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That's the idea. I'm working on flight software for Orion, and there are many levels of redundancy, both in design and process, that are put into the software a
by jakeinspace 8y ago
That's the idea. I'm working on flight software for Orion, and there are many levels of redundancy, both in design and process, that are put into the software architecture. It's extremely expensive, but flight software is still a drop in the bucket compared to mechanical, propulsion, and electrical systems. It should have an expected failure rate much lower than the physical systems, and should never be on the critical path. We're not doing fancy stuff, it's just gotta be robust and fault tolerant.
- jacquesm 8y ago> just The deadpan delivery really does it.
- jakeinspace 8y agoYeah well, it's definitely not trivial. I just mean that most of the problems we're implementing have been solved decades ago (inverse kinematics, control, comms, etc). When you actually need to get all of those functions working in a hard real-time system, of course there are enormous engineering difficulties. In my limited experience, these mostly manifest as extensive testing and formal verification, to the extent to which that is possible. Check out NASA Core Flight System if you're curious, it's an in-house framework and abstracted OS layer meant to support hard real-time flight systems.
- jacquesm 8y agoDefinitely will do that, thank you for the pointer. Reliable software design is something I've been interested in for a very long time and it is amazing (to me, at least) how much we already know and yet refuse to put into practice. I think a big part of this is that speed is sexy and reliability is not.