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NASA Draws On Open Source For Shuttle Bug-Tracking

Posted by Soulskill on Sun Nov 16, 2008 10:25 AM
from the hard-to-argue-with-cheaper-and-faster dept.
NASA Space Mozilla Software The Internet IT
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.'"
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Submission: NASA uses Mozilla to track shutlle bugs by thefickler (1030556)
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NASA Draws On Open Source For Shuttle Bug-Tracking 50 Comments More /

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  • They're already using it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Minwee (522556) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Sunday November 16 2008, @10:32AM (#25777547) Homepage
    Bug number one with the Space Shuttle is that "Microsoft has a majority market share in space travel".

  • Hopefully this is only the beginning. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bentov (993323) on Sunday November 16 2008, @10:42AM (#25777591)
    I can only hope that more of this is to come; gotta save money someplace. Better to save my by actually saving money vs. saving money by taking it away from something else.

    • It'll save money sure, but I think it is a huge stretch to say that open source bug tracking will save lives. It will do no such thing.

      • If it's not going to make the shuttle safer to fly, why did they bother developing it?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by pnewhook (788591)

          RTA - it was to replace a large number of proprietary databases spread across numerous subcontractors with a single common solution hosted locally at NASA. It saves costs and time, but not lives.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by khallow (566160)
            I disagree. That sounds like a big lifesaver right there. At the least, it'll help catch sets of problems that are synergistic. For example, if you have some avionics issue that is sensitive to excess vibration from the SRBs, it'd be helpful to easily access the SRB problem databases and see what vibration problems they currently have. That may tip the decision from "we'll let it go for this launch since it hasn't been a problem before" to "the latest SRBs have some new problems that affect this issue, we b
      • It will save lives because thanks to this particular change no cheaper components need to be used in other parts of the vessel to achieve the next round of price cuts.
    • I can only hope when somebody files a bug for something like say, "shuttle fires unreliably under ice conditions" nobody closes the bug and sets the status to "WORKS4ME".

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by DiegoBravo (324012)

        Despite the (European) Ariane, the most tragic NASA's episodes were not directly related to software. Even with the high business software project failure rate, the software in the space ships has proved very reliable.

        I think people is biased to feel the software as a intractable mess because of the intractable requirement dynamics in business projects. BTW, never complains that the hardware can be so bad too.

    • Eh I'm not so sure. Everyone knows how rigorously the military requires software to be audited for flight control systems.. and this is the space shuttle. A bit of a step up. So it may be easier to write everything from scratch, testing rigorously as you go, instead of handing developers an unfamiliar codebase and making them try to make it meet code robustness requirements.

      I love free software but I don't think volunteer developers in an anarchist programming environment have a place in the development of
      • I love free software but I don't think volunteer developers in an anarchist programming environment have a place in the development of a $2 billion system at the absolute pinnacle of aerospace design complexity.

        Yeah but it will fine for the space shuttle. [ducks]

      • Re:Hopefully this is only the beginning. (Score:5, Informative)

        by cyclone96 (129449) on Sunday November 16 2008, @02:09PM (#25779039)

        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.

    • Frankly, I do not think that it has something to do with money saving.

      I have seen that many times in past when people quoted costs only as justification to switch to better system.

      And frankly, systems like Bugzilla, Mantis are magnitude better compared to commercial offerings. I have used number of "state of the art" issue tracking systems - both OSS and commercials - and OSS options are plainly better. Commercial tools win against OSS options only because they have simpler management tools what mana

  • The name of the system sure sounds as from a dilbert strip: "Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA)"
  • Post-its next to their screens?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Avatraxiom (602424)
      They were using something like 40 different systems--a different one for practically each department and contractor at NASA. Some of them were pretty much using the technological equivalent of post-it notes next to their screens, and I've been told that some were keeping track of defects using paper files. -Max

  • Good Company (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DynaSoar (714234) on Sunday November 16 2008, @10:55AM (#25777659) Journal

    The order of magnitude under budget sounded familiar. Jefferson Lab Accelerator made a similar statement about at least some parts of the machine when they announced they had completed building and testing it and it was ready to fire up, ahead of schedule and under budget. I remembered they used government surplus and off-the-shelf parts as much as they could, but I didn't pay attention to the software. So I looked it up. HP-UX from 1987 to 2004, Red Hat since 2004. They talk about open source as a rationale, and specifically mention the Mozilla programs: http://users.cosylab.com/~mpelko/PCaPAC08/papers/mox03.pdf [cosylab.com]

    • Re:Good Company (Score:5, Informative)

      by invisiblerhino (1224028) on Sunday November 16 2008, @11:46AM (#25778007)
      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.

  • Bugzilla? Really? (Score:4, Funny)

    by rfreedman (987798) on Sunday November 16 2008, @10:55AM (#25777661) Homepage

    So, the rocket scientists looked at all of the available open-source bug trackers, and chose Bugzilla? Really?

    • Re:Bugzilla? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by david.gilbert (605443) on Sunday November 16 2008, @11:19AM (#25777819)
      Hopefully the rocket scientists were doing rocket science while leaving the IT people that support the rocket scientists to choose the bug tracker.

    • So, the rocket scientists looked at all of the available open-source bug trackers, and chose Bugzilla? Really?

      No matter which solution they choose, it certainly doesn't solve the common people related issues we see:
        - rejected, reason: space debris, this is out of scope
        - won't-fix, reason: no parts available
      I am sure there others.

  • How is this surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AndGodSed (968378) on Sunday November 16 2008, @11:06AM (#25777729) Homepage Journal

    So, open source is cheaper, AND appears to give good results?

    Why am I not surprised?

  • It could have saved a lot of lives, actually (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Avatraxiom (602424) on Sunday November 16 2008, @01:07PM (#25778629) Homepage
    My company (Everything Solved [everythingsolved.com]), 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

  • Why not publish the source online? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LingNoi (1066278) on Sunday November 16 2008, @01:19PM (#25778705)

    Why don't they publish read only access of the source code online and allow the public to file bug reports?

    More eyeballs, shallow bugs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I could use that bug tracker. My space shuttles keep exploding on me, and NASA support is really shitty.

    • I'm not sure the NASA wants people filing bugs for stuff they probably have no knowledge of.

      And honestly, how are you even going to reproduce it? Buy your own shuttle?

      • I think you could reproduce it and get it running, I believe most of the code is produced by outside contractors, so I don't see what the problem is.

        Otherwise how would they test the code themselves? You think they keep a couple of shuttles hanging around for testing the software?

        There was a story on slashdot about a year back about how they produce code, etc.

        • Yes, but are the peeps from NASA really gonna buy into bug reports from 20 year old kids in their mom's basement? I doubt the cons of opening up their bug tracker would be worth the benefits.
            • It isn't free if they have to audit every bug report to make sure they're actually real bugs, and then discard 80% of it. That's what I meant by "I doubt the cons of opening up their bug tracker would be worth the benefits"
    • I work at JSC. I'm just a code monkey; and am not speaking for the customer (NASA) or my employer; This should be considered (changeable,poorly expressed) opinion only, limited in all sorts of ways that lawyers like.
      Do you know what a Fischer ellipsoid is? (You're sitting on one.)
      Go ahead, google it. Make sure you fully understand before continuing. I'll wait right here.
      deedee dahdah boody-boop a doop...
      hmmmm....(what's taking so long?)....
      Ah, there you are.
      That's just one of the bazillion things

      • I never said submit contributions my good man, however I believe people would be able to spot bugs if given the chance.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by JetScootr (319545)
          Perhaps I was a bit snarky there...sorry.
          I work in the astronaut training facility, on simulation software. Loosely, I'd categorize the code like this:
          • simulation 'infrastructure' or 'framework' (ie,realtime game engine,graphics,network/shared memory protocols,etc) .. (Requires knowledge specific to computational hardware, i/o devices, etc of the simulator itself)
          • Model software, such as payload X or onboard system Y
            (Requires specific aerospace tech knowledge)
          • Math, like equations of motion, mass properties

          • It might take a lot to get someone up to material contributions, but many coding errors are noticeable without knowing much about what the software is doing. Although I guess static analyzers could catch most of those just as well.

            I think the real question here is... what's the harm? Worst case you get some emails you ignore, best case you find some genius who can help you. Just allowing the space enthusiasts who are also programmers to get some idea of what's involved, or to see progress go forward day-by-

            • What's the harm? absolutely none, to be sure. The real work would be for the few of us around here who are really into software to be able to sway managers and other engineers into accepting the new ideas. Most programmers here are aerospace engineers, EEs, math or physics geniuses, etc, first, who write code to implement their particular expert discipline. "herding cats" doesn't hardly cover it.
              There's no doubt they're brilliant, most of them, but I'm a minority here- a person whose first expertise is
  • For systems such as these formal verification is very important. NASA understands that and they have a pretty strong "Reliable Software Engineering" team: http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/rse/ [nasa.gov]

  • Half the bugs will sit in NEW status until the shuttle is retired, then they'll be closed WONTFIX.

  • It sounds like a bad Japanese movie. But it is no surprise to me that open-source software is saving money everywhere in the public sector. And about time!
    • The first shuttle mission was in 1981 - 27 years ago. You'd hope that in all that time, NASA would've cracked the major problems and the number of issues being raised now would be close to zero - reflecting the 30-odd years of development.
      .

      There have only been about 125 shuttle launches. The Boeing 747 has been in development and in daily use since 1970 with 1400 built to date.

    • The first shuttle mission was in 1981 - 27 years ago. You'd hope that in all that time, NASA would've cracked the major problems and the number of issues being raised now would be close to zero

      Presumably they keep changing it to carry different types of stuff into different types of space?

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