Re:Software not the problem... (Score 1)

on the last two trips to Mars that failed. Communication and incompetence on Earth were the problem. Exactly how do scientists screw up and get the unit system wrong?

But that was a software problem, and it wasn't the scientists, it was the project management. A real scientist would almost certainly have noticed that some of the constants didn't make sense in the context they were being used.

In any case, space missions have some real interesting problems, like hardware that's so out of date it isn't funny because there isn't more recent hardware that's certified for the environment.

And like "standard" ADA flight control software that's reputedly full of bugs that have never been squashed.

John Roth