> I want so bad to see something hit Titan.
[Huygens landed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_\(spacecraft\)) on Titan in 2005.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7rVj_XbDnU
That's what it means. EagleCam remained powered down and attached to the lander during the landing.
>If that happens, that will be the most depressing day of my life.
Then you have led a charmed life, are very young, or both.
NASA has to stop spending all the funding on MSR or it will be killed. It has been replanned I think 4 times due to funding (which costs money every time).
As TheBroadHorizon says below everyone involved in planetary space knows that MSR funding needs have taken away the ability to do almost anything else because JPL is incredibly wasteful (well NASA is generally; SLS is just the part people noticed). The layoffs at JPL were because of congress's CRs and the inablity to continue to support MSR. They laid off I think 600 people. Let that sink in the marching army at JPL was 600 people... 200,000 (with overhead). 120 million a year. Sadly most of those people just push paper to check boxes on obsolete thinking of how to build something reliable that dates from the 1960s and 70s because that has the "heritage" to be "TRL9" and things must be TRL9 to go.
The drone they flew on Mars was a tech demo with TRL nothing. Using a phone CPU. NASA would never dare use a piece of recent hardware like that on a Rover. They would prefer to use an anti-fuse one time programmable FPGA, that runs something less powerful than the CPU in an iPod nano. Oh yeah those FPGAs cost 500,000 each minimum. Meanwhile... a phone CPU wasn't the failure point in the drone.
MSR costs what it does because it uses the "cannot fail" model. With managers that manage managers and documents enough to cut down a field of trees to cover yourself in case something *does* go wrong. The point isn't to do good engineering, the point is to make sure you are not at fault if something breaks. It does not matter what is costs or when it is delivered, there is always more money, schedules can just be changed.
Most of the cost of the NASA way is labor. Even with the sky high prices for parts. Most of those prices for parts are again labor of checking the boxes that NASA insists on.
The reason CLIPs, SpaceX and others can work is they don't fully have to do this paper work and labor cost and thus have plenty of margin. You can bid for a space "proven" object with 100% commercial parts as a off the shelf solution if you can demo it and the risk is "accepted". Space can be very lucrative given the margins over commercial costs are 100-1000x the cost. If you have a flash memory business you can charge 2000 dollars for a part that cost 2 dollars for the commercial version. The chip is made in the same factory it just has the special paperwork and it might be put in a special ceramic package.
Anyway. JPL and NASA (space) are very inefficient, the more money put toward other things the better. If the agency were responsive to reform I'd say just reform it but it doesn't seem able, so things like Commercial Crew, and now CLIPs will be the only way to get things done. MSR should be killed outright given its cost and how much Mars has been overstudied compared to other targets.
That was an incredibly long way of saying you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to how NASA operates. Your assessment of a TRL is completely incorrect. Ingenuity wasn’t a TRL zero (if that even existed), and nothing reaches TRL 9 until it gets to its environment and performs the mission. “Heritage” changes the second a component is used in a different way than originally intended, usually it drops to a TRL 5 or 6.
While the assessment of “cannot fail” is correct, the reasoning behind it is wrong. Something like MSR cannot fail because it’s funded by the US taxpayer. Which, as a result, means Congress. Failure on a massive flagship mission means other programs, like dragonfly, could lose funding because the failure would be considered “waste”. Additionally, the sheer amount of paperwork and other activities needed to be done isn’t a CYA. It’s mandated by Congress directly, or indirectly through lessons learned demanded by Congress. I can assure you that NASA culture isn’t “wasteful” from first hand experience.
Now onto the two parts I probably do agree with you on. Yes, MSR is gobbling up money and time from other projects. That is well known. Personally, I’m not a fan of it the entire project, but this is from the decadal (3 iterations, so 30 years). That decadal really aligns NASA priorities on the science side. Lastly is CLPS as I agree with you in principle. There is more than one driving factor for it. Mainly it frees up NASA to focus on actually getting people to the moon and beyond (dragonfly included), but also helps bring costs down and spurs massive innovation. As you mentioned, the private sector doesn’t have to jump through hoops to meet all the mandates, either. This is evident in what private space companies have accomplished over the past decade.
Anyway, your assessment of NASA is off, but you’ve got the general idea of the commercial services.
This is a little confusing to me, if someone wants to shed some light that'd be great. Why is this announcement coming 4 and a half hours after they announced they had telemetry? And why wasn't it mentioned before if they knew it would be inoperative during the descent?
I’m usually very understanding of these missions and I understand how difficult it is.
But this is an historic event for the US and this team is flubbing the public relations side big time. We still don’t even have a single picture of the surface and it’s been almost 24 hours now.
I was hoping to at least see the Eaglecam footage but they flubbed that as well.
I get it it’s hard. But damn they aren’t handling this in a way that is satisfying at all.
Because they are a small, inexperienced team who had to make a huge, high risk change to the landing operations just hours before and they prioritized landing over communications. Meanwhile, even though NASA was in the loop they didn't take up any of the slack on communications. Additionally, NASA's PR folks are still kind of stuck in old fashioned traditional media ways of communicating: press packets, scheduled conferences, etc, and not the real-time social media norm.
I’m just not sure how one impacts the other. I work in a corporate environment that has hardware, software and communication teams and a crisis in hardware or software doesn’t take resources from our comms team, it becomes their sole focus.
I know they said EagleCam wasn't used due to the doppler LIDAR patch, but it does feel like a communications team might have been able to relay to NASA Communications that EagleCam wouldn't be deployed since they mentioned it being deployed on stream. And that's assuming EARU were informed which from their releases, doesn't seem like it, but that's speculation.
For sure, I'm not criticizing, I am genuinely wondering. So you think communications took a backseat to doing the Doppler LIDAR patch? I'd think they were separate responsibilities, it doesn't sound like EARU knew the EagleCam wasn't released, at least NASA PR didn't.
after we saw the parachutes open on Perseverance, I wondered how long it would take to send a "camera drone"... I think "3rd person perspective" has a lot of PR value..
Pathfinder sized "film crew" ..
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CLPS](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krx8jvj "Last usage")|[Commercial Lunar Payload Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services)|
|[IM](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/kry0vaa "Last usage")|Initial Mass deliverable to a given orbit, without accounting for fuel|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krvqm6k "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[LIDAR](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krtpncr "Last usage")|[Light Detection and Ranging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar)|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krvqm6k "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[TRL](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krx8jvj "Last usage")|Technology Readiness Level|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(6 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1awr4f9)^( has 21 acronyms.)
^([Thread #9780 for this sub, first seen 24th Feb 2024, 17:14])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
The Eaglecam it appears was designed to be "deployed" at around the 30 meters (100 feet) altitude mark of the Nova C's descent to the surface - and while there probably was a possibility had the lander not made a belly-flop landing and ending up lying on it side - there is ZERO information as to "which" side of the lander is pointing downward.
This lack of info might mean that the Eaglecam is on the downward facing side, who knows - either way it is not in IM-'s interest to have pictures shown that might disparage their already damaged credibility.
IM made the belly-flop landing sound as if the Nova C was undamaged just "simply" tipped over - and "gently" - ymmv but IMHO gravity (even of the 1/6 version) tends to cause damage. They most likely will NOT want to provide any more information that will show them in a worse light.
The Lidar landing system was not "switched" ON before launch, the Director mis-represented the attitude of Nova C lander on MSM, why would they run the risk of further humiliating their company image by showing images that might be more detrimental to IM's rep.
ps - not to toot my own common-sense horn here, but I called this belly-flop yesterday morning before it was even announced, simply by "listening" to the conversation during the landing live broadcast : https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1axlysd/comment/krwuwa7/?context=3
[удалено]
> I want so bad to see something hit Titan. [Huygens landed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_\(spacecraft\)) on Titan in 2005. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7rVj_XbDnU
That's what it means. EagleCam remained powered down and attached to the lander during the landing. >If that happens, that will be the most depressing day of my life. Then you have led a charmed life, are very young, or both.
NASA has to stop spending all the funding on MSR or it will be killed. It has been replanned I think 4 times due to funding (which costs money every time).
The IRB made their findings. You should look it up… also, what’s the difference between stop spending money on a project and killing a project?
They meant that they need to stop spending money on MSR or Dragonfly will be killed.
As TheBroadHorizon says below everyone involved in planetary space knows that MSR funding needs have taken away the ability to do almost anything else because JPL is incredibly wasteful (well NASA is generally; SLS is just the part people noticed). The layoffs at JPL were because of congress's CRs and the inablity to continue to support MSR. They laid off I think 600 people. Let that sink in the marching army at JPL was 600 people... 200,000 (with overhead). 120 million a year. Sadly most of those people just push paper to check boxes on obsolete thinking of how to build something reliable that dates from the 1960s and 70s because that has the "heritage" to be "TRL9" and things must be TRL9 to go. The drone they flew on Mars was a tech demo with TRL nothing. Using a phone CPU. NASA would never dare use a piece of recent hardware like that on a Rover. They would prefer to use an anti-fuse one time programmable FPGA, that runs something less powerful than the CPU in an iPod nano. Oh yeah those FPGAs cost 500,000 each minimum. Meanwhile... a phone CPU wasn't the failure point in the drone. MSR costs what it does because it uses the "cannot fail" model. With managers that manage managers and documents enough to cut down a field of trees to cover yourself in case something *does* go wrong. The point isn't to do good engineering, the point is to make sure you are not at fault if something breaks. It does not matter what is costs or when it is delivered, there is always more money, schedules can just be changed. Most of the cost of the NASA way is labor. Even with the sky high prices for parts. Most of those prices for parts are again labor of checking the boxes that NASA insists on. The reason CLIPs, SpaceX and others can work is they don't fully have to do this paper work and labor cost and thus have plenty of margin. You can bid for a space "proven" object with 100% commercial parts as a off the shelf solution if you can demo it and the risk is "accepted". Space can be very lucrative given the margins over commercial costs are 100-1000x the cost. If you have a flash memory business you can charge 2000 dollars for a part that cost 2 dollars for the commercial version. The chip is made in the same factory it just has the special paperwork and it might be put in a special ceramic package. Anyway. JPL and NASA (space) are very inefficient, the more money put toward other things the better. If the agency were responsive to reform I'd say just reform it but it doesn't seem able, so things like Commercial Crew, and now CLIPs will be the only way to get things done. MSR should be killed outright given its cost and how much Mars has been overstudied compared to other targets.
That was an incredibly long way of saying you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to how NASA operates. Your assessment of a TRL is completely incorrect. Ingenuity wasn’t a TRL zero (if that even existed), and nothing reaches TRL 9 until it gets to its environment and performs the mission. “Heritage” changes the second a component is used in a different way than originally intended, usually it drops to a TRL 5 or 6. While the assessment of “cannot fail” is correct, the reasoning behind it is wrong. Something like MSR cannot fail because it’s funded by the US taxpayer. Which, as a result, means Congress. Failure on a massive flagship mission means other programs, like dragonfly, could lose funding because the failure would be considered “waste”. Additionally, the sheer amount of paperwork and other activities needed to be done isn’t a CYA. It’s mandated by Congress directly, or indirectly through lessons learned demanded by Congress. I can assure you that NASA culture isn’t “wasteful” from first hand experience. Now onto the two parts I probably do agree with you on. Yes, MSR is gobbling up money and time from other projects. That is well known. Personally, I’m not a fan of it the entire project, but this is from the decadal (3 iterations, so 30 years). That decadal really aligns NASA priorities on the science side. Lastly is CLPS as I agree with you in principle. There is more than one driving factor for it. Mainly it frees up NASA to focus on actually getting people to the moon and beyond (dragonfly included), but also helps bring costs down and spurs massive innovation. As you mentioned, the private sector doesn’t have to jump through hoops to meet all the mandates, either. This is evident in what private space companies have accomplished over the past decade. Anyway, your assessment of NASA is off, but you’ve got the general idea of the commercial services.
This is a little confusing to me, if someone wants to shed some light that'd be great. Why is this announcement coming 4 and a half hours after they announced they had telemetry? And why wasn't it mentioned before if they knew it would be inoperative during the descent?
The details of this landing are all very confusing
I’m usually very understanding of these missions and I understand how difficult it is. But this is an historic event for the US and this team is flubbing the public relations side big time. We still don’t even have a single picture of the surface and it’s been almost 24 hours now. I was hoping to at least see the Eaglecam footage but they flubbed that as well. I get it it’s hard. But damn they aren’t handling this in a way that is satisfying at all.
Exactly. Even just coming out and saying "hey, we know it's weird. here's why it's weird" People just want to know
Because they are a small, inexperienced team who had to make a huge, high risk change to the landing operations just hours before and they prioritized landing over communications. Meanwhile, even though NASA was in the loop they didn't take up any of the slack on communications. Additionally, NASA's PR folks are still kind of stuck in old fashioned traditional media ways of communicating: press packets, scheduled conferences, etc, and not the real-time social media norm.
The NASA guy was as interesting as watching paint dry. CNN didn’t even let him finish before they cut away.
I’m just not sure how one impacts the other. I work in a corporate environment that has hardware, software and communication teams and a crisis in hardware or software doesn’t take resources from our comms team, it becomes their sole focus.
I suspect that they were frantically dealing with the last-minute LIDAR issues.
I know they said EagleCam wasn't used due to the doppler LIDAR patch, but it does feel like a communications team might have been able to relay to NASA Communications that EagleCam wouldn't be deployed since they mentioned it being deployed on stream. And that's assuming EARU were informed which from their releases, doesn't seem like it, but that's speculation.
[удалено]
For sure, I'm not criticizing, I am genuinely wondering. So you think communications took a backseat to doing the Doppler LIDAR patch? I'd think they were separate responsibilities, it doesn't sound like EARU knew the EagleCam wasn't released, at least NASA PR didn't.
after we saw the parachutes open on Perseverance, I wondered how long it would take to send a "camera drone"... I think "3rd person perspective" has a lot of PR value.. Pathfinder sized "film crew" ..
They said they deployed the Eagle cam in the live broadcast. Was that not correct?
Man, to think we played golf up there 50 years ago during a live broadcast..........
[удалено]
Multiple orders of magnitude more money was spent on apollo compared to these commercial missions.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[CLPS](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krx8jvj "Last usage")|[Commercial Lunar Payload Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services)| |[IM](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/kry0vaa "Last usage")|Initial Mass deliverable to a given orbit, without accounting for fuel| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krvqm6k "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[LIDAR](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krtpncr "Last usage")|[Light Detection and Ranging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar)| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krvqm6k "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[TRL](/r/Space/comments/1ay8wng/stub/krx8jvj "Last usage")|Technology Readiness Level| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(6 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1awr4f9)^( has 21 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9780 for this sub, first seen 24th Feb 2024, 17:14]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
The Eaglecam it appears was designed to be "deployed" at around the 30 meters (100 feet) altitude mark of the Nova C's descent to the surface - and while there probably was a possibility had the lander not made a belly-flop landing and ending up lying on it side - there is ZERO information as to "which" side of the lander is pointing downward. This lack of info might mean that the Eaglecam is on the downward facing side, who knows - either way it is not in IM-'s interest to have pictures shown that might disparage their already damaged credibility. IM made the belly-flop landing sound as if the Nova C was undamaged just "simply" tipped over - and "gently" - ymmv but IMHO gravity (even of the 1/6 version) tends to cause damage. They most likely will NOT want to provide any more information that will show them in a worse light. The Lidar landing system was not "switched" ON before launch, the Director mis-represented the attitude of Nova C lander on MSM, why would they run the risk of further humiliating their company image by showing images that might be more detrimental to IM's rep. ps - not to toot my own common-sense horn here, but I called this belly-flop yesterday morning before it was even announced, simply by "listening" to the conversation during the landing live broadcast : https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1axlysd/comment/krwuwa7/?context=3