6 ms·

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.

wannacboatmovie 3y ago
Sadly the "megabytes of JavaScript to 'hello world'" culture of today could not even begin to comprehend how this even works
- hef19898 3y ago
  It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because SpaceX get SW"engineering". And then NASA does something like this, and all of sudden it so cool! Coupd it be that those orgs aren't even nearly as incompetent as people have a tendency to think?
  - thiago_fm 3y ago
    It definitely doesn't, maybe there are some jerks that think badly of NASA, but I doubt they make the majority of us. They do a lot of engineering and science, but have been underfunded for so many years, with the government siding with private companies. 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.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Depending on where you live, ESA would be an alternative. The quite constantly look for people at their Oberpfaffenhofen site near Munich, if memory serves well they do some Galileo related work there.
      - thiago_fm 3y ago
        I'll keep my eye on it. ESA is awesome as well.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because 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)
    - hef19898 3y ago
      So SpaceX wants NASA to be able to spend all those billions with them instead of a competitor? Shroud business move, that says nothing about capabilities. 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.
      - somenameforme 3y ago
        Falcon Heavy has been launching commercial, government, and military payloads successfully for years now. [1] I'd strongly encourage checking out their first successful test launch of it, from 5 years ago. [2] Skip to about 29 minutes in for the money shot. Still gives me goose bumps! 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_payloads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Launches_and_payl... [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Personally, I'd tend to give most credit for something like this to the era that created it. I mean building something that can be reasonably expected to operate and maintained in some of the most hostile conditions known to man, for half a century? It's just borderline magical. And NASA of that era did everything just perfectly, nailing all the gravity assists (obviously using computational/telemetry tech of the time), and more. 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.
    - alcal74 3y ago
      Agree with you here.
  - schiffern 3y ago
    >It funny, usually people on HN [insert tribal "sports team" logic], and then all of sudden [actual technology discussion] I sure hope this doesn't come to be considered 'usual' on HN. If so, it just becomes a race to the bottom.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    At least it makes it easier to spot the inept and incompetent in the crowd.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    the delay of James Webb 10+ years is the epitome of gov bloat and incompetence. Also the 6x or so budget bloat. Thats why NASA has a bad name.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      JWST has at least justified itself with the excellent performance and better than expected predictions for its lifetime (since it is limited by the cooling and station-keeping fuel). 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.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Most of the discontent I see aimed in NASA’s direction has little to do with their autonomous missions (which have been consistently excellent) and more to do with how Congress has misused NASA’s crewed efforts as yet another cash pipeline for traditional aerospace companies, which has for decades prevented crewed spaceflight from becoming progressively cheaper, more sustainable, and more common, instead keeping it artificially suspended in its mid-late 70s state. 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.
- phist_mcgee 3y ago
  You're a barrel of laughs aren't you :)
perilunar 3y ago
Unit tests — probably not. They likely have a 'test article' though. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_article_(aerospace) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_article_(aerospace)
- jve 3y ago
  That guy in the suite making sure he doesn't leave any dust speckles... but that mirror looks very dusty in that photo. I verified it is not dust on my screen :)

wannacboatmovie 3y ago

Sadly the "megabytes of JavaScript to 'hello world'" culture of today could not even begin to comprehend how this even works

hef19898 3y ago
It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because SpaceX get SW"engineering". And then NASA does something like this, and all of sudden it so cool! Coupd it be that those orgs aren't even nearly as incompetent as people have a tendency to think?
- thiago_fm 3y ago
  It definitely doesn't, maybe there are some jerks that think badly of NASA, but I doubt they make the majority of us. They do a lot of engineering and science, but have been underfunded for so many years, with the government siding with private companies. 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.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Depending on where you live, ESA would be an alternative. The quite constantly look for people at their Oberpfaffenhofen site near Munich, if memory serves well they do some Galileo related work there.
    - thiago_fm 3y ago
      I'll keep my eye on it. ESA is awesome as well.
- skissane 3y ago
  > It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because 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)
  - hef19898 3y ago
    So SpaceX wants NASA to be able to spend all those billions with them instead of a competitor? Shroud business move, that says nothing about capabilities. 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.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Falcon Heavy has been launching commercial, government, and military payloads successfully for years now. [1] I'd strongly encourage checking out their first successful test launch of it, from 5 years ago. [2] Skip to about 29 minutes in for the money shot. Still gives me goose bumps! 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_payloads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Launches_and_payl... [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Personally, I'd tend to give most credit for something like this to the era that created it. I mean building something that can be reasonably expected to operate and maintained in some of the most hostile conditions known to man, for half a century? It's just borderline magical. And NASA of that era did everything just perfectly, nailing all the gravity assists (obviously using computational/telemetry tech of the time), and more. 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.
  - alcal74 3y ago
    Agree with you here.
- schiffern 3y ago
  >It funny, usually people on HN [insert tribal "sports team" logic], and then all of sudden [actual technology discussion] I sure hope this doesn't come to be considered 'usual' on HN. If so, it just becomes a race to the bottom.
- ilyt 3y ago
  At least it makes it easier to spot the inept and incompetent in the crowd.
- gosub100 3y ago
  the delay of James Webb 10+ years is the epitome of gov bloat and incompetence. Also the 6x or so budget bloat. Thats why NASA has a bad name.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    JWST has at least justified itself with the excellent performance and better than expected predictions for its lifetime (since it is limited by the cooling and station-keeping fuel). 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.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Most of the discontent I see aimed in NASA’s direction has little to do with their autonomous missions (which have been consistently excellent) and more to do with how Congress has misused NASA’s crewed efforts as yet another cash pipeline for traditional aerospace companies, which has for decades prevented crewed spaceflight from becoming progressively cheaper, more sustainable, and more common, instead keeping it artificially suspended in its mid-late 70s state. 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.
phist_mcgee 3y ago
You're a barrel of laughs aren't you :)

perilunar 3y ago

Unit tests — probably not. They likely have a 'test article' though. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_article_(aerospace) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_article_(aerospace)

jve 3y ago
That guy in the suite making sure he doesn't leave any dust speckles... but that mirror looks very dusty in that photo. I verified it is not dust on my screen :)