As NASA starts to wind down their Space Shuttle activity in the next three years, the space agency's effort to return to the Moon has been ramping up quietly in the background. With their new Orion/Ares space vehicle combination, crew automation will definitely be on the top of software priorities for NASA. But with a much smaller budget and shorter timescale than the last lunar attempt, would NASA and its contractors embrace new approaches and techniques so our tax dollars are better spent? Can Dan Goldin's "Faster, Better, Cheaper" approaches be finally achieved?

A couple of months ago I was fortunate enough to join ThoughtWorks, a company that advocates the use of Agile software development practices (Extreme Programming, Scrum, TDD, etc.) to bring business value to our customers. I have been using Agile practices on my previous project for over three years and it had proved to be highly successful. And ThoughtWorks' experience in this area proves that Agile can also be applied successfully on large enterprise software projects. But can Agile be used on a highly mission-critical software project such as the one for the Orion spacecraft?

Over ten years ago my first programming job was for small software company developing real-time, safety critical software for controlling railway trains. The work we did was the embodiment of the Waterfall model. The system requirements were collected and analyzed. The model was designed and validated. Then we mere programmers set out to write code to realize the model. Huge amount of unit tests and integration tests were created to make sure our code did what the model said it should do. All the while, the project manager kept track of our progress to ensure that, hopefully, we delivered the product on time and on budget.

At first glance, Agile sounds like a good fit with this type of project where requirements are generally very well defined and correctness are paramount. Short iteration and test-driven development will ensure features are delivered often and proved to be working by the unit tests. Continuous integration means there will be fewer surprises as multiple systems are joined up to work with together. The costs of requirement changes will be reduced and can be implemented quickly, rather than in the next version.

But would the world of safety /mission critical software development, dominated by engineers and scientists, be receptive to the less rigid world of Agile development? Would they feel that without the top down approach, its highly structured development process, and the tightly prescribed set of delivery artifacts, the project delivery cannot be guaranteed?

I would love to hear from people who have more recent experiences in this area of software development with regard to Agile. Is it being used, is it being used widely, and how effective it has been?

About a hundred years ago the Industrial Revolution transformed the lives of millions of people. The invention of steam power, telegraph, electricity and the like freed people from labor intensive jobs and let them spend their energy on improving living standards. The focus of the industrial revolution was on new mechanical inventions. It wasn't until the invention of the transistor in the 50's that the next phase of technological revolution was kicked into high gear. The advent of the electronic age further improved the mechanical machines and allowed us new methods of communications. Now, computer software dominates large aspect of our daily life.

The same pattern is happening with the environmental technology movement. As we move to a greener future, all our focus and efforts are directed towards mechanical improvements to existing technology, such as the use of fuel cells or bio-fuels over fossil fuel, or the replacement of environmentally harmful materials with bio-degradable materials.

Microsoft and NASA have released high resolution images of the space shuttle Endeavor. Microsoft's Photosynth web viewer stitches together hundreds of high quality images to present a 3D view of items including Endeavor at the launch pad, the space shuttle Atlantis, and NASA's vehicle assembly building.

All told, there are four image libraries made up of thousands of images. To be honest, the interface is a little confusing at first. As you click on the arrows and images, you move from one photo to another. But after you get the hang of it, you can drag and drop the images, smoothly zoom in and out of photos, and flip between alternate views of the space shuttle.

It's not your usual 3D display, in that you can't easily get a 360 degree view of the space shuttle just by dragging your mouse, but the photos are stitched together in such a way that you can see pretty much all there is to see, right down to the people working on the launch pad.

It's always interesting to take a dive into the lives of successful web based entrepreneurs to see what made them, and what their lives are like. Of course the guys behind Google are no exception. Larry and Sergey went from Stanford Ph.D. dropouts with an idea in a garage and went on to form a multi-billion dollar search company. If you are into Google and Entrepreneur life, you might be interested in spending a few minutes reading through Mark Malseed's report on the life of Sergey Brin.

Mark mentions interesting facts from how Sergey and Larry share an office in a far corner away from the public eye in the Googleplex like they did back in the garage days. He describes the office environment and how it resembles a large adult play area with the latest tech devices and comfortable seating arrangements scattered about. (but of course we knew that.)

Mark also had the chance to sit down with Sergey's parents in the suburbs of Washington DC to talk with his Father, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his Mother a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Both of his parents still cannot believe the success that Google has achieved, and how many people it has helped by saving large amounts of time and energy. Mr. and Mrs. Brin take readers on a tour of Sergey's childhood, and how this lead to co-founding a web based company that changed the world forever.

Google and Nasa officially announced their special Space Act Agreement Monday. Through this new relationship, both companyies and government agency will work on technical problems that face large scale data management and human-computer interfaces. Google and NASA's Ames Research Center's first focus will be to make NASA's information readably available on the internet, namely real time weather tracking, high-res 3D maps of the moon and mars, and real time tracking of the International Space Station. This partnership, which began in September of last year, was a long while coming, but now that it's actually in the works, it's getting a lot of people excited at the possibilities that both organizations bring to the table in the long run.

[Update: Thanks to Jeremy for reminding me that NASA is still a government agency, and hasnt made the switch over to a company as of yet! ]

In a more nerdy bit of news, NASA has named Future Air traffic management Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET) the software of the year. The program helps plan aircraft trajectories and manage air traffic across the US. NASA started the "software of the year" award in 1994, and aims to honor excellent software created for the agency, such as FACET. The FACET program has been licensed to Flight Explorer (a commercial aviation company), and facets of FACET have been incorporated into tools used by 500 flow managers across the country. The selection criteria for the award includes:

• Science and technology significance of the software and its impact on NASA's mission
• The extent of potential use
• The usability of the software
• The quality factors considered in the software
• Intellectual property factors, such as patents and copyrights
• Innovation of the software
  (excerpted from NASA's official news release on the award)
  

Congratulations to the Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California for winning the award.

Edward Tufte is a master of communication. In particular, his books on visual communication are classics, and should be standard readings for anyone in the field. Well I happened to find an essay on Tufte's site about PowerPoint, and specifically, how the slides used in a presentation on the dangers to the shuttle Columbia might have led to the death of its crew. Tufte analyzes the PowerPoint presentations made to NASA, by Boeing engineers. He points out deficiencies in the communications, and how the optimism in the presentation (not necessarily in its content, if you read it all) led NASA to not ask the DOD to take high-res pictures of the underside of Columbia while it was still in space. I still have an old book called "How To Lie with Statistics" from the 50's. Anyone in the dot-com boom can tell you how easy it is to lie with PowerPoint (or in Steve Jobs' case, Keynote). But the possibility of a miscommunication when lives are at stake makes PPT's a little more suspect. Perhaps, as the author suggests, PowerPoint isn't always the best tool for the job...

Desktop Earth is an oldie, but a real goodie. It allowed you to display a globe or map on your desktop that would move according to the time, either keeping your location centered with light changing to show the relative position of the sun, or showing from the sun's perspective with the earth rotating or moving by.

While very cool, Desktop Earth is extremely long in the tooth. Luckily, a new version has been released, dubbed appropriately Desktop Earth 2.0. In the new version, the imagery is based on NASA's Blue Marble Next and Earth's City Lights, and is generated from very high-resolution textures (2560x1280).