Also - unless folks complain, may put this kind of stuff in channel from time to time. Good to have a reasonably-anonymous forum for conversations that NOBODY SHOULD BE HAVING ON TEAMS. Teams chats are subject to govt review and FOIA requests, just in case y’all didn’t know.

FWIW https://www.nasa.gov/women-at-nasa/ is still up

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.

Nah. Folks are big mad because it’s exactly what we all expected when bezos bought the post. It didn’t immediately slide headlong into the void of bullshit pandering, so we developed a sense of false hope. Now it’s gone, we know it, we’re annoyed, and we’re mad about getting took.

Paywall. Don’t care enough to circumvent it, never heard of this dude, clickbait title is super-annoying. What’s the one simple thing?

…starts with a dizzying triple combo of ad hominem (democrats are infestations), straw-man (arguing that the commenters are bad instead of focusing on the article we’re commenting on), and association (all folks who disagree with me are bad).

…then demands fair and elevated discourse and complains when it’s not offered.

I might have been part of the problem in /r/politics, but your message leaves out the “treat others how you wish to be treated” lesson that is also frequently lacking in the policies of the states in the article.

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?

I’m a human spaceflight guy, and well-read in the area of NASA’s evolving plans for crewed exploration of the Moon and Mars. Would y’all like a series of discussion posts on NASA’s Moon to Mars Objectives?

I bet the fine just offsets the cost of the prosecution, it’s not gonna be some settlement, it’s just “time and costs of the lawyers on our side”. Agree that if it’s meant to be punitive, it’s pretty laughable.

Yup. keep your work life and personal life separate in interesting times like these for sure.

Right on, then. I’ll start looking for some content creation bots, pull in some feeds from the agency, maybe NASAwatch for some color.

Actually… if my SATERN training has been good for anything, it’s hammering home the value of inclusion. How do you feel about the idea of getting one member of the community to rep for each of the mission directorates? Job would be to watch the feeds, throw something into the community when it pops. I can probably rep for ESDMD, but I don’t even really know what ARMD stands for. :)

This isn’t a particularly hot take. It’s been a steady drumbeat since at least the instantiation of NASA… and it’s probably traceable all the way back to the folks standing around eating raw meat and laughing about the fool trying to tame fire.

The two biggest drivers for innovation are exploration and war. Exploration is the useful force in your proposed endeavor, teaching us how to survive in hostile environments and giving us insights about other resources or natural systems that we can adapt to our own. Exploration keeps the human race learning, thinking, and working together. You need those things.

What isn’t going to help you is the piddling handful of spare change that is spent across the world on space exploration. If your goals look inward, I respect that - you’ll have better returns by reforming the health and education mafias that siphon cash and stifle innovation. You’ll find more money and progress by far if you can divert funds and engineering focus from the military to environmental renewal.

What you shouldn’t want is to stifle any existing area of peaceful collaboration and innovation; this isn’t an either-or, it’s a yes-and. The target should be any societal aberration that makes it harder for people to get higher on Maslow’s pyramid. You’ve got valid goals, but bad aim.

The reason I am generally skeptical of the technology is the same reason I’m not going to try to give you a definition.

I’ve never seen it solve a problem or be proposed as a reasonable solution to a problem. What happens instead is that someone says “could we do BLOCKCHAIN for this, it’ll make it way more modern” and the subset of people that want to look really forward-leaning and cool say “YEAH”. If that subset of people is loud enough, a lot of money gets spent and a bunch of implementers have to figure out how to jam in something they can say is blockchainy… leading to a proliferation of definitions.

The results have been universally more expensive applications with fewer helpful features. I don’t like “blockchain” because everything that touches it gets worse.

Gonna sticky this for a day or so then let it go.

Photo from earlier in the unloading process.

Feeling very conflicted about this. Glad the folks are safe. Worried about the implications for Artemis III and the agency. Pretty sure every failure so far has been in the prop system, which is troubling given that the whole strategy for Starship requires extraordinary advancement in prop transfer technology.

Hard to deny a bit of schadenfreude for Elon taking it in the shorts again. Curious if his antics have had morale implications in SpaceX that are helping to generate misses.

A reminder for folks that starship is only viable if they can routinely execute autonomous in-space cryogenic fuel transfers. This explosion appears to be the result of a problem in human-executed on-Earth cryogenic fuel transfer.

Interestingly as of this moment it does not appear to have happened. Not clear why.

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.