollo hardware was what actually made it to the moon. After the fire that killed three astronauts during a test of the older Block I hardware, a decision was made to redesign the system for less weight, more reliability, and in-flight flexibility (removing the Block I philosophy of carrying spare part modules); however where possible, we were encouraged to salvage as much of the Block I design as was feasible to minimize schedule & cost impacts to the program. As a result. if one looks at the Block II Apollo electronic/electromechanical systems you will indeed find a strange mixture of maturity levels in the technology, but some of the IC's used were actually very current for that time. Finally, let me comment on the major misconception his message perpetuates; i.e that Apollo-type programs rarely generate technological spin-offs that have benefit in the commercial market place. I don't know about now (as I'm no longer in the space program), but during the Apollo era, an interdisciplinary infrastructure was created in this country that can only be described as a golden age of technology. NASA's problem was in not having the ability to properly trace the spin offs down and document them in a major PR campaign. I know personally many engineers and scientists who went on after the space program to build better heart pacemakers, better commercial computer sub assemblies, better display systems and U/I (user interfaces) for electronic publishing/composition systems, industrial pollution detectors that protect workers in hazardous environments, improved sensing circuits for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) scanners now in vogue in the medical profession, and improved articficial kidney machines that allow more lives to be saved each year than on previous designs; just to name a few (I have not mentioning the specific companies involved to avoid any conflicts here re: free advertising). What has really been missed as the biggest spin-off is the large cadre of engineers who went on with a "can do" attitude after leaving the space program and continued to do the impossible for the benefit of this country and the various companies they worked for. Earle F. Kyle.