Rewriting space mission analysis in Rust

Imagine you are a few months into a project for the European Space Agency, finally about to start the implementation of the software, and suddenly one of your main open source dependencies drops off the radar. Would you pick the reasonable option and choose an existing library? Or would you pick the unreasonable option and rewrite it in Rust? This happened to Libre Space Foundation with our main astrodynamics engine and as the title of this talk already gives away, we chose the unreasonable option.

In this talk, Helge Eichhorn shares the experience: Why Rust was chosen over other programming languages for implementing the astrodynamics kernel of our satellite constellation mission analysis system, and whether this was the route to go.