There's a lot of money in the space industry. You can't just drop a commercial core into an FPGA that's destined for space and not expect any issues. Even if AR

There's a lot of money in the space industry. You can't just drop a commercial core into an FPGA that's destined for space and not expect any issues. Even if ARM offered a free perpetual license, there would still need to be significant work done on applying reliability and radiation tolerance features to the design. Plus, NASA would want a wide range of features available for cores. A small FPGA might not have enough resources for things like floating point operations but a large one would. NASA would need access to multiple architectures to ensure they can fit the core to the mission. Also, NASA doesn't do a lot of their work themselves. They buy cores from vendors or buy boxes from vendors that have cores made in-house or from third party vendors. Would all of these vendors have the same open access to the ARM license? Instead, NASA can just say "we want to use RISC-V for everything" thus all of the vendors can now save some money by not having to insert a bunch of license costs into the final price. NASA could even come out with their own RISC-V cores that vendors can easily drop into their FPGAs, giving NASA the piece of mind that every system they get will have common architectures. There is also the benefit of the interconnects having commonality, it's a pain in the ass having add bridges to connect older cores to newer cores. If NASA says we want to use modern AXI4 for everything, vendors may be more inclined to update their cores to be more compatible. Even though the space industry generates a lot of money, it's nothing compared to the revenue that ARM gets from consumer electronics. NASA can contribute to RISC-V development in a way that far exceeds what kind of influence they would have with ARM. Overall, NASA benefits from a common architecture for a variety of reasons along with the benefit of not paying the ARM license multiple times for some missions.