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I'm betting that in 5-10 years, there will be an explosion of aero startups. But fast and loose don't work as well in space, where everything ends up going 11,000 meters per second at least. The culture will necessarily be a bit more conservative, and as others have mentioned, software is usually a supporting element at best, a necessary evil at worst.

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With launch costs falling and hardware getting smaller/lighter it's getting less conservative. It used to be everything was C99, VxWorks and SPARC or worse but a lot of companies are starting to look at newer technologies. Good luck finding one of those projects right now but it is happening.

You can have a look at ours: https://www.exodusorbitals.com

Cube sats don't count :)

The requirements and budgets for them mean that they're much more expendable than something flying on a full size bus. As such, the level of risk tolerance is much higher.

Even CubeSats today still use the SPARC (LEON) since it's easy to implement on a FPGA as a soft core. I'm personally not fan of SPARC though.

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