NASA taps Unisys for flight sim mission

Here's a job you probably wish you had. Unisys has just been tapped by NASA's Langley Research Center to provide application development and systems integration services for the space agency's simulators and flight research projects. The contract has a potential value of $48.5m. More than a decade ago, NASA Langley (which is …

[Lars]

Many have tried

"If NASA took the LaSRS++ software open source, it could probably get a bunch of geeks to do the support for free. Just a thought in the spirit of cost cutting."

But it is not that easy, and will not happen.

[Francis Boyle]

And one has suceeded

Already been done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiter_sim

OK, not strictly open source, but hell, this is a highly realistic simulator that is the work of one man. Imagine what a open source project could do.

[Adam White]

Or better yet...

...if Unisys took the software open source, it could get a bunch of geeks to do the support for free and still charge NASA $48.5m for the privelege.

[BraveOak]

title

As the article "Met confirms secret Gov forecast of Brass Monkey winter" has a disabled comments section and is clearly biased I rated it as "absolutely terrible"

[Andrew Norris]

The truth is in there

But if they took it open source, people would start asking why there is a flying saucer simulation module. And with budget cuts, NASA only has one guy in a black suit to take care of that sort of stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

But I understand that one guy

makes the suit look good.

[Anonymous Coward]

the NASA flight simulator

OOOHHH!!!!! I wan't to see if I CAN LAND ON THE MOON...

I've done the rest, like dead-stick landing a 747 from 35k

[Graham Marsden]

"60 to 95 percent of the code...

"...used to simulate one aircraft to be used to simulate another."

I'm sure a lot of governments and military organisations could (and should) learn a *lot* from this!!

[John Smith 19]

65-90% code re-use

Am I alone in considering that to be a *very* impressive level of code re-use?

Or is that *normal* if you factor OO code properly?