The fact that there is an identical HAL9000 computer back on Earth is discussed in 2001. It just got the name, SAL, in 2010.

score 3 · canonical

I had to think about that a bit. I presume you’re referring to the fact that Hal went on the mission but Sal didn’t?

Yes. Though I believe “SAL” wasn’t actually named in 2001 (“she” was referred to as SAL in the beginning of 2010, IIRC).

As for it being a major plot point; when HAL begins to malfunction (“mistakenly” predicts that some antenna was about to fail), the crew as well as mission control were baffled as to how HAL could’ve been wrong, and they explicitly explain that the identical unit they have back on Earth (SAL) did not make the same prediction when fed the same input.

This is important to the story, because one of the key revelations about HAL’s behavior is that he was secretly given extra instructions about the mission that were not given to SAL. So, they turned out to not be identical conditions after all.

Whether or not it’s described as “mission policy” in the story–I would argue–is not relevant to my point, because the author(s) of the story clearly did consider the value of having a clone of the mission-critical space tech stay on Earth for debugging purposes. Which refutes the claim of the article that “nobody” thought of such a thing before 1977.

score 5 · canonical

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — something like an operating system. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.

(This is a problem NASA long since solved. These days, every space probe that launches, leaves a perfect duplicate back on Earth. Remember in “The Martian”, how they had another copy of Pathfinder sitting under a tarp in a warehouse? That’s accurate. It’s been standard practice for 30 years. But back in 1977, nobody had thought of that yet.)

I only take issue with the pop culture history, here. It’s incorrect to say that in 1977 nobody had thought to do that. This is literally a major plot point in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was written in 1968, and definitely should’ve been the cultural reference instead of The Martian.

score 10 · canonical