On Thursday 31st of January 2002 at 19:20:41 +1100 Alan Brain emailed: "[..] BTW today was my last day working as leader of the On-Board Software Development on FedSat (Australia's First R&D Satellite in 25 years)." What an atrocious treatment of valuable human resources. "That's the trouble with Ada - the software works reliably first time, and the developers are out of a job till the next project comes along : there's almost no maintenance effort compared with the initial development." Having come from an onboard software maintenance department, I can say that though Ada is excellent the user perception of developers wanting to hop onto a brand new project would be changed if they provided a reliable; elegant; and safe way of modifying the software in flight without having to resort to assembly and manual task rescheduling.