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From the article in no particular order: - We don't spend enough money - We have a low tolerance for risk - We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simple

From the article in no particular order: - We don't spend enough money - We have a low tolerance for risk - We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs - The project is designed and built by international committee It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.

yodsanklai 2y ago
> but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...
- kragen 2y ago
  yeah. you can still buy a lot of ttl chips new (actually i think the agc used rtl, but ttl would be fine), there's new old stock of the others, and if that's not enough, teenagers can fabricate 10-micron chips in their garages nowadays this is not the problem
jwells89 2y ago
Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums. This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.
bee_rider 2y ago
It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there. Now, that science is done. Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.
- clintfred 2y ago
  I'm interested in learning more about your perspective that there's no science left to be done on the moon. Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?
  - bigbacaloa 2y ago
    [dead]
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Maybe it was unclear, I meant, tautologically and just for emphasis, that the science that was done for the previous mission was (of course) done. > Now, that science is done. That said, building a base on the moon is pretty pointless, and I think we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to become a spacefaring species, we’re going to have to learn how to live in space. The conditions on each planet, moon, whatever, are all pretty different, so we’ll probably need different bespoke solutions on each one. We should perfect the art of building self-sustaining orbital habitats, because those aren’t redesigned from scratch every time. Let’s iterate on the space-station. Energetically going downwell is a big cost. The only reason to go onto a planet is to get resources that aren’t already present in less energetically disadvantageous locations.
    - isk517 2y ago
      There are a lot of great benefits to planets, protection from radiation and meteors being among them, also a free source of gravity which is pretty important to us as a species.
cachvico 2y ago
It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale. If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then. So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.
- travisb 2y ago
  This really proves my point. I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust. So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code. The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out. Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
panick21_ 2y ago
And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined. Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem. High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'. The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem. The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program. When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign. And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done. If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system. Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.
- happiness_idx 2y ago
  You said a whole lot of nothing and no conclusion... What is your point?
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Try reading it again.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey. Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions. Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress? For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.

yodsanklai 2y ago

> but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...

kragen 2y ago
yeah. you can still buy a lot of ttl chips new (actually i think the agc used rtl, but ttl would be fine), there's new old stock of the others, and if that's not enough, teenagers can fabricate 10-micron chips in their garages nowadays this is not the problem

jwells89 2y ago

Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums. This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.

bee_rider 2y ago

It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there. Now, that science is done. Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.

clintfred 2y ago
I'm interested in learning more about your perspective that there's no science left to be done on the moon. Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?
- bigbacaloa 2y ago
  [dead]
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Maybe it was unclear, I meant, tautologically and just for emphasis, that the science that was done for the previous mission was (of course) done. > Now, that science is done. That said, building a base on the moon is pretty pointless, and I think we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to become a spacefaring species, we’re going to have to learn how to live in space. The conditions on each planet, moon, whatever, are all pretty different, so we’ll probably need different bespoke solutions on each one. We should perfect the art of building self-sustaining orbital habitats, because those aren’t redesigned from scratch every time. Let’s iterate on the space-station. Energetically going downwell is a big cost. The only reason to go onto a planet is to get resources that aren’t already present in less energetically disadvantageous locations.
  - isk517 2y ago
    There are a lot of great benefits to planets, protection from radiation and meteors being among them, also a free source of gravity which is pretty important to us as a species.

cachvico 2y ago

It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale. If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then. So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.

travisb 2y ago
This really proves my point. I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust. So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code. The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out. Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

panick21_ 2y ago

And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined. Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem. High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'. The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem. The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program. When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign. And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done. If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system. Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.

happiness_idx 2y ago
You said a whole lot of nothing and no conclusion... What is your point?
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Try reading it again.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago

Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey. Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions. Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress? For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.