Quote Originally Posted by Tellos Athenaios View Post
What you are overlooking here, is that your 486 contains a trivial amount of electronics compared to say your current laptop/desktop CPU. The difference is a couple of
order of magnitude. So no wonder that a modern desktop CPU is more fragile than the 486 in a high radiation environment: there's more components to "go wrong". But the modern equivalent to the 486 isn't a desktop CPU.

Instead it's something you might find in hospital machines or wafer bakers. Those have much tighter EMI requirements than the 486 ever had. So why don't we use that, then, you ask? Because software written for the 486 won't run on that kit.

EDIT: I guess the more interesting point is that 486 was made with knowledge of materials and their EMI properties of the late 1980's. We have much improved alloys and processing methods to deal with EMI now.
We're sort of saying the same thing, and sort of not. (Relatively) Trivial construction is one of the big(ger) reasons why older electronics have higher survivability, the other is robustness of construction. It's really annoying to hear our parents or grandparents say it all the time, but the old adage "They don't build 'em like they used to" has some level of truth in this regard. Not all modern electronics are built with that "battlefield" survivability in mind, the minimum level of compliance is that FCC standard that basically states that they MUST accept interference as well as not give it. The last thing I'd add is that I'm not disagreeing with you, in that we could put the latest and greatest into space and have it work fine, provided it's built right. The "built right" part is what I was trying, perhaps poorly, to imply is the hardest and most expensive part by a long, long shot.



Eh you can't just crash land the stuff on Earth. Once the amount of stuff you crash land is in any way meaningful, you won't be allowed to crash land it. Like you say: reusable containers is the hard part. Not because reusable containers themselves are so hard, but because the weight of the reusable containers and the machinery to load them is going to be hard to justify. The problem is therefore in getting the economics of rocket payloads to tip towards bigger = better, because only then can rocket investments be recouped by upscaling mining operations and amortizing costs per tonne of ore brought back.
I for one am looking forward to the apocalyptic hail of dump truck sized, partially molten rare earth ores raining down on heavily populated urban centers!