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Bug Software

Firefly Software Snafu Sends Lockheed Satellite on Short-Lived Space Safari (theregister.com) 25

A software error on the part of Firefly Aerospace doomed Lockheed Martin's Electronic Steerable Antenna (ESA) demonstrator to a shorter-than-expected orbital life following a botched Alpha launch. From a report: According to Firefly's mission update, the error was in the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) software algorithm, preventing the system from sending the necessary pulse commands to the Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters before the relight of the second stage. The result was that Lockheed's payload was left in the wrong orbit, and Firefly's engineers were left scratching their heads.

The launch on December 22, 2023 -- dubbed "Fly the Lightning" -- seemed to go well at first. It was the fourth for the Alpha, and after Firefly finally registered a successful launch a few months earlier in September, initial indications looked good. However, a burn of the second stage to circularize the orbit did not go to plan, and Lockheed's satellite was left in the wrong orbit, with little more than weeks remaining until it re-entered the atmosphere.

As it turned out, the Lockheed team completed their primary mission objectives. The payload was, after all, designed to demonstrate faster on-orbit sensor calibration. Just perhaps not quite that fast. Software issues aboard spacecraft are becoming depressingly commonplace. A recent example was the near disastrous first launch of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, where iffy code could have led, in NASA parlance, to "spacecraft loss." In a recent interview with The Register, former Voyager scientist Garry Hunt questioned if the commercial spaceflight sector of today would take the same approach to quality as the boffins of the past.

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Firefly Software Snafu Sends Lockheed Satellite on Short-Lived Space Safari

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  • Who needs waterfall and big up front design - just lots of iterations.
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Microsoft's Motto: "Move slow and break things"

    • You mean Go FAST and Break Stuff ! ... or whatever that ancient FB mantra was.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, exactly!! In my 30+ years as a software engineer, I've never seen such garbage code as I do today. This off-the-cuff design we do now with Agile is absolute nonsense. A bunch of idiots sitting in a room for an hour, throwing a design together for one small part of a very large system and calling it good. Sigh. There isn't even a measly architectural sketch for guidance. And most of the time, the hardware guys aren't even done designing the thing. The don't even have the registers laid out, yet!
  • by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @02:50PM (#64257914)

    Mal is NOT gonna be happy about this.

  • by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @02:50PM (#64257916)

    Take their code size, then allow them to use only 1% of that.

    • Won't happen. Half of today's coders are of the copy-n-paste type. They can't build anything without a shitton of frameworks and libraries for even the most basic tasks. We should just be glad that code size is not proportional to physical weight. (And that humans for the most part are able to steer clear of riding their products for a commute....)
  • I've seen people get the words of wisdom wrong and claim that history repeats. The proper wording is that those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it. But that's not quite right either because history truly repeating would be highly unlikely, but we do see it rhyme with itself.

    It seems every technology goes through similar cycles. Things start out badly as people are intent on details to get things right. Then things start to go right. After a time of going smoothly for a while people get r

  • They should have had a complete simulation with the real control hardware but the actual controlled hardware (valves, ignition etc) should be replaced. And similarly for sensors. That would have seen such an error if it was software. Each mission should run on such hardware several times ( and on simulated hardware for many many times for more outlier scenarios). If they have done that, the bug would be in the wiring of the actuator signals, or misunderstood signal strength or length to turn on the RCS thru
    • A simulation would not catch a software error if the test code is bad. An example, the people writing the code for the satellite enter the gravitational acceleration of Earth as 9.8 feet per second squared. Then the people writing the code for the test look at the same specs, and also enter the gravitational acceleration of Earth as 9.8 feet per second squared. But that's not correct, it is supposed to be 9.8 meters per second squared.

      Maybe if everyone makes the same feet vs. meters error then everything

      • I don't know if the issue was explained to me but I suspect that the LED with voltage supplied it would light up full brightness and then go dark immediately once voltage was removed, which is unlike an incandescent indicator or even many other LED types. Our attempts to modify the PWM code to dim it only resulted in blinking brightly.

        I can't remember ever having come across an LED that wouldn't respond well to PWM that was at a fast enough pulse rate and sufficient resolution in the duty cycle, but I 100%

  • Citations or I'm calling bullshit.
  • hey, launch costs are cheaper than ever!
    We've reached the era of the tech-bro mantra "fail fast, fail often".
  • by Anonymous Coward
    It'll all this new breed of programmers with their dumbed down languages and Agile process garbage.

    Colleges have stopped teaching real computer science because its was too hard and students were dropping out. Colleges, only caring about the money, started teaching just Java and C#. I had a new engineer flip his shit because he actually had to write code ("what do you mean there isn't a library for that?!").

    Companies, only caring about budgets and schedules, make their engineers release broken, unteste
  • There was a documentary about this a couple of decades ago that demonstrated what happens when you show things the wrong order in . . .

    Now, what was it called? Castle? Rookie?hmm . . .

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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