[duckfruit]

Essentially a

  throw new RuntimeException(e)

for rockets?

As a fellow engineer, I sympathize.

[skipkey]

I vaguely remember reading about that actually happening some years ago. Control system written in C++, bad data comes in from a sensor causing a floating point exception which was not caught locally, and the outermost catch code was basically, “explode the rocket”.

Might have been in the c++ Users Journal or Dr Dobbs in the late 90s.

[trothamel]

Probably the first flight of Ariane 5:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

[TylerE]

Kind of, but it's almost worse. More like a subsystem that reboots the machine if you run out of disk space or some other such "something is probably really wrong, but I can't prove it" sort of telemetry signal. Given that it seems to have been trigged by the pitchover manouver, likely something went a bit outside guidelines. Who knows how conservative those are? With an unmanned rocket they tend to lean towards pushing the big red button early and often.

A failed launch is bad. Drop a booster on an elementary school, and your nation is probably down attempting to go to space.

[ackbar03]

whoever wrote that line of code has the coolest job in the world.

try: launch_rocket()

except: explode_rocket()