[RockyMtnMan]

Full article

In other news offshoring IT workers on the rise...

[Billthedrill]

If the thing has a technical problem in space they'll just post their support questions on USENET...

[Notforprophet]

Hope these cats make it, they sound like they will.

[rs79bm]

Should work. Aeronautics and Science have long used programming languages to perform these operations. Albeit, this sounds like the first such one for Linux, which of course now handles most of todays web traffic.

As to your second point....

In other news offshoring IT workers on the rise...

have you ever contacted Dell customer support? Almost of there support is based over seas. It's pretty annoying when you can't even understand the person you're talking to. And, to think Dell prides themselves on customer service. Ok, how about giving me a plain spoken American to handle my questions?

[BioForce1]

A 1965 Univac computer with decrepit Fortran and Assembler can steer a TITAN IV rocket into earth orbit very nicely.

I know because I used to work at Vandenberg AFB testing the software that would control the bird through eight discrete launch events: Core 0 Solid Rocket Motor Ignition, Core 1 Liquid ignition, SRM separation, Core, Shroud Spearation, Core 3, Final shutdown, and Payload separation.  We could hit an accurate part of the sky at a determined velocity every time provided that various problems with the rocket did not force range safety to destroy the thing that we worker bees in beautiful Lompoc California had so lovingly contracted.

The USA went to the Moon six times using what today would be unbelievably primitive computers and software.

The USA has sent orbiters to Venus, flybys to Mercury and every outer planet except Pluto, Landed on mars, and launched most of our satellites using computers and software that would be laughed out of a computer junk dealers office.  The space shuttle uses the UYK 20 for flight control and I believe that computer was obsoleted out by the UYK 44 which was called a $200,000 Comodore 64 back in 1989.

It will be no big deal for the Linux heads to launch a rocket and steer it to a crash landing somewhere in the ocean using Linux.

A similar even was done using relay logic on a Redstone rocket with Alan Sheppard aboard it sometime in the early 1960s

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

As someone who has had great success developing carrier-grade telecom software on Linux platforms (yes, that's a plug), I can say without reservation that the Linux desktop(s) is (are) the most frustrating piece(s) of crap I have ever dealt with.

As a preposterously relevant example, if I hit "post" too soon after "preview," there is a better than even chance that my entire system will lock up and I have to do a manual power off/on. To be fair to the little POS, at least my post seems to take...

[BlazingArizona]

In other news offshoring IT workers on the rise...

At first, Linux-based amateur rocketry will give geeks a nice hobby to occupy their time while out of work. What I would love to see happen next is for some Chinese entrepreneur contracting with one of these teams to put a taikonaut base (or Confucius knows what) on the moon. Good-bye, NASA!

[gitmo]

Penguins in Space!