Space-grade CPUs: How do you send more computing power into space?

It's a scalability question mostly.

Perhaps something where more laser receivers and more lasers senders can be send into space.

To increase parallel compute performance this way without actually sending more chips, more solar panels and more batteries into space.

Though lasers ofcourse also require a lot of energy... to send signals.

Not sure what would be more efficient:

Use energy from solar panels to power more laser beams or use energy to do compute on processor ;)

At least free heat from processor to keep spaceship a bit warm ! HAHA.

However less powerfull processors possible ! ;)

Earth can have entire data centers compute for spaceship ! ;) :)

Basically Internatiol Space Station has this problem somewhat...

Most compute done on Earth... does not make ISS independant from earth ;) :)

But with lasers who knows... it might have some freedom ;)

At least for "near-earth exploration" ;) :)

Bye for now, Skybuck =D

For inter-stellar missions where the return time would maybe years doing computing on board would be a lot faster faster... And I would not depends on earth receiving and returning anything. Unrest increasing everywhere thanks to a crook in the white house a world war provoked by that mad-man.. Earthlings will have other priorities than to play echo for a few astronuts looking for a heading vector near Alpha Centauri.

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Idiot. Must be processing hardware in space to even receive it, much less decode it, much less encode a response to send back down, and even the send requires 'processing'.

You are one dopey f*ck.

Just so you know, there are already laser based data links. They require multiple 'computers' on both ends to utilize.

The exception would be simple morse code, which naval personnel use to communicate between ships using spotlights with shutters and those are read by humans. Unacceptably slow 'data rate' and severely limited character set, however.

I thought it was impossible, but there is a chance that you are even more stupid than Donald J. Trump.

Computing on the ground was used on the early LEO flights and on Apollo. The onboard computer on Apollo was similar as some early programmable pocket calculators, so much of the calculations had to be done on the ground with mainframes. The two way propagation delay was just above 2 s, so not a big issue. This method is already impractical on flights to Venus or Mars due to propagation delay.

This conversation took a turn to the redundancy issue rather quickly. No s mall part of the problem of sending computing power into space is that the qualification effort for space bound hardware is so much more than in cell phones. Combine that with the tiny number of devices that will ever be mad e under that qualification and you get an astronomical price tag per unit. So the latest processor to have been qualified costs $200,000 and for less er tasks they still use processors like the 1802.