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back to article NASA discovers black hole here on Earth – in its software budget

While NASA can do some amazing things in space, back on the planet's surface its coders are less than stellar. The US agency has spent four years developing code that will run its future Spaceport Command and Control System (SCCS) software. But an audit by its Office of Inspector General has found that the project's costs are …

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  1. Brian Miller

    Buy from big monolith or go open source

    Really, guys, is IBM going to go out of business any time soon? Yes, theoretically one supplier could go out of business. But somebody hugely major? Come on!

    The other avenue is to go all open source. Since NA$A is committed to writing a zillion lines of glue code, why not just make it all open source, and use open source? It's a public agency, right?

    8 0 Reply
    1. harmjschoonhoven
      Reply Icon

      Go open source

      like http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/projects/?

      1 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Buy from big monolith or go open source

      If you studied anything about the history about NASA then you would see that they already use open source code and open source hardware.

      The code and hardware is all from the Amiga computer line and was also used to launch all the space shuttles.

      0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Curd

    Why not just buy the bloody code then?

    1 0 Reply
    1. Crisp
      Reply Icon

      In the past I've used an Escrow Agreement.

      The code is held by a third party so that in the event that something unfortunate happened to the software company, we could still access all the code and documentation.

      0 0 Reply
    2. Inachu
      Reply Icon

      all the code and hardware is already open source.

      Search for NASA & COMMODORE Amiga history

      0 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does this remind anybody of anything?

    <tin hat>

    Such as UK government efforts in "writing" stuff that they could buy off the shelf or, alternatively, to try and reduce all "customer facing" interfaces to multivendor "generic mobile" third party apps to established, working proprietary systems (frequently) written by small domain specialist SMEs - which will then go out of business because they can't sell their existing UI solution and any app they might write isn't "generic" enough. In the meantime doing everything in their power to avoid doing things that might achieve their heart's desire, by defining (or even documenting and making available) the data interchange standards that could make it possible.

    </tin hat>

    PS: how does one say "apply tin hat" and "remove tin hat" in HTML anyway?

    2 0 Reply
  4. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    In comparison, going with SAP couldn't have been that bad...

    1 0 Reply
    1. Dan Wilkie
      Reply Icon

      YOU TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW!

      0 0 Reply
  5. AJ_Newman

    Home Help?

    Why can't they just take Apple to court and Comel them write it?

    AJ

    1 0 Reply
  6. MD Rackham

    SLS will be funded

    There is little chance of Congress cutting funding for SLS in the short term. NASA doesn't even want the thing. It's all a congressional pork barrel project which certain congresspeople will protect.

    I'm in favor of funding space to keep the A&D industry alive over building hanger queens like the F-35, but unless funding appears for missions that exploit the SLS heavy lift, it will end up as a white elephant after the first manned launch. And the leftovers will become lawn ornaments like the (flight ready) Saturn V's did back in the 70s.

    2 0 Reply
  7. veti Silver badge

    Imagine if this thing actually existed...

    This is a dream scenario, a blank check [sic] to write "software" for something that doesn't even exist, and therefore you know it won't be tested in anything but completely artificial and predictable scenarios.

    And they still can't get it "right enough" to pass even that level of tests.

    FSM help NASA, if it ever has to deploy this software on an actual installation.

    2 0 Reply
    1. Crisp
      Reply Icon

      Re: Imagine if this thing actually existed...

      How well defined are the requirements? Poorly defined projects can go on for ever...

      1 0 Reply
  8. Long John Brass

    I'll do it myself for $100 million

    Just make the cheque out to cash

    Only half joking, for that sort of cash I'm sure I could build up a team, then do the bloody thing from scratch.

    2 0 Reply
  9. imanidiot Silver badge
    Facepalm

    And this is better how?

    So you don't rely on a single vendor that might bite the dust, you rely on 10 of them, each one of which indivually or collectively could bite the dust. I'm assuming that even if one component of your Glueware comes unstuck that the rest is also not going to function properly. You'd need a major rewrite at that point to begin with.

    Either do it ALL in-house and do it ALL yourself to make sure you are not reliant on a supplier, or go with a single supplier with contractual provisions about getting full sourcecode and knowledge in the event of a bust.

    This really is one of those "solutions" that only make sense from behind a beancounters desk, after 30 conceptual meetings, 23 vendor sponsored "informational" events (preferably overseas) and a whole bucketload of useless managers have had their say.

    4 0 Reply
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SCCS ?

    I always found RCS much easier.

    0 0 Reply

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