It is ridiculous to say you could use this for a satellite. Yes, you could throw this up into orbit in a satellite and it would probably work for a little while before radiation issues. If you are buying a multimillion dollar rocket, you can afford to throw down more than $35 for your satellite bus. If you are hitching a free ride on rocket bought by a third-party and just wanted a few day of LEO orbit, then yes Raspberry Pi could be an option. If you have a free ride to space, you might want to spend a few more dollars to guarantee a longer mission life.

I was chatting with Marvin Minsky a few days ago, we started bitching about space, and he had this sad story to relate:

Once some of the ISS modules were relatively complete and ready for launch, NASA rounded up a group of dignitaries to bless it (I can't think of another reason why they were called in, and you'll see why I had more interesting things to ask about..), and he noticed an engineer really screwing up a docking procedure. He asked why they didn't just have a simple bit of robotics to handle it (any of a billion implementations would work great for something this trivial), and the answer was that NASA had dictated from high up that a human must be the operator for a wide class of tasks.

So there you have it! The space industry has some luddite motivations, which is absolutely terrifying. And unfortunately the great success of JPL/Caltech's probes gives more justification of their _small_ budgets (wow! you're so great you can keep being great with only $10 !!); I guess a large set of the administration still feels a need to justify 'manhood'. fucking retards.

K42

I just need to get some NUMA hardware!