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Comment by pdelgallego | Hacker News Reader

Are you guys developing any kind of software?

I am a web developer, so I don't know much about C, but I am sure a lot of people here can help if you put a repository.

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Just a head's up. If there are human lives involved and at risk based on software development, it is incredibly, incredibly important that the software go through the highest possible level of testing, including every possible codepath, every input partition, everything. If it crashes midflight due to a bug, there's about nothing you can do about it. And people will die.

Remember that when you're considering developing mission critical software. It is the most dangerous sort of software to write, and needs aggressively comprehensive testing.

I mean this in the most positive fashion possbile, so please don't take it as just snarky assholism:

It's that kind of thinking that would have prevented most of human achievement in the last few hundred years. If the people signing up to ride this open source rocket into space are aware of the risks, then let them take them. That doesn't mean don't put any care and testing into things, but don't turn into NASA when trying to innovate.

There's a difference between a risk-taking pioneering spirit, and needless stupidity.

There's also a difference between accepting the inherent dangers of primitive spaceflight, and being cavalier with people's lives.

I wouldn't consider the knowledge of proper mission-critical testing to be of any sort mission-critical scenario. You can choose to potentially put your people at risk, but I think those decisions should be left to the actual people who will be going up, and not to a person that wants to arbitrarily contribute to it like an open source project. Small patches can have huge consequences.

We (the support organization) only do financial and moral support :-)

But Copenhagen Suborbitals is pretty software heavy - uplinks, sensors, communications, ballistics, etc. require a lot of software. They're extremely busy right now preparing for the June launch, but I'll try to talk to them whether this would be a good idea. It seems like it to me, although safety might be an issue if you have someone "unknown" developing mission critical stuff.

Thanks for the idea!

"Mission Critical"

Like, literally.

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