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SpaceX Launch To International Space Station Delayed For Code Tweaks
RogerRoast writes "The first private spaceship launch to the International Space Station has been delayed, possibly by at least a week, the vehicle's makers announced Monday. The commercial spaceflight company SpaceX was set to launch its Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket April 30 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida." The article quotes SpaceX lead Elon Musk's twittered explanation: "Am pushing launch back approx a week to do more testing on Dragon docking code. New date pending coordination with @NASA."
Better they found it now and missed the deadline than went anyhow and exploded. You do not get too many second chances in space.
Cowards!!! Launch early, launch often. (Or just give the coders the honor of being test pilots. That will make those code monkeys program it real good the first time...)
heh.
Reminds me of that song, "99 instances of bugs in the code..."
99 instances of bugs in the code... .... ....
99 instances of bugs,
code one out, mark it out,
106 instances of bugs in the code...
106 instances of bugs in the code...
106 instances of bugs,
Life support systems require more rigorous testing than simple Monte Carlo. They generally require component testing, bounds case testing, and branch path analysis of the code so that every line of code gets hit during testing.
I've worked on two projects that qualified as life support systems; one was an MRI console for a GE Medical Systems MRI machine (back when it was still being called NMR before it was politically corrected to remove the word "Nuclear"), and the second was a blood gas analyzer. Incorrect operation of the code in either of those cases could have resulted in someone dying as a result of a doctor getting misinformation.
The amount of testing and the rigor of the testing involved in both of those projects was unbelievable. Even then, we were required to carry liability insurance out the wazoo on both projects in case we screwed up the code. There's a reason medical equipment is so expensive.
Space systems that can ram into an occupied space station, and which are intended to some day carry humans to orbit qualify as life support, even if they are being sent up with a load of supplies instead of a human crew. Monte Carlo won't cut it any more than it will for a system call fuzzer trying to find a sequence of three system calls in a row that , if they are called with precisely the right parameters, will trigger a kernel panic.
-- Terry