[adityaathalye]

Oh I don't dispute the fact that reusable vehicles are an incredible leap forward. Anything that manages to launch significantly more payload cheaper and more frequently is awesome.

That said, things like reusability work at all because of precision control which, as far as I can tell, is near-impossible to do in a lightweight package without the cooperation of a compute stack. Same for other kinds of soft landings and autonomous control scenarios.

As an aside: achievements like reusable rockets also became possible because of advances in materials research driven by advances in computer simulation and computer-aided manufacturing. So this is perhaps another under-appreciated layer of the rocketry compute stack.

[kragen]

yes, those are excellent points i strongly agree with

what kinds of new materials are they using in the falcon rockets, do you know?

quite aside from the weight, latency is extremely important to precision control; a factor of 10 in latency may be equivalent to 100× or 1000× more sensor error. so, even if weight was no object and you could mount a dozen 5-tonne 10-megaflops cdc 6600 supercomputers on your reusable rocket as the guidance system, you might still be better off with a 100-megaflops high-end microcontroller, just because it can respond more rapidly to perturbations of homeostasis

[adityaathalye]

> what kinds of new materials are they using in the falcon rockets, do you know?

I was thinking of materials innovation and new materials.

Without looking anything up, I would guess exotic alloys, ceramics, polymers, fuels and fuel mixes etc. at a chemical level, stress/failure modeling at a mechanical level, new manufacturing techniques that exploit properties of existing materials to achieve new capabilities, increased production efficiency for faster turnaround at better tolerances and integrity (because you figured out how to precision weld the thing in a new way) etc.

(edit: clarity)