The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
stackoverflow.blog
The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
1–10 of 112 posts
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#2If someone from SpaceX is reading (after 5pm, of course), can we get a more nitty-gritty of what's going on software-wise on your end? I'd love to see what control and embedded wizardry you guys are up to.
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#3I appreciate that they might not be able to share but I was hoping for a bit more source code and technical details given where this is posted.
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#4They're not running a dependency-ridden NodeJS backend with MongoDB and random cloud services? How are they even able to get to space?
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#5Interesting that they are doing updates at only 10 and 50Hz. I had kinda assumed they'd be looking at much higher frequencies for telemetry especially for things like the rocket motor metrics
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#6Interesting that they are doing updates at only 10 and 50Hz. I had kinda assumed they'd be looking at much higher frequencies for telemetry especially for things like the rocket motor metrics
I thought that too initially, but if you think about the physics it makes sense.. the larger the mass the more stable the object, the lower the frequency of acceleration needed to adjust it's trajectory. Also even though it's dynamic, it's not articulated or anything like dynamic robots.
Take the opposite, a little quad copter, very low mass, will need very high frequencies. I used to manually fly miniature remote control helicopters before all of the automatic control stuff came in, they were extremely, inherently unstable, very tricky to control.
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#7It is fascinating that they solve robustly 50 times per second a control problem and handle gracefully numerical issues. Granted they have dedicated hardware to do so that fast, but it never stops to amaze me.
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#8If someone from SpaceX is reading (after 5pm, of course), can we get a more nitty-gritty of what's going on software-wise on your end? I'd love to see what control and embedded wizardry you guys are up to.
There is a Reddit AmA by SpaceX software team that has some important details!
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#9Interesting that they are doing updates at only 10 and 50Hz. I had kinda assumed they'd be looking at much higher frequencies for telemetry especially for things like the rocket motor metrics
I found this also interesting. I can see how it simplifies the mathematics to use a fixed time interval.
Can anyone experienced comment if 10Hz is very different or the same as vehicle control systems such as a modern car?
Also, are these systems fixed or floating point? Fixed time intervals would help keep numerical instability of floats in check (however I'd really hope this is more formally understood for such a safety-critical system.)
Re: The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
#10 > ...when you plan to reuse booster rockets and shuttles on future missions.