NASA Draws On Open Source For Shuttle Bug-Tracking

thefickler writes "NASA has built a new software package to track problems with the Space Shuttle using open source tools from Mozilla. '[Alonso Vera, the lead of the Ames Human-Computer Interaction Group] wouldn't say exactly how much the new systems cost to build, but he said they were an order of magnitude cheaper than what was being used before, closer to $100,000 than the $1 million it would have cost in the past.' The Space Shuttle Endeavor launched successfully on Friday, so the new system is being used to track any problems which may crop up in the current mission. As one commentator pointed out, 'A system like this could save more than money; it could save lives.'"

Comments

Re:Good Company

[invisiblerhino]

A lot of science uses open source tools anyway, so this is only news in that it'll draw the public's attention to it. At CERN, the data analysis package (ATHENA) I worked on had a Python front end, used gnu tools (gcc, gdb), expressly encouraged physicists to use valgrind etc. I've forgotten how bug tracking worked, but I'm pretty sure it was something like Bugzilla. I'm not sure about the status (open source or not) of the full analysis package, but other stuff to come out of CERN (CERNLIB, Geant3) has been. It's all good.

It could have saved a lot of lives, actually

[Avatraxiom]

My company (Everything Solved), made PRACA along with NASA, and in one of the first meetings, a researcher at Ames told me that if a system like PRACA had always existed at NASA, then every major mishap in NASA's history could have been avoided. -Max

Re:Hopefully this is only the beginning.

[cyclone96]

I understand your point, however this particular software is basically a system for tracking vehicle "funnies" on the ground, it's not something that is in the loop of the vehicle flight software or something used to make critical decisions. The old system is pretty dated and unwieldy to use (I've used it, I work for NASA). We're obligated to try out cheaper alternatives to custom code to see if it works for us without compromising what we are trying to do.

Sometimes it does work for us - the Mission Control Center workstations and the onboard command and control laptops on the Space Station were all recently converted to Red Hat. It is in many ways better than the old proprietary unix solutions because with the source it's easy to do our own mods to the software. We still test the daylights out of it since that is critical software, but it's a lot easier to support since we have the source code and can do our own bug in-house bug investigations, patch it, or rip out things we don't want/need.