Dear readers,
Welcome to Quartz’s newsletter on the economic possibilities of the extraterrestrial sphere. Please forward widely, and let me know what you think. This week: Code agonistes, OneWeb resurrection and no, they aren’t going to pay for Artemis.
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Software didn’t just eat the world; it ate space, too.
Computing and the US space program are inextricably linked. The Apollo Flight Computer was famously the first built around silicon chips, as NASA engineers realized that the breadth of calculations required to hurl people to the moon demanded a high-speed electronic solution.
Today, computer decision-making is even more tightly integrated into space activities, and that means the software is even more important. Boeing learned that to its detriment last year after its Starliner spacecraft failed to reach the International Space Station during an uncrewed test mission. The problems were coding errors that should have been caught in testing.
This week, NASA announced that it had completed two major reviews of the close call, issuing eighty recommendations to the troubled aerospace giant as well as new guidelines to improve oversight over its contractors’ software engineering. NASA human exploration chief Kathy Leuders said that one important factor was understanding Boeing’s approach to systems engineering and integration—essentially, how it envisioned the software and hardware for its spacecraft coming together as one.
“If we would have understood what that structure was, we would have been better able to plug into their decision-making process,” she said. “We thought we understood it; over time, it had kind of changed.”
For example, some code was tested on hardware mock-ups that were different than the final designs used in the spacecraft, and engineers never performed a full test from launch to docking, which might have caught the timing error that caused the spacecraft to miss the station.
Boeing built Starliner for NASA’s commercial crew program, which also hired SpaceX to develop a vehicle to carry astronauts to low-earth orbit. SpaceX’s crew Dragon is now docked at the ISS after delivering two astronauts in May. It is expected to complete its final test flight by achieving a safe return in August. Reporters asked NASA officials why SpaceX seemed to go so well compared to Boeing, and they suggested that perhaps they had taken Boeing’s systems engineering chops for granted and focused more of their oversight on the newer firm.
But the question of extra supervision may miss the real difference in how these companies make their spacecraft. SpaceX’s engineering approach grows from a Silicon Valley-inflected style of product development, while Boeing’s is based on the way complex machines were designed in the era before high-powered computing.
NASA’s safety advisory panel described the two companies (pdf) thusly in 2019: “SpaceX focuses on rapidly iterating through a build-test-learn approach that drives modifications toward design maturity. Boeing utilizes a well-established systems engineering methodology targeted at an initial investment in engineering studies and analysis to mature the system design prior to building and testing the hardware.”
Another way to say it is that Boeing relies on “waterfall” system engineering, while SpaceX relies on “agile” systems engineering. These are broad and debated terms that don’t totally capture either company’s culture, but the basic thrust is that Boeing moves linearly from requirements, to design, to test, to build, while SpaceX begins testing earlier, allowing it to modify its design as it moves forward.
This latter approach lends itself well to software development, where iteration doesn’t require physically reassembling a machine, as in engine testing. But it seems to work there, too. In 2018, the NASA safety advisory panel found SpaceX’s novel-to-aerospace approach worth investigating, and documented how the company (pdf) developed an internal tool to track hardware design that could catch human data entry errors and flag anomalous test results across relevant engineering teams.
“SpaceX has allowed NASA almost complete access to this system, and NASA engineers can gain virtually immediate information and insight into the current configuration…[though it] differs somewhat from traditional systems engineering, there is no question that it provides much the same data and does so more quickly,” the outside safety advisors wrote.
The space world gives a lot of credence to “heritage” hardware and methods—if it worked before, it will work again. That idea may need a refresh.
“Software people are kind of strange, over in the corner, and kind of viewed as a service,” Leuders said. “But as we know nowadays, your system is very integrated. Your software capability really drives the capability of the overall system.”
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Imagery Interlude
Before software ate the world, the computers were women, and the software was…also hardware. Here’s a 1953 shot captioned “Mrs. Doris Rudd Porter Baron handling Manometertape, Bell computer” at NASA’s precursor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
👀 Read this 👀
NASA invented the concept of telecommuting, and the agency is a telehealth pioneer as well—keeping tabs on astronauts’ heart rates in space in the 1960s was no mean trick. Today, telehealth includes asynchronous communication, phone and video calls, and monitoring devices that allow doctors to track the health of their patients remotely.
Nearly every field, from dentistry to dermatology, has a remote corollary. But it can be especially natural to practice psychiatry this way: talk therapy, psychological assessment and diagnosis, and medication monitoring all translate well to digital platforms.
Read more about how accelerated adoption of teletherapy has been one of the bright spots in the coronavirus pandemic in our field guide on mental health’s turning point.
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SPACE DEBRIS
OneWeb II. The United Kingdom, alongside the Indian firm Bharti Global, is attempting to purchase OneWeb out of bankruptcy for $500 million. The firm became insolvent while building a megaconstellation of communications satellites in low-earth orbit. The bid, which is expected to be approved in US bankruptcy court this week, is seen in the UK as an effort to build out the country’s space sector after Brexit, particularly to replace the EU’s Galileo navigation and timing satellites. Ironically, the first order of business will be paying a $238 million debt to Arianespace, the EU rocketmaker contracted to launch OneWeb’s spacecraft. Oh, and astronomers aren’t thrilled.
Not enough moon money. The House of Representatives released the first draft of its bill to fund NASA next year, and it did not include $3 billion requested by NASA to get its Artemis moon landing on track by 2024. The space agency just hasn’t articulated a reason why its 2024 deadline matters, and there aren’t any lawmakers making the case, either. Administrator Jim Bridenstine is hopeful that the Republican senate will increase moon funding as budget negotiations continue, which happened in 2019. Still, that final budget also failed to provide the funding the agency says it needs to get back to the moon.
A private ride to a wet moon. The appropriations bill also includes an interesting hint that lawmakers might allow NASA to launch a space probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa on a SpaceX rocket. The mission, which hopes to find evidence of alien life, is currently slated to fly only on a Boeing SLS rocket in 2023—but that rocket still hasn’t flown and costs $1.5 billion a flight. The bill suggests Congress would allow the space agency to launch the probe on a cheaper commercial rocket, likely SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, if SLS isn’t ready in time.
It didn’t happen. Rocket Lab, the leading small satellite launcher, suffered its first operational failure this week and lost seven satellites in the process. The mission, dubbed “Pics or It Didn’t Happen,” included imaging satellites built by Canon and Planet. It’s not yet clear what went wrong with Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, which has flown eleven times since a failure on its first test launch in 2017.
Your pal,
Tim
This was issue 56 of our newsletter. Hope your week is out of this world! Please send your views on appropriate systems engineering for rocket vehicles, ideal scenarios for the future of OneWeb, tips, and informed opinions to tim@qz.com.