Good afternoon, dear friends.
I'm happy to greet you here today on this amazing event
dedicated to the outer space, and I'd like to talk to you
about the role of information technologies in the exploration of space
in the past as well as the future.
The outer space, the light of stars – what could've been be more attractive
to people throughout the history of humanity?
What could be more fascinating than the sight of the starry skies
on a fair summer night full of myriads of stars and run through
with the traces of shooting stars? I'm sure that every one of us
has at least once seen this mesmerizing picture, and different thoughts occurred to all of us.
Perhaps, someone imagined other planets;
others pictured themselves other galaxies, millions of light years away from us;
or imagined their astral or physical bodies overcome the space-time continuum.
But maybe, and that may appear even more strange, personally
I've always imagined thousands of lines of a program code on an orbit
which did its job so efficiently and correctly,
that brought us closer to the secrets of the outer space.
By the way, here's an interesting and at the same time amusing thought:
computer programs were the first ones to go into space and who knows,
perhaps the phrase that's known to all programmers - “Hello World” -
could be quoted instead the famous Gagarin's expression “Let's go!”.
But seriously, let's think over the role of information technologies
in the history of space exploration. In outer space and here on Earth
the most complicated information systems performed a seemingly invisible job –
calculating the trajectories of rockets, diagnosing and monitoring
the operation of satellites, controlling the operation of space stations
and a lot of other things. And I must say that projecting and developing
such systems have always been tasks of the utmost difficulty,
a real challenge to scientific thought. The capacity of processors,
the main memory capacity, the computational load, any other parameters
of those systems on orbit have always been very strict.
The price of a mistake was so high that it made the risks of developing software extremely high.
Another part of the problem that engineers and programmers of the past were facing
was that here on Earth they had to project and build powerful centers
of data processing that would collect, organize and process information
from the outer space. For your information, the size of those centers
was such that they could occupy a few halls such as this.
The total weight of those computers together with the peripheral equipment
and any other necessary elements of computer systems could reach many tones.
And the teams that were needed to maintain those systems amounted to tens of people.
The history of the use of IT to the benefit of space exploration begins in the 1950-s.
One of the first companies to cooperate with international space agencies,
NASA in particular, was IBM. I have to say that the contribution
that IBM has made to the exploration of outer space is hard to underestimate.
Since 1944, IBM has taken part in more than 40 NASA projects;
its technological solutions have been used in the projects of research
of the surfaces of Mercury, Saturn, in the Apollo programs.
In spite of the Iron Curtain, the company took part in joint projects
of space exploration with the USSR; in the launching of shuttles.
And this list is far from being complete. But one of the most striking examples
that I should give is the participation of IBM in the Apollo 11 project,
which, as you know, was the mission of landing the first humans on the Moon.
IBM provided for NASA a complex of machines that had been built
based on an architecture that was, at the time, revolutionary – a series of IBM 360 systems.
And those complexes proved to be secure computing systems,
allowing NASA  to make a phenomenal breakthrough in the history of space
so that we could come a little closer to understanding our surroundings.
But what is happening now? What IT tendencies influence the space programs
of the present day and what awaits us in the future?
As you now, nowadays the world of IT is experiencing a period of rapid growth;
technologies are becoming a pervasive factor in almost all the aspects of our life,
becoming, in fact, its inseparable component.
Of all the most prominent areas I'd like to focus your attention on the
social technologies of the Internet or the so called social media and on cloud computing.
I'm sure that nearly every one of those present has an account
on some popular social network like Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, or maybe Vkontakte,
has a personal blog or is an active Tweeter user.
By the way, are there such people here?
Great, now's the perfect time to update your Tweeter status.
It's become a normal and quite an ordinary part of our lives,
but the amazing thing is that official NASA space programs –
their participants and managers also have official accounts on Facebook and Tweeter.
And today any Internet user can receive information
on what is going on in the world of space exploration almost real-time.
You can find the actual participants of those programs,
exchange your ideas with them and, what's important, be heard.
You have to agree, even 20 years ago it was hard to imagine, but today,
on Tweeter for example, you can find  the current engineering manager of NASA,
learn what technical development tendencies he sees as priority and promising,
get to know what his team is doing and maybe even talk to him.
To me, it's crystal clear that social media make the world
of space exploration much less isolated than before.
They erase the information barriers and are becoming an important catalyst
in the popularization of research programs in our society.
A great example of this tendency is the NASA project called “Be a Martian”.
This project is absolutely unique. It offers every Internet user by
registering on the site to take part in certain research programs,
official NASA research programs, the studying of planet Mars in particular.
And today, as far as I know, there are about 54 000 people registered on this site.
Even if we suggest that not all those people take an active part in the projects, anyway,
it's a huge team – and I want to point out that they're ordinary people, not specialists –
who live in different countries, are of different ages, speak different languages,
but who are united by the same idea – the exploration of outer space.
Another important technological concept that is one of the most discussed nowadays
is cloud computing. The model of cloud computing for projecting dispersed,
easily scalable, available on the Internet and economically effective systems
is perfect for space programs, which, specific as they are,
require the ability to operate big data arrays, to have big computational power
and to be available from any place in the world.
I have to say that NASA have already realized the efficiency and the advantages
of this approach and they are slowly introducing it to several of their projects.
For example, one of the well known projects is the research
of the surface of Mars with the help of the Spirit and Opportunity robots.
This project was launched quite a long time ago, in 2004,
and from the point of view of engineers participating in this project
the model of cloud computing fits best to provide its functioning.
And what is especially important, it can enable its further development.
The thing is that during the time spent by the robots on the surface of Mars
they managed to gather so much information that it exceeded the initial plans.
And so the question is posed: how the IT infrastructure of this project
and the database servers would be able to handle
the torrent of information that continues to grow?
Because of that NASA re-engineered those systems
and together with the Amazon company, one of the biggest companies
providing cloud computing services, developed a whole series of decisions
that were introduced to that program and are now used quite effectively.
Another example is of a larger scale –
in fact, it's the evolution of NASA's own information structures.
Currently, NASA is developing its own cloud computing platform that would enable it
to gain all the advantages provided by cloud computing.
The second project, a symbolic one, that NASA is developing
together with the Rackspace company is the OpenStack project.
It's destined to help overcome some of the difficulties that exist in the cloud computing
model, like an open standard and a convenient migration from one cloud to another.
In conclusion, I'd like to tell you that social media, cloud computing and open standards
are not the only ones, but without doubt the most important catalysts of the success
of space programs in the future. Hybrid ecosystems of independent developers,
of NASA employees, of the Russian Federal Space Agency
and many other space agencies will be an important factor in the building
of space IT structures of the future. It's hard to predict the exact course of events,
but I know one thing for sure – dream, look up at the sky, fantasize,
and your talent will find its way to the stars! Thank you.
