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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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