Radiation-hardened chips, BAE Systems, Manassas

The computers that survive deep-space radiation come out of a handful of foundries, BAE in Manassas, Honeywell in Minnesota, Microchip in Colorado. The nodes are old and the volumes tiny, which discourages new entrants. SpaceX's break was to build Starlink on redundant commercial silicon rather than on these rare chips: a workaround, not a substitution, for critical missions.