This kind of comparison is ridiculous. It's like saying "Niagara Falls produces far more water per second than a kitchen faucet." Well of course it does. The computing power of a space shuttle is laughably tiny in comparison to an Arduino, which is itself a tiny computer by modern standards. Does the general public not know this?
The general public, assumes that because launching rockets and space shuttles into outer space, they must be much more computationally intensive than something like say, a farm tractor. It's a bit condescending to question whether they know this or not, as I think it's quite reasonable and expected that most people don't know this.
The computing power of a space shuttle is laughably tiny in comparison to an Arduino
Arduino: 8 million instructions per second
IBM System/4 Pi: 480,000 instructions per second
Most of the space shuttle is going to boil down to control theory. The code for a control system essentially looks like this:
while (true) {
readInputs();
smoothInputs();
computeUserDesiredSetpoints();
adjustVariablesToHitSetpoints();
makeActuatorsMove();
}
There may not be very many lines of code in the shuttle command program, but every single one has a mountain of work behind it.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if fully half the tractor's code was buggy DRM junk. (And spaghetti code 12 times longer than if should have been at that)