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."

Comments

How did you bring SDI into this?

[helix400]

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.

Re:How did you bring SDI into this?

[WegianWarrior]

"We" are not the Russians. We don't hold airlocks shut with a c-clamp, for example.

If it is stupid and it works... it ain't stupid. While many people joke about the apperantly lowtech russian spaceprogram, they seem to forget a few things.. like the fact that the russians operate on a shoe-string budget, that they have, for a lot less money, spendt a lot more time in space, that Mir - which a lot of people seem to dis these days - was up there there and operating for more than twice its intended lifespan...

But you're right... "we" (or rather you) are not the russians - but you might learn a few things from them when it comes to operations in space.

Re:space agencies make some big mistakes

[s20451]

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.

Re:SDI funds basic research too

[cranos]

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.

Re:Why single out SDI?

[broken_bones]

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.