aerospace and software

I can’t believe NASA would even consider a crewed flight without another uncrewed flight.  The awesomeness of autonomous spacecraft is that you can fly them until you get things right.  My old company has flown its spacecraft numerous times without any major issues, but they’re still doing missions to make sure everything is safe before…

truth, lies, and o-rings

I’m reading Truth, Lies and O-rings by Allan McDonald regarding the Challenger disaster.  The author was a senior manager at the time of the Shuttle disaster in Morton Thiokol, the company responsible for making the solid rocket motors, which were the point of the failure. I’m only 16% of the way through, but it is seriously…

fear of failure

I was sorry to see the SpaceX failure today.  Obviously.  One thing that I like about the space community is that generally speaking, engineers pull for each other, whether they be American, commercial, Russian, other foreign, or government or whatever.  OK, I don’t know any Russians, but I assume they also like to see successful…