Last Friday, NASA launched the Endeavour space shuttle on mission STS-126 to further equip the International Space Station.

It was also the first live test for PRACA, (Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action), the Bugzilla-based application used by mission control to track problems with the space shuttle.

Bugzilla is the bug tracking system developed and used by Mozilla for all its projects, as well as a long list of other companies and projects ranging from the Linux kernel to Facebook.

Developed by NASA’s Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Ames Research Center with help of Everything Solved, a consulting firm founded by Max Kanat-Alexander, one of Bugzilla’s main developer, PRACA “is replacing a set of more than 40 different database systems that had been used over the past 30 years by the many different parts of that Shuttle ecosystem”, said Alonso Vera, HCI Group lead.

“Technicians will be able to make changes to either PRACA or IFI more or less on the fly, rather than having to submit any proposed changes to the publishers of proprietary software, steps that often took weeks to achieve.”, Vera added.

PRACA is expected to live long. It is already in use in the Constellation program that will replace the space shuttle after 2010.

More details at CNET.