helgee · HackerTrans

há 2 mesesdiscuss

The Ben Franklin effect is real! My experience at conferences has improved significantly by ending talks on a personal note and explicitly saying that I have trouble approaching people but very much like being approached and chat about anything. This usually leads to interesting conversations in the breaks. Please give it a try if you are like me and aimlessly wander the hallways in between sessions otherwise.

helgee

ano passadodiscuss

1. Safe as in type-safe, memory-safe, and null-safe in contrast to the state of the art which is mostly C++, Java, and tons of ancient Fortran.

2. At the moment, we are using it for speeding up Python code for telecommunications constellation design.

I want to commission a real human artist to design a logo and header image in the future. The AI art is a nice placeholder.

P.S.: I wish this was my day job. I actually had to quit my job at a major aerospace contractor to be able to work on this project.

helgee

ano passadodiscuss

Nah, not really. I sometimes wish that this was all about Rust but as of now the library is mostly being used through the Python wrapper.

helgee

ano passadodiscuss

We already have the possibility to get positions of celestial bodies with very high precision via JPL ephemerides but you would have to write and integrate your force model yourself.

helgee

ano passadodiscuss

Nyx is the OG Rust-based astrodynamics library and much more mature.

Lox started as a vehicle for myself to learn Rust and at that point I did not feel comfortable contributing to an established code base.

helgee

ano passadodiscuss

Oh, hi! Project creator here.

I am very happy that you folks are showing interest but I am also terrified because this thing is definitely not ready for primetime, yet. The discerning astrodynamicist and/or rustacean will surely find things which are less than optimal or plain wrong.

I am also preparing for a trip so I won't be able to monitor this thread closely but I'll try to answer question wherever I can.

helgee

há 2 anosdiscuss

Shower thought: People vote for Trump because he is actually predictable. You never have to guess whose interests he is protecting. It's always his own. You never have to guess whether he is lying. He sure as hell is but there is also no hidden agenda. It's unfiltered mental diarrhea but it's raw and authentic.

I think a lot of the unease and disdain for the Western political class stems from their attempts to be inoffensive and appeal to everybody. Whatever policy you enact there is always going to be a trade-off, winners and losers, and if you do now acknowledge that, how can I be sure that you are acting in my interest?

“Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid.” ― Captain Jack Sparrow

helgee

há 3 anosdiscuss

I owe my career to the incompetence and greed of Arianespace. For my master's thesis I reverse engineered launcher ascent simulations for ESA because Arianespace was unwilling or unable to answer basic questions such as "how much payload can rocket X transport to orbit Y which is not GTO" without charging an obscene amount of money and needing months of lead time. A few years later at one of the Lunar X-Prize startups, my team and I sat together with Arianespace's mission analysts and we had to explain to them why you cannot have a 24-hour launch window when you want to fly to the Moon. The bloody thing moves!

After SpaceX published the video from the first successful grasshopper flight it was clear to me and basically everyone else I talked to in the industry that an expendable Ariane 6 was DOA. But the pork must flow...

The corruption, nepotism, and incompetence runs deep in the European space industry. ESA is an organization where people get passed over for promotion because they are "too technical" or don't belong to the right old boy network.

Geo return (the geographic return rule) excacerbates all these problems by creating quasi-monopolies. As an example, the market leader for astrodynamics software in Europe is at the top because their national delegation heavily invests in programs that benefit them and not much else. Thus, they "need" to win a lot of contracts to balance the scales and make a luxurious living by repackaging the same old Fortran77 garbage over and over again.

</rant>

helgee

há 4 anosdiscuss

I have quit caffeine twice in the past few years with the longest abstinence being around one year. Before that I was chugging up to four double espressi per day which I replaced with decaf. The inital withdrawal was brutal with migraine-strength heachaches (including feeling very sensitive to light and nausea) on the first day and milder headaches for another week or two. I noticed small improvements to my sleep, e.g., falling asleep a bit faster, but I am a bad sleeper in general and having a newborn child did not help. The biggest benefit was not being dependent on caffeine and not consuming lots of bad coffee as a result (Starbucks et al.). I remember one instance were I was on vacation snowshoeing in the Alps. The cabin were we slept only offered coffee that was absolutely undrinkable and I had a lousy day as a result. Not great...

That being said, I am back on caffeine again because I realized that it acts as a mild anti-depressant for me. It seems to have an effect on my dopaminergic system as well and helps me focus and get stuff done. Since I started drinking coffee again, I have not had a day where I do not feel like doing anything (not even goofing off) and get nothing done at all. This happened regularly when I was off caffeine. I manage the negative side effects by not drinking coffee after 2 PM and I limit myself to three cups/espresso shots per day. Seems to work as well.

helgee

há 5 anosdiscuss

The French horn is a holy instrument. Because if you blow into the mouthpiece, only God knows what will come out of the other end.

helgee

há 5 anosdiscuss

A second degree acquaintance of mine in Germany had his house raided by police and all of his electronics (including his work laptop and phone) temporarily confiscated on suspicion of possession of child pornography because...

...an anonymous member of a child pornography forum used the handle "$NAME_$YEAR" and had his location set to $TOWN. The innocent bystander's middle name is $NAME and he was born in $TOWN in $YEAR but had not lived there for decades. He only learned about this absolutely nonsensical justification and got his stuff back by hiring a lawyer who requested access to the DA's investigation file.

If you can get a judge to sign a warrant with flimsy non-evidence like this, what will they do when the robot says "95% match detected".

This gives me pause...

helgee

há 5 anosdiscuss

Disclaimer: I am one of the (many) engineers working on the project.

Before COVID I worked for a European lunar exploration startup and access to a constellation like this would have changed everything. The plan was to provide an end-to-end payload transportation service to the lunar surface and we wanted to fly our own two rovers as a demo mission.

While you can accomplish all communications (TM/TC, HD video) and navigation (orbit determination, surface nav) tasks with terrestrial ground stations, it is hellishly expensive.

Just as an example, the good thing about the Moon (in contrast to Mars) is that it is very close and you can drive a rover almost in real time due to the comparatively low latency (that's what the Russians did with the Lunokhods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme). That means you can cover more ground than on Mars which was also very important to us because the plan was to drive to one of the Apollo landing sites (where you must land outside the exclusion zone) and we would have had only 10-12 days of daylight for our operations until the lunar night would have killed our electronics. For that you need good video feeds from the rover's cameras which again required downlink via X band antennas due to the Moon's distance from Earth. There are not that many X band ground stations and all the interplanetary missions are constantly fighting for the limited capacity.

We would have then needed even more ground station time for ranging operations, i.e. performing orbit determination during the transfer and prior to landing and determining the rovers' exact positions on the surface. In the end, we would have needed to pay several million EUR for ground station time alone. A reasonably priced Project Moonlight constellation would have been a godsend and significantly reduced the complexity of our operations. Cash-strapped startups are not the best customers, though...

I can only assume that all the companies in the NASA CLPS program are facing the same issues. The problem is that they are planning their missions and are designing their spacecraft now. If this constellation becomes a reality, it will certainly be too late for the first batch.

As for the ideas about Starlink, satellites are designed around their payloads, i.e. all subsystems (power, thermal, comms, on-board computer, propulsion) are designed to fulfil the requirements of a specific payload and its mission with some margins. Very rarely can you swap or add additional payloads without redesigning the whole system especially if your starting point is as streamlined a design as Starlink's is. I am a huge fan of all things SpaceX but they are not miracle workers. Also Starship has not reached orbit (yet) and Super Heavy has not flown (yet).

Finally, the costs. As some others have commented, this is a paper study right now which is comparatively cheap (no idea how much exactly but my educated guess would be single digit millions). Whether this will be funded for real and becomes an actual program will be decided at ESA's next ministerial. In the grand scheme of things this is not a lot. Compared to of ESA's annual budget of ~6 billion EUR it is almost negligible. That again is a joke compared to NASA's annual budget of ~22 billion USD. Which still pales in comparison to the up to 1.3 trillion EUR that the German federal and state governments alone spent on the mitigation of the pandemic (https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/corona-novemberhilfen...) or the economic cost of climate change which is also in the trillions. Yes, space hardware is too expensive, there is too much red tape, and frankly too much nepotism in OldSpace. But taking the few billions spend on space every year away and spending them on the "big problems of our time" would accomplish very little.

TL;DR: The technical benefits are real whether it becomes a reality and is commercially viable remains to be seen. SpaceX is great, Starship is great, Starlink is great, but it is also not magic. Space sounds expensive but really isn't when you do the math.

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