h (Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 13:13:08 CST, in a place far, far away,
(Henry Spencer) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

I'm told that the component-qualification rules for undersea-cable
repeaters make space-qualification procedures look amateurish.

It would be interesting, then to know how they compare to, say,
satellite transponders in terms of cost per pound.

The undersea repeaters have a big advantage - they really only have
one constraint, reliability. I'd guess they care very little about
weight, very little about thermal control, and they don't need to
endure the stresses of launch. My intuition says that the costs will
go up as something like the square of the number of difficult
constraints. For example, a simple and reliable way to make something
stand up to vibration (or sea water immersion in this case) is to pot
it in epoxy. If you are mass-sensitive, though, you can't do this and
you'll need to do a lot more tricky design and qualification.

So I'll wager (without evidence) that the submarine stuff is still
cheaper, even if the component qualification is even more stringent
and hence the parts more expensive.

Lou Scheffer