Way back in 2001 I set off for university armed only with a rudimentary grasp of the object-orientated programming model and my trusty desktop computer. Actually, that’s a slight misnomer; my PC at the time was a reclaimed, bright blue server case that stood nearly as tall as me.

It weighed an absolute ton, and virtually no desk could support it. Inside were 4 or 5 hard disks, of random size and origin, a bizarre selection of scrounged components and enough fans to build a quite effective hovercraft, all linked to a controller that I’d built myself.

Needless to say, it wasn’t the most stable PC ever created. It fell over, a lot – very often because a screw had been worked loose by the vibration from all those fans and landed on a circuit board. In the halls of residence we used to hold regular movie nights, with media streamed all over the super-fast campus network. If the film stopped, I would have to run back to my room to find the offending screw, remove it and reboot.

The reason I mention this is that I was reading the Wikipedia entry for the International Space Station this morning (on the bus, on my iPhone – the wonders of technology), and I couldn’t help but notice some similarities between the multi-billion pound international project and my old PC.

The first ISS section was launched ten years ago, almost to the day; a Russian module called Zarya. Next came the Unity module launched by the US, then Zvezda, then some joining trusses, then the Pirs docking compartment, a lab, an airlock and a robotic arm. After this there was a brief delay while everyone caught their breath (and recovered from the Colombia disaster), then a new European lab, a Japanese lab, another robotic arm and some solar panels.

In the WIkipedia entry you can see images of it at every stage, gradually sprawling into space over a decade, its spindly and intricate shape unencumbered by any of that pesky gravity that keeps Earth-based construction all squat and dull (before you make a comment – I know, there is gravity in orbit, but not really – sort of).

The point is that it wasn’t designed, so much as scraped together from bits – just like my old machine. OK, maybe that’s a slight stretch, but to look at it you’d find it hard to believe that its shape is what would have been drawn up by a single, consolidated design team. A camel is a horse designed by committee, after all.

That’s not to take away from the achievement: I’m all for space exploration. In fact, I’ve even been to a Mars Society conference, so there. The complexity of the ISS is incredibly impressive – it’s just that it’s slightly worrying, too. On a recent space-walk astronauts noticed a loose screw floating by, but couldn’t quite reach it. That screw obviously came from the station itself, but nobody is quite sure from what part.

“I have no idea where it came from,” said Stefanyshyn-Piper, one of the space-walkers who spotted it, sounding not even close to as worried as I would be in her position.

It’s just like my old desktop – I never found out where those system-crashing screws came from, either. They normally just ended up in the bin. Eventually, the continual repairs and constant crashes drove me to get an iBook; which worked consistently for several years with no mishaps.

I’m not sure what my point is, to be honest. It would be hard for Apple to develop a competing product to the ISS, and I’m sure it would come with a hefty mark-up if they ever did.

Maybe I mean to say that space exploration will be the eventual saviour of mankind, and that we should pool our resources in the most effective way possible, without care for the political or financial implications. Maybe I mean that all complex systems will have inherent flaws, or that maintenance is an important but draining part of any large mechanical project. Perhaps I mean that you need to keep track of screws when building something; they’ll only end up getting stood on when you’re just wearing socks, which really hurts, or ripping through a space station at 17,000mph, which probably hurts even more.

Maybe this whole post is an excuse to show you this video of the tool bag that Stefanyshyn-Piper dropped on a recent space-walk streaking across the sky like a comet. Who knows?