I've been procrastinating in writing up the rest of my attendance at Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology (SMC-IT) 2009, mostly because there wasn't anything about it that really struck me, besides it being a little disappointing in comparison to the last iteration.

On Day 2, Tuesday, 21 July 2009, Mars Science Laboratory Chief Engineer Robert Manning gave the plenary keynote, "Stealing Success." I thought it was one of the best keynotes of the conference (there was at least one each day). If my fading memory serves, he talked about how difficult it has been for any space agency to land a vehicle on Mars. I hadn't realized just how failure-ridden those endeavors have been. I also hadn't realized how many attempts the Soviets had made. On a related note, I recently watched and enjoyed the Discovery Channel series When We Left Earth via Netflix. I really wish there were a version of that series describing the development of the Soviet space program.

As I had the day before, I spent much of my time on Day 2 in the International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space, attending talks like Multi-Objective Scheduling for Space Science Missions, On-board Plan Modification for Opportunistic Science, and Runtime Goal Selection with Oversubscribed Resources.

That evening I convinced some colleagues to come with me to the first Ignite LA over in Hollywood. The place was packed. We experienced a whirlwind of energetic, oddball and/or fascinating five-minute talks on topics from uranium and DIY unmanned aerial vehicles to humpback whales and optical illusions. It was a fun evening—if only SMC-IT scheduled its talks Ignite-style! Among the better talks was Thomas Edwards' "Getting Physical over IP". Afterward he led us on a walk down Hollywood Boulevard to Gruman's Chinese Theatre, where we checked out the film star footprints. Note to locals: the second Ignite DC is on Thursday, 8 October, and I've already got my ticket.

Hello from Pasadena, California, where I'm attending Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology (SMC-IT) 2009. I arrived in the Los Angeles area yesterday, and before getting settled in Pasadena I stopped in LA's Little Tokyo neighborhood to chow down on a pile of zaru soba and a scoop of matcha ice cream (not nearly as good as homemade) and peruse the shops. As I was driving out of the neighborhood I saw a couple of street musicians playing a sanshin, performing what I think was traditional Okinawan folk music, something that has caught my interest lately for reasons I don't understand. Being a little intimidated by driving in LA, though, I didn't stop, regrettably.

Over dinner on Sunset Boulevard I was glad to have a chance to catch up with Dorkbot DC founder Tom and meet his wife and beagles. My plan tomorrow night is to go see him and a bunch of other fascinating geeks speak at the inaugural Ignite LA.

But I did come for a conference. :) Today my favorite talks were in the International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space, which is sort of integrated with SMC-IT this year. It has been the most applicable to mission operations, the area where I work, of the talks so far. Looking at the conference program this year, it's hard not to notice the preponderance of talks on the technology of sponsor Tilera, whose founder characterized the company's vision as "The 'core' is the logic gate of the 21st century."

The demographics of this conference feel a little different than they did in 2006, when I met a bunch of energetic young people working at NASA Ames Research Center. This year I don't see any of them, and the attendees seem older. The proportion of female speakers is almost certainly lower than you'd find at OSCON to our north this week.

As it was three years ago, perhaps my biggest complaint is about the lack of accessible power outlets in the Pasadena Convention Center. The place just underwent a $150 million expansion, but goddess help you if you need 120 Volts of alternating current.

Three co-workers and I arrived in Los Angeles, California around mid-day on Wednesday of last week. After renting a Ford Edge, driving to Pasadena, checking into the hotel, unpacking, and eating lunch, we were ambivalent about getting ourselves involved in any lengthy tours, but we called our contact at ITT, the contractor that runs the Deep Space Network complexes and networking infrastructure. Our "tour guide" was Lu, one of the Network Operations Project Engineers with whom we occasionally speak in the course of our jobs. He showed us around their offices in Monrovia, where they have a Remote Operations Center and test facilities along with the standard rows of cubicles, all housed in the shiny facilities of a defunct dot-com. We were introduced around to more people than we could possibly remember. For dinner that night, we walked all around Old Town Pasadena before settling on Barney's Beanery.

On Thursday we attended a morning of presentations at ITT on how they support DSN operations, from scheduling and resource allocation (there are thirtysome spacecraft—still including Voyager—competing for time on the antennas) to radio electronics the likes of which I lack the background to understand much.

In the afternoon we toured JPL. They've got a beautiful campus and a renovated Deep Space Operations Control Center (with plenty of room for press and VIPs). Outdoor snack bars dot the campus, reminding us how far sunny California is from temperate Maryland. From viewing galleries we took in high bay cleanrooms where Kepler and the Ocean Surface Topography Mission were being physically assembled. We made de rigeur visits to the gift shop and the (web-invisible?) von Kármán Museum. New to me since my last visit—when the auditorium had been converted into a dining area—was a Voyager display including a model of the spacecraft and visual and audio material from its evocative golden record.

My companions were itching to go to In-N-Out Burger to eat that evening, but I'd already eaten one meal that day at a restaurant whose cuisine I don't like, so I struck out on my own and found Masa, a sushi and sake bar. I enjoyed an oyster shooter, a crunchy spicy tuna roll, an interesting-if-not-genius salmon-and-mango roll, and a bottle of Kurosawa Jun-Mai Kimoto sake, which made the nigh-interminable wait for my bill a little more tolerable. Afterward I stopped by Zephyr for a chai tea and some much-needed liberal company.

Friday was our day to go out into the Mojave Desert and see the big antennas and related infrastructure that constitute Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. From Pasadena/Monrovia it was a three-hour drive, but it didn't seem that long to me, maybe because the landscape was so interesting to watch. It wasn't as flat as I had expected. Apparently the rolling hills (combined with the geographic isolation) helps shield the complex from radio spectrum pollution, to the extent that regulations like the ones that have created the radio quiet zone near Green Bank, West Virginia, are unnecessary. Military activities nearby can interfere with the complex's communications, though, so the military is warned well in advance of any times during which especially critical spacecraft communications are scheduled to occur.

The two of us from the New Horizons mission and two of us from MESSENGER were joined on our tour, once we got there, by about fifteen people from Kepler. Our guide told me my skirt and sandals would be a problem, which certainly wasn't something I anticipated. And being a six-hour round-trip drive from my suitcase, I was peeved—but only until a staff member of about my height and build lent me a pair of jeans, socks, and steel-toed sneakers.

The first antenna we visited was the biggest: the 70-meter dish. It was impressive. In addition to walking around it in awe, we donned hard hats and went up to a platform about two stories high outside and inside its "pedestal". (That's the part where open-toed shoes and a skirt would notionally have been problematic.) We saw the thin, greased shims that keep the structure level and a great many insulated cables. We were allowed to go inside the area inside the pedestal for a short time without hearing protection, but it didn't turn out to be very loud inside. We also got to go inside a small building next to the antenna where the signal processing (and control operations for the whole complex) happens. The control room there is where you can find the DSN operators with whom I talk during each communications session with our spacecraft in order to configure everything right.

After visiting the big antenna, we visited several 34-meter antennas with various sophisticated optics. I think our tour group was a bit too large for us to be able to follow the guide's explanations, so we mostly wandered around inside the equipment rooms underneath the antennas, gawking at the machinery, electronics, and controls. Capping off our tour was a visit to their maser laboratory.

For dinner we walked to Cameron's Seafood, which was okay; the decor at least managed to be marine-themed without veering into Red Lobster kitsch. And that was it: the next morning we got up bright and early and headed to LAX for our flight home, which was late as well as uncomfortable, but it did get us home.

Perhaps the most productive part of the conference, for me, was an informal panel discussion on Tuesday afternoon entitled "Space Communications Researchers and Mission Planners: Shall we talk?" It addressed the dissonance I alluded to in my earlier post between the nifty technical work presented at the conference and the conservative managers who decide whether it gets to fly. The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems was applauded for its work in establishing standards that pave the way to conservative-manager acceptance, with very few staff and very little money. U.S. export laws that define spacecraft technology as "arms" were identified as a big obstacle to collaboration in the spacecraft software community. At the end of the discussion, we vowed to Do Something About It this time and collected names and e-mail addresses.

The talks I attended on Wednesday contained more of the technical details of space communications systems. "Security Considerations in Space and Delay Tolerant Networks" was one of the more interesting, to me, combining some of the network security perspective I'd gleaned from varous security-guru friends with the awesomeness of space. :) Following the talks was a lightning-round of poster presentations, including my brief overview of Andrew Turner's open-source spacecraft simulation software. I was pleased to see some interest in it afterwards.

Wednesday evening was our "night out" at JPL; here are my pictures. We wandered in their museum for a little while, where I was impressed with the immensity of the Galileo spacecraft, based on their full-size mock-up. They also had a cube of aerogel on display, but alas, it was strictly hands-off.

Then it was time to head to their auditorium, set up as a banquet hall and laid out with a sumptuous buffet. I hung out at a table with self-described "protocol people"—I assume that refers to protocols like LTP. The keynote speaker was Steve Kilston, of Ball Aerospace, who presented his vision of "The Ultimate Project - A Plausible Path to the Stars." This would be a spacecraft to be launched in about 500 years, carrying around a million people to some other star system. At first the sheer ambitiousness of this plan (dubbed simply "THE PROJECT") seems stunning, but of course 500 years is a long time. The only other time I've heard about projects on this time scale is from the Long Now Foundation and those planning for warning signs at the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository. I love hearing about this kind of stuff. Here's a pdf of slides very similar to those he showed us, where you can get an idea of the physical form of the suggested spaceship and some rough mass and energy estimates. (On a side note, I think Kilston bears an unmistakable physical resemblance to his one-time research advisor, the late Carl Sagan.) I thought he seemed pretty clear-headed about the challenges and questions about THE PROJECT, including the need for human civilization not only to avoid collapse but, indeed, to advance our understanding of ourselves before we can reach the stars.

My presentation on the Evolution of a Test Process for Spacecraft Software was Thursday morning, and I think it went quite well. Attendance at all the sessions on that last day of the conference lagged, so I was satisfied to see about fifteen people in the audience for my talk, if I recall correctly. They asked plenty of questions at the end, and I got some leads on people to talk to about funding for evaluating software development and testing tools and about lessons learned in this area by people at NASA centers and the like.

SMC-IT wound up on Thursday afternoon with a panel discussion that was a broader version of Tuesday's discussion among network-oriented people. The panelists included people from industry, government, and academia, so a variety of emphases were expressed. Technology infusion was a major theme, again. My attention span was a little taxed by this point, though, so this discussion might have been more valuable than I'm making it sound.

The rest of the evening was spent chilling out, tea shopping (I picked up ilennium [?] green tea and vanilla black tea at Leaforever), and stopping by a Thirza Dafoe performance at Levitt Pavilion that involved dancing with hoops and audience participation and heavy doses of self-acceptance—an only-in-California sort of experience, or so it felt.

So, in conclusion, it was a great conference; I wish it was held more frequently than every three years. I met a bunch of cool people, felt validated in my progressive attitude about spacecraft software development, and experienced California for the first—and certainly not the last—time.