Photo from earlier in the unloading process.

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

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.

PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 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 / antangil@lemmy.world 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).

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?

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?

…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.

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.