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.
Earlier this year, a nimble bit of on-the-fly software engineering saved a moon landing mission. Engineers at a company called Intuitive Machines realized that sensors on their lunar lander had never been turned on, meaning their Odysseus spacecraft was essentially flying blind, unable to scout the moon’s rocky and hilly landscape for a safe landing place.
“We started looking at what it would take to basically hotwire the system,” James Blakeslee, a software architect at the company, said in an interview. To buy time, the team decided to fly the spacecraft around the moon one more time while the coders tested their software update on a simulator. “We worked out in the backroom and the developer that was in charge of it, he wrote it down on a Post-it note and ran it into the front room,” Blakeslee said.
Perhaps no space company values software development more than Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Its giant rocket boosters fly back to Earth, landing on autonomous ships at sea or landing pads on land. Its Dragon spacecraft flies itself to the space station, relegating the astronauts onboard to little more than passengers.But SpaceX has had its share of nail-biters that required a bit of improvisational creativity. In 2013, a Dragon spacecraft had a few valves stuck while it was approaching the space station.
That’s where Bennett and his Starfish team found themselves last summer, with their spacecraft tumbling. Called Otter Pup, the spacecraft was supposed to detach itself from what’s known as an “orbital transfer vehicle,” or OTV, a separate spacecraft that acts like a tugboat and brings it to a certain location in space.
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