I spent two hours on thursday to the point they cancelled - almost forgot about it today....
As Grot noted - some channels were OK. I had it running on two PC's with different feeds and one was almost exactly 30 seconds behind the other. Being a part of the businesses that participated in the program I can state this is a serious accomplishment (again!). Just getting the rocket to lift straight with that amount of thrust in the tail is a major accomplishment. Further manuevering in space to miss all the other crap on low earth orbit is another major feat. At least they now carry some reasonable computing power on board. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo has less general computing power than most cellphones but what they had was dedicated and refined for specific calculations. I am extremely happy the launch and docking went well.I was watching... CNN I think it was, and they almost missed the launch! Apparently Mission Control announced 30 seconds to launch and started counting down, and at about second 25, the rocket was already in the air! They totally missed it, just then showing it rocketing up, up, up. Did somebody hit the button too soon or what?!
Many of the avionics systems get upgrades over the years and many external parts are often replaced but there is miles of wire & cables buried in every airliner and replacing it all does not happen often. Many of the newer flight controls are configured to use the existing wiring harnesses when they can to keep costs down.The electronics in new cars has blown past those early rockets.
The trend has been towards more powerful computers every where, obviously, but it has also been away from a single central computer doing all the work. Microcontrollers have become so inexpensive and reliable that they end up scattered all around the car. When you flip the turn signal switch on the steering column it sends a message over the car-wide computer network to the microcontroller in the tail light telling it to start blinking. It's actually cheaper because it requires less copper wire!
I know nothing about avionics or space craft, but I imagine it must have gone in the same direction. Interesting that many of the commercial airplanes you might fly in are 40 or even 50 years old. I know they've been updated along the way, more modern engines etc. I wonder if the entire flight system, electronics, even the cockpits get updated too.