Comment by travisb

Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey.

Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.

Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?

For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.

It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there.

Now, that science is done.

Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.

> but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic

I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...

And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined.

Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.

High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.

The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.

The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.

When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.

And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.

If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.

Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.

Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums.

This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.

It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale.

If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.

So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.