Laura, congratulations. Does it support acronyms? :)
Anyone interested should sign up for the changelog emails. It's only 1-2 emails a month and shows how much progress Laura and her team are making.
Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#22Really excited to be part of this team! Laura was talking yesterday about tearing up at after the Blue Origin launch, not just because it's amazing to send people to space, but because it requires the work and communication of thousands of people to take them up and bring them home safe. We're excited to build tools to enable all of the hard work that leads up to a successful launch!
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#23Looks very interesting. I surfed around your site and watched the video. So how about nonconformance processing? Do you have workflows for that, or is that where something like JIRA comes in?
Also, have you utilized anything like the S1000D aerospace data schema with this tool, or are you rolling your own?
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#24First, congrats on launching. Second, "AWS GovCloud for ITAR compliance," can the USG access my data (EU company) then?
Thanks! No, the US Government can't access your data. Only you can. GovCloud is just a special portion of AWS that has extra security controls so that US companies are confident that all their data is housed in US servers and properly treated according to ITAR regulations. It's totally fine for companies outside the US to use and doesn't give the government any access.
We also support on-premises deployments if that's preferable to companies outside the US.
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#25Congrulations on the launch, it sounds awesome. This is one of the companies where I would love to work. Are you taking remote candidates?
Thanks! That's nice to hear. You can see our job openings, which are remote-friendly, at https://angel.co/epsilon3/.
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#26Is your name a Babylon 5 Reference?
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#27Wow. This is enormously impressive. I currently work for a small startup based out of Denmark in the renewable energies space (wind turbines) developing web based tools to assist in our ML operations.
With a lifelong obsession with cosmology and astronomy, and perhaps even more applicably relevant; our own human advancement to and into the stars, I have increasingly become more and more inclined to the notion of further developing my current skillset with the eventual goal of transitioning to the space industry.
My recent experience and exposure to renewable energies has given me massive insight to just how important companies like you guys are to furthering humanity’s progress. My question to you all regarding your technology, is how you manage what I imagine to be extraordinarily large, rich, and complex datasets that must vary between use cases (you mention hotels, debris removal, etc.). The data between these use cases must vary in structure— how is it normalized/standardized to work with your pipeline(s)? The commonality I see (as a fairly novice layman in terms of space technology) is of the rocket propulsion, orbiting, and payload delivery kind, but I’m sure the data it is far more nuanced and goes far beyond that.
Furthermore, is any sort of machine learning applied on your side, perhaps in some sort of statistical analysis / metric reporting?
I’m going to definitely keep an eye on you all at Epsilon3. Perhaps you will be looking for more engineers with web dev, data, ML, and cyber/info security experience in the future!
Huge props. I can tell there is an extraordinary amount of innovation involved with this venture. Excited to see where you all go with this =)
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#28They are the real deal! Awesome team and product.
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#29This is awesome and made my day knowing that the space industry is big enough to support a startup building this kind of ops tooling. You said “you don’t hear about most of those on the news” and you’re right - most of the customer logos on your website I’d never heard of - is there a website / twitter / ? that you rely on for daily coverage? I would love to build a better view of the industry, players, priorities.
Cheers! Thank you! https://orbitalindex.com/ is an amazing resource. https://jatan.space/ is another that I follow. Payload Research newsletter rocks too: https://mailchi.mp/payloadresearch/bezos-leaves-earth?e=e515... There's even a Slack bot to be notified of launches (most of which you don't hear about on the news): https://groundcontrolbot.space/
I run Payload Space. We are about to transition from a weekly newsletter to a media company. We hope to solve the problem that there is no real media coverage of the business and policy of space.
Re: Launch HN: Epsilon3 (YC S21) – Software for spacecraft and complex operations
#30Love this! It's certainly surprising that something like this doesn't exist for the space industry yet (and other industries that do complex texting and operations). Glad to see someone working to fill that gap especially as the commercial space industry starts to blossom. Couple of thoughts/questions: 1.) How do you convince space orgs that using a third-party SaaS offering is a better approach than building it in-h…
Joseph, for #1, I've worked on in-house tools and: 1. They never get enough developers. 2. They usually get deprioritized in lieu of other projects. 3. Many small space companies don't have resources to build awesome in-house tools. It can be really time consuming and take the team's focus off of the primary goal as well, so we try to get teams to focus on the things that they are uniquely qualified to do, rather tha…
> 1. They never get enough developers. 2. They usually get deprioritized in lieu of other projects.
As a dev currently building out several fairly-complex in-house tools for a small startup, I can relate to this first-hand.
It’s enormously frustrating as a perfectionist with a slightly neurotic obsession with (in a balanced and healthy way, trust me ;D) and appreciation for best practices, I have had to (against better judgement) sacrifice many things such as extensive time spent on in-depth automated testing, abstraction of reusable code for polymorphism and shared packages, extremely in depth documentation, and many other aspects that would contribute to long term viability and efficacy. This is of course for the sake of a business-friendly timeline, and that I can appreciate.
There is a definite balance, and I have (and continue to) learn enormously from this business view on software. The “it just works” ethos can be scary further down the road. The economic upsides to this perspective for an MVP or POC type of development are absolutely massive, but I can’t help but think this could be supplemented further by dedicating more resources to focusing on best practices.
Whether that focus comes from an internal team with more dedicated resources or a third party, I’m still unsure as to how that decision should be made.
Either way, it has been very helpful in further developing my skills in communicating things like tech debt (what notions like automated testing actually mean in terms of value to a SaaS company) to the CEO and other colleagues who do not have software dev experience.