In sci.space.policy Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
Sander Vesik wrote:
Rad-hard electronics and solar arrays are very hard on the budget (and on
the schedule, because of availability problems).

compared to what? The availability of tethers is rather worse so far and
unlike almost anything else, ramping up rad hard electronics production
is not that hard...

Yeah, but they're not going to *do* that for you unless you're spending
millions, maybe tens of millions, on parts alone. I'm talking about
practice, not theory.

As a launch will cost an order of magnitude more than that, given multiple
launches.


The practical reality is that it's hard to do anything low-cost with parts
that cost several orders of magnitude more than commercial ones (and no,
I'm not kidding about the "several" part), and have acquisition lead times
of many months rather than one UPS package travel time.


Yes, so you basicly have a catastrophicly high NRE for the design (this is not
unique - ASICs have the same problem) followed by specialty manufacturing. Similar
practices as were brought to bear on asic problems should work here too -
design for testability, patch manufaturing etc


--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++