Recently, there has been growing interest in using Raspberry Pis in CubeSats. NASA is even in on the trend. But, considering that outer space is pretty harsh on electronics (i.e. radiation and cosmic rays, wild temperature swings, space-dust and micro-meteors), is the Pi really viable as a space satellite?
Based on what I remember, space-worthy electronics usually feature a way to recover from a disaster, ECC memory, redundant systems, redundant communications, some form of radiation hardening, and could handle temperature swings. Basically, as reliable as they can make it.
As far as I know, the Pi has none of those. Yes, the Pi can probably handle the temperature part, but one wrong bit-flip can crash whatever is running on it and render it unusable by the lack of recovery. They can probably use the watchdog
service in that case. But is it enough?