151–160 of 318 posts
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Maybe the guy who helped launch the two manmade objects furthest from earth knows more about how to build space probes than you
Shhhh, this is HN, where just like on reddit, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than a professional in said professional's field.
Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse.
Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?
It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.
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That doesn't seem helpful. Nothing lasts forever, and if you don't figure out when it's going to fail, it's going to be sooner rather than later.
>Nothing lasts forever, and if you don't figure out when it's going to fail, it's going to be sooner rather than later. You might be surprised about the reality of the situation. I had a professor who worked on the design and fabrication of the Apollo Guidance Computers, which likely was a somewhat similar process to the one being discussed here. It's been quite a few years since his lecture on it, but the process we…
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> and the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist. Various forms of nuclear propulsion have been investigated. None of them are anywhere near ready for missions, but that seems to be more due to lack of investment in their development (and environmental/legal/regulatory/geopolitical/etc concerns) than any scientific obstacle. If NASA/etc were really serious about it (as in willing to spend multiple bil…
This probably can happen as soon as there’s some manufacturing and mining capacity beyond LEA, so that it’s safe to use nuclear technology without any environmental impact. Moon is an option here, so likely it’s 5-15 years after first Moon base is established (I‘d expect exponential growth of it).
I think that’s probably a very optimistic timescale. If there’s heavy industry on the moon inside 50 years I’d be surprised.
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Shhhh, this is HN, where just like on reddit, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than a professional in said professional's field.
> this is HN, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than And they are correct At least on the programming part, having in mind the huge advances in computers since the Voyager was built. Any professional computer programmer here knows more in their field than a programmer from 70's. A Voyager built today with similar resources would be much better, 100% guaranteed. Voyager 1 was a fantastic machine don…
There are so many abstractions today that you don’t _have_ to know how computers work. They did.
Re: state of the art, you don’t need or want state of the art for building things that go into space, or underwater (closest analogue I can think of that I have experience in [operating, not coding for]). You want them to be rock-steady, with as close to zero bugs as possible, and to never, ever surprise you.
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But this is about the overall engineering of Voyager, not just the programming. Also, I'm skeptical how much better modern hardware will fare in deep space conditions, considering the use of finer and more fragile electronics. Since you're talking about general people instead of specialists, also consider how the median software developer seem to focus less on correctness, reliability, and optimization, compared to t…
> skeptical how much better modern hardware will fare in deep space conditions Why? Deep space radiation is only 4x the dosage compared to LEO. Starlink satellites use modern tech and they've spent >10,000 collective years in space since we launched more than 2 of them. The whole "modern electronics are more fragile" issue is overblown. The CPUs are tiny and easy to shield. The MMICs use huge features that you can se…
I think the Voyager probes teach us lots about what's wrong with corporate America. Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, or that isn't built by committee where they just keep shipping requirements around from one department to another. Imagine if it weren't all proprietary and if it didn't have no public or even complete documentation. Think of all the problems we have ins…
It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?
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Still a huge amount of luck involved. If that planetary alignment had happened even 10 years earlier NASA probably wouldn't have had the capability to do anything with it. If it had been sometime recently, say after the Challenger disaster, I doubt it would have got funding...
There's no way that a disaster on a manned mission would affect a satellite launch. They share nothing in common.
Even today, launch vehicles are shared between both crewed and uncrewed missions (Dragon uses Falcon 9, Starliner uses Atlas V), so a launch vehicle grounding due to a failure in one mission type absolutely can impact the other type too