Were unit tests a thing back when the probes were built?
I wonder how new engineers learn about the intricacies of such ancient tech, without breaking them.
I wonder how new engineers learn about the intricacies of such ancient tech, without breaking them.
For many, like me. It would be a dream to work at NASA, whatever the salary or bureaucracies it might involve.
It was my childhood dream, but given I wasn't American, that would never happen.
Many of NASA’s problems aren’t the fault of NASA, they are the fault of Congress. NASA didn’t come up with SLS+Orion all by themselves, the high-level design was dictated to them by Congress and NASA was left with the job of fleshing out the details and making it all work somehow. SpaceX needs NASA as a customer and a source of valuable expertise, it just wants it freed from being forced by Congress to spend billions on super-inefficient projects such as SLS+Orion, when SpaceX has a solution which can do more for less (Starship+SuperHeavy) and is likely to be available soon (bureaucratic delays due to the FAA and environmental agencies such as the FWS being under-resourced being the current biggest obstacle to that)
Just one question, what will be avaiable first, FalconHeavy and a fully certified Starship (which has to launch without blowing up for that), Tesla FSD or Tesla's humanoid robot?
Regarding SLS, they launched successfully last year and aim for a manned launch in 2024. SpaceX has to beat that timeline, assuming this whole thing being a race, which it isn't.
So let's compare the two! Falcon Heavy was developed with completely private funding, at a cost of ~$500 million. The prices of the launches are listed in Wiki. They start at $117 million, as NASA paid in 2023 to launch their Psyche craft. The SLS has been in development for more than a decade now, fully paid by the taxpayer, at a cost just about to break the $30 billion mark. The nominal cost per launch is still unknown but will almost certainly top a billion dollars. The last NASA administration gave an estimate of $800-$900 million per launch in 2019 dollars. And SLS cost estimates only go one way.
And what do you get for $30 billion, and then another billion per launch? Ideally up to almost twice the capacity of a Falcon Heavy. The reason people are so cool on the SLS is that it's already a very poor value against existing technologies. And will be completely obsolete by the time Starship comes to pass which should not only be able to launch for a fraction of the cost of Falcon Heavy (which is already a fraction of the cost of SLS), but also launch well over the ideal launch capacity of SLS.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Launches_and_payl...
For Starship to make things like SLS obsolete, it has to be available first. Until then, it is just pure speculation. Is SLS more expensive than Starship development wise? Yes. But it is not the goal of a government to be profitable, nor is it to hand technologocal monopolies to eratic billionaires. Supporting alternatives is always good, and it maintains know-how and technology at different companies, which is also a good thing.
We know how much SLS and Ariane 6 have spent, but that's not any kind of reliable indicator of how much they're going to cost.
> For Starship to make things like SLS obsolete, it has to be available first. Until then, it is just pure speculation.
Only if SLS is ever going to be available. If Starship is further along in development, that's pretty suggestive.
From an outsider's perspective it's quite difficult to understand what the big barrier is.
So instead it should award contracts - without any competition even - to big established aerospace firms such as Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and Aerojet? SpaceX, by contrast, won its most important NASA contracts (ISS cargo and crew, HLS) by open competition.
> Supporting alternatives is always good, and it maintains know-how and technology at different companies, which is also a good thing.
If NASA wanted to do that, they would have spread the SLS/Orion money around newer and more innovative players (not just SpaceX-Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Axiom, Relativity, etc), rather than giving billions to Boeing/Lockheed/Aerojet/etc to keep alive technologies from the 1970s. Of course, Congress wouldn’t let NASA do that
In order: Falcon Heavy (because it's been around for years already), then I recon Starship, the robot, then FSD.
But this is on the pair of assumptions:
(1) that the robot will initially launch with a very limited role and set of environments it can work safely in — a lightweight mobile pick-and-place robot is much much easier than a fully general humanoid that you can drop into any role a real human would do and expect it to not accidentally dismember or decapitate itself or others.
(2) it only counts as "FSD" when they can ship the cars without including a steering wheel. If the current marketing of a nice-but-limited cruise control, lane changer, and occasional automatic break counts as "FSD", then it too is already out. (I would not count this myself).
And that applies to everything from that era. We hadn't even put a man in orbit in 1962. 7 years later, we would be walking on the Moon!!! The degree of competence and capability of that era of NASA is something that I think is probably unmatched in the entire history of our species.
I sure hope this doesn't come to be considered 'usual' on HN.
If so, it just becomes a race to the bottom.
SLS has no such justifications forthcoming. It's too rough of a ride to launch any scientific probes on, it's too expensive for private launch, they can't make them fast enough to do more than 1 launch per year (without pouring more untold billions and decades into it), and the only reason it's even involved in Artemis is because Congress insists on it. Even putting Starship aside, between Falcon Heavy, F9, New Glenn, Vulcan, Neutron and maybe Ariane 6, the West has so much lift capacity available or coming online (mostly drastically cheaper than SLS) that SLS is kind of irrelevant.
I think it’s a massive error for Congress to have anything to do with any remotely technical decision. That should be at the sole discretion of NASA. Congress’ involvement should go no further than deciding what slice of the taxpayer funded pie they get yearly, and should not include the ability to attach strings of any kind to the funding.
They likely have a 'test article' though. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_article_(aerospace)