Comment by kragen
3 days ago
At Satellogic, we famously flew mostly just regular cellphone parts on orbit. We did have higher rates of various kinds of failures than is usual on Earth, but hardware failure can generally be masked by software redundancy.
RAM corruption is not cheap to protect against
At today's prices perhaps, but pre ChatGPT you just have to run more of it + more error correction. Not great for the power budget but not anything significant in the grand scheme of things.
You need parity, which is cheap, or lockstep duplexing, which isn't. Or, you know, sometimes you can just restart malfunctioning processes and repair corrupted filesystems while you run the failed tasks again on another node.