It’s pretty amazing stuff! I’m sure there’s some redundancy built in but there has to be a lot of single points of failure. A tiny diode fails, a software bug surfaces , or an actuator doesn’t function, and the mission may not be recoverable.
What’s equally impressive is what the engineers have done in the past with far less hardware resources. I think the original avionics computer on an F-15 had something like 98K of memory. 98K! OK, these were probably four byte memory locations but you couldn’t even begin to run the smallest phone app with this amount of memory. Even now, with power consumption being a big concern for space vehicles, the engineers are most likely still somewhat constrained in how much processing power they have at their disposal. They do remarkable things.
Glad to see some guys in the video that look like they might be about my age. Maybe I do have a few good years left.
