This might sound totally irrelevant, but it kind of reminds me of the situation with NASA. Once a certain technology has been proven to work, people do NOT like to deviate from that change, since hey, it might fail and no one wants to take the blame.
The end result is that NASA is still using computers from the 60s, and it took someone like Elon Musk to change the status quo which resulted in reduced costs (which is why NASA is currently contracting SpaceX, which can do things cheaper).
Bullshit. SpaceX dropped the launch cost, which is far away from the overall mission costs that NASA has to deal with. Dropping the launch cost means decreasing the cost of red tape and infrastructure (such as using fuel stored at higher temperatures), and increasing modularity and benefits of scale but it doesn't help decrease the cost of R&D and manufacturing of satellites and mars rovers.
NASA uses the RAD750 [1] as well as a few other still in production CPUs. Remember Voyager? The satellite is still flying and sending back priceless data after many decades? To launch missions (and critical infrastructure like GPS) you need years, decades even, for usage & reliability data to accumulate and industry to perfect the manufacturing process of parts that can handle environments that are, by any definition, at the extremes. But, please, show me a mission launched in the last 5 years with a 50 year old CPU design.
The other side of the coin is NASA is rarely rewarded for success, but is punished for failure and it's a problem rife in the space industry - you can't have a mission fail.
One of the things the Deep Space Industries people were feeling confident about was they were signing all their contracts to have a 1/3 success criteria - they could launch 3 spacecraft, but would have fulfilled the contract if only 1 succeeds. That little bit of leeway, they think, will allow them to try new things and definitely lower costs.
Obviously some of this you can't do with manned missions, but its still a big cost saver when you change how you balance the equations. One of the things driving the CubeSat movement at the moment is the ability to fail - the low cost is encouraging people to take non-spacerated components, launch them, and see what happens, which then turns them into space-rated components (for a given mission envelope).
Thanks for bringing this up! In my general aerospace engineering class, taught by several active engineers and project managers from JPL, one of the professors did a rough estimate and figured that NASA could double the number of launches without effecting budget or success rate.
He thinks that, save for a few critical infrastructure missions, the diminishing returns get to such an extreme that they add no benefit to most missions. However, because NASA has to play politics for an ever shrinking pie, they can't afford to take no-brainer risks like launching ten missions instead of five because four failures looks worse than two, even if they both represent 40% failure rates.
> (which is why NASA is currently contracting SpaceX, which can do things cheaper).
And they're also contracting Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada and Boeing and probably a bunch of others of whom I have no knowledge.
SpaceX is following in the footsteps of many other private companies that have developed spaceflight hardware on their own initiative. They might be 'younger' and more agile but it's not a new innovation.
I'd be surprised if NASA is using, on a wide-spread basis for missions, computer hardware older than 20 or 25 years at this point. I'm extremely skeptical they are still using much (any?) hardware from the 1960s or 1970s. Your exaggeration goes way too far.
It was an exaggeration, but it seems that the Shuttle was using computers which were a '70s, then a '90s version of a '60s design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AP-101 At least the '90s upgrade removed the ferrous core memory.
The end result is that NASA is still using computers from the 60s, and it took someone like Elon Musk to change the status quo which resulted in reduced costs (which is why NASA is currently contracting SpaceX, which can do things cheaper).