During the time of the first Apollo missions, a dominant portion of computing research was funded by the defense department and related arms of government, making this type of deterministic and WCET (worst case execution time) a dominant computing paradigm. Now that we have a huge free market for things like online shopping and social media, this is a bit of a neglected field and suffers from poor investment and mindshare, but I think it's still a fascinating field with some really interesting algorithms -- check out the work of Frank Mueller or Johann Blieberger.

Tesla’s Cybertruck uses that in its ethernet as well!

It's not like the approach they took is any different. Just slapped 8x the number of computers on it for calculating the same thing and wait to see if they disagree. Not the pinnacle of engineering. The equivalent of throwing money at the problem.

Agile is not meant to make solid, robust products. It’s so you can make product fragments/iterations quickly, with okay quality and out to the customer asap to maximize profits.

If you look at code as art, where its value is a measure of the effort it takes to make, sure.

You could even say that part of the value of Artemis is that we're remembering how to do some very hard things, including the software side. This is something that you can't fake. In a world where one of the more plausible threats of AI is the atrophy of real human skills -- the goose that lays the golden eggs that trains the models -- this is a software feat where I'd claim you couldn't rely on vibe code, at least not fully.

That alone is worth my tax dollars.

I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insanely poor history of success, and they talk as if they have cured cancer.

This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world.

Lets at least wait till the capsule comes back safely before touting how much better they are than "DevOps" teams running websites, apparently a comparison that's somehow relevant here to stoke egos.

In the Shuttle they would use command averaging. All four computers would get access to an actuator which would tie into a manifold which delivered power to the flight control surface. If one disagreed then you'd get 25% less command authority to that element.

One of the things I loved about the Shuttle is that all five computers were mounted not only in different locations but in different orientations in the shuttle. Providing some additional hardening against radiation by providing different cross sections to any incident event.

Nice “well, actually”. I’m sure Lockheed were building this quad-redundant, radiation-hardened PowerPC that costs millions of dollars and communicates via Time-Triggered Ethernet anyway, whether NASA needed one or not.

Lockheed Martin and their subcontractors did the implementation.

We do not know how much of the high-level architecture of the system has been specified by NASA and how much by Lockheed Martin.

True, but BFS was mainly done in-house. Source: my best friend and I worked on some parts of it.

Eh, in these kinds of subcontractor relationships there is a lot of work and communication on both sides of the table.

will nobody think of the megacorps!!!

Not a direct answer but probably as good information as you can get: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Basically, yes, radiation does cause bit flips, more often than you might expect (but still a rare event in the grand scheme of things, but enough to matter).

And radiation in space is much “worse” (in quotes because that word is glossing over a huge number of different problems, both just intensity).

You don't need 4x redundancy for everything. If no humans are aboard, you have 2x redundancy and immediately reboot if there is a disagreement.

They dont go into here.. but I thought that NASA also used like 250nm chips in space for radiation resistance. Are there even any radiation resistance GPUs out there?

(Off-topic:) Great word. Is that the usual word for it? Totally apt, and it should be the standard.

That was a laptop, not one of the Artemis computers.