Space radiation and hardware reliability are not the given reason for the upper-bound. From the NASA document: > Rule: All loops must have a fixed upper-bound

Space radiation and hardware reliability are not the given reason for the upper-bound. From the NASA document: > Rule: All loops must have a fixed upper-bound. It must be trivially possible for a checking tool to prove statically that a preset upper-bound on the number of iterations of a loop cannot be exceeded. If the loop-bound cannot be proven statically, the rule is considered violated. > Rationale: The absence of recursion and the presence of loop bounds prevents runaway code. This rule does not, of course, apply to iterations that are meant to be non-terminating (e.g., in a process scheduler). In those special cases, the reverse rule is applied: it should be statically provable that the iteration cannot terminate. One way to support the rule is to add an explicit upper-bound to all loops that have a variable number of iterations (e.g., code that traverses a linked list). When the upper-bound is exceeded an assertion failure is triggered, and the function containing the failing iteration returns an error. (See Rule 5 about the use of assertions.)