Contents I. Introduction
The use of COTS (commercial off the shelf) components in space missions constitutes a plausible alternative to the use of military or rad-tolerant components. The trend of using COTS began in the 1990s and was associated most of the time with small amateur satellites [1], which succeeded if the COTS were validated in flight. In the beginning the space agencies used to be more conservative, and they avoided this emergent mean for components validation. The later reduction of budget devoted to aerospace technology was the factor that sparked off the in-flight validation of COTS.
