I love stories like this one. It gives me sooo much motivation to dig deeper into CS (I'm in college, studying CS while working as a developer).
Often I feel CS isolates me from the world around me which stops me from digging deeper in CS. But articles like this reinforce the thought that this might just be a question of the right environment.
It has always been a childhood dream of mine to work on (or in) space. I won't make it to NASA (they only take Americans) unfortunately. But hopefully I'll make it to ESA or one of the other private companies that are going to exist in the EU in the future.
If you want to work _on_ space then anecdotally I don't believe it's true that you have to be American citizen to work at NASA/JPL (you need a work visa etc.). However ESA and others are doing plenty of cool things also!
I remember first day doing some work as consultant with JPL for Cassini and a sim finished just before lunch and my collaborator says “huh, that’s interesting, the bug we have been reproducing for the last week suddenly disappeared! Case closed! Well let’s go...”. Being a naive youngster I say “wait, don’t we want to rerun the sim?? Maybe we need to tweak the parameters, etc, etc”
He shakes his head knowingly, says something to the effect of “no time for all that, son” and off we go.
In the end he was right, Cassini performed wonderfully, proof in the pudding and all that...but still can’t help think that it was in many ways a lot of lucky coin tosses!
I've not seen the presentation/summary that prompted this email, but it sounds like someone wanted to dunk on JPL and tossed a few stones they shouldn't have.
Henry S F Cooper Jr.'s book The Evening Star: Venus Observed describes a similar problem, remote debugging of a race condition (and some other things) of a spacecraft orbiting Venus.
Recommended reading for both space and computer geeks (well, there is a lot of overlap...).
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] threadOften I feel CS isolates me from the world around me which stops me from digging deeper in CS. But articles like this reinforce the thought that this might just be a question of the right environment.
It has always been a childhood dream of mine to work on (or in) space. I won't make it to NASA (they only take Americans) unfortunately. But hopefully I'll make it to ESA or one of the other private companies that are going to exist in the EU in the future.
Thanks for posting this <3
He shakes his head knowingly, says something to the effect of “no time for all that, son” and off we go.
In the end he was right, Cassini performed wonderfully, proof in the pudding and all that...but still can’t help think that it was in many ways a lot of lucky coin tosses!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZK0tW8EhQ
Glenn Reeves is now Chief Engineer of the division of JPL that designs spacecraft systems.
Mike Jones now appears to work on the notion of Identity on the internet (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/mbj/).
And Dave Wilner is one of two co-founders of Wind River, which developed vxWorks, the OS used on Pathfinder.
Also, previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993080
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764297
FireWire is the main bus for F-35 and other advanced US/Nato weapon systems.
The Ruskies also used the same buses for their MiG fighters, which makes sense for standardization and maintenance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1553
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394
Recommended reading for both space and computer geeks (well, there is a lot of overlap...).