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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Wait, they're doing this by hand? Production deployments to a computer on a different planet? In the 21st century? If there's one deploy I'd want to automate the hell of (and test, over a 2 baud network), it's this one.

It's not like these guys never did a remote software update before. So I must be missing something.

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It depends on what you my by "doing it by hand." The update process is "automated" in the sense that it's completely scripted. Every step is known ahead of time, and has been extensively tested on ground-based duplicates of the flight hardware. The only aspect of the process that is done "by hand" is "pushing the big red button" to initiate the next step of the process, and even this is a very stylized and well rehearsed process. The only reason for having even this step of the process be manual is so that humans can assess the situation between steps and satisfy themselves that nothing has gone wrong with one step before proceeding to the next. That's the real challenge in a situation like this: your communications link is operating on the hairy edge of the limits imposed by the laws of physics, so lots of things can go wrong in production that worked in rehearsal.

i see! Thanks for the clarification. And, makes a lot of sense.

Who said they're doing it by hand? It takes 28 minutes to receive feedback from anything, so they're going very slowly and monitoring what happens.

What is your proposal to automate this? Remember there is very large delay and blackouts that happen.

After they do it by hand several times, sure automate it.

Automate it in a test environment that simulates production as closely as possible. Once the automated software updates work flawlessly under various conditions, use that in production.

Then an unexpected condition happens and the automated response breaks something badly, and suddenly your expensive robot is now an expensive piece of junk.

What makes you think they haven't already tested the hell out of it?

We are not talking about some machine in amazon cloud there. We are talking about the robot on the freaking Mars.

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