6 ms·

Didn't this use mostly off the shelf parts? If so, I wonder how this will impact costs on future missions. If they can do more with consumer hardware, they can

by Kye 3y ago

Didn't this use mostly off the shelf parts? If so, I wonder how this will impact costs on future missions. If they can do more with consumer hardware, they can save budget to apply toward more science.

artemonster 3y ago
Yes, it did. I like the sentiment but I wonder how much conflict of interest would undermine this idea. Imagine how many companies are involved in developing space grade one-off hardware! Also, why would a highly bureaucratic structure undercut the amount of money that they themselves are asking for (and receiving) out of a budget? Savings are not aligned with the interest of such structure. Its not that for the amount you have saved you can allocate rest of the funds for something else (usually this is how it works with publicly funded projects AFAIK)
- foota 3y ago
  Well maybe they could start doing bigger and better missions, if they can reliably pull it off.
- augusto-moura 3y ago
  This also drops the bar for other space agencies, from other countries and private alike. Getting cheaper hardware also means more launches and more testing. Instead of sendind a multi million project to space, you can send basically a smartphone (an epheumism, ofc) and some big antennas, and do it in bulk
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Every bit of money and platform resources (rad hardened CPUs are giant, slow and power inefficient compared to even semi modern COTS) is money and resources that NASA can spend on scientific payload on the same platform. NASA absolutely does have some incentive to find savings in control hardware and software. Finally, while Ingenuity does use a non-hardened Snapdragon, many other of its critical electronics components are still rad-hardened. The FPGA and dual MCUs (that actually do the low level control and I/O I assume) are both rad hardened. In addition, the COTS components that were used where screened by NASA for their performance in radiation. The Snapdragon is really just there to control the radio, and do image processing. Critically, these are functions that have -some leeway- for timing, giving the option to just restart the Snapdragon if a watch dog detects a problem. All of this to say is that rad-hardening isn't going away, but will probably stick around in many critical niches. What Ingenuity absolutely do is validate that modern COTS processors have a role to play in radiation elevated environments, including in semi-critical applications.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    This is a great and informative comment! HN is dominantly a web/SW crowd plus some mobile frontend, and "it uses a Snapdragon" gives many a wrong idea. In embedded device projects a lot of time is spent planning and designing around a heavy compute element running Linux like this, especially if the device has a safety concept or other mixed criticality concerns. It will have a substantial moat around it. On HN if you say "systems architecture" most folks go "Oh you mean like, whether we use microservices?". In embedded, while there is a lot of overlap and analogues, it's also all of the above, plus power state management and other aspects. It's not very shiny, but that profession makes all your cars, airplanes and alien planet multicopters.
    - WWLink 3y ago
      "It's not very shiny, but that profession makes all your cars, airplanes and alien planet multicopters." If you have a good head for it, it's a pretty darn good career. You might not make $500k/year like you would at google, but the money is still decent and reliable. Plus, working on spacecraft is cool as hell.
iknowstuff 3y ago
The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part: > He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  This is a terrifying anecdote.
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    You're talking about the $120k price tag right? Considering the reliability of Falcon 9.
  - willis936 3y ago
    From some perspectives, yes. From others it's not so bad. I love having cover from the top to do engineering and qualification to have better solutions. Normally it's "we don't have time or resources to make it, get back to the spreadsheet mines". For LEO you can scoot by pretty easily with non-hardened solutions and better systems engineering and software. For deep space you'll need to be more clever.
    - Kon-Peki 3y ago
      > It got there by challenging conventional wisdom, she adds. Most launchpad air conditioning systems, for instance, cost nearly half a million dollars, but SpaceX execs wondered why it cost so much more to cool an area the size of a conference room than the $75,000 it cost to cool their entire headquarters and manufacturing plant. The company brought the cost down to about $35,000, says Shotwell. https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/rocket-maam.html https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc... (Page 3)
      - wolverine876 3y ago
heavyset_go 3y ago
It was a PoC, I assume mission critical hardware will go through the same vetting, hardening, etc processes that they currently do. It does bode well for sending cheaper "nice to have" experiments on missions, though.
systems_glitch 3y ago
Applied Ion Systems is throwing these kind of rocks with small-scale electric space propulsion. It's interesting to see both the excitement and energy from eager researchers and hardcore hobbyists (cubesat folks), and the oftentimes rude and nasty pushback from industry.
ijustlovemath 3y ago
"off the shelf" in aerospace means that you can buy it from an aerospace manufacturer, and don't have to build it in house. There's considerably more engineering behind these products than the equivalent consumer electronics
- Kye 3y ago
  My understanding was they used actual consumer hardware for it. This was a big thing in the news when it landed. edit: from another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081718 It looks like it's just a couple of (important) components that can handle the quirks of not being radiation-hardened, but it's still significant.
bloggie 3y ago
There is a lot of cost savings in taking COTS parts and qualifying them for space vs. designing new space-qualified parts, we will see more of this in the future especially with expensive niche technologies with a lot of crossover such as optical communications.

by Kye 3y ago

artemonster 3y ago

Yes, it did. I like the sentiment but I wonder how much conflict of interest would undermine this idea. Imagine how many companies are involved in developing space grade one-off hardware! Also, why would a highly bureaucratic structure undercut the amount of money that they themselves are asking for (and receiving) out of a budget? Savings are not aligned with the interest of such structure. Its not that for the amount you have saved you can allocate rest of the funds for something else (usually this is how it works with publicly funded projects AFAIK)

foota 3y ago
Well maybe they could start doing bigger and better missions, if they can reliably pull it off.
augusto-moura 3y ago
This also drops the bar for other space agencies, from other countries and private alike. Getting cheaper hardware also means more launches and more testing. Instead of sendind a multi million project to space, you can send basically a smartphone (an epheumism, ofc) and some big antennas, and do it in bulk
icegreentea2 3y ago
Every bit of money and platform resources (rad hardened CPUs are giant, slow and power inefficient compared to even semi modern COTS) is money and resources that NASA can spend on scientific payload on the same platform. NASA absolutely does have some incentive to find savings in control hardware and software. Finally, while Ingenuity does use a non-hardened Snapdragon, many other of its critical electronics components are still rad-hardened. The FPGA and dual MCUs (that actually do the low level control and I/O I assume) are both rad hardened. In addition, the COTS components that were used where screened by NASA for their performance in radiation. The Snapdragon is really just there to control the radio, and do image processing. Critically, these are functions that have -some leeway- for timing, giving the option to just restart the Snapdragon if a watch dog detects a problem. All of this to say is that rad-hardening isn't going away, but will probably stick around in many critical niches. What Ingenuity absolutely do is validate that modern COTS processors have a role to play in radiation elevated environments, including in semi-critical applications.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  This is a great and informative comment! HN is dominantly a web/SW crowd plus some mobile frontend, and "it uses a Snapdragon" gives many a wrong idea. In embedded device projects a lot of time is spent planning and designing around a heavy compute element running Linux like this, especially if the device has a safety concept or other mixed criticality concerns. It will have a substantial moat around it. On HN if you say "systems architecture" most folks go "Oh you mean like, whether we use microservices?". In embedded, while there is a lot of overlap and analogues, it's also all of the above, plus power state management and other aspects. It's not very shiny, but that profession makes all your cars, airplanes and alien planet multicopters.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    "It's not very shiny, but that profession makes all your cars, airplanes and alien planet multicopters." If you have a good head for it, it's a pretty darn good career. You might not make $500k/year like you would at google, but the money is still decent and reliable. Plus, working on spacecraft is cool as hell.

iknowstuff 3y ago

The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part: > He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”

heavyset_go 3y ago
This is a terrifying anecdote.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  You're talking about the $120k price tag right? Considering the reliability of Falcon 9.
- willis936 3y ago
  From some perspectives, yes. From others it's not so bad. I love having cover from the top to do engineering and qualification to have better solutions. Normally it's "we don't have time or resources to make it, get back to the spreadsheet mines". For LEO you can scoot by pretty easily with non-hardened solutions and better systems engineering and software. For deep space you'll need to be more clever.
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    > It got there by challenging conventional wisdom, she adds. Most launchpad air conditioning systems, for instance, cost nearly half a million dollars, but SpaceX execs wondered why it cost so much more to cool an area the size of a conference room than the $75,000 it cost to cool their entire headquarters and manufacturing plant. The company brought the cost down to about $35,000, says Shotwell. https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/rocket-maam.html https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc... (Page 3)
    - wolverine876 3y ago

heavyset_go 3y ago

It was a PoC, I assume mission critical hardware will go through the same vetting, hardening, etc processes that they currently do. It does bode well for sending cheaper "nice to have" experiments on missions, though.

systems_glitch 3y ago

Applied Ion Systems is throwing these kind of rocks with small-scale electric space propulsion. It's interesting to see both the excitement and energy from eager researchers and hardcore hobbyists (cubesat folks), and the oftentimes rude and nasty pushback from industry.

ijustlovemath 3y ago

"off the shelf" in aerospace means that you can buy it from an aerospace manufacturer, and don't have to build it in house. There's considerably more engineering behind these products than the equivalent consumer electronics

Kye 3y ago
My understanding was they used actual consumer hardware for it. This was a big thing in the news when it landed. edit: from another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081718 It looks like it's just a couple of (important) components that can handle the quirks of not being radiation-hardened, but it's still significant.

bloggie 3y ago

There is a lot of cost savings in taking COTS parts and qualifying them for space vs. designing new space-qualified parts, we will see more of this in the future especially with expensive niche technologies with a lot of crossover such as optical communications.