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Comment by dgoodell | Hacker News Reader

I’m an engineer at NASA working with nuclear space power systems. I ignore most of the more trite software / internet / money making bullshit. Some of that stuff is legit but most of it feels like “advances in advertising technology” or media delivery. I’m old enough to remember the earlier days of the internet and it’s sort difficult to admire the people that worked hard and made a lot of money turning it into what it is today.

Luckily, there are a lot of smart people here who are interested in many other things and that’s what I’m here to get exposure to.

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I agree it’s especially disappointing knowing that it was the very stewards of the internet who ultimately turned it into an attention sucking money centric ad platform. For who else would it have been than those who wield the power to manipulate its fabric?

I think advancements in advertising has added more value to the average human life in the last 20 years than NASA has. If any human wants to learn how rockets fly or how to make focaccia bread, thanks to advertising YouTube will provide that information.

Interesting perspective, thank you for the thought, but I'm going to go with "nah"

I'd love to chat with you more about this if possible. Is there a way to get in touch?

sounds like a very cool job. Can you tell us more about your work at Nasa?

I’m involved in the development of the free piston Stirling engines for space power production. Ideally, we would like to replace the current solid-state thermoelectric energy conversion system used on the MMRTG and its precursors with a piston engine energy conversion device. This has the potential to increase the conversion efficiency from 6% to 25-40%. This would allow us to use less plutonium 238 so we could either produce more electricity or use less plutonium and do more deep space missions, since the plutonium is in limited supply.

I’m also involved with the much more preliminary work into a fission power for nuclear electric propulsion, which is a much more difficult problem.

I could speak a lot about this stuff. If anyone really wants to talk, email is in my profile.

Fascinating, I thought that the ion engine powering Deep Space 1 was already powered by a nuclear cell, am I wrong? Is your nuclear electric propulsion project connected to an ion engine, or is that something different?

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