Re: They're still around?
going that far back makes it difficult (impossible?) to get the 100X performance improvement they want
Depends on from how far back they're coming from. I remember not terribly long ago hearing that NASA was launching stuff using rad hard 8 bit CPUs, anything from 2001 would go way beyond 100x improvement over that.
Edit: a little googling shows the Mars Rover uses a PowerPC CPU similar to what you might find in a late 90s Mac (though clocked slower, probably because of being made differently for the radiation hardening)
It looks like the HSPC project mentioned in the article is going to base the next one on ARM Cortex A53 with up to 8 cores - so there's 8x of their performance increase.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
