As a minor note, MOST's software was architected by Henry Spencer, who wrote the original UNIX regex library.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer

I would be curious about how regex was designed and developed. It's such a cool and not very intuitive to come up with thing.

I mean, regular expressions have existed in discrete maths for decades right?

I don't know. Is that where the inspiration came from?

This article is from 2005.

In 2007, the US launched the KEPLER planet finding satellite with massively more capability than MOST.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanets_discovered_...

MOST wasn’t/isn’t intended as a planet finder (and especially not competition for Kepler etc). It’s a tremendously cost effective and efficient tool for staring at particular stars with high pointing stability looking for variations.

What's about capability per dollar of cost? KEPLER (a great instrument) can't boast this - "...this whole mission has an end-to-end budget of $10 million Canadian, or $7 million US.", can it?

Certainly not knocking MOST - it was a really cool mission, and we should do more in that buget range.

And that budget was before the first Falcon 9 landed back to be reused.

It was before Falcon-9 first flew.