wrote:

"A couple of thousand......." Um, yeah. Like you have a clue about it.
Yep I do, I am electronic designer.

Obviously not a professional one. Or maybe you just work out of the
side of a van selling breadboarded products.

Redesigning any of the consumer products I work with to, say, change
one transistor type, is a minimum cost of six to nine months and
$100,000 of direct costs in engineering, QA testing, FCC
recertification, perhaps also UL relisting (that is an instant ~$35,000
cost for our type of product), and more.

That's merely to meet ISO900x, FCC and AHJ requirements. NASA's
application also has to meet aviation safety standards. Even if the
change is as trivial as just switching to a different transistor
vendor, I'd be willing to bet the costs START at $250,000 and a year's
engineering and qual time - and that's probably a conservative
estimate.

Which is why they continue to use junk parts. Too expensive to replace with
something that works reliably on account of the paperwork.

That's why light aviation aircraft still use carburettors with their
attendant intake icing and falling out of the sky problems when a simple
replacement with fuel injection would fix the problem. It's too expensive to
certify the safer solution often.

Graahm