Do you disagree that cultivating the launch provider industry in this way has strategic value?
Nope, but that wasn’t what I was responding to, either.
Readit Newsdmvdoug commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
dmvdoug commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
I was talking about rapid miniaturization, not just miniaturization in general, which I agree was underway before any space development.
NASA literally had departments and budgets dedicated to miniaturization.
I’ll give you an example: the technology in the Instrument Unit on the Saturn V, which was the computer that controlled the Saturn V during launch, was largely derived from System/360. By technology here I mean things like the Unit Logic Devices (ULDs) out of which the logic boards in the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) were made. No surprise, I suppose, given that it was contracted to IBM’s Federal Systems Division.
dmvdoug commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
dmvdoug commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
The industry is going through growing pains, New Glenn is almost ready for payloads, Neutron is a year or two away from flying, and other small launch companies are in the process of pivoting to either medium launch or space services.
I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government? The same as any other launch provider would be doing? At this point the vast majority of SpaceX's activity, and likely cashflow, is from its mostly self-funded Starlink.
SpaceX won the original HLS contract because their design actually had hardware in testing, actually met NASA's payload, landing area and testing requirements, had a clear path to commercialization and was willing to cover most of the cost themselves, as otherwise NASA wouldn't have been able to choose anyone given the limited funding allocated by Congress.
> * I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government*
Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business?
As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.
dmvdoug commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
>NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything by themselves...
I keep running across this perception and I don't understand where it comes from. Overwhelmingly, like since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything per it's appropriations from congress. Their job is to 1) Define mission requirements and objectives, 2) Oversee contracts to execute those missions, 3) Test and verify elements of those systems, and very distant 4) do some in-house research and development for cutting edge technology (still mostly contracted out). ~75% of their budget is contracts to private companies to execute missions.
NASA's job, as defined NASA directors over the years and by congress via appropriations, is to come up with ideas and fund private companies to execute them.
Yes, this. And the reason why congressional appropriations plummeted was that no one saw any need to maintain such high expenditures. There hasn’t been an actually coherent vision of what NASA is supposed to be working towards since the Apollo Program. Everything after that is lurching from one project to another, justifying it based on short-term possibility rather than committing to a longer-term goal the agency is supposed to be achieving. Just look at Shuttle. It accomplished some nice things, but it was always a dead end. Everybody in NASA knew it. ISS: accomplished some nice things, dead end. Sure, you can talk about how these were steps along the way to learning about long-term human habitation in space, but we’ve never had a coherent vision for that that everyone is aligned with. What they really were: make-work projects that were at least short-term justifiable, executed in order to preserve NASA’s capacity to do anything at all.
dmvdoug commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
The electronics we're typing these comments on were only rapidly miniaturized originally to be small and light enough to shoot into space.
There are second, third, etc order effects to things like a space race.
Nah, that’s false. Miniaturization was already underway before the Space Race. The space program absolutely benefited from it, yes. But NASA wasn’t at the forefront of those developments.
dmvdoug commented on Systemd can be a cause of restrictions on daemons utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/zdw
Systemd haters really are often a masterclass in finding problems with flexible, sanely configurable systems.
Dude’s been arguing with people since at least 2012 that systemd is a good thing. It took me less than a minute to figure that out by searching his blog.
dmvdoug commented on Compiling with Continuations swatson555.github.io/post... · Posted by u/swatson741
It was very odd to start a “review” of a book from 1992 by criticizing it for lacking all the things you think a book published in 2025 should have. And then searching GitHub for code related to it, like TFA is expecting this to be something widely read as an introduction. TFA never considers who the target audience for the book was—in 1992, hardly a year when books about compilation techniques were looking to reach a wider audience (like Nyquist’s book Crafting or something).
All of these companies have good and bad stories. I’ve been in the IT biz for a long time and have lots of stories of heroics and villainy.
I can think of a bad one where a significant number of laptops and 1st party docking stations were deployed. There was an issue where in certain scenarios plugging into the dock would brick the dock. It affected ~5% of the population in 90 days. Vendor response: fuck you.
One of the interns working on desktop support at the org figured out that certain laptop serial number ranges were affected. She then popped it open and found what turned out to be a counterfeit chip.
Flying monkeys were released and the CEO of the vendor got a call. End result: ~$40-50M redeployment of everything, eaten by the vendor. If they had been accountable from the beginning, they likely would have recalled $3-5M of devices and spent $300-500k on deployment.
On the flip, I remember one scenario where an off warranty device failed before its replacement was ready (and the replacement was another vendor). The part wasn’t available locally, and the account exec ditched a conference in Chicago, picked up the part from a depot in Indiana and drove it to Massachusetts overnight, with a CE waiting for it in the lot.
It’s almost like what really matters when something goes wrong is who responds to the incident. There are individual human beings who genuinely give a shit about customer service, and will move heaven and earth in order to help customers. And then there are other individual human beings who want to do as little as possible, when confronted with an issue, and blaming the customer is often the shortest route to minimal work.
It really doesn’t matter what the organization’s policies and procedures are. At most, an organization’s culture may affect this, by nudging marginal cases to align with the culture. But in the end, it always comes down to individual human beings.
The first half of the essay:
> It happened astonishingly fast; within about five years a knowledge skill that I had completely taken for granted as a basic requisite in an undergraduate was diminished beyond recognition.
Then the second half
> A good way of writing documentation for human beings today will still be a good way to do it in a few years’ time.
Don't these contradict each other? Documentation that worked well for us who grew up pre-Internet is not working well for "web natives".
No, because the first one isn’t talking about writing documentation. It’s talking about knowledge discovery as a learned skill that eroded when web searching replaced how knowledge used to be sought. They actually say: even in the new-fangled domain of web searching, which you would think web natives would be better at, it’s actually people who had learned the skills and techniques of knowledge discovery pre-web who were better at finding what they were looking for. Now, why they think that is the case is a bit harder to grok, having to do with their object-oriented (sorry, sorry) view of understanding/knowledge.
Contrast that with the second quote. Good documentation could be in a dusty book in the library or in a SPA. What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces.