With the 40 year anniversary of the first moon landing this week, there has been a lot of articles and news about NASA and the Apollo program. One thing that struck me in a story on NPR last night was the fact that immediately after Apollo 11, a major exodus began at NASA. The best and brightest leaders moved on and were replaced by more cautious management centric people. Sound familiar? The goal had been achieved, they put man on the moon, they shipped their product and got the IPO. Time to find another challenge.

The Apollo program at NASA was effectively a high tech startup complete with defined goals, good funding, brilliant leaders with huge egos (von Braun, Faget et al..), great technology and a esprit des corps that made the work paramount to all else.

The remainder of the Apollo program was a success - carried on by inertia much like a company that follows up an initial product with a similar design with a few tweaks. The visionaries and risk takers were gone though and NASA settled into large corporation mode - still producing new technology, you can argue that the production of new and innovative products was greater post Apollo but the direction and focus was (is?) less precise.

It’s a natural cycle then that now with the X-Prize and other private space ventures coming to light, we see folks that have made money in high tech (or other endeavors) going back to fund and run space startups.

The entrepreneurial personality type is what is needed to drive significant progress in any space but maybe even more so in space itself.

Embedded.com just ran a nice story about debugging serial busses in FPGAs: http://tinyurl.com/kltw7y

I agree with the article but cannot always afford the luxury of a new high end scope to capture the serial stream for easy debugging and instead rely on the FPGA vendor supplied logic analysis tools (Altera / Signal Tap) by adding a simple shift register to capture bytes or if the serial stream is slow speed, adding an LSF core called “Monitor” that captures the serial data internally and streams byte values in ASCII through a UART to a serial port.

Coupling that to a terminal program (Hyperterm or Tera term) allows you to capture and log the data being streamed in the chip. Check the downloads page here shortly for the release of the monitor code. I plan on making it freely available.