So much for exploring space beyond the solar system, then. If it takes more than a hundred years to get anywhere, all your automated control systems are dead.
They are talking about individual components and what _can_ happen.
What you can in these cases is a whole other layer of engineering.
You want multiple redundancies. With concensus of independent units running. So have something like 15 guidance computers. 5 running (so that each has 2 back-ups) and their output goes to concensus to determine the actual action. Of course the concensus mechanism will need redundancy so maybe each concensus mechanism controls between 0-25% of the throttle...
