ISS astronaut finds NASA floppy disks in space | Hacker News Reader

ISS astronaut finds NASA floppy disks in space

cnet.com

44 pointse1ven18 comments

I thought that we were still at the point where NASA knew every single object on the ISS because they analyse and test[1] everything? So surely they knew this was there - why didn't they send it back down when they changed laptops?

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/wstf/testing_and_analysis/mater...

There is so much stuff packed inside the space station and there's such a high likelihood of things getting lost (you can't just set something down on a table and expect it to be there when you come back) that it's not surprising that things like this show up occasionally. This may have been on a lost items list for long enough that it was assumed to have been trashed at some point. Or perhaps it was still on a lost items list. Every item is tracked, and the inventory managers do a great job tracking it, but some items slip through the cracks... particularly items from 20 years ago.

> some items slip through the cracks

For reference, go to eBay and type in the word "flown".

This is fascinating. I almost made an impulse purchase.

Didn't know I could own fragments of Kapton tape from Apollo-11 or a part of the tail fin from the first successful Falcon 9 landing.

Wonder how much boosting that mass has cost in the intervening years.

Not as much as running Windows 95

1. Wouldn't they need to be shielded in some way to protect against the increased radiation.

2. Were US export controls still in force for encryption software etc. Did this require special dispensation for 'export'?

1) I wondered about this too. Floppy disks used magnetism to store data, so I wonder what the impact on such a device at such altitude.

2) According to wikipedia, encryption export laws were lessened starting in 2000, so it's possible that the encryption on this disk was no longer controlled?

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

Why would they need Norton Utilities up there ?!

For the utility of astronortons.

I chuckled

Probably a NASA/government requirement that all computers have some sort of antivirus and that's what they used at the time. The computers up there are networked with the ground so it's not that weird of a requirement.

Norton Utilities was not an anti-virus though, it was an utility package for things like data rescue.

Back then, the stuff from Norton was widely considered best-in-class software... so very much unlike today. Sad how that brand name was ruined.

Perhaps it was in case there was a disk failure? I'd like to think they had storage redundancy up there (and they probably do), and NASA likes to have contingency plans for contingency plans for contingency plans.

norton for windows 95/98 :') classic

Neat tale of Computer archeology in space.

Calling Jason Scott

Come on. You all know he wants the NASA ones.

Happy thanksgiving HN.

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