Hello World and Others…
Space, the Final Frontier
Artemis II is a spacecraft that took mankind back to the stars. The images can be seen here and eventually the mission will lead to a permanent presence of humanity on the Moon. The gates of space opera are no longer closed, but opened.
What has this to do with software I hear you say?
It is not about “I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one is working”, although this post could well be about that.
Software in Space
The Artemis II mission is a fine example of how software, operations, and security mingle together. Let’s take a walk through the process. And, before you ask, I had nothing to do with any of it. I never worked at NASA. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If your company was writing the software for the spacecraft, how would you write it? Would you vibe code the whole thing with Claude? Would you use the latest language du jour? Let’s go with Rust. Would there be any guidance as to how it is written? How much testing would you do? Is 70% test coverage good enough or would you want to see each line of code executed by two (or more) distinct tests?
How about operations? How do you test that your code works as expected on the hardware which is still being built? What happens if you need to patch things as they run? What metrics do you decide to show to the crew, which are are for computers to read, and which ones go into the black box? Which version of Kubernetes do you run locally? How about X-ray radiation impact on the hardware?
Do you run a firewall? More than one? How about the link between the space craft and the ground? Do you insist on a TLS certificate? When is that going to renew? Or is the comms okay unencrypted. What could go wrong?
In space, no one can hear you scream. If things go wrong, the crew perishes. The craft is lost. The mission is a failure. Do you have what it takes?
Conclusion
Does this appear to be daunting task? Are you not doing all this already? This is what we do: we plan and make sure that it’s boring:
No drama. No panic. No crisis.
Sounds like something you could do with?
Imagine, if you will, a day when all the drama is removed from your software production: no panic, no crisis, just smooth software releases that exceed your customer’s expectations. This is what we have done in the past and can do for you.