I've never shipped anything to real customers in the wild before, so let me tell you how insanely stressed I was to open the firmware and find a 10k lines of C contained entirely within a single switch statement. I think they used some no-code tool to graphically design a state machine then plopped the generated code straight into the device.
Just convincing them that their problem boiled down to a single incorrect bit was difficult enough but then having to, in a day, build and successfully operate a test harness to prove the fix worked was the real stress.
I do not miss embedded engineering.
Generally firmware can't be updated by the end user because there is physically no way to do so without returning the hardware. (Unless an update mechanism is specifically implemented in hardware, obv)
Pucker factor goes way up because if you ship a bug, there's no way back. If you aren't careful, you can break physical devices which can have consequences anywhere from thousands of RMAs to burning down a user's house depending on the hardware and how bad you fucked up.
The deployment process itself is about the same. Tests and more tests, including testing on prototype and/or pre-production units. Hardware testing can get wild depending on application, but I don't think any SWE would find it too surprising. Then you email a binary to your manufacturer and pray
I don't think any crewed interplanetary mission is going to last that long for the foreseeable future.
So in a cylindrical ship you'd want to have one end pointing at the Sun most of the trip. This is, of course, very different in effect on the hull compared to the repeated expansion and contraction of heating cycles.
Surely this was considered when building the first modules.
You don't get the AtOx going to mars but you have everything else which will utterly take its toll on a traveling craft.
Corrosion is a hard problem in living quarters (ie moisture and salt) in space (sealed with no gravity)
Anything larger, say a lost screw driver, would punch thru the ISS like it wasn't even there leading to some ugly consequences.
The ISS can dodge debris by adjusting the height of its orbit.
Two astronauts stranded for nine months taking the ISIS supplies intended for others. This is after they safely docked, which was considered risky at the time.
We had two astronauts stranded in space for the better part of a year just last year!
Except you forgot to mention an epic leak in Destiny just three years after it was attached to the ISS: "At its highest rate, the station was leaking about 5 pounds of air per day overboard." [0] Imagine that happening on the 4th year of American Mars mission.
Also, if you on American mission to Mars, it would be reasonable to worry about cooling system dying mid-flight requiring three spacewalks to fix it: "We'd lose cooling capability to half of the electronics on the U.S., European and Japanese part of the space station." [1]
The Soyuz, the MIR, the human space records, the Venera program, closed cycle rockets, all have no equivalent in the West. Even their version of the shuttle was superior (it flew 100% autonomously).
I don't like Musk, but he single handedly saved the Western space programs.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
They've also got some new passenger jets certified and about to enter production (MC-21 and SU-100).