Goodbye Endeavour
It seems just like yesterday when the Space Shuttle Endeavour had her first mission in space. That was 1992. Those of you who know me, know that I worked as a NASA contractor from ’89 – ’96 writing GN&C software for the space shuttle fleet, writing applications for the mission control centers around the world and laptops used onboard the shuttles and space station. Thousands of other people have similar, if not closer, connections to Endeavour.
Endeavour was the first shuttle to fly with an upgraded nose-wheel steering. This is particularly personal for me, having spent about 9 months implementing the software to take advantage of those upgrades. Many thousands of lines of code and some Karnaugh mapping to speed the boolean decisions. Many thanks to Henry for pointing this dumb ASE to that logic simplification technique. I recall during the code review at IBM-FS that nobody had checked those lines of code for 100% accuracy due to the complexity. They announced it. A peer on my team had validated it by creating exactly the same equation himself (thanks BW!) and we tested every possible combination of inputs to validate we met requirements 100%. It passed. Running that many tests was a major team effort with all the other coders jumping in to save me from missing the deadline for weeks. I doubt anyone has touched that code ever since.
I have fond memories of walking around building 30, working on the FCR computers, servers and working with the different flight controllers. This week, I found myself re-watching the HBO From the Earth to the Moon series. It brought back more memories even if some of the places aren’t 100% accurate. I also recall watching the Apollo 13 movie on opening day, surrounded by NASA flight controllers at a local movie theater on NASA Rd 1 in Webster, Tx. Yes, we saw it during work hours. Together, we changed the world for the better.
Anyway, Godspeed Endeavour. Here’s wishing that you only exercise the nose-wheel steering and elevon flight control code that I implemented for smooth landings and none of the other code – mostly for when really bad things are happening.
The launch is scheduled for around 3:47 pm today. I always hold my breath (not really) during a launch. Going into space is a dangerous business the way we currently do it.
Different View of Space Shuttle Costs
In a BBC article about the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing the author mentioned a few statistics.
A Few Statistics
*First flight: 3 October 1985
*Total number of flights: 32
*Distance traveled: 195 million km
*Total number of days in orbit: 294
*Total number of orbits: 4,648
Cost Estimates
So if we assume that each shuttle launch and mission costs NASA about $450M on average, that leads to a few other operational cost numbers.
- $14,400M for 32 flights
- $48.98M for each day in orbit
- $3.1M for each orbit
These are just the costs for Atlantis while on mission. These numbers make my next vacation plans seem tiny. ;)
Disclosure: I was employed by the space shuttle program for 5 yrs and by both the shuttle and space station programs for 3 years. I worked at NASA-JSC in Houston, Tx for both of those jobs.
