Mobile phones in space, Potentially lowering the cost of spacecraft design? Options

[jasedm]

An interesting mission outlined here proposes to blast a high-street mobile phone into orbit, to determine whether its processing power would be adequate to control a satellite in orbit.

Assuming the components within an ordinary handset can survive in space (it will be partly shielded by the satellite's casing) this might have appreciable effects on cost for some unmanned missions in the future.

[stevesliva]

COTS ARM-based architectures in space doesn't have the same ring to it.

But with smartphones already integrating so many disparate things: phone chip, GPS, camera, wifi, 3G, etc, along with volatile and nonvolatile storage... I can see how it would be a great start for a cheap satellite architecture. And then, since it's so cheap, you just make it triply redundant, rather than rad-hard.