mechatronix00

Obviously, this thesis is much more in depth but it reminded me of this fun video titled, "Why Every Movie Space Battle Is Wrong! (Because Science w/ Kyle Hill)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea89t9U2ZJk

Individual Contributor

Don’t forget about failure modes driven by out of spec loads, vibration, shock, acoustics, and thermal environments. A launch vehicle can experience higher than expected environments and can transmit those to the satellite or adapter, causing a separation or satellite failure. I’m not saying this happened but its usually a complicated post flight analysis that takes some time.

For those interested in the AGC development history, I highly recommend “Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight” by David Mindell.

“We certified the Tesla roadster to space flight loads and dynamics” - Can’t beat that kinda of safety engineering! :)

I agree. The vibroacoustics and shock environments in a fairing are intense. He would likely have to rebuild the car from scratch to pass testing. Last thing you want is a wheel vibrating off and bouncing around in the fairing during flight. That could cause big problems with loads and/or controls.

Is there a FPGA equivalent for these analog chips? I'm guessing no but that would be handy to have field programmable analog computers.

I’ve read SpaceX uses Linux to fly Falcon and Dragon. If true, I wonder how they got happy with it for safety critical tasks. Or maybe those safety critical tasks get offloaded to microcontrollers with easier to audit codebases.

edit: reference to the article- https://lwn.net/Articles/540368/