You Should Really Considering Explaining Acronyms Before Posting, obviously.

A remote command from some random phone to reboot does sound like the a wonderful vector for malware, though

YSRCEABP

Designing any kind of space vehicle is always a trade off.

The vehicle needs to be light enough to be launched from earth to mars, but durable enough to fulfill its mission goals.

I’m sure if nasa had access to a vehicle that could send an M1 Abram’s sized, solid steel rover to mars, they totally would, but that would probably cost more than a moon mission, and the whole point of rovers is that they’re fairly cheap for the amount of research you can get out of them.

I remember doing the bear grills one, and one of the choices was to jump over a ravine, or walk over it using a fallen tree as a bridge.

Being the hiker I am, the obvious choice of walk around it being missing kind of annoyed me, but I chose the tree option.

Bear died.

So I got to go back and pick the jump over option, which was apparently the right one.

Who the fuck does running jumps over a 15 foot deep ravine.

I never bothered with the choose your own adventure things again. When the correct choice is just not available and the next logical choice just means an instant loss, you don’t have a very fun game

If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.

The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.

But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.

One of those fancy plasma lighters, sure. But butane lighters have been around for decades

There was a big idea a couple decades ago that corporations were going to copyright natural genes and sell them for massive profits to other biotech companies that could use them to make cure for diseases and other things.

Michael Crichton wrote a few books about it, pretty good reads.

They did do the gene copyright thing in the real world, but it turns out that doing anything with a random gene is pretty hard and the genome isn’t just something you can copy paste a gene into and have it cure aids or cancer, so no one wanted to buy genetic sequences that they would then need to do a whole bunch of work on anyway to make it useful.

Pretty much all 23andMe did was increase the size of the Law Enforcement dna database by letting cops send in samples of suspects and get back their family members info. Of course the company said that was very naughty, but no one got into real trouble for it. And now 23andMe owns a lot of other people’s genetic code, and it’s not worth the hard drives it’s stored on.

I could actually see this being useful for dangerous working environments like steelworks or inside nuclear facilities. As long as the control system is on a separate intranet that’s properly air gapped.

You should still pay the operator their full wage though. The human still needs all of the technical knowledge to do the job, you’re just removing most of the physical risk.

That’s an extremely bold assumption.

The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.

And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.

Oh we have generics all over the place.

The problem is that large drug companies abuse our patent systems to keep their drugs exclusive for longer than should be allowed.

Look at EPI pens. The drug is just Adrenaline, you can get a vial of that anywhere as long as you have a prescription. But the EPI pen mechanism itself is patented. So no other manufacturer can sell an easy to use, pre measured dose of Adrenaline without violating the patent. That’s why EPI pens cost hundreds of dollars instead of the 20 bucks they probably actually cost to produce. And you need that mechanism, because no one with a throat that’s closing is going to be able to calmly pull out and ampule or vial, measure the right dose into a syringe, and get it into their system before they pass out from anaphylaxis.

Semi drivers require a commercial license, and special training. They’re monitored way more closely than your average American driver.

And side mirrors only let you see what’s behind the car to the sides and at a distance, not what’s immediately behind the car. I don’t want some idiot in his $80K battering ram to roll over me because I happened to walk behind his death trap and he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the rear view camera to come up.

Not being able to see what’s immediately behind the vehicle is a safety hazard, especially in suburban areas or parking lots where most people are reversing out of a space with other people walking around.

The Cybertruck has no rear view mirror when the back cover is down.

So any reversing requires the use of the backup camera.

The car also accelerates really fast, and weighs 7,000 pounds.

It’s also an $80,000+ car that was preordered by a lot of people without test driving it. So it’s primary driver is someone who makes risky and impulsive decisions.

So a really fast, heavy car that can’t see behind it without a reverse camera, driven by impulsive people makes me think the reverse camera should definitely come up really fast.

Nope, they were awarded 3 billion dollars to develop the Human Landing System, which is the Starship they’re supposed to use for the moon landing.

Why 3 billion dollars?

Because Kathy Lueders, the interim director at NASA at the time, called SpaceX and told them if they could get their proposal down to 3 billion, it would be approved. No other contractor was given this call. When SpaceX submitted the revised proposal, Lueders unilaterally approved SpaceX for the contract.

Kathy Lueders is now the manager of Starbase Texas, SpaceX’s private launch facility. She was hired six months after she approved the contract.

Oh, and recently the Government Accountability Office released a report that the Raptor engine, which powers starship, does not have the performance required to do the mission anyway. But this has largely gone unmentioned, because the GAO is largely a toothless organization.

You’re right in that the contract is Fixed-cost, so if SpaceX blows up too many rockets and burns through that 3 billion, they are left holding the bag. But SpaceX did receive that money and are spending it to develop Starship.

I love Space, it’s been a passion of mine since I was a kid. I love learning about space, and learning how all these launch vehicles work. Rockets are really fucking cool. I want the Starship to be everything they say it is, it would be a powerful tool for making Spaceflight cheaper and easier. But the more I’ve learned about the history of spacecraft development, and the more I’ve learned about Starship in particular, the more concerned I’ve been. Starship is ludicrously complicated, even compared to a similar vehicle like the Space Shuttle. And the fact that it looks like SpaceX was awarded the contract to make Starship not on merit but though a corrupt deal where the director of nasa called and told them the price tag, and then took a job from SpaceX less than a year later, just makes me incredibly jaded with the whole project. The develop approach is concerning given they are spending US tax dollars, the design of the craft is concerning given the complexity it adds to an already complex mission. Everything comes together to make me think that because of this, we may not have humans back on the moon anytime soon. We need someone at the GAO or NASA to take a serious look at what SpaceX is doing to develop this lander, why it’s failing to test all of the hardware needed for the Artemis mission, and why they are now several years behind schedule on a multi-billion dollar contract.

It’s not about converting the car.

I have a 2009 Chevy with an automatic transmission. I’m order to convert it to electric, the ECU would have to be replaced so the car knows when to shift to a higher gear without a combustion engine.

Because of environmental reasons, ECUs are pretty tightly controlled by the government. I don’t know if any company even exists that can sell an aftermarket ECU. There’s plenty that can hack or reprogram ECUs, but even that is becoming increasingly regulated and legally questionable.

I would love to convert my car to an electric, but it’s an automatic so I’d have to spend as much as a new car to convert it.

A drop in ECU replacement and motor/battery would be great, but I doubt the auto industry or the government is going to allow the sale of third party drop in ECUs.

Idk why, but the red coloring of his eyes make him look really demonic

Oh they definitely did.

Before the pandemic, I’d see one or 2 highly questionable moves in a drive.

Now it’s like a dozen.

I see people making lefts on red, cutting off semi trucks, weaving in and out of traffic, driving with absolutely no lights at night, and my god the speeding.

A few years ago it was normal to see people doing like 5 miles an hour over the limit, now it feels like half the people want to do 10 or 15, even on surface streets.

I wonder if it’s that most people drove less during the pandemic, the fact that cops around here were told to only pull people over if they were a direct threat to the public, or if the social isolation just made some people way more self centered. But driving has definitely gotten worse since the pandemic.

The manhattan project originally start as a way to defeat Germany, it just wasn’t ready in time.