It&#x27;s more that software is becoming a dominant factor in everything. Which is both good and bad. It&#x27;s bad in that insufficient effort and process is going into ensuring software quality. In a very real sense we&#x27;re in another &quot;software crisis&quot;. Software complexity is growing beyond the bounds of the previous era&#x27;s &quot;best practices&quot; (of which only a subset were ever actually applied) to manage. While at the same time the impact of software problems is growing, especially because the potential for problems due to interactions of software systems is also growing.<p>Though in truth that&#x27;s mostly unrelated to this instance. Real-time control systems for satellites have always been a tough problem, and there have traditionally been growing pains for organizations tackling new designs. Even NASA has had its fair share of stumbles in that regard, for example the loss of the Mars Polar Lander and even the Mars Climate Orbiter (the famous metric&#x2F;english units fuckup) were substantially due to problems with the software and operational management of the spacecraft.