They aren't satellites and they haven't made it even close to orbit yet, but I recently had a chance to make it down to Boca Chica, TX recently where SpaceX is

They aren't satellites and they haven't made it even close to orbit yet, but I recently had a chance to make it down to Boca Chica, TX recently where SpaceX is building rockets. Granted the incredibly complex engines are built off-site and only installed at Boca Chica, but the entire facility is a gigantic dusty, oily, noisy construction site with guys in hard hats and driving lifted trucks. My kind of place, tbh. In college I worked at a physics lab that built an instrument that was on the Cassini probe to Saturn. The amount of effort that went into the supply chain and maintaining even jellybean components under a constant nitrogen atmosphere (to prevent any oxidation) was crazy. Meanwhile, Ingenuity[0] is flying around Mars with running Linux and literally off the shelf components[1]. [0] https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/ https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/ [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/to-infinity-and-beyond-linux-and-open-source-goes-to-mars/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/to-infinity-and-beyond-linux-a...