Ask HN: What OS do they use at NASA? - pWneD
======
fleitz
Lots of different OSs. Voyager probably doesn't even have an OS. The booster
rockets on the shuttle use 8088's and assembler. The mars rovers use vxworks
or it's predecessor. And I've heard rumors of embedded linux and QNX for some
projects.

Basically you're going to find an OS reasonably suited to the job. Also,
you're going to find OLD stuff as NASA wants something where the bugs are
known / already worked out. This is why a few years ago they upgraded Hubble
to a 486. And why on the rovers it executes code in debug mode and has
hardware to interface with the JTAG ports. Everything that works off planet
needs to be as bug free as possible and if something goes wrong you need a way
to patch it remotely with latencies in the minutes to hours.

------
dasht
NASA is very big with many largely separate parts. "All of them" is a
reasonable approximation.

------
hector_ka
Mostly Windows, but I have seen Macs too.NASA is not only rockets.It has lots
of offices and labs.

------
kakali
Many. Ames uses Windows, RHEL, and OSX. The choice is up to the user and
division they are in.

------
mkinnan
My father works at the KSC location and his computer runs Windows :)

------
gjvc
Linux

