- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- I am directing most employees to work from home tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7, so everyone can be in a safe, comfortable environment on a stressful day. Most individuals will not be able to enter the Lab during this mandatory remote work day. A Lab access list has been created and those who will have access will be notified by email shortly. If you do not receive an email instructing you to be on Lab, please plan to work remotely, regardless of your telework agreement status. In addition, and to ensure we have everyone’s accurate contact information, I am also asking everyone to please review and update your personal email and phone number in Workday today.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company or organization that had mandatory remote work day outside of really crazy weather during the peak of Covid. Perhaps it’s to protect the equipment from distraught or disgruntled employees?
I hate to bring this up, but SpaceX (and I’m not giving Elon any credit here) as a private space company has done more significant advances than NASA has done in a long time.
NASA has no spacecrafts right now! American astronauts are riding SpaceX Crew Dragon to dock with the ISS. And before Crew Dragon’s first flight in 2020, they had to book Russian Soyuz to fly their astronauts into space.
Look at the SLS/Artemis, an over-bloated project in both time and money, while simultaneously managing to accomplish zero new innovation at all. It’s literally strapping 4 Space Shuttle’s rocket engines together (from literally the very same engines scrapped from the retired Space Shuttles) and using the same Solid Rocket Boosters (the very same defective booster design that caused the Challenger explosion) to get American astronauts back to the moon again (at least this is how it’s planned).
Where is the innovation? Where are the advancements? The same Space Shuttle rockets that are inferior to the Soviet rockets built in the 1980s, a country that has not existed for over 30 years!
At least SpaceX is trying something new with their Raptor engines. NASA is still stuck in their past glory, at least in terms of launch vehicles and spacecrafts. I’m not denying that there are some cool satellites and telescopes and stuff, but the heavy engineering that is going to blow everyone’s minds by achieving some incredible breakthroughs is not there anymore.
I assume you are not aware that this is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab(JPL), not a general NASA layoff as you may have guessed from the headline. You seem to have based your entire comment on that premise if so this is all painful to read honestly, a huge miss.
The JPL is responsible for some of the most cutting edge research in space robotics and probes, the name is a relic of its origin in the post war era, it is not an actual rocket research factory or anything like that.
Even though there are obvious issues with the SLS program, I’m not sure how much of that is NASA’s fault, right away you’re giving NASA way too much credit and autonomy that doesn’t exist IRL at all. The privatization was the point, SpaceX is the culmination of what started in the 70s so trying to give relative praise to SpaceX’s achievements here is literaly the Obama self-medal meme. I would expect you to spot this from mile away. The US government defuned NASA after declaring the space race “won” and ever since then the budget is still less than it was in 1965!
America never actually gave a shit about space exploration, even though most Americans wouldn’t mind a higher NASA budget there is nothing the public can do about it. The fact is the NASA isn’t just “stuck” in past glory. Don’t mistake NASA and their actual research for the shit America uses as daily life propaganda. Things like the Hubble, the JWST, all the Mars and space probes etc are all incredibly important and valuable, nobody would object to this fact.
And yet hardly any of that makes the news. It seems like NASA is irrelevant because yes to some extent if you only look at modern culture, the average American couldn’t name a US space probe or gives a single fuck about Mars etc.
The JWST alone was a huge worldwide boost to astronomy and physics research, teams from around the world are eager and reliant on it.
Finally the point was always that nothing SpaceX does is uniquely because its a private company or anything. Yes I agree and indeed there is undeniably some cool tech behind the Raptor engines but that is not meaningful rhetoric, Its like saying the F-22 was a huge boost in composite material research. The US could have all of that through the public sector is the point.
It was a general comment, and I don’t see what you’re writing is anything fundamentally that disagree with what I wrote.
Also, as far as chemical rockets go, yes the Raptor engine is still at the leading edge. But as I have said before, even chemical rockets likely won’t see any significant breakthroughs anymore, especially for deep space exploration. The breakthroughs I’m talking about is the next Sputnik moment, and it’s not going to come from NASA/SpaceX anytime soon. There is no such projects as you see.
As someone in the industry, you missed the forest for the trees. There’s a lot more to space exploration than just launch vehicle development. SpaceX isn’t going to be doing bespoke Mars rover missions anytime soon unless it has a profit motive. JPL offers a very unique product in these one-off science-driven missions that the private industry has yet to be able to replicate and may never have the incentive to do so. Further gutting JPL just means losing out on those missions, which offer valuable scientific returns to the world. JPL is the reason we have rovers driving and a helicopter flying on Mars, oribters around the gas giants, satellites in interstellar space. The list goes on.
What are you talking about?
Not OP, but I think the first part of the sentence you quoted is what they’re talking about. SpaceX, a private company that is now the cutting edge of space tech in the US, is what you get as a result of general efforts to privatize everything. These efforts ramped up dramatically in the 70’s, from my understanding.
This is your brain on spacex PR and launch vehicle tunnel vision
Most of the fundamental technology breakthroughs were achieved by NASA in the 90’s but due to various issues, the space shuttle being the obvious one (thanks Nixon/Agnew), they were not followed up on. Also NASA has worked very closely with SpaceX essentially from the beginning, just another case of the government selling off technology to a private company because it’s the only way things change in this country.
NASA has never built rockets or passenger carrying spacecraft. They have always contracted them out, yes even the Saturn V, with NASA oversight/management. Also you literally bring up Artemis so not sure what you’re talking about.
You’ll notice how they haven’t had an accident since either but you can literally thank Obama for SLS.
Which itself is based on old Soviet and Aerojet Rocketdyne designs. Just like how Starship’s design is inspired by the N1.
It was never there. Apollo only got funded as a way to ‘peacefully’ develop ICBM and related technologies. If China manages to land on the Moon before the US does again then perhaps there might be a similar program for Mars or an effort to industrialize LEO but while China is making progress in space they don’t seem to be making it a priority and I would be genuinely surprised if they manage to make it to the Moon before the US/SpaceX does.
Edit: Also even if China did manage to somehow beat the US to the moon they don’t have a fully reusable superheavy rocket (even their plans talk about the 2040’s) so it would be a significant but ultimately very temporary victory.
Again, none of this disagrees with what I wrote. You aren’t going to see any breakthroughs soon, either from NASA or SpaceX.
However, I do find this comment a bit strange:
A fundamental design flaw is a fundamental design flaw. You can say that they have since fixed and strengthened the O-ring until the final cancellation of the Space Shuttle program, but that doesn’t change the fact that it poses significant risks to the crew. Just because a poorly designed car hasn’t run into accident, doesn’t mean it’s a safe vehicle. When the accident eventually happens, you’re more likely to be dead than alive.
Furthermore, solid rockets shouldn’t be used for manned space flights, especially for a country as rich as the US. The only reasons to use them is because it’s cheap, and easy to build, and can be stored for years, yes. But there’s a reason the Russians use liquid propellant rockets for their manned space flights. Solid rockets cannot be throttled, and if it explodes, there’s no way to abort the crew safely.
I mean … you’re disagreeing with what you wrote so I don’t know what to tell you.
To begrudgingly defend SpaceX here, if Starship actually works as advertised it actually is a game changer. Their intended launch cadence makes things like Skyhooks a realistic consideration which in turn would make Sci-Fi levels of interplanetary activity possible. Even the semi-reusable Falcon 9 has made a big difference in the launch market, for better or worse, Starlink and the other satellite constellations would not have been anywhere near the realm of profitability without it.
For the Shuttle yeah but Orion has launch abort capability. I agree they shouldn’t be used on principle but SLS is a jobs program that happens to build rockets, not the other way around.
NASA is bloated by government bureaucracy and red tape. They’re also limited by their engineers and scientists because they pay poorly (don’t get the best talent) and don’t offer incentives such as promotions and there’s no equity to grow multiples of if they succeed (no motivation to work hard). And until now, there was guaranteed job security no matter how little they worked so there was also no fear instilled into the employees. Glad they’re letting the workers know now though that they actually have to produce something of value to earn their paychecks
SpaceX fixes literally all of these problems by virtue of being a private sector corporation participating in the free market rather than a publicly funded state apparatus with 0 interest of generating profits
is this a parody comment wut
I’m a libertarian socialist that believes in the power of free markets, infinite growth, and profits chasing
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing that you’re a parody or not so I’ll give a short serious answer.
NASA being underfunded and bloated is intentional. It was neither of those things in the 1950s and 60s, but since Nixon got the moon landing he wanted the whole point of NASA has shifted from pushing the boundaries of space exploration to providing key technologies to the private sector, and over time everything NASA does has become about feeding money to private corporations.
Meanwhile SpaceX underpays and overworks its engineers to the point of a psychotic break as its normal policy. It is currently the place that you tough out for a year or two to get it on your resume, and then flee as fast and as far as you can to a more reasonable job. Everything SpaceX is doing could be done for half price without giving a generation of aerospace scientists PTSD by NASA if they were funded properly and not intentionally hogtied by Congress and the military.
SpaceX lists entry level Engineering positions for $115-185k and is hiring an incredibly young crowd (i.e. this isn’t gated by a huge amount of experience) so I don’t know that you could say they are underpaid but the hours are clearly hellish and it seems unbelievably disorganized. But yes to the rest, it seems a lot like what Amazon was to software devs.
You’re not getting paid $115k as an early career hire there for most roles. Have several friends there and, compared to the rest of the LA aersopace market, it’s probably a $10-20k cut.