Programming Space!

Commission by Chirpy-chi

What is the difference between a missile and a satellite? A missile is either aimed at a point on the ground oh so many kilometers away, with a 50/50 chance of landing within a given radius based on known performance balanced with Murphy’s law, or it uses a seeker to reduce the distance to its target to zero (basically-if I expound I get in trouble here). A satellite uses a comparable amount of fuel and similar thrust (depending on the missile in question: RS-20 yes NO-DONG [never gets old] not so much) and does something completely different-namely not go burny flashy bang kill.

So it must take an enormous amount of processing power to fly one right? WRONG! The basics can be done with consumer level hardware bought from your local dealer. Barring scientific specialization you can run a whole ship off of a decent laptop. *FORESHADOWING* . So the general trend is to stick to what we know works-think how long we have had the Atlas5 the Delta4 the Soyuz the Airiane and the most recently retired Shuttle. Check wikipedia and get a feel for how often their hardware was given an update, hardly ever really. Building the same thing over and over just so you can break it in new ways is never a good sales pitch. But nothing gets to fly if you don’t have a 100% warm and fuzzy that it will work without a hitch.

Controls on the other hand has always been improving, lines of code are much cheaper than designing new parts. And you only have to write it once, after that it’s copy paste. You can test code over and over again without having to worry about wear and tear the same way you would testing fuel mixtures or engine efficiency. You can write new abilities for existing hardware with out physically changing it (though still recommended). And finally you can replace entire hardware systems with nothing but code.

Case in point the ISEE-3 International Comet Explorer probe currently under the control of college students (where was that class when I was in school?) Check them out at spacecollege.org/isee-3/ . You know I don’t know what’s cooler: the fact that they crowd-funded a zombie satellite, or that their mission control is a refurbished Mcdonalds (can’t say I mind the pirate flag in the window XD ). Anyways all of the communication equipment that was used when this thing went up no longer exists and so everything has to be emulated. Thanks to technical data from NASA, help from the staff at the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, and a small list of organizations and Universities, this now awakened satellite is now being readied for its new instructions and its new mission. Compare that to the Heat2X (Copenhagen Suborbitals) static engine test that was canceled yesterday for a bad sensor-sad times.

It is interesting to note that DARPA has recently built a program for the Oculus Rift that would allow a military hacker to conduct cyber-warfare without ever touching a command line. Perhaps this is more than laziness, not many people have the patience to type line after line of code. Learning to code is one thing, actually doing it is another. Could you imagine a symphony of nothing but the recorder flutes you had in elementary school? No doubt you could get a good beat, pace, or melody by the simple number of players available. But what of the richness of sound that separates the Tuba from the xylophone? What of the depth of Beethoven’s fifth? Also great musicians did not always sit still in fixed posture getting tendentious from predictable functions of this tone or that! Each had ways to move with their medium, in dreams, on the walls of their homes, some sing, Lindsey Stirling dances, Einstein broke into a chicks house to play the violin with her at the piano (how could you be pissed at that?).

Elon Musk also put something out with the Occulus in tandem with gesture recognition software which he purported to be the future of designing hardware (I get it I’m a drooling fan boy- suck my hoof!) what is to stop us from applying the same to software? Code is linear, like computer DNA, think of strapping on the soon-to-not-be-motion-sickness-causing goggles and playing sorcerers apprentice with sections of code that we can plug and play like Lego Jenga? We have the Dragon microphone voice-to-text software available at stores in every city that I have had the pleasure to be in and amazon delivers! Why must we be stuck with one instrument when we have the whole symphony to play with(more foreshadowing if you haven’t guessed already)? Why settle for the cubicle when we can make technological mastery the Dance Floor of Legends!

We have more to interact with than just eight fingers and two thumbs, why not use them? Think but for a moment of waving your hands and carving an object out of the air, and from this being able to seeing it come into reality. Not just wire frames and circuit maps but a beating pulse and flexing servos. A transparent artwork only until you hit print-but that comes later ;)