Slashdot Mirror
Astronauts In Florida For Space Station Mission
Michael Holve writes: "It seems the ISS (International Space Station) is slipping 1.5 miles per week closer to Earth. Seven astronauts are set to use the Atlantis to push it 19 miles back out into space until mid-July, when the Zvezda module arrives, which was meant to keep the ISS in orbit and provide living quarters for three astronauts."
The international space-station is turning into one fabulous hack. Us software geeks should pay serious attention to the developments on the space-station not because it's "cool" or anything but because it represents one of the largest projects humanity has ever undertaken next to the construction of Operating Systems.
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An old prof. at my U. loves to point out that MS Windows, the Great Pyramids, and the Great Wall, all share approximately equivalent numbers of person hours in them. So, he asks... what makes the great wall and the pyramids stand for centuries and Windows crash almost daily?
The answer is (according to my prof.) that by the time of the pyramids and the great wall, construction was a technology that humans were very familiar with. The project was huge but the tech was well known. Software and space-stations are brand-new, and therefore a certain amount of instability will be inherent in the project.
(* microsoft flame & linux chest-beating omitted *)
What intrests me in the space-station aside from the coolness factor are "patches" like the one posted in this article. NASA is slapping together a mission to prevent catastrophic falure of the project... its a hack. A quick and dirty fix until other team members get their act together. I've seen this millions of times in software-engineering projects.
Open-Source is an intriguing way of dealing with enourmous projects. I think that NASA could stand to learn a few lessons from OS development... as well as OS building from NASA. I find this an intriguing problem set... enormous projects in a short time with huge unknowns... and no one pays attention unless you make a mistake and blow something up.
BTW:
Anybody got numbers for the person hours spent on any given linux distro?
--// Hartsock
Live to Code, Code to Live!
As Shuttle astronauts scramble to keep the International Space Station up, a team of Nasa navigation engineers came out with some new findings that brings new urgency to the shuttle launch.
``We're incredibly happy to be here,'' said mission commander James Halsell, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. ``It's our understanding the vehicle is in fine shape, but if it drifts any lower in it's orbit, it'll be whacked by Iridium salelites.''
An unnamed source close to the project said that a team of hackers calling themselves "Team Slashdot" have hacked the trajectory of the Iridium satleites and put them into the International Space Stations path.
When asked for comment, an unidentified slashdot team member said only: "first..post..grits..pants..natalie..taco". Crypygraphic experts from around the world are working on decoding the message to find it's hiden meaning.
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