A native of Zhytomyr creates software for the Elon Musk rockets

Ukrainian Olexiy Pakhunov, who works for the company Elon Musk SpaceX, wrote software for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and now for Starship.

Pakhunov himself wrote about this in his blog.

According to him, he has nothing to do with programming the Crew Dragon rocket, which on Saturday, May 30, sent the crew to the International Space Station.

“No, I’m not “writing all the software that is responsible for flying Crew Dragon”. Crew Dragon flight software has been created by more than one hundred people over the years. Among other things, this software includes a version of Linux. I specifically checked – I definitely did not write Linux. Some Finnish guy was noted there”, – Pakhunov wrote, stressing that Dragon had never had any relation to software development.

Olexiy Pakhunov said that he wrote software for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and now for Starship.

“Of course, since the software for all four is assembled from the same code base, part of my code is used when flying Dragon … I was the engineer responsible for launching F9-21 (first successful landing), FH-1 (first launch of Falcon Heavy) and a few other launches from the Flight Software group”, – he said.

According to him, the chief engineer of the company (Chief Designer) – Elon Musk.

Pakhunov’s position is called – sr. software engineer – “an ordinary developer, just experienced”, this position does not involve managing people.