In space, no one can hear you kernel panic (2020)

"From the dawn of the Space Age through the present, NASA has relied on resilient software running on redundant hardware to make up for physical defects, wear and tear, sudden failures, or even the effects of cosmic rays on equipment."

An interesting case study in this domain is to compare the Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer with the Apollo Guidence Computer

Now the LVDC, that was a real flight computer, triply redundent, every stage in the processing pipeline had to be vote confirmed, the works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_Vehicle_Digital_Compute...

Compare the AGC, with no redundancy. a toy by comparison. But the AGC was much faster and lighter so they just shipped two of them(three if you count the one in the lunar module) and made sure it was really good at restarting fast.

There is a lesson to be learned here but I am not sure what it is. Worse is better?

▲

thomascountz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OT: I really enjoyed The Increment when it was first being released. It felt like the first software engineering practitioner's publication and introduced me to a lot of new people to follow.

▲

throwaradfy5745 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How would these considerations affect Musk's space cloud ?

▲

rogerrogerr 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Starlink very likely leans toward “many cheaper satellites that may fail” instead of “fewer expensive satellites that are less likely to fail”

Their advantage in the satellite-internet industry is that they can launch stuff fast and cheap; very likely this drives different tradeoff decisions than the regime this article talks about.

	▲	Panzerschrek 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Having thousands of satellites also allows finding more software bugs, so that in the reality they can be more reliable compared to NASA-style probes (when each one has its unique software).

▲

gostsamo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The same way it will affect the incoming mission to the center of the galaxy. The space cloud is much more related to the incoming SpaceX ipo than to any phenomena of the physical or computing universes. Thermodynamics says "no".

▲

gnabgib 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

(2020)

▲

adampunk 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do not attempt to adjust your television. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical.

We know Glenn is loquacious.