well at least the trillions spent on military contribute meager scraps to genuine science

that "flying spot" and electronic transmission system developed in 1963 is blowing my mind though

nothing mentioned about bitrates at the time, can't be more than 1000bps?

or wait, was it ANALOG? wild

then compare that to the new Roman Telescope 60 years later which will transmit at 500mbps from L2 a million miles away (1.5TB per day)

ha that took me down a rabbit-hole

apparently this tech led to the first fax machine in 1964 which weighed 1000 pounds and took six minutes to transmit a page (effectively 300bps but it was analog)

two years later in 1966 they had it down to a 50 pound machine but still six minutes per page

four years later in 1970 using more technology developed for satellite transmissions they got the pages down to 40 seconds

this kinda historical progress stuff absolutely fascinates me