antangil

It’s the odds-on favorite for the next generation of radiation-hardened space computers (HPSC). Potential to be a 25x improvement over current capabilities. Guessing most of the use cases will be niche like that, but who knows.

The Starship concept of operations requires 11 launches for each mission to the moon - one for the vehicle, another 10 to refuel it once it get into earth orbit. Each of these missions have to autonomously dock and perform a cryogenic fuel transfer.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, has shown an operationally-viable in-space cryo transfer. Even doing it on Earth is a fussy thing - cryo transfer was behind two of the Artemis I scrubs, and NASA’s been doing it since Apollo.

Getting one Starship into orbit is an interesting milestone but it’s a long way from what they promised the world they could do… and the clock is ticking.

I’d frame this discussion somewhat differently. Fixed-cost service contracts are really good when everyone involved knows what the hell they’re doing. When the contractor doesn’t know what they’re doing, they either inflate the bid or under-bid and lose money. When the government doesn’t know what it’s doing, it gives bad requirements and the result is either poor outcomes (spent the money, didn’t get what we needed) or shitloads of change orders (which is where cost-plus bites you anyways).

So - for fixed-price to work, it needs to be for a service both parties fully understand. Guess what? Nobody knows what the hell we’re doing with lunar travel. Not NASA, not the billionaire space enthusiasts, nobody. We’re making it up as we go along… and that’s okay unless we’re locked into contract mechanisms that make adjustment and collaboration difficult. Guess what? That’s exactly what we did.

Fixed-price is a different kind of “screwed” than cost-plus. It’s not less screwed…just different.

Let’s add this technology development piece to the story. Everyone doing space stuff needs CFM. In the old days, NASA would pay a lot of money to have a technology developed… but they’d own the rights and could license it or give it away. In the new world order, NASA is still paying (slightly less) for the technology to be developed… but the solutions may not be broadly useful to the rest of NASA’s goals… and nobody else gets the benefit of the technology. That’s called vendor lock, and vendor lock sucks in any situation.

So I dunno. It’s complicated, but it’s not the fault of the CFM engineers. NASA is indirectly throwing money at CFM, and they’re not getting good value for money in that investment. If you ask me, it’s the fault of the contracts folks for not thinking through these enormously obvious pitfalls and coming up with ways to manage them.

This directive is largely pointless, which is pretty normal for government travel. Absent orders to the contrary, it’s still “lowest-price option that gets you to the destination in time.” 9 times out of 10, that’ll still be the contract airline fare, a basic per diem hotel, and the lowest-bid compact car at the destination.

I’m part of a pretty large subset of government folks that travel largely to large installations (military bases, etc) with no guarantee of EV charging stations because facilities funds have been constricted for decades. The per diem hotels don’t usually have much charger infrastructure either, which means government EV renters will have to run around looking for fast chargers in unfamiliar towns. I’m not at all unusual in this regard; I think it’s pretty unlikely that a given federal govt worker will be able to catch a train to their TDY.

The train thing is goofy except for the northeast and maybe California. I’m not in those places, there isn’t a train station in my zip code, and it looks like POV travel is a no-go now so I can’t leave my immediate vicinity without a rental.

Outside of big population centers, this new rule has no real effect other than to make a few new checkboxes on our travel forms… “did you consider rail travel for this trip? Y/n”, “was an EV rental available at a rate equal to the compact car rate? Y/n

The only thing that would really work here would be a requirement and a subsidy. “Rail travel is required unless the total cost of the rail option is greater than 125% of the air travel option.” “Government travelers are required to rent EVs unless the EV rental price is more than double the cost of a conventional compact.” You’ll also need an “all government buildings shall provide EV charging for official travel.” …and probably a “Government travelers with an EV rental may exceed hotel per-diem by up to $15/night if the hotel has EV charging infrastructure.”

Eric Burger has been against SLS for like 15 years, it’s his whole schtick. Loves making points about how expensive it is, about how late it was, and that it means NASA can’t design rockets anymore. Never talks the other side - how Congress hamstrung the design, how it was consistently under-funded, and how it was shackled to Boeing at the same time that the entire company hit the skids.

SLS was forced to be a Frankenstein rocket slash jobs program by legislative fiat. Of course it’s not sustainable in a financially-constrained environment - it was designed to spread money and jobs just as much as it was designed to deliver payloads.

It’s still the only thing that can put an Orion vehicle in orbit, and Orion is the only vehicle we’ve got today that can get crew off the earth and to lunar orbit, and Artemis I was a masterpiece launch of a first-build rocket.

Another SLS hit piece from Ars Technica isn’t news, it’s just noise.

[email protected] is a direct NASA employee.

Bio to come. :)

I call shenanigans. A fully autonomous space vehicle is three miracles away - we need a revolution in avionics to get systems capable of running computationally-expensive models, a revolution in sensor technology to allow for dense state knowledge of satellite systems without blowing mass and volume budgets, and we need a revolution in AI/ML that makes onboard collision avoidance and system upkeep viable.

I do believe that someone has pre-trained a model on vegetation and terrain features, has put that model up on a cube sat, and is using it to “autonomously” identify features of interest. I do believe someone has duct-taped a LLM to the ground systems to allow for voice interaction. I do not agree that those features indicate a high level of autonomy on the spacecraft.

This is my personal opinion. The Moon to Mars Objectives offers an agency-vetted response that’s probably better than mine.

I think folks with this opinion are very nearly allies. They have an interest in things outside their immediate environment, they recognize the value of both investment and innovation, and they’re unsatisfied with the status quo. I can get behind all of those qualities and recognize in them a friend.

I also, for the record, want to see the world a better place. I want to see conservation and education, I want to see the hungry fed and the hurting aided. I don’t want to pick between aiding hurricane victims and educating youth. I don’t want to pick between feeding the hungry and going to space. All of these things can be good and valuable at the same time, and there is no reason we as a society should be forced to choose. I’m a “yes, and” voice for those who want to see the world a better place today… I think that the human behaviors that NASA inspires are critical to achieving your goal.

Tsiolkovsky’all / [email protected] is a direct NASA employee.

(Hi folks! I’ll go first to show you what I have in mind.)

I am not part of NASA’s Public Affairs office and have no official outreach role. I’m part of this community because I love what I do, but nothing that I say should be interpreted as an official NASA position.

I have a masters degree in systems engineering with a concentration in space systems and a BSE in Mechancial Engineering. Before that,
I was a barista and a mall retail worker. Before that, I was a college dropout with a difficult-to-achieve 0.0 cumulative GPA.

I worked for NASA as a contractor for over 10 years and was hired as a direct NASA employee fairly recently - all of that experience is in the domain of human spaceflight. In one way or another, I’ve been lucky enough to work on pretty much every going concern in the Moon to Mars portfolio. Folks that worked Artemis 1 SLS, the early days of HLS, or in the ACD integration organization would generally recognize me.

My experience lies in a few related domains:

• Cross-Program Integration (the engineering effort to make sure that all the hardware built by the programs works together)
• Modeling and Simulation
• Digital Transformation (I hate that term)
• NASA SE Processes (logical decomposition, requirements development, verification and validation, etc)
• Technology maturation
• Human Systems Integration

In addition to moderating, I’m going to try to contribute content generated by NASA’s ESDMD that is in the public domain but that maybe doesn’t get a lot of mainstream press… especially about NASA’s evolving plan for Mars (which is something I’m mostly just really curious about).

There’s definitely relevant crossover, but I’m also okay if members of both communities focus any zeal for Musk in your domain. I’ve got a lot of respect for Glynn and her team and SpaceX is definitely having their Apollo moment - and they have a gift for keeping the press excited in a way that’s generally good for the whole world of space exploration.

But… (fair warning) I’ve worked SLS and the NASA govt reference design for HLS. My personal feelings on the “just give all the work to Elon” storyline are therefore a bit complex. Regardless, welcome to the community - all engagement is positive. :)

I’ll throw out another one. Would it be useful to the community to see short bios on those among us that work at (or around) NASA? Would others that work there be interested in posting one?

If there’s interest, I was thinking that I’d police that post heavily to ensure that only posters that had proven their credentials to me had posts… and that I’d share my own credentials with anyone that passed so that we were all on the same playing field.

I’ve worked at NASA for a good number of years, and I’ve interacted a lot with the human health and medical establishment. Anyone want to do some read-and-discuss threads on interesting layperson-friendly HMTA papers?