Maybe sometime in the future NASA will deploy a service or repair pit stop station for all their crafts on Mars. Imagine that, if a craft is damaged another automaton is deployed to retrieve the damaged craft where it is transported to the pit stop to be fixed or for routine maintenance. This will improve service life and only the service station would need manual intervention ie. Restocking for parts.
So you would have a service station and a manufacturing station, that's nuclear powered and retrofitted with a 3D printer that can produce custom crafts on Mars.
I often ponder about what will the result be of having a human colony on Mars or the Moon? Think about the ethical implications, what about if someone commits a murder? Or breaks a law ( will there even be laws? Who creates the law? Who will deliver judgement? Will there be a jury? ) it just breaks my mind.
One of the reasons that Cobol is still so popular is because of banking products like Tata Consultancy's BANCS. If you're starting up a new Bank and need an off the shelf, secure and robust banking system, then TCS BANCS is a viable option. It comes with TCS support and dedicated developers, to implement new features or customize existing ones at a premium.
Cobol is powerful when it comes to batch jobs, and you can bundle transactions ( ie. TX1900 means execute this transactions, which consists of 10 other transactions that will create a new client, and open a savings account, etc). Your front end can be whatever you want and all your business logic is embedded into Cobol transactions.
The con however, is that these consultancy companies do not share these transactions with their clients or external developers. You'll either have to figure it out on your own ( good luck ), or use the consultancy company. These products are really cash cows for their vendors.
There are _many_ other off the shelf core banking systems - some are more modern and cloud first (Mambu) and others more direct competitors to BANCS (Flexcube, Finacle, Temenos). I don't think many of them are Cobol/mainframe based.
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