Orlando Sentinel: “After investing $273 million, NASA is canceling a cutting-edge launch-control computer system for the space shuttle that is over budget, behind schedule and too expensive to operate.”
(A few paragraphs later) “The CLCS program began in 1997 as an effort to upgrade KSC’s 1970s-vintage system.”
Here’s my question. In the 1970s, computers didn’t have much memory. An expensive mainframe from that era couldn’t have had more than a megabyte or so of core memory. It seems to me as if the most complex piece software that could possibly be run on such systems would pale in comparison to the complexity of the software in a modern CDMA cellular phone, also about a megabyte in Assembler code. (I know, somebody’s going to tell me about how mission critical this stuff is, and how lives depend on it, but heavens, $273 million dollars?)
The question is, why are NASA, the FAA, etc. still running these ancient systems, and why have so many quarter billion dollar projects failed to replace them? Jeez, they didn’t even have relational databases in those days, to say nothing about structured program, GUI development tools, and books by Kent Beck. Recreating those old systems with modern tools would probably be a weekend Visual Basic/Access project. OK, I’m exaggerating a little. But if the problem is that you can’t even get parts (vacuum tubes, no doubt) for the old system, you don’t need a zillion dollar Big Science project: you need a four week project writing a CPU emulator for that old mainframe that runs on PCs.
OK, maybe now we won’t be subject to all those annoying lectures about how great SEI Level 5 is because the shuttle uses it. Flipping back and forth between today’s news and that old FastCompany hagiography will keep you entertained for hours!
Ged Byrne points out that it was actually a different system that used SEI Level 5.
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