softwacosts

While attempts are being made to rein in the cost of
hardware, software costs are
increasing. The percentage of a space-mission budget
devoted to software has risen
from 5% to 20%, and will soon reach 50%. Goldin points
out that 25 years ago the
Voyager spacecraft had 5000 lines of computer code,
whereas the ISS has 1.4
million lines. "For some of our new missions, we're
projecting 1 billion lines of code."
To improve reliability, Goldin formed the Higher Software
Consortium: "We have
every major software player in the country working with
us to see how you can build
high-assurance software when you have very large, complex
programs."