Part of me REALLY wants to agree with this article. Going out and exploring new frontiers is the American way and I'm about as patriotic as a girl can get. I've also always been fascinated by the idea of space and hope that I can go into space sometime before I die.
But the bigger part of me is the computer scientist who knows how easy it is for bugs to show up and knows how guilty I would feel if a bug introduced by me or my team were to cause a fatal accident. Someone at work the day mentioned how he can't even comprehend what it must feel like to be one of the analysts who had to say "I didn't see it coming" after 9-11-01. I feel the same way about Therac-25. Astronauts and Pilots may know that they're risking their lives, but living with the death of another person on your hands would be difficult.
NASA's had it's fair share of errors (missing hyphens, unhandled exceptions, rounding errors, metric conversions). It's a very visible organization. Fatal errors in the DoD will fly under the radar unless a reporter gets his hands on the story, but even small bugs NASA runs into are immediately visible. And if NASA runs a mission and there's a mission-critical error (camera won't operate, safety issue, etc) it would be far more expensive to waste a mission than to spend extra money getting it right the first time.
Another problem NASA has is testing. There is no test system and production system. They have to deal with mockups and pray that they got it right before something launches. NASA's development model is so vastly different from the real world because they're not working with the same types of systems found elsewhere.
All in all, I feel like my opinion is "yes, they are over-averse to risk, but I can understand why and I won't balk much"
Slashdot Mirror
Part of me REALLY wants to agree with this article. Going out and exploring new frontiers is the American way and I'm about as patriotic as a girl can get. I've also always been fascinated by the idea of space and hope that I can go into space sometime before I die. But the bigger part of me is the computer scientist who knows how easy it is for bugs to show up and knows how guilty I would feel if a bug introduced by me or my team were to cause a fatal accident. Someone at work the day mentioned how he can't even comprehend what it must feel like to be one of the analysts who had to say "I didn't see it coming" after 9-11-01. I feel the same way about Therac-25. Astronauts and Pilots may know that they're risking their lives, but living with the death of another person on your hands would be difficult. NASA's had it's fair share of errors (missing hyphens, unhandled exceptions, rounding errors, metric conversions). It's a very visible organization. Fatal errors in the DoD will fly under the radar unless a reporter gets his hands on the story, but even small bugs NASA runs into are immediately visible. And if NASA runs a mission and there's a mission-critical error (camera won't operate, safety issue, etc) it would be far more expensive to waste a mission than to spend extra money getting it right the first time. Another problem NASA has is testing. There is no test system and production system. They have to deal with mockups and pray that they got it right before something launches. NASA's development model is so vastly different from the real world because they're not working with the same types of systems found elsewhere. All in all, I feel like my opinion is "yes, they are over-averse to risk, but I can understand why and I won't balk much"