I remember first day doing some work as consultant with JPL for Cassini and a sim finished just before lunch and my collaborator says “huh, that’s interesting, the bug we have been reproducing for the last week suddenly disappeared! Case closed! Well let’s go...”. Being a naive youngster I say “wait, don’t we want to rerun the sim?? Maybe we need to tweak the parameters, etc, etc”
He shakes his head knowingly, says something to the effect of “no time for all that, son” and off we go.
In the end he was right, Cassini performed wonderfully, proof in the pudding and all that...but still can’t help think that it was in many ways a lot of lucky coin tosses!
I love stories like this one. It gives me sooo much motivation to dig deeper into CS (I'm in college, studying CS while working as a developer).
Often I feel CS isolates me from the world around me which stops me from digging deeper in CS. But articles like this reinforce the thought that this might just be a question of the right environment.
It has always been a childhood dream of mine to work on (or in) space. I won't make it to NASA (they only take Americans) unfortunately. But hopefully I'll make it to ESA or one of the other private companies that are going to exist in the EU in the future.
If you want to work _on_ space then anecdotally I don't believe it's true that you have to be American citizen to work at NASA/JPL (you need a work visa etc.). However ESA and others are doing plenty of cool things also!
I've not seen the presentation/summary that prompted this email, but it sounds like someone wanted to dunk on JPL and tossed a few stones they shouldn't have.
Henry S F Cooper Jr.'s book The Evening Star: Venus Observed describes a similar problem, remote debugging of a race condition (and some other things) of a spacecraft orbiting Venus.
Recommended reading for both space and computer geeks (well, there is a lot of overlap...).
He shakes his head knowingly, says something to the effect of “no time for all that, son” and off we go.
In the end he was right, Cassini performed wonderfully, proof in the pudding and all that...but still can’t help think that it was in many ways a lot of lucky coin tosses!