The developments in quantum computing that are going to take place are analogous to the space race in certain aspects: major investment by massive organizations in futuristic technologies aimed to push mankind to the next level. Today, NASA and Microsoft are bringing it to the next step with a collaboration that should make it easier for the United States space agency to manage its spacecraft, which is a complex task as any on the planet.  

What is the main objective? Using quantum technology, we can reduce the time needed to transfer commands from hours to minutes. 

“As NASA conducts more regular and complicated missions into space, coordinating connections with an increasing amount of spacecraft is getting more and more difficult,” Microsoft writes in a blog article. “NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has turned to Azure Quantum to investigate more effective ways of communicating with missions probing our solar system and far beyond.” 

There are even indications of progress. During experimentation, Microsoft famous for Office 365 observed schedule runtimes of 16 minutes, significantly less than the two or more hours formerly required by NASA. NASA would’ve been able to construct several schedules with a larger rollout, allowing the organization to become more adaptable. 

Microsoft famous for Microsoft Teams hasn’t revealed much additional information regarding the collaboration, but we’re certain we’ll learn more as time goes on and quantum technology is applied to one of space travel’s lesser-known bottlenecks. 

Quantum technology deviates from the traditional binary system, in which inputs may only be one or zero, by inserting phases between those inputs and enabling them to be both at the same time. 

As a consequence, computing occurs far more swiftly, as demonstrated by the preceding example, yet we are only at the beginning of quantum computing study. It’s similar to when Computers had 32 Kilobytes of RAM as opposed to operating a system with 256Gigabytes, both in relation to future potential and in relation to present processing power. 

IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, the United States, China, and a slew of startups, governments, and large corporations are now investigating the topic in order to gain a competitive advantage in the next generation of computation.