2011.10.30
Lessons from Space
By Diomidis Spinellis and Henry Spencer
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
— Wernher von Braun
Twilight saw the landing of Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center on 21 July 2011, marking the end of the 30-year Space Shuttle program and leaving the Soyuz series of spacecraft as the only remaining major option for sending humans into space. With a history of 1,700 flights over an almost half-century lifetime, the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft are arguably a tremendously successful spaceflight design. Given the parallels between the complexity of human spaceflight and large software systems, what can we developers learn from the Soyuz program?
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