In a previous generation, the stars of the Space Age were the astronauts, men of military training and “Right Stuff” bearing who would be expected to tackle whatever problem arose in space and find a solution. Today, it’s the software engineers and computer scientists.
The robotic spacecraft was spinning wildly. The first mission of Trevor Bennett’s spunky space start-up seemed doomed.Over several weeks, they drew up algorithms on whiteboards, ran computer simulations and hardware tests and devised a solution: By reprogramming the satellite’s software, theyearly one morning last July, they pressed send, shooting the software fix from Starfish headquarters in Seattle to a ground station in Norway to the spacecraft 335 miles above Earth — hoping it would work.
During a briefing with reporters earlier this year, CEO Steve Altemus recalled delivering the news to Tim Crain, his chief technology officer and mission director.“I said, ‘Tim, we’re going to have to land without laser range finders,’ ” Altemus said. “And his face got absolutely white, because it was like a punch in the stomach that we were going to lose the mission.”
The spacecraft landed on its side after catching one of its legs, a partial success that allowed the company to claim the first lunar landing by a commercial venture — and the first by the U.S. since the last of the Apollo missions in 1972.when Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was in trouble. The spacecraft’s onboard computer system was 11 hours off, meaning it was executing commands for an entirely different part of the mission while burning precious fuel.
As is often the case, that fix was not the result of writing entirely new code from scratch, Tripathi said, but rather tweaking existing code to produce new outcomes. It also came after engineers tested the software extensively before beaming it up to the spacecraft. If all went well, the tug would release Otter Pup, which would then fly itself back to the tug and reattach itself — a demonstration that Otter Pup could dock itself to satellites in space and move them to different orbits, or even repair and service them to extend their lives.“It literally did a whole spin every second — all the way around,” Bennett recalled in an interview. “And somebody was like, ‘Oh, one revolution per second, that must be a typo. They must mean one degree per second.
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