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>Airliners, satellites, rockets and cars all, by necessity, run extremely thin stacks consisting almost entirely of C (though some of us are starting the push f

>Airliners, satellites, rockets and cars all, by necessity, run extremely thin stacks consisting almost entirely of C (though some of us are starting the push for Rust). You can't just Python your way to glory in a fly-by-wire controller because that's how you get people killed. A friend mentioned to me that Spire is doing satellite control software in Python. Presumably it's higher quality than your average python project since you can't wipe it and provision a new one on a fresh satellite when something goes wrong.

pdelbarba 8y ago
Some satellites do run higher level code on the payload side. My company also uses it for our open source telemetry package. That code is typically very isolated though. If it crashes entirely, you can't exactly send someone over to hit the reset button or re-upload the image so you need some sort of hardened supervisory code running on radiation tolerant hardware. The big gotcha though is that space-capable hardware is frequently at least a generation behind commodity stuff so you don't really have a lot of overhead to deal with interpreters or VMs. This is less of an issue on cube sats where you don't care (as much) if it doesn't work and the mission is very short and non-critical. On the bus side (the part that controls the satellite's support systems, thrusters, etc) having garbage collection kick off while making orbital adjustments is no bueno. Don't really have to say much more than that.
ryandrake 8y ago
Not sure if that’s your job req or whether you just found it online, but here’s some unsolicited feedback on it: the way the qualifications are written there are probably less than 10 people on earth who meet them all. As someone who has embedded experience and an interest in space tech, if I were in the job market I’d be so intimidated by that description that I’d probably not even bother applying!

pdelbarba 8y ago

Some satellites do run higher level code on the payload side. My company also uses it for our open source telemetry package. That code is typically very isolated though. If it crashes entirely, you can't exactly send someone over to hit the reset button or re-upload the image so you need some sort of hardened supervisory code running on radiation tolerant hardware. The big gotcha though is that space-capable hardware is frequently at least a generation behind commodity stuff so you don't really have a lot of overhead to deal with interpreters or VMs. This is less of an issue on cube sats where you don't care (as much) if it doesn't work and the mission is very short and non-critical. On the bus side (the part that controls the satellite's support systems, thrusters, etc) having garbage collection kick off while making orbital adjustments is no bueno. Don't really have to say much more than that.

ryandrake 8y ago

Not sure if that’s your job req or whether you just found it online, but here’s some unsolicited feedback on it: the way the qualifications are written there are probably less than 10 people on earth who meet them all. As someone who has embedded experience and an interest in space tech, if I were in the job market I’d be so intimidated by that description that I’d probably not even bother applying!