The Apollo astronauts used Hasselblads for still photography. I'm pretty sure Firefly is not sending back rolls of 6x6 film.

What is the point? Are we comparing coconuts and apples?

Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.

you are talking about stills. still don't know what the actual tech difference is.

Here's what Apollo used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_photography

Here's what Firefly uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_photography

Hopefully you can see that from a raw tech level, there's practically no overlap between those things at all. The technology has moved on _completely_.

Excuse me?

I'm familiar with the Mariner camera. It's pretty fascinating. There obviously no way to return film from a Mars flyby, so they had to take a digital approach. But the technology was so crude in 1965 that they literally had to paint the "digital" images by hand in order to get a visual output. It's a fascinating story.

https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-tv-image-of-mars-han...

Suffice it to say that this technique has essentially no relation to today's digital cameras, apart from using electrons or something. The Apollo missions did not use digital cameras; they used film, which could produce superb high-resolution images, provided you could return it to Earth.

You can actually learn things in this forum, if you listen to people who know what they're talking about.

You simply dumped me with the inane digital / analog hint. Like I missed that transition. Excuse me? YOU started to talk about analog photography, just to make me look like an idiot.

Just saying it uses digital photography doesn't give me any clue. Is the tech bleeding edge or 20 years old?

My initial argument was that it takes time to add new tech to space flight, due to radiation concerns. Your argument is that they use digital tech now. Which doesn't disprove my point, nor does it point out any mistakes I made.

To be honest with you, you're making yourself look like an idiot. I would take the advice of the person you are arguing with.

If you'd elaborate on that I would probably try.

Last Apollo landing was 53 years ago…

Space engineer here, not exactly true, esp for non-critical systems. Check out the "Careful COTS" paper by Doug Sinclair

The paper is 12 years old. If there haven't been other methods to evaluate modern commercial tech, then it's an actual proof of tech evolving slowly due to radiation concerns. Even the process pointed out in the paper requires resources, but it just got a bit faster in the last years.

Apart from that, adding new components is also costly. You just don't order a random megapixel camera from alibaba and slam it on your 1bn space project.

Considering I made clear that i am no expert and my claims were under that context your response was simply arrogant and not helpful.

would be happy if someone would explain or differentiate "not exactly true"