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NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

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Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#221

Post by Muromec »

rrdharan wrote: post #200
zrail wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible. Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.

Is this about the US specifically? There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind). Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?

Capital is concentrated in US, so you have to go there, make some good money and if that doesn’t work — fall back into safety net of your home country.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#222

Post by dboreham »

rrdharan wrote: post #200
zrail wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible. Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.

Is this about the US specifically? There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind). Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?

> Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them

You might argue that there's more tech came out of the UK (which still has some sort of healthcare, and had free education until recently) than there should considering its population and economy size. E.g. ARM, HTML, cloned sheep... Also quite a bit of popular music came from the UK. And Harry Potter was written by a person on state benefits.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#223

Post by ben_w »

hef19898 wrote: post #108
skissane wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 202…

> 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?

In order: Falcon Heavy (because it's been around for years already), then I recon Starship, the robot, then FSD.

But this is on the pair of assumptions:

(1) that the robot will initially launch with a very limited role and set of environments it can work safely in — a lightweight mobile pick-and-place robot is much much easier than a fully general humanoid that you can drop into any role a real human would do and expect it to not accidentally dismember or decapitate itself or others.

(2) it only counts as "FSD" when they can ship the cars without including a steering wheel. If the current marketing of a nice-but-limited cruise control, lane changer, and occasional automatic break counts as "FSD", then it too is already out. (I would not count this myself).

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#224

Post by trealira »

0xDEF wrote: post #183
coldtea wrote: post #78

Before: In 1994 JPL started working on the Remote Agent (RA), an autonomous spacecraft control system. RA was written entirely in Common Lisp despite unrelenting political pressure to move to C++. At one point an attempt was made to port one part of the system (the planner) to C++. This attempt had to be abandoned after a year. Based on this experience I think it's safe to say that if not for Lisp the Remote Agent wo…

What is the most Lisp-like type safe language?

Shen has type checking that you can turn on and off. When it's on, it's very much like an ML such as Standard ML.

https://shenlanguage.org/

This probably isn't the "most Lisp like," though, even though it does have s-expressions and cons cells. The other person who suggested Coalton is probably right, since AFAIK it's just Common Lisp with static types.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#225

Post by somenameforme »

hef19898 wrote: post #139
somenameforme wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

We do not have any reliable financials from SpaceX, just advertized launch costs and PR releases. SLS on the other hand has, as does e.g. Ariane-6, public budgets and a lot more bureaucracy. For Starship to make things like SLS obsolete, it has to be available first. Until then, it is just pure speculation. Is SLS more expensive than Starship development wise? Yes. But it is not the goal of a government to be profita…

Starship's a red herring. The SLS is already so far behind the game (before even being finished) that it lacks any rational argument even against the Falcon Heavy, which has been in service for years. And nobody's being handed monopolies. Government space contracts have a competitive bidding process. If Boeing/Lockheed, Blue Origin, or any of the other less known aerospace startups can come up with something that can reasonably compete against half a decade old SpaceX tech then I'd love to see it as much as anybody else. But for now that's simply not happening, and just corruptly tossing tens of billions of dollars towards Boeing/Lockheed isn't bringing us any closer to that happening.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#226

Post by croes »

WrongAssumption wrote: post #218
croes wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA uses metric

NASA didn’t begin to standardize on metric until 1990. Far after Voyager was developed and launched.

NASA already used metric internally for the moon landings

https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...

And I doubt that calculations for the voyager mission where done in imperial. The output and for contractors yes, but internally it's metric.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#227

Post by gosub100 »

aklemm wrote: post #209
rrdharan wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this about the US specifically? There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind). Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?

Go there and look at how they live; that takes inspiration. The benefits of their social welfare are apparent in their lifestyle compared to US daily life. And the flip: Shouldn't Scandinavia be overrun with drug-addled do-nothings if social welfare is so bad?

And reverse your flip: how do Scandinavians perform when they immigrate to other countries (vs the local population) ?

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#228

Post by croes »

mardifoufs wrote: post #187
croes wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA uses metric

NASA are still Americans. I'm not arguing about metric or imperial being better.

Parent claims genetic inferiority for not grasping metric, NASA does, so they are excluded in the first place.

Same with "military" time.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#229

Post by slingnow »

simpaticoder wrote: post #198
qrybam wrote: post #31

This is incredible. Not just because of the engineering that went into such a long lived machine, but also because of the ingenuity of the teams that have looked after this mission and those currently working on it. Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond. Not only is the technical achievement som…

>Half a century of operation. The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entir…

You're going to be blown away when you discover people have been reliably passing down information to future generations for many many centuries.
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