[costigan]

I think lisp is still used in various nooks and crannies of NASA. As a small example, I was the payload software engineer for the LCROSS mission (a robotic mission in 2009 that demonstrated there was water ice near the moon's south pole). The software that ran on the payload computer was in C, but there was a very simple, ad hoc scripting language provided by the company that provided that payload computer. Because this language was very simple, I wrote a higher-level DSL and a simulator of the computer in common lisp and then wrote all of the instrument command sequences in that DSL. Lisp's simple, flexible syntax and macros made it easy to express patterns of commanding and timing for this. What the commands did is described in the last (topmost) blog entry here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/lcrossfdblog/ . These days, I'm working on the VIPER rover, and the commanding approach for it is very manual, as Ron described. VIPER will be a moon rover, so the turn-a-round time for commanding is much shorter than it would be for a MARS rover, and teleoperation from Earth is a very reasonable and lower-risk solution than autonomy. Still, some of the systems used in self-driving vehicles today to evaluate the environment around the vehicle will be used by VIPER, but to provide advice and situational awareness for the drivers. No lisp involved.