It makes perfect sense that NASA used a lot of open source software for this. If some high quality, widely used and tested code already exists, why not use it instead of trying to reinvent everything?
Oh, the badge tells, you... Hmm, let's see, it says "attrs". That's not mine, I must have submitted a PR at some point, let me find it.
Ah, right. I changed "serious business aliases" to "serious-business aliases" in the README.
You guys are all welcome.
There were redundant paths with redundant hardware, and the node I worked on wasn't particularly important, but I got a taste of what the engineers and scientists at NASA must live for, the sense of contributing to something historic, profound, and deeply human.
The fix was simple at the end, a firmware rollback and disabling further updates, and most of the time was consumed in conversation and carefully assessing each step and action, but I count it as a high point in my career. Just to touch the edge of it was special.
The people whose code and engineering get sent to space are contributing to the betterment of mankind, literally making the universe a better place. Kudos to those guys. To write code that's part of a critical system is a meaningful in a way
This is precisely the spirit of free software and the motivation behind movements like public money public code. Govermnets immensely overpay for software (projects).