MajorasMaskForever

I work in the aerospace industry, mainly to satellites these days but I've worked in launch in the past and have plenty of friends who have as well.

That 450 figure is probably all of Falcon 9s development which has gone through several design iteration cycles. Industry rumors point to a new Falcon 9 booster being around $50 to build and a million or two to refurbish on average. The re-use is saving them a significant amount, but the upfront design cost was just so stupid high.

It's also worth noting that Starlink supposedly launches at near cost meaning little profit for each of those, but then SpaceX turns around and prices Falcon 9 close to Atlas V for government contracts (90-150m total price so probably 60m profit) and gouges people on Transporter (they're almost certainly pulling in 150-200m on each of those)

Nuance on the Internet? Not allowed, fuck off

/s cause last time I made this comment a mod deleted it

Senior embedded C developer here in the US. I can speak first hand experience at people applying to be on my team that have reasonable sounding experience and then collapse under interview questions.

Everything else you said applies here too, legally we don't have repercussions for firing someone quickly (once had a team member for two months), but a healthy org will try very hard to get hiring right because it can cause pretty bad morale to see a revolving door and there is a massive brain and resource drain having to constantly be training new people.

Smaller businesses or privately owned businesses with a smart owner do.

Large publicly traded companies are sustained by a perception that an investment in or loan to that company will pay off in a higher dollar amount in the future, so if the perception becomes the company is shrinking then the investments and loans slow down which makes the perception worse, you get that feedback loop which turns into the death spiral.

So the bigwigs at the top of these companies have to be professional liars and gamblers to change the perception and make it look like everything isn't just fine, they're doing great! The line must go up.

Navi was never really that bad in game.

Fi on the other hand....

Yup, sometimes it's too easy for me to just slip into work mode when talking about this kind of stuff and I don't elaborate enough. Thanks for stepping in.

Based on industry rumors I believe the Orion capsule control computers are running VxWorks (I've heard that maybe a few boxes are using RTEMS?) All of that source code would have been reviewed, audited, and tested to hell and back.

The day-in-the-life stuff for the astronauts is entirely believable to be Windows. The risk of it failing is so low (medium probability, low impact), it's what they'd be familiar with, and it's part of daily life at NASA anyways. Linux is no better when it comes to safety critical components and the astronauts almost certainly wouldn't want to be dealing with Gnome's... uniqueness....

I have not worked on human rated launch vehicles, but I've been adjacent to them, saw what went into them, and a few close personal friends have worked it.

Anything that can jeapordize the safety of the crew must go through a rigorous independent validation and verification process that takes years, software included. No shot a Microsoft product was even in consideration for those systems.

Being in industry I find it crazy that so many people are freaked out by this. Astronauts have email, they have tasks and schedules and reports to make. Why would NASA reinvent the wheel on a task/schedule manager when the ground operators and astronauts are already used to using Outlook.

Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It's all about excess power across the entire grid.

Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I'm home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I'm not home, my AC is off, fridge isn't running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor's down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we're all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts

Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it's still payment. I'm not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power

I too came in here thinking about outer wilds.

The controls are less realistic than you think, because they attempted to have the ship correct itself but it constantly fought me. I program spacecraft for a living, I know how the orbital mechanics and movement in 3D space works, and they made it super frustrating it made me rage quit the game for years. I only finished it because a close friend wanted me to experience the story.

For me, the story >!was the games weakest point. Putting together the history and the question of "what happened" was cool, but the dialogue was insufferable, I hated reading the story walls and having to string together the order things were said. Then to finally put everything together, get a half baked story about being marooned on effectively a desert island and it ends with a shrug and "yup, everyone died, you too"... Man fuck that.!<

Spacecraft software engineer here:

They are and they aren't. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won't have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.

Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it's supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.

The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there's no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time

Your math is right but scales are off.

Dollar raise a year? Yeah, $1 * 100 * 80 = $8000, and to a lot of businesses that's peanuts. It's also peanuts to the individual employees, if you work full time federal minimum wage you make $15600, an extra dollar wont make a difference there.

Increase hourly wage by a dollar, and to the business that becomes $1 * 40 * 52 * 100, that's $208,000 annually they're paying out

I hope this meme never dies, but I fear it's already reaching obscurity