Question why is it so easy today to build reusable rockets? Is it because the onboard cpu speed of the chips can solve more granular control problems with low latency?
replies(17):
so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.
Before there were no general-purpose simulators, and barely usable computers (2 MHz computer with 2 KB of memory...), so all you could do was hardcoding the path and use rather constrained algorithms.
I think there is also a distinction to be made between offline (engineering) and onboard computing resources. While onboard computers have been constrained in the past, control algorithms are typically simple to implement. Most of the heavy lifting (design & optimization of algorithms) is done in the R&D phase using HPC equipment.