Slashdot Mirror
Software Bug Causes Soyuz To Land Way Off
howhardcanitbetocrea writes "A mysterious software fault in the new guidance computer of the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft was the cause of the high-anxiety off-course landing over the weekend, according to NASA sources.' Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative - the star wars project. It only takes one line of mistyped code in what will always be a beta release."
Software faults are not mysterious -- people are ignorant.
-kgj
It only takes one line of mistyped code in what will always be a beta release.
That's right. Better to have never tried at all than to try and fail, I always say.
Talk about your flaming articles
Its fine to discuss a bug in a new Russian guidance system...but to immediately jump into a hot political topic like the SDI star wars system and then vastly overgeneralize it with "It'll never work, because it relies on computers" shouldn't have any place in this story.
"...high-anxiety off-course landing..."
Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing. Especially when you're talking about a manned re-entry vehicle.
Lest we forget, the last time an Earth-bound crew were returning from space their orbiter disintegrated and all seven astronauts were killed. Landing a couple of hundred miles off course and having to wait two hours for groundside assistance is a small price to pay for a safe return.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
You sit behind a computer and critisize other computer people. You say things like, "Oh. Programmers sent our space men hurtling toward their firey grave."
Look at the facts. Not one space man perished in this. Space men have only died in shuttle disasters, such as in 1986 and also a few months ago. Nobody died from this Russian misfortune. Every man is OK.
Don't critisize so quickly, lest YOU get the same treatment.
I suggest you read Slashdot
You'd think that in such operations, where you only ever get one chance, they would have the most error free systems possible.
They do go to great lengths to remove the errors. In fact the Challenger investigation singled out the methods used for validating the shuttle's software as a model for the other parts of the program to follow in improving safety. Also, the article said that the backup system kicked in automatically and led to a safe, albeit off-target, landing. So in fact the overall system worked as expected.
And as for the "big mistakes", it's very easy to point fingers afterward and boil a problem down to a catch phrase. However, engineers aren't idiots; almost all accidents involving spacecraft are a result of a long string of seemingly innocuous miscommunications, coincidences, and bad luck. Consider the story of the Ariane 5, which was destroyed because of an overlooked feature in a piece of code reused from a smaller rocket. No software engineer can say that they haven't made a similar mistake.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I hate to say this but Military Research has led to some of the biggest break throughs in our life time. Without the V1 and V2 rockets we wouldn't have had Saturn 5, Satelites, Velcro, Microwave ovens, High Strenght Materials, Computers, the Internet all can be traced back to military research.
Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative
And yet, you think I would want to put all my trust the sanity of other world leaders to not fire nuclear weapons at the U.S.?
There is nothing unsafe about a defensive nuclear missle. The key term here is "defence initiative". If the worst case scenerio happens that a weapon is fired at the U.S. at least there is some better chance of attacking the missle before it reaches the U.S. instead of sitting back watching the light show.
I don't understand why people doubt the technological capability of scientists and engineers to create a defensive system. With the amazing advancements in computers and science, this is just another advancement in technology.
Why is it all the news stories recently in the US press recently seem to have a dismissive, almost mocking, view of the Russian space programme? Words like primative, old technology, not as advanced as American keep coming up over and over again. The Russians have vastly more experience in manned space flight than the Americans and arguably a much better success ratio. It pisses me off the "American must be better" attitude you see in the western press these days. They should remember who it is keeping the whole ISS alive while the shuttle isn't around.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I think it would be unfair to single out the United States in the way you suggest. If Britain, Russia (USSR), France, Germany or Japan had possed nuclear weapons during the second world war do you think they would have hesitated to use them? We must remember that the human carnage in WWII was imense. Russia alone lost literally millions of people. Given that do you think they really would have cared about killing a few hundred thousand of the enemy's citizens? When Japan or Germany were facing their ultimate demise do you think that they would have hesitated to use a nuclear weapons if they had them?
Debating whether using the bomb was the right thing to do or not is fine. However I don't think that a case can be made that the US is somehow "worse" or "different" than anyone else for using nuclear weapons. Had any other nation possesed the bomb at that time I don't think they would have hesitated to use it.
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
The best nuclear weapon shield will be hard put at defending itself against an attack that uses brute force to overcome it.
I couldn't believe my ears a few weeks ago when I heard Richard Perle making the amazing claim that the U.S. would always be safe having a shield because no other country in the world would ever have the technology/money to build one themselves.
It is an act of stupid arrogance to believe that the U.S. will always have superior technology compared to the other powers in the word-- I'm sure the Romans thought their military engines would protect them forever too.
Further, one only needs see how just how sensitive and volatile high tech has been in the last few years during times of economic difficulty. Our innovation is tightly tied to economic growth. In three years we've seen massive reversals in the tech industry. Is it not incomprehensibly foolish to fail to consider the possiblity that one day the U.S. won't be the world's bastion of growth or technological progress?
Indeed, the pillars of today's technology: IBM, Microsoft, Sun etc... already farm out technological work to 3rd world countries around the world-- ideed, the U.S. doesn't even manufacturer a large part of the electronic components it uses.
I despair that, even though the U.S. absolutely crushed an army once ranked 5th in the world, we're still getting told we need more military protection, more spending in weapons research, and a big shield to protect us from their nasty missles--- this when arms races have universally shown themselves to be precursors to major warfare throughout the history of mankind.
We don't need more military. We need competent politicians of principle and vision who can think beyond warfare to solve the problems of the world.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
yoru first comment, I can't be too direct about this but I'll try to explain with an example you can test yourself. Some ATM machines have a time delay mechanism when they eject the user's card. If the card sits in the reader too long, it is pulled back in and the account locked until a bank person resets everything. That's an example of hardware enforcing procedure. Initiating a national asset weapons includes a series of steps, personal actions and hardware requirements that must be done in a specific order for it to work.
Uh...which generation of Pattiot? Do you know what it was originally designed to do? Scud-busting was an admitted quick hack.
The current generation, used in Iraq the past month, did do what it was supposed to. The jets it knocked down failed IFF interrogation so that makes them targets.
wrt, falling debris. Well, duh. Why wouldn't that exist and have a potential to create soem kind of damage? If something's in the air and it blows up, pieces fall down. That's true of everything. Heck, I shot a duck once and shot came back to Earth, so did the dead duck.
The assumption that "SDI" is only effective during what is considered a boost phase only makes sense if you think it's impossible to detect/track/target/destroy MIRVs. As far as being more difficult to destroy during the re-entry phase, why? Wouldn't they be generating a lot of heat? Might be easier to detect then?
Why assume a missile would be an alley-oop, over the top lob and not a low-flying cruise?
wrt test firings of ICBMs, sure LAUNCH was tested under very controlled conditions. Those only flew a short distance, were unarmed, and flew west from the California coast. Find a map that shows magnetic anomalies. AFAIK, none have been fired over the North Pole. That's a heck of a lot different than crews in the field knowing they have real weapons and the only launch orders that come in that environment are real. So...they haven't been "tested" as much, in that regard, as you might think.
SDI, the term, is a little outdated and if you try to limit it to 20-year-old concepts and technologies, you'll be misleading yourself.
Everything about the moon program was NOT civilian and was NOT publicly available. It still isn't.
There were some intercepts that were faked during the Reagan era. Heck of a payoff those had, huh? Soviet Union collapsed because they knew they couldn't compete. In that regard, the system WAS successful. (Sun Tzu: the goal is to get the enemy to surrender without having to fight...) Same with those $600 toilet seats. ("Komrade, they have these huge money scandals and still completely outclass us, we can't compete.")
I'm not excusing graft, just trying to illustrate a point.
Lots of things were screwed up on the Bradley project, too. (There's a really cool movie about that, forget the name.) As I recall, the M-16 was also a real mess at first.
Your conclusion has a number of statements for which you have no validation. It's based on a hypothetical future condition so, by definition, there's no way to state what the outcome will be. history has shown the exact opposite of what you claim to be true. Surface mount electronics, GPS, fiber optics, etc., etc., etc. all come from technologies the military needed. Why would anything based in space be different?
FWIW, and I know this will irk anyone who has a dogmatic hatred of the military, the first real historic use machining tools and practices was to make uniform firearms. Everything came from that. So, basically, all the quality controla nd manufacturing processes we use, outside hand operations, trace their roots to military needs.