What software will space need?

Reliable, just flexible enough, real-time (hard real-time for some things, soft real-time for others).

https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/10/the-space-operating...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661998 (HN submission of the above, but no actual discussion yet)

That talks about the OSes (primarily) involved, and also discusses why agencies are slow to adopt newer OSes and languages (tried-and-true beats novelty, in general, due to the cost in time and money of testing/verifying/validating).

Something that's not tied to any cloud, entirely self contained and happy to run reliably forever.

Elon asked for a GPS for the stars in twitter I think.

That'd be a rad side-project. I'm not that good though