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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I work in the aerospace industry, mainly to satellites these days but I’ve worked in launch in the past and have plenty of friends who have as well.

    That 450 figure is probably all of Falcon 9s development which has gone through several design iteration cycles. Industry rumors point to a new Falcon 9 booster being around $50 to build and a million or two to refurbish on average. The re-use is saving them a significant amount, but the upfront design cost was just so stupid high.

    It’s also worth noting that Starlink supposedly launches at near cost meaning little profit for each of those, but then SpaceX turns around and prices Falcon 9 close to Atlas V for government contracts (90-150m total price so probably 60m profit) and gouges people on Transporter (they’re almost certainly pulling in 150-200m on each of those)



  • Senior embedded C developer here in the US. I can speak first hand experience at people applying to be on my team that have reasonable sounding experience and then collapse under interview questions.

    Everything else you said applies here too, legally we don’t have repercussions for firing someone quickly (once had a team member for two months), but a healthy org will try very hard to get hiring right because it can cause pretty bad morale to see a revolving door and there is a massive brain and resource drain having to constantly be training new people.


  • Smaller businesses or privately owned businesses with a smart owner do.

    Large publicly traded companies are sustained by a perception that an investment in or loan to that company will pay off in a higher dollar amount in the future, so if the perception becomes the company is shrinking then the investments and loans slow down which makes the perception worse, you get that feedback loop which turns into the death spiral.

    So the bigwigs at the top of these companies have to be professional liars and gamblers to change the perception and make it look like everything isn’t just fine, they’re doing great! The line must go up.



  • Yup, sometimes it’s too easy for me to just slip into work mode when talking about this kind of stuff and I don’t elaborate enough. Thanks for stepping in.

    Based on industry rumors I believe the Orion capsule control computers are running VxWorks (I’ve heard that maybe a few boxes are using RTEMS?) All of that source code would have been reviewed, audited, and tested to hell and back.

    The day-in-the-life stuff for the astronauts is entirely believable to be Windows. The risk of it failing is so low (medium probability, low impact), it’s what they’d be familiar with, and it’s part of daily life at NASA anyways. Linux is no better when it comes to safety critical components and the astronauts almost certainly wouldn’t want to be dealing with Gnome’s… uniqueness…


  • I have not worked on human rated launch vehicles, but I’ve been adjacent to them, saw what went into them, and a few close personal friends have worked it.

    Anything that can jeapordize the safety of the crew must go through a rigorous independent validation and verification process that takes years, software included. No shot a Microsoft product was even in consideration for those systems.

    Being in industry I find it crazy that so many people are freaked out by this. Astronauts have email, they have tasks and schedules and reports to make. Why would NASA reinvent the wheel on a task/schedule manager when the ground operators and astronauts are already used to using Outlook.


  • I too came in here thinking about outer wilds.

    The controls are less realistic than you think, because they attempted to have the ship correct itself but it constantly fought me. I program spacecraft for a living, I know how the orbital mechanics and movement in 3D space works, and they made it super frustrating it made me rage quit the game for years. I only finished it because a close friend wanted me to experience the story.

    For me, the story >!was the games weakest point. Putting together the history and the question of “what happened” was cool, but the dialogue was insufferable, I hated reading the story walls and having to string together the order things were said. Then to finally put everything together, get a half baked story about being marooned on effectively a desert island and it ends with a shrug and “yup, everyone died, you too”… Man fuck that.!<


  • Spacecraft software engineer here:

    They are and they aren’t. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won’t have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.

    Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it’s supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.

    The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there’s no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time


  • Your math is right but scales are off.

    Dollar raise a year? Yeah, $1 * 100 * 80 = $8000, and to a lot of businesses that’s peanuts. It’s also peanuts to the individual employees, if you work full time federal minimum wage you make $15600, an extra dollar wont make a difference there.

    Increase hourly wage by a dollar, to the employee that’s an extra 1 * 40 * 52 = $2080, and to the business that becomes $1 * 40 * 52 * 100, that’s $208,000 annually they’re paying out.

    That’s what they aim to stop






  • I think it’s a perception and noticeability problem.

    I’ve been around a lot of guys who cc, and I only knew because it happened or come up in conversation or someone else told me. If I walked by them on the street, never would have noticed.

    Former friend from highschool, his whole family was military, gun nuts, who all cc and they made sure you knew it. The dude went into national guard and was ecstatic about getting deployed to the local large city during a police brutality protest.

    For a lot of people, I feel like the later is the more common experience with cc than the former, despite the former being the truly more common one


  • Kind of

    The vast majority of the time we use our social security numbers as a personal ID number. Drivers licenses also will have unique numbers on them which you can query off of, so too do passports.

    By law, no one is required to have any of those three. People having a social security number is pretty common, but getting one of those is the easiest of the three.

    Because none of them are a legal requirement to be a citizen, each one has multiple document set requirements, and if you have the other two, the third is trivial to obtain.

    The documents you need if you’re not leveraging another form of ID are basically a set of documents that aren’t that difficult for your average person to get their own copies of but harder for some one else to forge and claim to be another person


  • I think it’s that a large pool of stocks going up for sale with no context seems suspicious. Stocks are inherently a gamble on the future price will be higher than current price, so by selling you’re withdrawing your bet which could be interpreted as you knowing that the bet won’t pay off and that other gamblers owners paying attention might panic and try and sell too, which then could trigger a feedback loop. New buyers might see a bunch of people trying to sell and then think to themselves the bet isn’t a good one and won’t buy, making the current sellers reduce the price in the hopes of actually selling off and not left holding the bag

    A lot of “could” and "might* in that scenario, and it does play out from time to time (see NFTs, 2008 housing market). It also won’t play out if the reason for the sale is known and isn’t based on lost faith of the bet