Viewing profile — GlenTheMachine

The RPO and docking are autonomous specifically because it's hard to deal with the latency. Note that the algorithm stack for almost any spacecraft cannot rely on modern compute. S…

It's very likely that a spacecraft similar to MRV/RSGS could do a life extension mission on Hubble. But, unfortunately, Hubble is in a very different orbit than MRV/RSGS is, so we …

It's almost impossibly hard to return things to earth from GEO. Robert Heinlein famously wrote that "a circular orbit is halfway to anywhere", which means that the most energetical…

I can only provide answers to technical or programmatic questions that have already been "approved for public release" by DARPA and NRL. We've done a number of publicly released pr…

It’s all custom flight code. The only software packages we use are basic matrix-vector libraries. Hopefully there will be a paper describing the dynamics/kinematics/controls algori…

Oh gosh. I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia. Like many of you I was a nerd, and I had no outlet for that nerd-dom until I spent all summer working for money to buy a C64. …

Thanks! There isn't a paper yet, but I'm working on one; I hope it will be presented at the upcoming iSAIRAS/iSpaRo conference in Cologne.

We use pretty standard BLDCs.

You wouldn't. Ionizing radiation at GEO altitude quickly exceeds your lifetime exposure dose. The Apollo (and Artemis II) astronauts went through GEO inside a metal capsule going a…

Sort of mini-fridge sized. They take over attitude control and propulsion for satellites that are low on fuel. "Since the mission is designed to attach one and then leave to go to …

I'm the lead roboticist. Within bounds, I can answer questions.

If you had no idea what a restorable sequence is the takeaway is about halfway down the OP: “This is why Linux now provides rseq() which is a much more enlightened solution. With r…

I am firmly convinced that, in the long course of time, Pratchett will be recognized as a modern Shakespeare.

Maybe that’s the protocol?

It's more complicated than that. "The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around lo…

“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally” As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a t…

As a government employee, enmeshed in the bureaucracy: This is the way. The problem is that it took Karen zero effort to say “we only accept fax”. She doesn’t care about how much e…

So after almost 50 years of hacking, I'm starting to feel it in my hands. But I don't have any wrist problems -- no carpal tunnel. What I have is tendonitis in my fingers, primaril…

“Extendible” —> extensible, I believe

That’s certainly an opinion. I’m not convinced that it's a good one, but it’s an interesting one. I think it’s probably important to remember two things: 1) the novel is a relative…

I was a grad student in Dave Akin's lab from 1994-2003. Like many labs, we had a journal club. Once a week (Wednesday, I think) somebody would give a presentation over lunch on a p…