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Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous from NASA point of view :-( They're shooting their self in the foot.

They should fund the DSN and make sure that not only all antennas are operational, but build new ones at the 3 locations or even better create additional locations.

A strike from DSN personnel would teach NASA to spend some money on dish antennas. It's insane to "throw" hundred of billions of USD for Artemis and not invest 1 billion for the comms infrastructure.

I guess it won't be long until a "genius" manager comes up with the idea of DSNaaS (Deep Space Network as a Service) :-)

Bonus link, live console/status of the DSN: https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

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> It's insane to "throw" hundred of billions of USD for Artemis and not invest 1 billion for the comms infrastructure.

Perhaps, but that's largely not in NASA's control; Congress appropriates money for specific purposes. NASA can't legally go grab Artemis money and shift it over to DSN.

I agree, but perhaps they should've included in the Artemis budget a small item for comms investment/modernization. Or even better spread out the DSN cost in all missions (JWST, Orion...) and also ask partners like ESA and JAXA to help cover the costs.

I fear that as soon as something becomes this controlled by politics, reasonable project decisions take the backseat to political concerns, no matter what any participant's motivations and reasoning is.

They might have tried attaching this to Artemis, as you suggest, but gotten political pushback. They might have known that they can get Artemis approved without the DSN improvement and then hold Artemis hostage for DSN improvements. DSN money might have ended in the wrong Congress person's district. So many possible political reasons we might never know

The DSN has facilities located around the globe which is most definitely not in Congressional districts, so it's not capable of being a jobs program. That might help explain why it gets such little attention.

Call your Congressperson. Ask them to support an appropriation specifically for Nasa's DSN. It only takes 5-10 minutes.

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

"Hello, my name is $name. I am asking you to either sponsor legislation or to support legislation sponsored by another memeber of Congress to increase funding for NASA's Deep Space Network to an appropriate level, which to my understanding is roughly $700M, about $500M more than current allocated. I'm sure you are aware of the enormous amount of value that we enjoy from space science [1], and therefore why it is crucial NASA has the capability to continue to operate this communications network in order to enable that ongoing science. Thank you for your time."

They will ask for your zip code and possibly contact info to follow up (you'll usually get a letter or email from your rep on the topic).

> The agency's internal watchdog said a project to upgrade the three DSN sites with more 34-meter antennas and higher-power transmitters is five years behind schedule, and the cost of the upgrades has increased to $706 million. That expense takes a long time to pay off for the DSN's budget account, which has fallen from an annual level of about $250 million in 2010 to about $200 million today.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Benefits-Stem... (if you want specific value talking points)

Sending a letter is probably more efficient and effective than making a phone call. But bear in mind that many sensible proposals are DOA if they don't fit neatly into the hyperpartisan agenda that obtains in Congress at present. Some lawmakers would be against any sort of proposal that involves increasing spending, and when one party has a razor thin majority such ideologues have leverage disproportionate to their numbers.

For sure, but it only takes a few minutes to make the call versus asking folks here to write a letter. Default to action and all that jazz. A call is better than nothing.

Hi, 1999 called. Today, people are more along the lines of "What's a call?"

The old rule was congress critters weighted a personal letter with highest weight over a form letter, over a call, over an email. Now, staffers are of younger age, and they are the gate keepers of what gets passed along. So that order of weighting may be different now. Then again, that's probably also highly dependent on the specific congress critter. AOC may be much more open to tweets/emails/etc vs Mitch McConnell or similar aged someone

A representative from the EFF's policy team I met at def con a few weeks back mentioned that calls are still weighted heavily. YMMV.

Writing and printing a letter takes about 5 minutes, phone calls are not that time effective unless you already know the person you're calling, in my experience. Calling Congress I would expect to be on hold for a long time, plus staffers know that you're reading a script, and will also discount it because you have a general ask rather than saying 'Please vote (yes/no) on HR ####'.

Sorry but you are pretty much missing the entire point, maybe you aren't in the us but this doesn't work like you expect. Nasa has really limited budget options. Congress points them toward specific things like Artemis and funds those. Nasa often has to use a tiny bit of money on the side for the irreplaceable things like voyager being continued and upgrading the DSN - all the money in the world can't replace them without decades of effort, for example.

Artemis (like the F35/JSF) is a jobs program that happens to eventually produce an aircraft/spacecraft. Maintenance of existing communication systems doesn’t get the public excited like “we are building cutting edge aerospace technologies”

>I guess it won't be long until a "genius" manager comes up with the idea of DSNaaS (Deep Space Network as a Service) :-)

Well, it doesn't seem such a bad idea considering the alternative is to do nothing. (now if the alternative was to build more sites and more antennas that would be great, but I think its unlikely).

As for DSNaaS it could be provided by a number of competing companies just like intercontinental fiber links are today.

> ...live console/status of the DSN: https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

Very cool--you can even see the data rate for each one, AND the animation changes if the data rate is higher.

This is highly likely to be a dumb question, but can each dish only communicate with one object at a time?

These are highly directional antennas that are pointed at the vehicles they’re communicating with.

Yes, though sometimes we use something called "bent pipe" where we communicate with something like MRO who is then communicating to an asset on the ground at Mars, so technically we're talking to two assets, but not "really"

The DSN stations can receive from multiple spacecraft at the same time, but can only transmit to one. If you look at the DSN status station and click on the details sometimes you will see them in "MSPA (Multiple Spacecraft Per Antenna) mode". Looks like they can do 4 at the same time [0]. You will typically see this for Mars spacecraft where there are multiple within the beamwidth of the antenna.

It also looks like they have proposed some options to provide additional downlink by doing raw recording of the intermediate frequency with a high bandwidth receiver and doing the demodulation with additional processing to get telemetry/data for more spacecraft [1]. So they could support getting more data, but not necessarily "realtime" data.

[0] https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/206/206D.pdf

[1] https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-200/200B.pdf

INAL but I don't think they can strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Service_Labor-Manageme...

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