

Nattering Nabobs Of NASA Negativity 126
code_rage writes "IEEE Spectrum Magazine has an article by James Oberg which enumerates some of the problems which have cropped up and will crop up during assembly of Space Station Alpha (or whatever it is called this week).
The article lists many software problems, including safety related issues. Also a problem which was news to me: the U.S.-supplied Solar Arrays operate at a high voltage, which would place astronauts at risk of a potentially deadly plasma discharge during EVA. The workarounds include some Catch-22's."
It's getting dangerous to be an astronaut (Score:2)
Sheesh, I wish for a return to the old days, when things would just blow up.
Mmm... Random plasma discharge... (Score:1)
Being An AStronaut is DANGEROUS?????? (Score:1)
Jeez (Score:2)
Don't practice your alliteration on me!
deadly plasma discharge? (Score:1)
Plasma RULES! (Score:2)
Oh... wait - we're talkin' 'bout that ion stuff...
Question. (Score:1)
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Re:Mmm... Random plasma discharge... (Score:1)
damn, nice typeface, dude! (Score:2)
I still think... (Score:2)
...chuckle...
News Flash: New complex design has problems! (Score:3)
I see no reason to panic based on what was in that article.
Come on, anybody who saw the movie "Outland"... (Score:3)
We are catching up to science fiction, and I for one am glad to see it. Now bring me my flying car.
i volunteer (Score:1)
1. I would never have to hear or see any mention of microsoft, or bill gates and their shitty products
2. I require my space ship and future home on another planet or space station to be made entirely out of lego's.
that is all. other than that you have yourself a guine pig.
(i'm negotiable with the legos, but firm on #1!)
Star Trek sparks (Score:5)
________________
Re:Question. (Score:2)
Reliable Mir (Score:2)
Yup, it certainly is nice to have that reliable Mir technology to depend on in case the new stuff has problems.
Re:Question. (Score:3)
I remember asking the same question when I worked at Rockwell Collins, why were they using 186's in the Boing 777. They don't need more. Plus that chip has been around long enough for them to have a damn good idea of what could go wrong with it. The more complex the chip, the higher the chances of something going wrong.
Ask Slashdot? (Score:3)
Flying Deathtrap (Score:1)
Maybe they should use Alpha as the location for the next "Survivor" show. The person who can live the longest without getting electrocuted, explosively decompressed, or killed by buggy software (Dr. Chandra taught me a song today, would you like to hear it?) wins $1,000,000 and gets to come home. I don't think I'd even apply for a place in that show.
Space Station Computer Powered by 386SX (Score:2)
Well, at least it won't run Windows.
passing the blame (Score:1)
I blame this squarely on West Palm Beach voters, Microsoft, the RIAA, and the MPAA. They seem to be the cause of all evil, around here at least.
Re:Star Trek sparks (Score:1)
For the purpose of redundancy... (Score:1)
A similar concept is used with the clustering features of Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter, as multiple, relatively cheap servers behave as one unit.
Thank you.
-- Patrick Bateman, Esq.
AeroWelfare (Score:1)
Who SAYS HAL9000 didn't run Windoze ???? (Score:1)
Grinning, ducking, and running like hell. . . .
Re:Ask Slashdot? (Score:1)
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Re:Space Station Computer Powered by 386SX (Score:2)
Not necessarily. You could run Win3.x. Can't leave the astronauts 100 miles up in orbit without Solitaire.
Re:Ask Slashdot? (Score:2)
Bill - aka taniwha
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Re:math equation (Score:1)
Re:Question. (Score:1)
How many chips made it to market that couldn't divide correctly? And this is a situation where it actually matter, as a mostly closed air lock just doesn't cut it.
How much oxygen do we have left?
About two hours.
Two hours?
Actually about 5 minutes, the computer rounded up.
Plasma and "mini-arcing" (Score:1)
Re:It's getting dangerous to be an astronaut (Score:2)
Re:Reliable Mir (Score:1)
plasma risk (Score:1)
this is always a risk. the van allen belts for example will kill you. the altitudes for satellite and especially human missions is chosen based on this. coronal discharge affects the shape of the terrestrial plasma/magnetosphere/etc. this is why we watch solar activity so closely. i don't know if any humans have actually been killed by this but many satellites have been.
Re:Being An AStronaut is DANGEROUS?????? (Score:1)
Robustness... (Score:2)
Mike
nattering nabobs of negativity (Score:1)
tips for writers (Score:1)
"Always avoid annoying alliteration"
Re:Ask Slashdot? (Score:1)
accent on the da (which sounds like the russian 'da' or yes.
It means 'star'.
Re:i volunteer (Score:1)
Which O.S. is running on all those computers which the article says have fragile software?
Remember the Challenger (Score:1)
Kurdt
Kurdt
Re:It's getting dangerous to be an astronaut (Score:2)
Personally, I'm more worried about the Russian Mind Control Lasers installed on the last module.
Re:News Flash: New complex design has problems! (Score:1)
At the moment it sounds really shitty and dangerous.
That and the brain-deadness of the 'fixes' for the power system that should have been thought out more to start with just make me groan while reading that article.
Can't wait for Space Station Beta.
Maybe when we get to Space Station 1.0, it'll run smoothly.
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Re:Ask Slashdot? (Score:2)
Bill - aka taniwha
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Solar array plasma potential dangers are low. (Score:5)
If the PCU goes out, though, plasma charging is a problem. You have the possibility of electrical arcs...which are equally dangerous to astronauts and to the electrical equipment on the station. The torques on the station change when the ground is disturbed, possibly changing its orbit or spin. Ion sputtering (erosion of the spacecraft hull) increases...although that's probably the least of your concerns. There may be periods in the orbit when the astronauts, if they work quickly, can get out and fix things safely. That'd be tough, though, as they hit the aurorae belts every orbit and the South Atlantic Anomaly at least once every seven. You don't want to be EVA over south america next to an ungrounded high voltage space station.
But the folks who build the ISS know what they're doing, and I think they'll have the plasma environment under control. Some of the other problems mentioned in that article I did not know about and do look like a worry, but I'm sure things aren't as dire as the article writer is predicting.
(Full disclosure: I work (subcontract) for NASA on a satellite program unrelated to the ISS. Whether that makes me knowledgeable or just biased is your decision.
Biggest Danger on Station (Score:1)
Something you might not know (Score:2)
They said that the tolerable noise level in any module (according to NASA spec) was somewhere around 30 dB but a lot of the modules being made by other countries (notably Russia) exceeded those specs by as much a 40dB. Compund that with the fact that the sound has nowhere to go but in.
In space no one can hear your server crash!
"Me Ted"
Re:nattering nabobs of negativity (Score:2)
Re:Star Trek sparks (Score:3)
Captain: "Target their sensor arrays with a medium-burst photonic beam."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 random buttons on the console.
Captain: "Set up a medium-level force field around decks 3, 4, and 17 aft."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 other random buttons.
Captain: "Create a weapon out of technology none of us have ever thought of before this very moment but the lieutenant over there just suggested."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 4 or 5 buttons.
NASA can brag all they want, but until they get this magic console button technology, they ain't got squat!
________________
Not as dangerous as being President of the US. (Score:1)
OTOH, I think that five of our presidents have been assasinated. Shows that politics is even more dangerous than science.
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BSD or BSOD, your choice...
What about "Moon Base Alpha"? (Score:1)
Ah well, who's counting...
Anyone else remember this show [cybrary1999.com]?
Capt. Ron
Science is already feeling the burn... (Score:5)
The payload I've been working on--and from the best I can tell, most of the other payloads on UF-1, the first of the many Utilization Flights--was bumped from its flight. Technically, we weren't on schedule, but the schedule is unrealistic to begin with.
The manifest is full of lies, damned lies, and statistics, but that's no different than any other NASA program. It's the typical NASA FUD: make the schedules unreasonable, and when the contractors fail to meet specs, blame the contractors, slip the schedule, and ask Congress for more money.
It makes one wish for the days of carte blanche, when the schedules were unreasonable, but you could at least throw enough money and brainpower at a situation to get the thing solved. People worked long hours, slept at their desks, had recreation at work, and took simple pleasure at their jobs being finally completed--then moved to another job.
You see, the geek culture today has a lot of roots in the geek culture of the '60s--but instead of Apollo and Saturn, we work on Linux and Gnome. Rather than the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, which hid all their secrets behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain, we now fight the Evil Empire of Redmond, which hides all their secrets behind the impentrable Closed-Source Curtain.
All of which begs to ask: where's the deals with Life, and when does Tom Wolfe write a book on the open-source movement?
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Re:Question. (Score:2)
Re:nattering nabobs of negativity (Score:5)
Re:Something you might not know (Score:1)
Problem solved.
And the foam could be shipped up as packing material for other equipment, saving space and mass.
Just make sure that the foam won't off-gas as time goes on - chemical pollution of the life-support system is a real issue, and certain cements, glues, plastics, and other synthetics really put out a *lot* of gaseous pollution as they age.
Re:Question. (Score:1)
Re:It's getting dangerous to be an astronaut (Score:2)
Read the article again, Chester. The whole damn station's skin is going to get charged up, so that even getting close to something as "unlikely" to be necessary to a spacewalk as, say, the airlock, will expose you to an arc. And those arcs aren't just wussy little things that are going to harm something conductive in the suit, they are at near lethal levels.
I don't know about you, but I don't like the thought that anytime I contact the skin of the station during a space walk, I could very easily be killed.
You first.
Re:Solar array plasma potential dangers are low. (Score:3)
Hope it survive's Slashdot's mungling.
Complex == Fragile (Score:4)
The big, fat gates in a 386SX are also nice and sturdy from an electrical perspective.
Are these guys writing the software? (Score:1)
Re:News Flash: New complex design has problems! (Score:1)
It's not quite that simple (Score:2)
And modern Space exploration has only been going on for fifty years now. Presidents have been getting assasinated for the last couple hundred years. Since the space program started, only one president (JFK) has been assasinated, though their have been other attempts (Reagan, etc.) By your logic, space exploration remains ten times as fatal as the office of president.
why no manual workaround? (Score:2)
In one error discovered earlier this year, the corruption of two adjacent flags (bits in a status word) would command an air valve to open while locking out the "valve close" command; only a power cycle could reset the system and prevent all the air from leaking out.
What is the point of making things like this computerized with no manual workaround? That sounds poorly thought out. Surely a valve could be made so you could also close it by hand?? This reminds me of the models of BMW where you can't unlock the doors by hand, so if the power locks fail, you're locked in your own car (this actually happened to someone I know). Madness...
One Fat Hen??? (Score:1)
I thought it was: "Nine nude nymphs nibling on Nat's nails and nicotine"
Re:It's getting dangerous to be an astronaut (Score:1)
Dude, read the article. The problem is that the solar arrays raise the potential of the entire space station relative to the thin plasma bath that's around it. In other words, the space station is like a live wire at ~120V and space is the ground. It doesn't matter where you're at, if you're doing EVA, you're the lightning rod.
That's BAD.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision! [schells.com]
Re:Question. (Score:2)
There is a 186 or more properly a 80186. it was never used in a PC. It was never intended to be used in a PC. It wasn't a prediessor to the 286. They were actually sybling similar architectures, one targeting the desktop and the other targeting embeded devices
Re:AeroWelfare (Score:1)
NASA Slang (Score:2)
Cool, you mean I've been using NASA jargon all this time?
Re:Ask Slashdot? (Score:2)
Re:why no manual workaround? (Score:2)
the article doesn't say that there are no manual workarounds, it just says that they are expecting troubles with the automated ones.
in fact, it talks in several places about the fact that there are workarounds for everything, and that NASA is going to go ahead and plunge in, knowing that they can get around problems with the automated systems.
Re:Solar array plasma potential dangers are low. (Score:2)
Re:Question. (Score:2)
A) They need to design new cooling systems since radiant heat dissipation does not exist in zero gravity (heat cannot rise in zero g).
B) They need to harden some of the shielding on the systems so that stray radiation does not have a negative effect on bits.
C) They need to have special chips made for stray radiation.
D) They need to be flight tested and sturdy.
E) They don't necessarily NEED blazingly fast computers to do the tasks required.
F) Development cycles for the software are much slower (There is not Fix/Release type thing, its Fix/Test/Test/Test/Test/Test/Fix/Test.../Release)
G) This is what is proven to work through time.
Is that clear enough?
Jay
Re:Dude: (Score:3)
Eric
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Not Only 'e' (Score:1)
6 out of 10 Russian vovels cause the consonant in front of them sound soft, and there is also a "soft sign" that has the same effect on consonants.
Re:It's not quite that simple (Score:1)
BTW (Score:1)
Re:For the purpose of redundancy... (Score:3)
Would this be a RAID system (Redundent Array of Inexperienced Dudes?)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Something you might not know (Score:1)
Re:what the hell is a nabob? (Score:2)
BTW, there is a site www.m-w.com, Merriam-Webster Online.
Re:NASA's problems (Score:1)
Re:Question. (Score:1)
It Might Be Interesting ... (Score:1)
For example, commercial jetliners or houses had not had enough sound isolation.
No reliability for software without hard encap (Score:2)
And it will continue to be so, across the entire software industry, until software developers force the chip manufacturers to provide hard MMU encapsulation for fine-grain objects like they do for processes now.
Programs are unreliable to a very significant extent because their internal objects all live in the same address space and can merrily tramp all over anything they like under fault conditions. And fault conditions always arise in any non-trivial program, yet recovery is impossible in the general case because there is no internal protection against fault propagation.
Today's software developers are still using a 30-year old hardware model. Is it any surprise that software is still as flakey as ever?
Re:It's not quite that simple (Score:2)
-Bryan
Re:Star Trek sparks (Score:1)
Re:Something you might not know (Score:1)
Re:Question. (Score:2)
Re:I still think... (Score:2)
Talking about cute names for things, did you notice one of the modules is called the Zenith Integrated Truss Structure [ieee.org]? They're having so much trouble getting all the blemishes out, because the space station has ZITS!
Re:It's getting dangerous to be an astronaut (Score:2)
No?? Thought so. So long as there is one a functional PCU or the solar arrays are off, everything's fine. PCU fails with astronaut outside? PCU fails period? Shut off the fucking array until you can get the other PCU online. Duh. I don't honestly think they'd let the software keep the array mains on. That would be fucking dumb, like allowing the inner airlock door to be unlatched at the same time as the outer. So what if the other PCU takes a while to get up? There's still the 28V system on the Russian module, so they're not going to lose life support or anything.
Re:why no manual workaround? (Score:2)
The result - KABUUM!!!
Re:No reliability for software without hard encap (Score:2)
Interestingly, late-model SPARC CPUs do have some hardware support for inter-object calls across protection boundaries. It was put in for Sun's Spring operating system, which never came out but provided some of the basis for Java.
Question for Morgiane: If CORBA calls from object to object on the same machine were fast enough, would that accomplish what you want? Get in touch with me directly, please.
Re:Solar array plasma potential dangers are low. (Score:2)
Now, the real mystery is why the earth's magnetic axis is so far off-kilter.
Software problems (Score:2)
If you have ever written custom code for anything you recognize that truth. The code for the space station is essentially 'alpha' code. How could they get it to the 'beta' stage? Where would they get any 'users' to test it? Can any of you write millions of lines of alpha code with no errors?
The reason that nobody can write alpha code error free is the same reason that nobody can go out and shoot '18' for a round of golf; the job is too difficult for anyone to accomplish. That is why software requires several versions to get it right.
The computing section of the space station is far more extensive than any previous space flight. It was done that way because of the advantages that computer control brings. Because of Yin and Yang there is always a down side to anything which has an upside. The down side is that computer controlling everything necessarily increases the complexity of the computer code. With that complexity comes increased error problems. Sorry, that is the way that reality works.
There is one more truth - NASA has never managed a software project this complex for space use. As a result the management process has problems also.
Here is a management truth: nobody ever has enough time to spend doing the job right in the first place, but somehow they always find enough time to do the job over when their work breaks. In other words there always is enough time to do the job right . Doing it wrong and trying to fix the screw ups with kluges later always takes longer. That ought to be software management 101 - but it is something which most managers never understand.
The only way to solve the complexity issues that computer control brings is to do away with the computer controllers. That costs a lot more money and weighs a lot more. Either live with the problems that computers bring or live with the problems that not having computers bring.
I have to agree with the NASA veteran on the preparedness issue: it costs far less to be prepared at the start than to find out later that you weren't prepared.
Re:It's getting dangerous to be an astronaut (Score:2)
I'm no electrical engineer, so please enlighten me. The article says that you could get a full ampere going through you if you come anywhere near the skin. Is one amp enough to be dangerous, or is it on the same order as the examples you give?
Shut off the fucking array until you can get the other PCU online.
The article also said that because the PCUs were designed in such a hurry, there is no mechanism to tell anybody when a PCU goes offline. So how do you shut down the array if you don't know that the PCUs are dead? Also, how quickly does the residual charge bleed off? Quickly enough that the arcing danger can be waited out if somebody is outside when it happens?
Re:Ask Slashdot? (Score:2)
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Re:No reliability for software without hard encap (Score:2)
Objects should not be able to touch the private parts of other objects, not even if they are of the same class, and that is a trivial thing to guarantee given fine-grain hardware assist from the MMU.
In a fully object-oriented system, the trap will happen at the very first transgression, not after you have already blown through a ton of safety nets. And if one's system libraries aren't yet fully OO (ie. the case today just about everywhere) it won't matter much, because it's virtually always the application code that blows up, not system libraries.
Reliability would soar, and so would ease of debugging because of the hard separation between objects. I just cannot understand why software developers haven't been calling for it.
Re:No reliability for software without hard encap (Score:2)
Efficient local CORBA calls would be useful, but they won't help here. In a CORBA-based system, the user can still define local non-CORBA objects, and so he will, so systems will continue to be unreliable through lack of hard boundaries between objects. And anyway, CORBA protection is soft. It's good in many respects, but it's not the solution to this general problem in software engineering.
Re:Reliable Mir (Score:2)
Re:Ask Slashdot? (Score:2)
Bill - aka taniwha
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