As you probably guessed, these are not fireworks for the 4th of
July but, rather, the explosion of the Ariane 5, which happened 30 seconds
or so after takeoff due to a software error. And this is
just an example of what can go wrong when we don't build software
and we don't test and verify and perform quality assurance of software
in the right way, and quite an expensive one. In fact, to develop
and to build the Ariane 5 it took 10 years. The cost
was around $7 billion and there were $500 million of cargo on board.
Luckily, at least there were no humans on the
rocket. And you can find more details in case
you're interested about the Ariane 5 accident in the
lesson notes. I put a couple of links there.