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Mars Failures: Bad luck or Bad Programs?
HobbySpacer writes "One European mission is on its way to Mars and two US landers will soon launch. They face tough odds for success. Of 34 Mars missions since the start of the space age, 20 have failed. This article looks at why Mars is so hard. It reports, for example, that a former manager on the Mars Pathfinder project believes that "Software is the number one problem". He says that since the mid-70s "software hasnâ(TM)t gone anywhere. There isnâ(TM)t a project that gets their software done."" Or maybe it has to do with being an incredible distance, on an inhumane climate. Either or.
You know, 1/10th of something rather than 1/4. Damn engineers can't figure out the conversion between metric and standard!
Fundamentalism stops a thinking mind.
Before complaining at the lack of manned missions to mars any time soon.
SPAM
I think it's hard to get to Mars because it's far away and it it's in SPACE! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out! Well on second though....
I'm fairly certian it's sabatoge on the part of the Martians.
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
because software is one of the only things that could and should be theoretically perfect
maths (especially that based on 1 or 0 is either right or wrong it seems to be only when humans get involved that things go wrong and mistakes happen
I really hope this explains why there isn't a manned mission. =)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
That explains why it's so hard? :-)
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
They don't want us there.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I am with NASA on this one (almost always a good idea to stick with NASA). From when I remember of fubar'd mars missions, its been screw ups by the programers.
Just as in the NFL when a receiver drops an easy pass and someone yells that he gets paid to catch passes like that, programers get PAID not to fuck things up.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Martian aim is getteng more accurate by the hour, isn't it obvious!
Please stop denying it, the great Anthropoligist and Engineer Erich von DÃniken has been writing about this for decades. Wake up and smell the Martians.
hehe
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
He says that since the mid-70s "software hasnâ(TM)t gone anywhere.
as we didn't allready knew this...
The motivation for achieving Mars is much less than the moon. The reason for this is because there was extreme speculation that the Moon was made of green cheese. Mars is already assumed to have red dust on it. For a society that gorges itself on Big Macs and Cheese Fries this is hardly a worthwhile goal. And as a programmer myself I understand the need to work on projects that will benefit the community as a whole, not on one that will invade a dirt planet.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
We could use this from the previous story, unless the Martian ADA has forcefield defeating technology . . .
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Im waiting for the promotions to buy a square acre of land on Mars go up! I mean, doesnt everyone already own one on the Moon? I think Mars would be a much better place to own land. Gotta luv us Americans, always wanting to make money on -anything- :)
...is "garbage in, garbage out" right? One of the mottos anyway.
If you underestimate the resources you need to do software right, of course you'll have problems -- either getting it done on time, or getting the quality to the level it needs to be (or both).
That problem is hardly unique to the space programs. And of course, it would be a little tricky trying to upload a software patch to a hunk of solar-powered metal a few million miles away.
I wonder how much NASA et al. really tap the resources they should be tapping -- I mean, there ARE areas of industry where mission-critical or life-critical software has been developed and deployed for some time now. Maybe it's just a question of getting the right kind of experience in-house...
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Oooh, stories like this make me SO ANGRY.
... on the last two trips to Mars that failed. Communication and incompetence on Earth were the problem. Exactly how do scientists screw up and get the unit system wrong?
âoeThe limiting factor in Mars sample return is mass,â he said. âoeDirect return [of samples] from Mars right now exceeds the cost envelope and performance envelope of the available launch vehicles and upper stages.â
The first samples returned should have mystical properties ascribed to them and then sold on EBay. This should generate enough revenue to substantially increase the size of the "cost envelope"...
cheers
(I got engaged last night) =)
Make it simple. The original software used (like in the moonshots) was Very simple control loops... no OS, no overhead.. just a simple program doing a VERY simple job over and over. Read stick, fire retros as appropriate.
Also, solid state, however big and bulky, isn't susceptible to the radiation that many mega-tiny chips are... by writing (and testing) the software in the simplest manner, and building a VERY specific piece of hardware out of solid state components.. and lots of unit testing... you're more likely to get there.
For the same reason the 486 was the only space-rated intel processor for quite a long time (not sure if thats still true).
I'd rather go on "slower" simpler hardware that does a very specific job... and you can repair with a soldering iron.
meh
What we need is a bit of competition between nations. Let's face it, without Kennedy wanting to 'beat the Russians' to the moon, there would have been no Apollo programme. Nowadays we throw unmanned stuff around and expect it to perform flawlessly with (comparatively) little monetary backing and none of the incentives of older space programmes.
However just throwing money at the problem isn't going to solve it, I'd suggest throwing away the rulebook and starting over for unmanned systems, better craft, less of the multimillion dollar single units and more cheaper devices that can carry out multiple landings at once.
For once, it might be worth imagining a Beowolf cluster of those things - because with many cheaper devices, the mission would most likely have a modicum of success.
It's interesting that he blames the problems of software on external pressures such as management hassling of coders but there is no mention of project delivery methodology. I would be interested to know what methods they uses. Are they using continuous intergration techniques, unit testing, agile methodolgies, XP? These things in my experience are crucial to low bug software. Also who are they employing to write their software? Rocket scientists or coders. In my experience domain expertise counts for very little when it comes to writting rock solid code.
----
Of course, the stupid metric conversion problem only accounted for one of the failures, but it's indicitive of a larger problem. There's obviously a shortcoming in quality control and verification if such an obvious mistake could be overlooked. What less obvious problems are we missing all together? Most of the failures occured during the orbital entry phase, during which time they shut off the transmitter, and therefore don't have up to the second data on the reason for the failure. Sure, they likely wouldn't have much of an opportunity to save the mission, but they would have a good chance at figuring out what the problem actually was so it could be fixed the next time around. Instead, we're left to guess. Cost concerns are always mentioned as the reason, but how much have we "saved" really? An extra million $$ to keep the transmitter on would probably have paid for itself a long time ago.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
It looks as if the testing and debugging starts at the begining and works through the mission. I suppose this will eventially work, but it seems to be an expensive way to do it.
1st page
Why is Mars so hard?
by Jeff Foust
Monday, June 2, 2003
This June will see the beginning of the most ambitious exploration of the Red Planet in a quarter-century. If all goes well, three launch vehiclesâ"one Soyuz and two Deltaâ"will lift off this month, placing four spacecraft on trajectories that will bring them to Mars by this December and January. Those spacecraft include the first European Mars orbiter, Mars Express; Beagle 2, the British lander built with a mix of public and private funding; and NASAâ(TM)s twin Mars Exploration Rovers, perhaps the most advanced Mars spacecraft even built. They will be joined at Mars by Nozomi, a Japanese-built Mars mission launched in 1998 and forced to take the long road to Mars because of thruster problems.
This should be an exciting time for those interested in Mars exploration, and for scientists and activists alike, it is. If these missions are successful, they should offer new insights about what happened to the planetâ(TM)s water and the potential for past or even present life there: some of the most important questions in planetary science and astrobiology today.
The catch is, if these missions are successful. The history of robotic exploration of Mars, stretching back more than four decades, is littered with failed missions and dashed hopes. Some of these failures can be chalked up to the growing pains of early planetary exploration, when a wide variety of spacecraft of all types failed. Others, particularly the 1999 failures of NASAâ(TM)s Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) and Mars Polar Lander (MPL), are more indicative of management, programmatic, and other problems, rather than purely technical issues. Understanding these problems, and acting to correct them, are critical if current and future missions are to succeed in studying the Red Planet.
The star-crossed history of Martian exploration
Mars has been one of the most popular destinations for missions beyond the Earth. Since 1960 the United States and the former Soviet Union have launched 34 missions to Mars: 15 by the US and 19 by Russia and the former USSR. NASAâ(TM)s success rate is not too bad: nine of those 15 missions, including the Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey missions still in progress, can be considered successes. Russiaâ(TM)s luck has not been nearly as good: 14 of its 19 missions failed, and only oneâ"Zond 3â"can be considered a complete success; the remaining four are, at best, partial successes. Overall 20 of the 34 American and Russian Mars missions, or 59 percent, failed.
Four of the seven NASA Mars missions since Vikingâ"Mars Observer, MCO, MPL, and Deep Space 2â"have failed.
Digging into those statistics in greater detail shows some interestingâ"and troublingâ"trends. Many of the failed missions, particularly those launched in the 1960s, were lost because of launch vehicle failures, not because of any fault with the spacecraft itself. Many Russian spacecraft, from the earliest âoeMarsnikâ missions of 1960 to Mars 96, either failed to leave a parking orbit around the Earth or never made it into Earth orbit into the first place. However, in the last 30 years only one mission out of 16 attemptedâ"Mars 96â"was lost due to a launch vehicle malfunction. This can be most likely attributed to the maturity of launch vehicle development, including the use today of vehicles whose designs date back literally decades.
The problem with Mars exploration now appears to be with spacecraft themselves. Four of the seven NASA Mars missions flown since the twin Viking missionsâ"Mars Observer, MCO, MPL, and Deep Space 2â"have failed, all due to spacecraft problems of one manner or another. (MCO is a borderline case, since there was no technical problem with the spacecraft itself, but rather with how ground controllers operated it.) The only other NASA Mars missions to fail, Mariner 3 in 1964 and Mariner 8 in 1971, were each lost due to launch veh
That the South Sandwich Islands Space Agency has had a colony on Mars since the early 70's and have been attempting to disable any efforts by untrustworthy imperialist states to reach the planet with remarkable success.
Well, there are a lot of reasons thing go wrong. Landing a spacecraft on a different planet is inherently difficult, and when you read about how MER-1 and MER-2 will land, it's amazing that they can work at all.
The flip side is that. After Mars Ovserver spectatularly failed in 1993 ("Martians"), NASA started to go with faster, cheaper, better. The idea was, instead of a single $1 billion mission every 5 years with with 90% chance of success, why not 2 $200 million missions every two years, with an 80% chance of success. Everyone loves this idea when it works (Pathfinder), but when a cheap spacecraft fails, the public doesn't care if it cost $10 million or $10 billion, all we know is that NASA is wasting money.
So, the answer is, NASA has hit some bad luck. But the idea of faster, cheaper, better is ultimately a cost-effective one, so if we can solve these software problems (I mean, can't someone independently design a landing simulator?), and NASA can get 80-90%, we'll be getting a lot more science for the dollar. But NASA-haters will always have some missions to point to as a "waste" of money, and try to cut funding as it's mismanaged; other space junkies will insst that anything under 100% is unacceptble, and costs should double to move from 80% to 100%. I don't which attitude is more damaging.
NASA has a "good" track record since Observer, unfortunately, the highest profile missions have generally failed. If MER-1, and MER-2 are both succesful, and SIRTF flies this summer, then everyone should get off of NASA unmanned program's back for a while.
Wait till they try to land on Jupiter.
They keep shooting our probes down. We should really look at is as a success that we got the ones there that we did.
I mean notice, they never land near the face or the pyramids!
(apologies to the author Robert Doherty for stealing the idea from his Area 51 series)
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Marvin The Martian's Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator...
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
Seriously. Space is tough, as the US has experienced with both Challenger and Columbia, and those should only reach orbit. Going even further away in space is tougher. So much can go wrong, and so little can be done to correct it. Certainly a few blunders like the feet-to-meter bug is huge, but they try. I'm not so sure any private corporation that had been asked to do the same would fare any better. They are pushing limits, where you fail and (hopefully) learn from your mistakes.
Which is why we should continue to try. Giving up, saying "space travel is just too costly and risky" is a big cop-out. If we could send people to a different stellar object (the moon) in 1969 with the equivalent of a pocket calculator but not now, what does that say of our technology? Or sociology? Sure you could take the narrow-minded approach and say "and what does that bring us? The ability to jump from rock to rock in our solar system?" If so, you might as well ask why people decided to go to the poles (just ice) or whatever. You're still missing the point.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In my years at NASA Goddard I saw a dysfunctional management operate in ignorance of reality.
There was much praise of the employee who "went the extra mile", "put in long hours" and "served the customer" (that applied to contractor employees). There was also very little thought paid to the consequences of those practices.
What's the first thing to go when you're tired? It's not your body -- it's your mind. That's right -- if you're staying at work until you're feeling tired, you're making mistakes that need to be corrected later. The tireder you are, the more mistakes. The tireder you are, the less you can actually do.
I witnessed people who wore their exhaustion as a badge of honor. And, when they got into management, insist that others emulate their bad example. The result that I saw was people who should have been kept out of management becoming increasingly dominant. This was accentuated by the "faster, better, cheaper" ideology promulgated by former NASA administrator Goldin. This ideology was used to get rid of more experienced (and thus costly) people who were aware of the consequences of trying to squeeze more work out of fewer people.
It could take a long time for NASA to recover from this culture. The failure of projects in the past few years, the crash of Columbia could be turning points -- or they could be used by incompetents to justify even more dysfunctional behavior.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
Perhaps one of the reasons that the software isn't getting done on time is that much of the system is written from the ground up. Perhaps it would be better to design a common, open source spacecraft platform. So many of the basic tasks that spacecraft software must perform are essentially identical. The main differences for critical spacecraft systems would be the hardware. If a general purpose OS and spacecraft toolkit were designed, then the main things that would have to written from scratch for different missions would be drivers for the hardware and various configuration settings.
I'm not sure how suitable RT Linux would be from a technical/performance standpoint, but having a highly portable open source OS would give a flexibility and availablility that would make adoption much easier.
Yeah, Amnesty International's been ridin' those damn Martians for years about their climate. It's oppressive!
Anybody who has a clue in mathematics know that the above mentioned disciplines usually work with a style of mathematics which was state of art 80 years ago. Physicists refuse to write anything down in non-tensorial, coordinate free form, engineers usually don't even know what a manifold or a singularity is (wondering why they can't solve that damn non-linear equation) and CS guys normally work with highschool calculus/prob. theory with a little Fourier transforms from the engineers mixed in (though they won't ever touch the Laplace transform, dunno why; that's really weird).
I must admit that some HEP guys have a clue of mathematics (hey, sometimes they even use the DeRham-cohomology, that's senior year stuff !), but most others won't.
Well, and there their problem starts. The n-body problem is known to be chaotic with n>2. These problem can be handles but not the naive, ancient ways. You would have to use some non-linear control, Finser space stuff, nonlinear dynamical systems theory maybe even some resolution of singularities. You might want to throw even some stochastic control, but that's not critical.
The tools are backed by the works of Anosov, Arnol'd, Lobachevski, Thom, Isidori, Cheng, Smale, Picard and Zariski.
However, you must know and understand them to use them. And at this point CS freaks, engineers and physicists usually fail. They claim that "there was this crack" or "we confused metrics" but at the very core of the problem they didn't understood the problem and the tools to solve it.
And NASA the engineers early-retirement bandwagon fails to hire any mathematicians but only engineers, CS guys and physicists instead. Well, we all physicists, CS guys and engineers here, why should we let any mathematicians take over ?
And BOOM there goes another 163 million space probe.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Theoretically, all programs have latent bugs, unless they are too simple to do much.
I've seen the code for some MAJOR blue chip companies and I really do wonder how these people stay in business with the rubbish that they put out. For example some of code drops from our clients don't even compile! The reason for all the crap is that it's very easy to cut corners without it being very obvious immediately. Typically, the first thing that gets stopped when things ar getting tight (either time or money) is documentation, quickly followed by testing. Next it's individual features, removed from the requirements 1 by 1.
Since software engineering is still a 'black art' as far as most traditional engineers and project managers are concerned, there isn't the real intuition/understanding of when things are starting to look bad. Without looking at code AND knowing something about it, you won't stand a chance 'intuiting' whether or not things are going well.
Writing software is an expensive business in both time and money. It's also a very young business without the same 'discipline of implementation' as other areas. Until the process matures and people realise that doing it on the cheap gives you cheap software, things aren't going to change and Mars probes are going to continue to produce craters.
Yes, programmers have erred. To err is human, to allow errors to propagate into mission failures is a failure of systems engineering, and I think that is where the real blame lies. A lot of the problem is thatspacecraft systems engineers often have a very amateurish grasp of software, if any at all.
For example, on Mars Climate orbiter, a junior programmer failed to properly understand the requirements. However, systems failed to:
Helium balloons want to be free.
Anyone who's been listening to Coast to Coast AM (first hosted by Art Bell, now hosted by George Noory) may have heard of Richard C. Hoagland, a fairly frequent guest of that show.
Hoagland thinks many of the Mars missions--including the failed European/Russian Mars 96 mission--were deliberately sabotaged by various space agency officials that want to prevent people from finding out that Mars used to not only have life, but intelligent life on that planet. You should read Hoagland's book The Monument of Mars--it's a conspiracy theorist's wet dream come true, to say the least (rolling eyes skyward--pun really intended).
Space Exploration isn't easy.
Look at the Space Shuttle. The space shuttle has never had a catastrophic computer failure-- but every line of code on that truck has survived review by a group of programmers. They've examined it, line by line, multiple times, in order to ensure that it's exactly right, because the cost of failure is 7 astronauts and a multimillion dollar orbiter.
The new Mars programs, however, are part of the streamlined "do it on the cheap" NASA. NASA put the Mars Rover down using mostly off-the-shelf and open-source software and a small amount of home-brew stuff. No matter how good open source software gets, it still hasn't undergone the level of review that the Space Shuttle code has seen. No matter how popular an off-the-shelf package is, it's not cost-effective for the manufacturer to give it that sort of treatment. NASA can't afford to do that level of code review because that costs them the ability to do some other program.
NASA is simply trying to do more with less in the unmanned launches, and the cost of that is we need to expect some failures. These failures are unfortunately very visible...
-JDF
Well, there's no such thing as luck. So it's not that.
Then after 3 months you are then shot into a planet and stopped by a parachute and then some air bags. The entire time literally thrown into the surface.
And all this with the safety and security, of the lowest bidder.
I dunno, you tell ME why these missions have a high failure rate. Could it be there is no humans on board therefore not as much care is taken to insure the safe delievery of these machines? Could it be the fact that they are designed not to go to mars, but to go to mars as cheaply as possible. Could it be that no one really has a whole lot of information so a lot about mars is (pun intended) hit or miss?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Part of it was the fact they had absolute geniouses working on the problem. Think of it, they designed a system in the late 1970's, tested it on the ground, and had it successfully fly for 20 years without a major "oopsie". Or rather, if a major "Oopsie" happened, they had ways around, over, or through it. They spent YEARS developing the flight software for the Shuttle.
Software CAN be done right. It just has to be a priority.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The solution would appear to be including industrial design and process concepts in the education of software engineers.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Okay, that metric conversion thing could have been easily avoided if they'd just use MKS units throughout. That was boneheaded. But all those other failed missions...
Listen, this stuff is hard. A design feedback loop measured in months can be a killer. Simulators aren't enough for a problem this complex. I'm not whining. I'm just pointing it out.
Disclosure: I don't work for NASA, but I do hard real time programming for robotic systems. I can imagine what these people are dealing with. I have to extrapolate, but I can imagine it.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe Better a smartass than a dumbass.
It is the Martians. They don't want us poking around their planet.
This little story might amuse you...
:)
/. - he was noseying through a book about nuclear missile guidance systems the other day :)
:^P ;)
/. readers who do not know this:
One of my friends is (more or less) a rocket-scientist (or likes to think he is
He is currently doing a study on what it would take to launch a bunch of Kiwi's into space/orbit
(don't ask) using existing, off the shelf technology. It's part of his physics degree.
(IF he finishes his study I might see if we can get it linked on
Anyway, asked him about a mission to Mars the other day...he reckons the trip back and forth would take about 500 days in total (I hope I remembered that right) which would give the crew a window of about 10 (!) days to explore the planet.
I was then officially made a member of his potential mission to Mars.
Hence I, Marcel, will be the first man on Mars
(Obviously my ego doesn't fit on Earth anymore, as such we are relocating it to Mars - move over losers!
Anyway, then more details of this mission to Mars were explained to me...and this is were things went wrong.
My friend has come to the conclusion that a six-way group marriage is the most stable group of people possible. Hence, if you want to join his mission to Mars...you have to bring along a female and marry 4 others.
(In fact, bring two...or three for that matter)
3 men and 3 women in a tiny space capsule, going where no man or woman has boldly gone before. Catchy.
I'm all for it of course, I don't mind sharing 3 women on a 1 year trip back and forth too Mars...
My fiance...took a different view of that proposal...sufficient to say that she's not allowed anywhere near rocket-scientists anymore...
For those of you
"Never underestimate the power of she."
Mankind found themselves trapped on a small, smelly, dying planet. Reaching the moon seemed easy, but this nascent race of spacefarers soon found that gravity was much easier to beat than complexity. For every step forwards, they took twenty steps sideways and five steps back. It took generations and a genius to understand that they were trapping themselves in their own technology. The solution, finally, was simple. They created a simple, robust artificial organism and launched it into space. Instead of trying to overcome the challenges of interplanetary and interstellar travel by intellectual brute force, they would let evolution and selection do the the work for them.
Time went by... and the organisms dispersed and flourished. Eating methane space crumbs, basking in solar radiation, they spread to the farthest, darkest corners of the solar system, and - hitching a ride on the occasional comet - beyond.
An Eon passed, and mankind forgot all about their space seedlings. But deep in the liquid depths of one of the giants of their solar system, something stirred...
Next episode coming soon...
OK, my point is: let's concentrate on trying to get clean water to everyone on earth before throwing such huge amounts away on space games. Simple things make life better for all, and humanity's basic resource is not knowledge, science, or exploration, but humans.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
/.ed
God I hated that broken down piece of underpowered crap! But to be fair, the rust holes weren't design problems!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I have to really disagree with this. NASA is used to dealing with alien climates and terrain and astronomical distances. NASA is also used to dealing with problems. They have some of the best problem solvers out there, and when something goes wrong, then tend to pinpoint why. When NASA says A, B, and C are the causes of failure, I believe them. When NASA cannot figure out why something went wrong, I worry.
What I'm trying to say is, distance and inhuman conditions shouldn't have that much of an affect on how well a probe works. We built Voyagers I and II, didn't we? They worked even better than expected. And they encountered climates and conditions which make Mars look easy.
NASA has dealt with so many varying circumstances and climates over the years, and been so blunt about their mistakes, I find it hard to believe that they would blame the failures of an entire class of missions on something "easy." And yes, blaiming failures on software is an easy way out, how many times have you heard someone say "Oh! It must be the software!" when something doesn't go as expected?
Now, I know this guy doesn't speak for NASA as a whole, but as a NASA trained administrator, and the head of some very large projects, I'm willing to take his opinions at face value. If he says it looks like software has really been a cause of failure, who am I to laugh at his expertise and belittle his explanations? I might not like his explanation, but I buy it.
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
~Idarubicin
Most PHB's haven't figured it out yet: SOFTWARE IS HARD. It's amazingly complicated. It's also notoriously hard to come up with realistic estimates.
PHB's also haven't figured out that developers aren't interchangeable widgets. If you know C, it doesn't mean you'll be immediately productive in Korn shell scripting, and vice-versa.
PHB's also haven't figured out that experience is key. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, a young hotshot isn't going to be as productive as an experienced professional. Sure, the young hotshot might get v1.0 done first, but it'll be buggy, unreliable, unscalable, hard to maintain, etc.
The "problem with software" is almost entirely a management issue, imho.
-Teckla
Maybe if Nasa and others involved decided to follow something closer to the free software development model we could have lots of people contributing to the software.
That would mean that bugs, like the metric system one, would be quickly found out and fixed. And of course all the different mars projects could share knoledge and experience.
I have no idea how complex these systems are, and if this would be feasible at all, but i think that there are a lot of competent people out there that could contribute with Nasa, if only it would let them.
just my 2 cents
We haven't seen software failures taking out manned missions, two shuttles failed from the high stresses of takeoff and re-entry. Just a guess, but the engineering standards are probably much higher for the manned programs, and more people review the code. Also, keep in mind that NASA has been experimenting with the idea of saving money with faster paced development which means some reduction in review and other QA standards, particularly on unmanned planetary missions. It may even be that this method is cost effective in spite of some high profile failures.
...but it's not brain surgery.
*rimshot*
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
But it's gotten much prettier!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
According to this page only 3 of 26 missions to Venus have been total failures. When you consider that Venus is a much more hostile environment than Mars then you have to conclude that either Mars is just plain unlucky or mission planners are getting something wrong.
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
Apollo 11 damn near crashed into a crater full of jagged boulders.
No time to develop quickly spaceÂs programs in less than 100 hours, hehehehehe.
So, the European (satellite) and Rusian (launcher) agencies could be the firsts to answer to question: is there water inside Mars?
ItÂs not 'stars war', hehehehe. ItÂs 'Mars war', hohoho.
euro is the best: $ is weak, 1000$ = 847 eurs.
They could improve the chance of sucess by using pre-written well established software. I recommend "Mars lander" availiable on the acorn electron introductory cassette
those mathematicians are arrogant and elitest and fail the basic forms of social communication?
Your post came across as snobish, and if most mathematicians were to behave as you did (which I doubt), then it would not be surprising if they aliented themselves from the others in a team that needs to communicate very well in order to function.
I presume it has largely to do with financing. To make systems that must be reliable over long periods of time and huge distances, one would need to do a large amount of testing, something for which there is little budget today.
True, Mars is far away and hostile (but nowhere nearly as hostile as say Venus) and landers are automatically open to more risks than orbiters, but the simple lack of funding for good testing is probably what makes so many missions fail.
The other end of NASA, for the manned spaceflight program, does not seem to have problems getting correct software, according to the article >
I have 'Trolling in A Nutshell' from O'Reilly. Invaluable reference and it's published under the FDL!
I think the primary problem is that the technology to build and design probes changes too quickly, and affects design.
I always thought that there should be a way, to build a probes navigation and propulsion systems in a standardized whay so that avionics software wouldn't need to change that much.
Sort of a standardized platform if you will for doing solar system exploration.
This platform would consist of a number of parts that would not change, and could be reusable in a number of different configurations for building a probe, depending on what its job was.
Cameras, photometers, spectrometers, and power sources could all be packaged in the same why depending on the probes job.
Every probe that nasa launches is always customized and built around cost and included packages.
I am not so sure that is the best way to go about it as you have to reinvent all the software to manage the probe every time you build one.
Probes should be cheap, produced in high volume, (thousands) and interchangeable.
With a standardized approach, failure rates should come down a bit and costs should be reduced.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You know, the problem is that all these liberal geeks smoked so much pot and can't handle a hard day's work. They all talk about the time-savings their software made for their department right up until a satellite crashes into a planet and then they blame it on the weather. When I was just starting work, we actually had to make our own lunch, walk to work, and even walk to the mailbox to get our mail. Any programming without punch cards and serial printers is too lazy to be reliable. All this point-and-click programming is what we have to blame. Don't blame Microsoft. Blame the guys that made keyboards and disk drives.
1) You can have it on time,
2) You can have it under budget,
3) You can have it be of high quality.
Pick any two.
NASA apparently have been going for 1) and 2) lately.
Unlike the ESA mission which achieved an earth orbit before heading for Mars, the NASA mission will launch directly at mars. This means that the speed, and the exact timing of the launch to coincide with the position of the earth (so that it IS pointing at Mars when they press go) has to be down to an incrediable accuracy.
be amased, be very amased, because we CAN do some cool stuff.
Java moves the bugs from the application level to the JVM level - freeing the programmer to make slower code.
So then they spent what, twice as much? three times as much? As a QC regime would have cost to actually design, build, and install compensation electronics on the Hubble to correct for the aberrations in the mirror.
Probably is, then as a result budgets STILL get cut. There's no money to do things "right".
NASA writes better software than perhaps anyone else on the planet. It's what runs the shuttle. Go read about how REAL software projects are undertaken.
The problem with most Mars programs is that the code seems to be developed like code everywhere else. Budgets overruns, working late to meet deadlines, and generally living the 'coder life.' This is NOT now critical software needs to be developed, and in fact isn't how most software should be developed.
To those proposing the 'more eyes open source' model, consider this: There's nothing in that model that GUARANTEES formal and complete code review. Something more rigorous is needed for projects like this.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Granted, the Freak can't lights a fire at night or on a cloudy day, buy on average they both tend to take about as long to get the flames going.
In EE we have the theory of control. I admit, I curl into a fetal position when I recall Laplace. But we did learn it. In fact, many of my peers (the much more successful ones) actually found it useful. While I'm there trying to solve a problem with my primative stone tools, they figure out how to model the problem in some higher order. I remember on guy who designed one of our machines at K&S managed to use some high order math to accurately (I'm talking fractions of a millimeter) position a robotic wire bonder with a voice coil and a few encoders!
One of these days I'm going to go back to school and actually learn how to do this stuff right.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Heh, I was a part of a space failure myself. We were using pretty much off-the-shelf equipment, but it passed NASA spec shake and thermal testing. What probably did it in was radiation...in low earth orbit we figured there wouldn't be much risk of radiation problems.
If we were to do it again, we probably would have had some kind of radiation-resistant reset system, because building the whole thing in rad-hard would be very expensive (our budget was $1500 plus donated equipment!) But having a few rad-hard devices to reset the box in case of a crash would probably have been affordable.
About 100 amateur radio operators contacted our payload, and relayed their GPS coordinates to others using amateur packet radio. At the same time, the GPS unit on board the Spartan satellite transmitted its position to listeners on the ground as well. But had it not crashed after about 17 hours, it is possible that several hundred other amateur radio operators would have used it.
Venus, like the woman she is, is a real bitch and a half.
Thick sulfuric acid atmosphere?
Gigantic storms?
Temperatures that will melt aluminium?
Ahh, I need to stop. I'm getting flashbacks of my ex-gf.
Guess you forgot about the famous JPL english/metric conversion? There have been fuck-ups in the space agencies from all angles. If you want to expand your scope, programmers didn't fuck up Challenger or Columbia (btw, I hope this is an end to space vehicles beginning with "C"). Which apollo mission burned up on the ground? Wasn't software. If we want to consider Hubble, its lens was fubar'ed because someone *didn't* trust the computer.
So yeah, the programmers have screwed up, but I'd say anyone involved with multimillion (billion?) dollar equipment is paid not to fuck up, and that certainly extends to the engineers. Not to mention a lot of software errors come from poor specifications...
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The Mars rover that was so successfull used an 8080 Processor -- the same one used in the Tandy Model 100 laptop computer.
Having done low level programming on it, I understand that simplicity = reliability. It comes down to more the design requirements and verification to ensure that everything works together.
Michael
and the Viking landed. Dad points out that the budget for the Viking was in the neighborhood of 1 billion dollars, and that was when a Mustang Mach 1 cost just over 4 grand. The space program doesn't have the money now to do the missions the right way, which is unfortunate... the developments of NASA when they had tons of money were numerous and wonderful (i.e. Tang!)
stuff |
Of course Mars is hard, it is in space and anytime you put a candy bar in space, it shall become hard. Now drop that bad boy in some hot oil and you have a confectionary treat...now...what is the chance of taking fry daddies with the probes to warm Mars up a bit? Rambling is good!
Before we continue to crucify programmers, we need to remember how hard it is to really get to Mars, from a purely spacefaring perspective.
From my experiences flying to Mars in Orbiter space flight simulator (FREE!), several problems become apparent:
Mars is a fantastically difficult target to reach for two main reasons. It has very little gravity, and very little atmosphere.
If you shoot for something big, like Jupiter, you find that it is hard not to miss it. It's gravity well is so massive that navigational errors en route are relatively insignificant. Mars doesn't help you very much in this regard. An Earth to Mars flight has to be dead on.
When you get there, you are likely going to want to use the atmosphere to do at least part of the braking maneuver to get into Mars orbit (as most modern probes do). The problem is that Mars has a very thin atmosphere. Think about the sheet of paper analogies with Earth re-entry. Earth's atmosphere goes MUCH farther into space than does Mars'. You have to get dangerously close to the surface (within 50 miles) to effectively aerobrake using Mars' atmosphere. So with Mars, you are more talking about a near-ephemeral gossamer thin 1 cell thick membrane you have to hit the edge of rather than a nice, thick piece of paper.
This happens to me all the time now.
I'm not a karma junkie by any stretch, but when I get a "redundant" score simply because I was one of the first to post something that 100 others did later isn't MY fault.
Look at the times posted, is it that hard?
*sheesh*
There was only ONE other post on the board when I started typing that.
I swear the moderator quality is falling FAST...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Has anyone consulted the martians, to get their angle on this problem. Perhaps someone should find the web address for RedPeace and see what they have to say.
... and the Mars vehicles. The Shuttle carries people. You can afford to cut corners a little if no one's going to get killed.
Sean
We like to prey on these simple glitches only because it is poetic to do so. Saying the MPL failed because a programmer failed to initialize a variable sounds much more interesting and is much easier for a reporter to remember than saying MPL failed because a programmer failed to initialize a variable, which determined how close to the planet the retro-rockets would turn off, and that this was observed in the testing laboratory, but the test data was not annalyzed until after the crash.
0xfeedface
Take their early record, before Mars 1 got to Mars, they had had a series of attempts. Two, known to the West as Mars1960 A and B reached Earth orbit then disintegrated.
Mars1962 A exploded in orbit at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis - briefly causing a panic with the Americans thinking a missile attack was underway. Fortunately the computers soon told them that doomsday had been averted.
Next, was a partial success - Mars 1. Which smashed the record for deep-space communications with Earth across a distance of 106 million kilometres. Unfortunately it failed just before reaching Mars.
Mars1962 B exploded in Earth orbit and didn't appear in the Soviet record.
November 1964 saw the launch of Zond 2, a highly advanced probe using ion thrusters to perform stabilisation and orientation tasks. It may have also been the first probe to carry a lander. It died a long and lingering death before sweeping past Mars at only 1400 km altitude. (By this time the US had got their first Mars probe to the planet in working order, Mariner 4 took 22 pictures of the planet from 10 000 km. (Its sister ship, Mariner 3 had failed en-route)).
Neither side went to Mars in the next launch window, but 1969 was a busy year. Three attempts for the Soviet Union, including at least one lander. Mars 1969A exploded in flight as did Mars 1969B. Mars 1969C was removed from the pad after cracks developed in the relatively new Proton rocket design. (Cracking in the Proton was also a major reason for the failure of the Soviet Union to send a manned mission around the Moon during 1969). The US had a twin success with Mariners 5 and 6 flying past Mars.
On to 1971 and a pair of launches for the US, Mariner 8 ended up in the Atlantic, Mariner 9 went on to become one of the most successful missions ever and the first probe to orbit Mars. For the Soviets - mixed results again. Their first mission reached Earth orbit, but went no further and was named Kosmos 419. But then both Mars 2 and 3 left Earth orbit. They each comprised of a lander and an orbiter. The two craft jettisoned the lander before entering Martian orbit - just as the planet entered an intense dust storm with raging winds and almost total blackout.
Mars 2's lander was apparently DOA, it remained silent and does not appear to have returned any data. It was however the first craft to hit (not land on) Mars. Mars 3's lander was more successful. It entered the atmosphere, deployed parachutes and landed on rockets. It deployed its antenna and began to transmit the first picture from the Martian surface. Sadly, just 20 seconds later the transmission stopped. The Soviets said that the lander's parachutes had been caught by the storm and pulled it over.
Mars 2 and Mars 3 orbiters remained on-line and performed experiments on the Martian atmosphere and took photos of the surface. So I would call both missions a partial success and Mars 3 almost a triumph.
The next window was 1973 and the Soviets planned no less than 4 missions to Mars. Mars 4 and Mars 5 would be orbital missions, studying the planet much like Mariner 9, but also serving as telecoms relays for the Mars 6 and Mars 7 heavy landers.
Incredibly, bearing in mind the past track record of the Soviets, all four missions reached Mars in working order. Then everything went wrong. Mars 4's main engine failed and the probe did not enter orbit, it relayed images of the planet as it swept past into solar orbit. Mars 5 was next and was the only unqualified success of the year; it was the first craft to return colour images of Mars.
The two landers then arrived, Mars 7 first, it deployed the lander, but an attitude problem meant that the lander actually missed the planet entirely! Mars 6 was more lucky, the probe entered the Martian atmosphere, took readings all the way down and went dead ab
But in the article:
That was just too perfect.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Just look at the rate of failure for early moon missions
It's a hard probelm to send a probe to the Moon or Mars. landing and aerocapture at Mars are dicy things.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
by neophites and dabblers.
I would never buy a toilet designed and built by a software firm. I couldn't trust that the idiots programmed water to CONSISTENTLY run down-hill.
Come to think of it, I don't trust software firms to hold to any set of laws; physical, moral or legal. We have had plenty of expensive lessons that they DON'T.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ditto. DITTO DITTO DITTO.
customers who act like brats.
Management IGNORES metrics on previous performance.
Incomplete specifications and requirements.
Coding begins before any design work is done.
High level design is so high level as to be useless.
Code inspections where inspectors have no idea what the code does, how it fits into the system, or how it works, so they just look for typos in comments and check that {} match.
Process is ignored by the grunts and there is no one auditing until waaaay after the fact (like, after the coder has LEFT the company).
Everyone says they want to have the best business process, and everyone knows that finding bugs in the field costs ten times as much as finding them at code inspections,
however I don't think modern management practice supports true software engineering principles. They simply make a half-assed attempt and are trying to push a few more features out a few weeks ahead of schedule.
P.S.- you can argue with me till you are blue in the face, but the amount of anecdotal evidence and publicly reported fabulous disasters of systems begs to differ.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
From page 2 of the article:
âoeFaliures are simply due to human error, which is avoidable,â said Spear.
Say WHAT? If humans are involved, somewhere, somehow, something is gonna get busted. I want some of what this guy is smokin'.
Dogu
Here's the problem as I see it: As software and hardware have become more complicated, there's a need to increase testing. Instead, in order to meet NASA's new budgetary requirements, funding in general, and specifically for testing, has gone down. So, it's not possible to completely test all of the hardware AND software, as it should be.
As an analogy: If we were talking about commercial airliners; these probes would never be certified to fly.
I'm not putting all the blame on NASA here; although, it is apparent to me that they need to start reporting what it's actually going to cost. Having said that, Congress is equally complicit; they need to come to the realization that it's expensive to do work outside the atmosphere (they apparently don't understand this...)
Software can be done right. Anyone who doesn't believe this either (a) does not know how many millions of lines of software are involved in avionics and air traffic control, (b) never flies on an airplane, or (c) has a death wish. Of course I guess there's also a fourth possibility - when all else fails, blame the software. The space shuttle's record proves that software can be dependable, but also illustrates that making it that way is very, very expensive. Just a matter of priorities.
I think one of the factors contributing to the poor Mars success rate is orbital mechanics. The launch window to Mars opens for only a month or so every two years. This is the longest interval between window openings for launches from Earth to any other planet; windows to the other planets open at roughly yearly intervals or less. Since missing the launch window means waiting another two years, this undoubtedly creates enormous schedule pressures on any team preparing a spacecraft for launch to Mars.
As I see it, the problem is this:
1. Distance from Earth to Mars is about 35,000,000 miles at the closest and the mean distance is something like 48,000,000 miles.
2. The velocity of light is constant at 186,000 miles/second.
3. This means it takes 6.5 to 9 minutes or so, round trip for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and get feedback in either direction.
4. If the spacecraft encounters difficulties that would require it to report, receive instructions, report back, receive additional instructions, if necessary, then we are talking about a 13 - 18 minute process, just for minor correctons.
5. This is akin to remotely driving an unmanned car with messages transmitted by carrier pidgeon.
6. So, for all practical purposes, the landing craft must be autonomous, which means that the software must be reliable, fast, and comprehensive.
I don't know about you folks, but I haven't seen any software that I would trust to drive my car from my house to the office unmanned (about 7 blocks), much less take millions of dollars worth of hardware millions of miles from home and expect it to get there safely.
In my opinion, manned missions make more sense because they have a significantly greater chance of success even though the cost is also significantly higher.
Programmers on NASA projects aren't usually asked how much time it will take to do a good job. They are told by management what the schedule allows. If you tell management how long it will actually require to do a competent job that you feel good about, they just laugh at you.
To make matters worse, management intentionally low-balls estimates in order to get funding for projects, with full knowledge that their estimates are unrealistic. I was once told that the rationale is simply that "If we don't lie about it, we won't get funded." Personally, I'd rather NOT get funding unless it's adequate to do the job properly - even if it means layoffs.
In the early days quality was the primary concern. These days cost (and schedule, which is related to cost) are the primary concerns, so naturally you're going to have a much greater failure rate.
I don't normally post anonymously, but in this case I believe I will.
I hate the compiler NASA's CLIPS because a lot of reasons.
open4free
Storm Again Delays Mars Rocket
Storms mysteriously show up on the day of the launch and ruin everything?! Must be a software bug in Mother Nature application.
Our manager(s) are always talking about the next release needing to be "NASA Safe". I've always wondered what that means exactly.
There is a big difference between 'fail safe' and 'fail proof' design. The biggest difference is that 'fail safe' exists, 'fail proof' doesnt. One problem with being in space is that when 'fail safe' systems fail safely, you can still be SOL.
TallGreen CMS hosting
The player wins if destroy completely the alienÂs spaceship.
open4free
Unfortunately, that page is incomplete and misleading, as it only mentions the probes that actually got near Venus. For example, the page lists Mariner 2, but not Mariner 1. Mariner 1 went off course due to a sofware error resulting from a missing hyphen. Venera 1, though in the list, suffered a communications failure and was a complete failure. Also failing was Sputnik 7, whose 4th stage didn't ignite. Sputnik 23 and 24 never made it from Earth orbit. Sputnik 25's 3rd stage blew up the entire craft. Cosmos 21 failed to leave Earth orbit. Venera 1964A and Venera 1964B failed to achieve Earth orbit. Venera 1964C did, but couldn't leave orbit (renamed Cosmos 27. Soviets apparently named things in Earth orbit as 'Cosmos', even if they were failed missions to somewhere else). Zond 1 is on the list as being succesful, but contact was lost with it 2 months before it got to Venus. Also failing: Cosmos 96, Venera 1965A, Cosmos 167, Cosmos 359, Cosmos 482. Obviously there have been far more failed missions to Venus than your list implies.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Well, actually there were many problems with the voyager spacecraft. Its is incredible that they worked at all. Cameras got stuck, memory failed, things like that. The engineers just knew their equipment so well that they were able to find ways to work around the problems. New algorithms were "discovered" since the launch, so they were able to do things like add compression and error correcting codes for more reliable communications with the spacecraft. They were also extremely clever about solving unforseen problems. When the cameras were stuck they swiveled the whole craft to get long exposure times. It is unlikely that the current probes are understood anywhere close to as well as the Voyages spacecraft were.
-tim
There was much praise of the employee who "went the extra mile", "put in long hours" and "served the customer" (that applied to contractor employees). There was also very little thought paid to the consequences of those practices [mental fatique].
I am not sure they have many alternatives. There is not exactly a "NASA Temps" company to just come in and assist. It probably would take months at least to interact with them to get them up to speed.
"Problems with your probe? Just dial 1-800-SKY-TEMP!"
Table-ized A.I.
Software ain't rocket science, and that's the problem. The software system is orders of magnitude more complex than the rocket that they control.
Ever since they went OOP, Mars probes have been munching mars dust.
(1) Schedule realistically, so that tasks can be completed without overtime. This may mean some things just cannot be done in the desired time period. Learn to accept that.
(2) Hire and retain sufficient staff, so that the work can be shared between multiple people. This may mean that some of the time the company will be overstaffed. Accept that too.
Obviously both these suggestions come with a pricetag, but lost missions aren't free either...
And that whole "g not being a constant" thing! How on Earth ( ;-) ) could they not think of that?!!
The Bush Clan and Dicky, Donnie, Johnnie and Connie would have sent the Marines to '...Liberate the People of Mars from the brutal and tyrannical Martian Dictatorship'.
Damn, 4, I probably have less degrees of seperation to terrorists than the Moon landings. (Or maybe not.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It's telling that nobody mentions the tools we use. We talk to the computer using a programming language. I really can't understand why we would use a programming language that let us pass feet to something that expects metres. If you press compile, it should just refuse to compile it!
How many years do we already know about static typing and abstract data types? Design By Contract, anyone? But alas, we're programmer gods and need no stinking protection from our computer languages, compilers and tools.
If I had a sig, I would put it here.
are a group of Indian Programmers.
Later lunar rover missions were under orders to never pick up hickhikers. (Do you think that the "burn-out" of Apollo 12's cameras was an .. accident?
I see a problem here. Do not overclock your spaceprobe without proper cooling!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
But NASA is nearly dead anyway, and their irrational bias in hiring quotas is most of the problem.
:
:
:
There reason the MAJORITY of recent mars missions failed is gender and race bias in hiring and promotion against whites adn asians.
Vital FACT! Nasa switched to forced female hiring in most of the recent Mars failures.
For the first time ever ONLY WOMEN called the shots on the mars missions that failed. read
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/ 04 1899nasa-women.html
for the first time ever all three KEY positions were female
Sarah A. Gavit = the mars project manager
Suzanne E. Smrekar, 37, the lead mars scientist
Kari A. Lewis= the mars project's chief engineer
Current hiring rules from the new top level NASA female administration dictate this new female forced hiring policy.
NASA has hiring policies that try to hire women DESPITE IQ or experience. In fact they now PREVENT job related award honors and bonuses based on how many females you hire and how many females and black contractors you hire!!! This is a fact!
NASA publicly has stated this from the woman in charge. I can't tell you about my own memos.
NASA is proud to boast 2% female active engineers minimum and that is WAY out of wack with societies norms.
The mars missions are even more than 2% female.
The average IQ of a Caucasian US Male holding a medical degree is IQ 124, but as the front page of the San Jose Mercury proclaimed in huge block letter headlines, and millions of IQ scores show (see the Bell Curve book data), the chance of a FEMALE obtaining a test score of 124 is EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male. EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY. Conversely very low IQ people are almost always males. The average IQ is the same for both genders 100, but the IQ distribution bell curves are dramatically different shapes.
NASA boasts a female-minority web site documenting how not only are contractors hired by whether or not they are female or black but what state their small companies reside in! NASA apparently requires all 50 states to have minority participation in parts design and supply for the mars missions! REGARDLESS of competence! Sex and race are the prime criteria for 1999. Check out NASA own detailed list of female and minority small contractors at : http://sbir.nasa.gov. SBIR is a euphemistic acronym for small business innovation research, but as you can easily see it is actually a gender and race quota based system spearheaded by the new women helping to run NASA now.
from the female mars leader
"Women have really added to the workplace because we do come at things from a different angle," she said.
"For the same reason that cultural diversity works, gender diversity is wonderful, too, especially when you're trying to do something creative."
Also from the female mars leader Gavit:
"The fact that we're women hasn't made a difference," she said. "It's not an issue here. But it's good that young girls see that engineering and technical fields are wide open to women. That's the good thing about saying it's a woman-led team."
The report in The Guardian (British) December 7th included the following comment: "The total launch and development costs of NASA's lost Mars spacecraft is put at $320 million.
Forced hiring of women disregarding IQ score or talent created this staggering $320 million loss and many more female related losses are already in the works.
Kennedy Space Center rents out IMAX II theaters for a wizbang "Take Our Daughters To Work Day" the recent theme was about how the shuttle is now COMMANDED by a female and this years motto was "The Future is Me".
Even study grants awarded from NASA are targeted to females now at expense of males : refer to Federal Register: September 16, 1999 (Volume 64, Number 179)] NASA Grants and Cooperative Agreements; Proposed Rule.
And if you g
No matter what, everything seems to get hectic just before the deadlines. I know it defies logic, but it just turns out that way no matter how much planning is done.
Table-ized A.I.
OK, my point is: let's concentrate on trying to get clean water to everyone on earth before throwing such huge amounts away on space games. Simple things make life better for all, and humanity's basic resource is not knowledge, science, or exploration, but humans.
You deserve the "troll" tag, but your delusion is sufficiently common that I'm going to reply anyway.
We're running out of oil.
We have a huge and growing Third World population who want living standards comparable to the USA.
The problems you cite can be solved by throwing enough energy at them.
Alternative energy sources limited to the Earth as a closed system can not sustain our lifestyles [the wasteful side is granted. Which one of your computers are you giving up for the sake of humanity?], let alone make a significant impact on improving Third World living standards.
The energy required to solve these problems is available by the terawatt from the sun. The only way to get that kind of power without massive ecological disruption on earth (you *really* want to pave the Sahara with solar cells?) is to build powersats to collect it and beam it to earth. This requires massive investments in alternative launch technology (either the Space Elevator or rail guns big enough to launch payload by the ton into orbit) and the rest of the infrastructure required to make industrial operations not only possible, but cost-effective and convenient in Earth orbit, the moon, and ultimately, the rest of the solar system.
We can do this now, and pay for this with annoying inconveniences (say, world market prices for gasoline in the USA, for instance based on increased taxes) or we can do this later, when the resource allocations to do this will result in a lot of people not getting enough to eat. We will do this, or our children won't be living in a technological society. Remember the good old days when only a small fraction of kids live long enough to be adults? That's what you're asking for.
As for your delusion about humanity's basic resource being humans, I recommend watching the Fox network for 48 hours in a row as a cure.
Tech Public Policy stuff
NASA started to go with faster, cheaper, better.
Yes, well the normal saying is 'pick any two'. NASA tried to pick all three. Guess what happened?
So, the answer is, NASA has hit some bad luck.
We make our own luck in this life.
But NASA-haters will always have some missions to point to as a "waste" of money, and try to cut funding as it's mismanaged; other space junkies will insst that anything under 100% is unacceptble, and costs should double to move from 80% to 100%.
Right, so you are implying that everyone who criticises NASA is a NASA hater. Uh huh.
I don't which attitude is more damaging.
Probably the one that assumes that NASA is golden, everything they touch is high-tech wizardry and they are just unlucky when things go wrong.
These things are clearly not true- on the other hand they are not clearly false either- try to avoid the binary thinking mistake.
NASA has a "good" track record since Observer, unfortunately, the highest profile missions have generally failed.
Yes, well you said it; I didn't. Actually, I don't think NASA is quite that bad; but there's something about a pork-barrel government monopoly on manned space flight, or anything really, that does not sit right in America- especially in America; other countries have the same disease, all governments have the same problems, but not nearly as acute as with NASA.
With NASA it's not what they do, it's the way they do it, and what that does to what they do.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Yeah, I don't understand the insightful bit either.
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
NASAs mars programming problems at AMES can be traced to:
-Use of contractors such as QSS and SAIC instead of a dedicated staff
-Use of low paid interns in functions such as QA
-Extremely high amount of Nepotism and Cronyism within NASA/Contractors
BTW, why was the parent modded into the floor? I would have given it a +1 informative.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
because Russians got Venus.
(lame lame lame me)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Could you provide more info about Remote Agent? Was it written in Lisp? (It seems to have been written in a custom language, but was that language created with Lisp?) Is it being rewritten in C++? If so, do you know why?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
of Russia is all screwed up!..
:D
They blew all their money on Mars!
I did too, before my Mom found out and banned chocolates in the house for ever
Rapid Nirvana
I have written software that is on-board spacecraft at present.
A large part of the failures are to do with Mission Frequency. I did an analysis of all Space Science missions. Historically the original missions had 50% success rate, then the engineers learnt from their mistakes and the rate went up to more like 80%, but as missions got more expensive and money tighter the rate of missions went down, and we returned to the state where everyone actually DOING THE WORK (the guys coding and bending metal and the like) were on their first mission again. The rate is now back to 50%. Of course science missions are - by their nature - unique. That means that software re-use is more difficult, and the environment (SEU etc) and the hard-real time nature also mean that coding and testing require special skills. But part of the problem is that you cannot sustain a team, or a software product on one mission every 10 years (which is what a module like IR astonomy, outer planet imaging or planetary geology gets from any one team). Keeping teams together is impossible, career progression is impossible, and money is tigher each time round. In the end I had to leave the industry - with great sadness. I'd like to contribute to the human race's exploration, but my family have needs as well.
One made XP
the other made LIXUX
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You have laws that allow you to use matric.
Do I have to face due north before I can break wind on a wednesday?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The problem lies in the fact that they're developing complex software systems that can't be effectively tested. You can't take these systems out for a test drive - its gotta work the first time. Most terrestrial systems can be tested in the environment in which they're meant to work.
Now, the space shuttle, for example, falls under the "untestable" catagory, but it has performed extremely well considering the environment in which it works. Why? The space shuttle's development process was EXTREMELY thorough and long. With so many cutbacks in NASA budgets, they just can't afford the same thoroughness afforded the shuttle program.
Reliability costs money.
This is what is happening, and one of the basis of smaller, faster, cheaper. For example (at ESA) the satellite control system for Mars Express was derived heavily from Rosetta and Venus Express will derive from Mars Express... And ESA has developed it's own infrastructure that sits between the OS and the mission-specific software (SCOS-2000).
And the "Polar Platform" (PPF) forms the basis of low earth orbit satellites, eg Envisat.
Tang Teflon Velcro and NASA