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?
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?