With all this talk of retiring the NASA space shuttle fleet and Canadian astronauts being propelled into space using this 1960’s to 1980’s technology I thought I’d write about the software that makes the space jalopy work. The coding when compared to commercial software is far superior, being that when your OS encounters a bug at home or you office, chances are good that you’re not flying thousands of Km/h high above the continents with millions of pounds of extremely explosive fuel strapped to you. Therefore, the software used by NASA for these shuttles is as close to perfect as we’ve been able to get…on this planet. But what about these guys?

Software inevitably has errors. Thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of lines of source code, at times co-authored by several different people is just not likely at this point to be perfect; especially with deadlines and competitive pressure from other firms. And where there may not be bugs there may be logic errors, that slip through the debugging process even if your syntax is correct. See this NY Times article on the development process for Microsoft Windows Vista and you start to get the picture of how screwed up software platforms can become in a clunky and inefficient design environment. To err is human, but these particular kinds of software errors cost the US economy alone up to 60 billion dollars every year

Open-source software has been hailed by some as offering a new programming method that actually decreases the amount of bugs because of the multiple scrutinizing eyes combing over the code as it matures. Google may have had this philosophy in mind when they pre-released Google Wave to scores of developers earlier this year, hoping to avoid MS Windows-like problems. See previous post. But to get back to the soon to be retired space shuttle fleet. In the newest Microsoft operating systems there are tens of millions (about 40 to 50) of lines of code and scores of bugs, perhaps thousands. The software coding for the shuttles has about 420,000 lines, smaller yes, but in the past three versions have only had ONE bug apparently. And the past 11 versions collectively have had only 17 errors total.  So for 4.5 million lines of code we have 17 bugs total. As an Astronaut I like those odds. That means I only have a 1 in 265 thousand chance of being blown to pieces on the job. Still probably a lot lower odds than your average safe desk job.