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NASA Culture versus Corporate Culture



 
 
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Old September 6th 04, 07:18 PM
Zoltan Szakaly
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Default NASA Culture versus Corporate Culture

My experience is that a large portion of the NASA budget is spent on
payroll.
There are many more people doing a project than are necessary. About
90% of
the people do not actually cut metal, design circuits or solder wires.
Many
of the people have advanced ideas and complex thinking, but all they
do is
write fancy papers.

This situation is analogous to software development. Actual
software development means familiarity with the hardware, the
instruction set,
the assembly language of a processor. This requires sweat and blood,
persistent
and intense study and hard work. Instead people learn advanced
concepts in
our colleges, like polymorphism, object oriented languages, high level
programming. This makes it easy for anyone to write software that
actually
does not work, cannot be fixed if it crashes, takes up a 1000 times
the memory
that it should and executes 100 times slower than it could. If you
analize
such modern software you will find that when a function needs to do
something like draw a line or erase the screen or compute a sine
value, invariably it
calls another function to do this. If you find this other function, it
will
also call yet another function, this repeating to a level of nesting
of maybe
ten. Your typical code contains 90% of useless junk and under 10%
beef.

Your typical NASA engineer will buy hardware then try to plug it
together and
write high level software to try to make it work. When it does not,
the project
gets cancelled to avoid embarrasment. A new project is started by
purchasing
new boards and writing new software using the OOPS paradigm.

NASA needs to lay off a lot of people so the rest can get somewhere.
They
should keep the engineers who actually cut metal, weld and solder,
design
circuit cards and write assembly software. To conquer space we don't
need any
fancy advanced knowledge, just high school math and physics. We could
do it
with slide rules 30 years ago.

With my modest effort funded by my own money I will probably get to
the Moon
before NASA does. The only competition I have to worry about is guys
like
Rutan.

Zoltan

 




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