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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

If you find yourself coming up with a NASA-style solution, that's a pretty good indicator something is going horribly wrong. NASA-style architectures are non-modular, highly complex, non-reusable, bureaucratic, inefficient, difficult to test, high maintenance, and high risk solutions.

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The priority-based process scheduler says "Hi."

Like being able to run multiple things on your computer without having the less-important tasks block more important tasks? Thank the Apollo computers.

You misunderstood my comment. I didn't say "nothing good ever came out of NASA".

For every billion-dollar probe that comes in over budget, NASA tends to have a thousand little tidbits that end up getting reused over and over.

The topic is taking a run at the perennial arguments about monolithic vs. incremental development and ad-hoc vs. recyclable solutions - but NASA isn't really a great whipping boy for this one.

As I tried with the other responses to criticisms of my original post, I'd like to steer away from blanket judgements about NASA. While I personally believe there are a lot of systemic dead-ends, wasteful processes and general mismanagement going on and that this in combination with a widespread anti-science stance in politics is responsible for the failure of our space program (as defined against my completely arbitrary vision of what could have been achieved in this area) - I originally intended to make a statement about my much more personal experience that huge, complex (...) software projects are a recipe for failure: sure, you can still pull it off if you're Microsoft or IBM or SAP, but most of us are not.

Edit: Also offtopic, but I feel compelled to answer this:

  [..] NASA tends to have a thousand little tidbits that 
  end up getting reused over and over.

I would go even further than that and assert that we shouldn't be aligning science and space exploration with the derivation of practical applications in mind at all. It should be done regardless. I'm not one of these "let's concentrate on terrestrial problems first" Earth-isolationists. Quite the opposite: my criticism of NASA is that there has been too little actual science and exploration.

NASA does both science and the engineering necessary to achieve the science. You can do something for its own sake and still achieve more pragmatic benefits.

Okay, I give up - this isn't remotely related to anything I said or wanted to say :-)

High Risk is exactly wrong. The need for extreme caution (in the face of world-wide publicity for mis-steps in the space race) are what lead to many of their other 'sins'.

Now that the problem has been 'solved' by the pioneers, the follow-on players have it relatively easy.

> NASA-style architectures are non-modular, highly complex, non-reusable, bureaucratic, inefficient, difficult to test, high maintenance, and high risk solutions.

Source?

History.

Right, but, given the amount of incredibly useful products and discoveries that have come out of NASA's "inefficient, non-modular, non-reusable, difficult-to-test" architectures (see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-...), I think such a broad statement about the way NASA works deserves a little more qualification than a witty one-word answer, don't you?

There is no question that NASA did produce some incredible useful things and made very cool discoveries (otherwise I'd have added the lack of those to my list), but the fact remains that NASA due to the way it operates and approaches projects did a lot less than what it could have achieved and ultimately presided over the long and painful death of the US space program.

But my comment wasn't even meant to highlight NASA's historically documented failures. Instead it was meant to illustrate what kind of project properties are not appropriate for software projects. I was making a statment to the effect that it should be considered a big warning sign if projects are structured like the space shuttle program.

On a final offtopic note about commenting style: you're complaining about deserving more than a witty one-word answer, yet you have no problem with making comments that consist of a passive-aggressive one-word question, do you? Let's keep it friendly, even if we disagree.

A lot of the alleged NASA spinoffs are vastly overrated or incorrectly attributed to NASA. Overall the spinoff benefits do not justify the enormous cost of, especially, NASA manned spaceflight and thus aren't a good argument for its continued existence. Trying to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in expenses with hand-held vacuum cleaners and better golf balls is patently ridiculous.

The only good argument is the direct one: it's something we want to do and something we should do for its own reasons and merits. Personally I believe that to be the strongest argument and also a perfectly adequate argument.

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