It took quite a few attempts to get the Falcon 9 to land correctly. A lot of the work to get it to land correctly like involved getting the computer models right. Everything that’s involved in computer modeling got better over the 20 years.
Hardware in the rocket got cheaper. Compute for the offline models got cheaper. On the physics side, we likely learned lessons about how to model the airflow and other factors better.
Dragon runs a special version of Linux that’s optimized for low latency. It’s unclear to me whether a low-latency OS that would do the job was around in 1995.
I don’t know anything about the requirements for the Falcon or Dragon computer systems, but I do know that in 1995, real-time operating systems had existed for many years. At that time, computers that I would guess (maybe wrongly) would be adequate for the task weighed in at 10s of kilograms. Of course, the ones I worked with weren’t built to endure the rigors of space flight. Still, I would guess that the 1995 level of computer technology would not have been a show-stopper for such rockets being built, though the computing requirement would have added more to the cost than today.
But I wonder whether advances in materials science since 1995 might be crucial?
It took quite a few attempts to get the Falcon 9 to land correctly. A lot of the work to get it to land correctly like involved getting the computer models right. Everything that’s involved in computer modeling got better over the 20 years.
Hardware in the rocket got cheaper. Compute for the offline models got cheaper. On the physics side, we likely learned lessons about how to model the airflow and other factors better.
Dragon runs a special version of Linux that’s optimized for low latency. It’s unclear to me whether a low-latency OS that would do the job was around in 1995.
I don’t know anything about the requirements for the Falcon or Dragon computer systems, but I do know that in 1995, real-time operating systems had existed for many years. At that time, computers that I would guess (maybe wrongly) would be adequate for the task weighed in at 10s of kilograms. Of course, the ones I worked with weren’t built to endure the rigors of space flight. Still, I would guess that the 1995 level of computer technology would not have been a show-stopper for such rockets being built, though the computing requirement would have added more to the cost than today.
But I wonder whether advances in materials science since 1995 might be crucial?
Are the necessary algorithms parallelizable under the strict latency requirements?