I guess I should say something about Columbia. I feel bad for the astronauts and their families and I admire the sacrifice they made. It takes an extraordinary person to take a risk like that even if the reward is great.

... but the engineer in me looks at Columbia like one big complicated system. If the human race is ever going to get off this planet, we're going to need more complicated systems than a space shuttle. And you can bet these systems are going to have more and more software in them. This should worry the software profession -- a profession typically concerned with a quality level somewhere around "good enough as long as we can still get the product out the door without too many people noticing any problems we've missed."

I personally would like to create software I can be confident will work really well and reliably. Otherwise, value may be there in the short term but not the long term. There have to be better ways to create quality software without taking eons to test it. We should use a computer's power against itself, so to speak, to do this. People will demand this quality from software engineers just as from any other engineering profession, and not just in the space exploration industry.