"Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday.
Close inspection may not be advisable due to difficult terrain:
There seems to be some spots almost directly south (-southeast) from the landing site (300-400m away maybe?) that look like they would be reachable without descending down to the riverbed and ripples. And I think that's the general direction Percy is going towards anyways (mostly west), so it wouldn't even be a huge detour to go check it out. I'd guess it would be mostly matter of how good of a path would be available there, but eyeballing it seems relatively benign.
Interesting question. Principally image-based location tracking, though also with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and laser rangefinder, all off-the-shelf components.
This is pretty sad but also pretty amazing. The original plan was for five flights of around 90 seconds each, and it looks like it finally failed on flight 72 with a total from all flights of two hours, eight minutes and eighteen seconds of flight time. All of this in an extremely thin atmosphere.
It's less about being the best (no criticism of NASA) but rather engineering decisions to _guarantee_ the planned mission, which means you over-engineer and thus get extra performance/reliability. You're not willing to accept the statistical risk that may end a mission early.
I agree that it's not strictly that NASA engineers are better engineers, but I do think there's part of this that's both cultural and becomes actual capability - I think even if you gave most engineering organizations the budget and mandate that NASA has, they still wouldn't be able to pull off something like Webb because they don't have the practice of it*. Capacity both builds and atrophies over time, and most places don't work to that standard often enough to maintain the capability to do so even if they wanted to.
(*I don't necessarily mean the practice of shooting a rocket into space and launching a telescope, but the ability to build an object that can perform that exactly to its specifications under those kinds of circumstances.)
Mostly, with any endeavour, you never start in advanced state, you have basic solution, then refine and grow it. I guess formula would be: tech skills x organisational quality x budget x iterations already under the belt. Any of these factors can bring down the total result to zero. Not an easy task trying to control all of these.
Nasa, congrats on successful mission, which now ended.
> I think even if you gave most engineering organizations the budget and mandate that NASA has, they still wouldn't be able to pull off something like Webb because they don't have the practice of it
IMO, Webb is a bad example. It was super over budget, late, and experienced a litany of problems.
In contrast, most un-manned NASA projects are roughly on budget and generally have few issues. And even the ones that do, NASA often figures out how to correct them like the Hubble telescope.
Probably one of the purest examples of American exceptionalism.
Give other space agencies the budget of NASA, let experience marinate and you will see similar performance. NASA does not have some sort of magical intrinsic property that makes engineers perform better by sheer effect of working under its umbrella.
I speculate that beyond that, extra longevity can also be used to increase your budget. If you plan for six months operations, you have a lower mission budget. They won’t shut you down after six months as long the device is still working.
The most over engineering in the world won't help you if you don't have good to great engineers when you're talking about stuff that is off world. So while they aren't going to be guaranteed be the top 10 engineers in the world, they are easily some of the best engineers in the world and deserve that to be acknowledged, NASA attracts the best, and even though they don't necessarily pay Silicon Valley salaries for cream of the crop, a lot of people aren't strictly motivated by money.
I am in absolute awe of the results of research and engineering at NASA and many other space agencies for that matter. Nevertheless, I wonder: how much of the overperformance is in fact about playing it down in the first place?
For example, what requirements for the Ingenuity helicopter were set for the engineers? Five flights or a 100 of flights?
Definitely a substantial portion of it, but we should be far more scandalized by the damage your typical runaway hype machine does to otherwise brilliant achievements than by NASA's successful efforts to wrangle expectations.
No, it's not. As the other commenter nicely explained, this is mostly a byproduct of a very, very low tolerance of failure and extremely difficult conditions, like the impossibility to test it beforehand in the real environment.
Under promise, overdeliver, is a nice way to say that you're dishonest with the client. The fact you can overdeliver means you're making some trade-offs elsewhere, e.g. in design/production price, time, weight or somewhere else.
Overdelivering is a nice byproduct, but it shouldn't be the goal.
When I see it used it's as a device to set expectations when there are so many variables at play that any promise or commitment would be foolish, lead to disappointment with no upside. And that's how I'd interpret it here too.
It has nothing to do with dishonesty. Though I have no doubt that it might be used that way, that's fraudulent and a whole different ball-game commercially.
> When I see it used it's as a device to set expectations when there are so many variables at play that any promise or commitment would be foolish, lead to disappointment with no upside. And that's how I'd interpret it here too.
In such a situation, why not say like it is? Just explain the client the situation, what's the risk and for what additional cost it can be lowered. And I have no doubt this is what was happening in NASA, in other words this was no "underpromise and overdeliver", this was "explain the situation and agree on trade-offs leading to the best ratio of positive outcome for the price".
I think the only situation where this approach is valid is when your client is not sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs and make an optimal decision.
You figured it out yourself, internally NASA is definitely talking about the risks, tradeoffs and more realistic expectations.
But officially the statements are always set as an "underpromise and overdeliver" thing because the clients are not sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs.
Nope, just going off of interviews I've seen over the years and just general realities of engineering, kind of hard to design such long lived systems if you're genuinely just aiming for the publicly stated 90 days or whatever else. Plus, I've been learning that the lab I work at is pretty similar. It isn't outright lying, but technically it's not wrong to promise the most pessimistic version of what you think you can deliver that is still interesting enough to get funding.
By clients I mean politicians and the general public, who take even delays or testing-to-failure as being actual failure.
> Just explain the client the situation, what's the risk and for what additional cost it can be lowered. And I have no doubt this is what was happening in NASA, in other words this was no "underpromise and overdeliver", this was "explain the situation and agree on trade-offs leading to the best ratio of positive outcome for the price".
That doesn't work well when communicating indirectly, through politicians and journalists, to the public at large. It may not work when communicating to elected politicians.
> Under promise, over deliver… that’s the smart engineering way.
That brought to mind the glass-half-full / half-empty (false) dichotomy: The engineer thinks the glass is twice as big as it needs to be (or maybe 30-40% bigger to allow for a safety margin).
It's not overperforming per se. NASA spacecraft/probes have primary, secondary, and auxiliary missions. Everything on the probe is designed and built with an eye to being able to complete secondary and auxiliary missions but the guarantee (insofar as anything can be) is the probe can accomplish its primary mission.
Unfortunately this leads to uninformed reporters to make stupid claims like "a probe only designed to last 90 days...". There's no self destruct or planned obsolescence in NASA probes. They don't have an egg timer set to 90 days and then explode.
The probes are designed to last at least as long as the ability for their consumables/power supply lasts. Consider the stresses of launch, transit through space, and insertion/landing are way worse than day to day conditions for a lot of probes. If they can survive all of that rolling around a desert is relatively easy (in comparison). If Ingenuity made one successful flight there was little reason it couldn't make more so long as it had the appropriate power available and the Martian Space Defense didn't shoot it down.
Ingenuity didn't overperform, it performed according to its actual design and construction. It only overperformed misinformed media expectations.
> this leads to uninformed reporters to make stupid claims like "a probe only designed to last 90 days...".
C'mon let's not blame the reporters. NASA pushes this line - why do think everyone repeats it, using the same language almost every time? You can even see it here on HN.
If NASA says "We're going to send a helicopter to mars with the mission of taking 5 flights" is that somehow bad? If the quality of the engineering and the quality of the parts, and all the redundant systems and fail-safes required to absolutely guarantee that the helicopter will complete its mission of five flights then go on to allow the helicopter to take more flights before it finally breaks down, that isn't NASA lying to anyone or "pushing a line". If the media then tells the public that the helicopter was designed to make 5 flights, but got over 70 that's not misleading anyone.
You're just making statements, with no argument behind them other than a strawperson or two (it's 'bad'). Anyway, the arguments seem to have all been said.
NASA doesn't push that line. They say the primary mission is X flights or whatever. When the probe lasts longer reporters translate that into "designed to only last X flights!!1!"
NASA never wants to say a probe will probably last longer than its primary mission because then reporters go the complete opposite direction and claim NASA said a "probe failed to last the claimed X+Y flights".
> It comes down to the fact that a poorly educated public and a ruling class of parasites has made it so NASA has negative room for failure.
Both basically true yet overdone. Fundamentally the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture. Too strong, in that it is a distraction, a spectacle, and inhibits resolution of an actual problem, if one even exists. I don't mean this just in government: it's a fundamental part of the American Weltanschauung, one oddly rarely discussed. It seems to be so fundamental that it's simply taken as a given, like the old "fish doesn't know it's wet" metaphor.
FAA is a good example of an organization that implements an opposite approach: crash investigations follow a "what happened so we can address it, not punish" in air crashes, sometimes causing people to complain that "nobody was punished." But without the threat of punishment people are more willing to speak freely, so that hardware or procedures that need changing can actually change.
I don't know about USA politics to have an opinion on the matter, so I'd rather believe you assesment. But I want to add another point of data. Or rather point of view from outside.
My experience of communication and collaboration with individual Americans points to the opposite direction. They are focused on a problem solving, not on a blame assignment. I can compare with my fellow Russians, I can't play games with them, because they kill all the fun looking for someone to blame.
But at the same time, if we take a look at our Russian politicians... If they even look for someone to blame, they look for a blatant scapegoat.
So, I mean, it seems like a complete reverse. Probably it is a coincidence or a result of a flawed methodology, but still...
The discussion here is specifically about US (political) oversight of government agencies like NASA, specifically after a failure. Not private companies, or tech, or problem-solving in general, or scenarios where positive incentives outweigh the likelihood of blame.
Compare the huge public scrutiny of Space Shuttle failures vs the FAA being out-to-lunch on oversight of Boeing 737MAX for over a decade.
Some people have commented that excessive scrutiny (e.g. at NASA) has resulted in changes in culture and the rise of risk-averse 'professional administrators'.
True, but my comment was intended to point out that the punitive nature of political oversight of government agencies is a consequence of a more general attitude of the public, and thus probably impossible to broadly change.
I don't think the more general US attitude of the public towards private, non-govt entities is very critical (absent any scandal/ coverup/ bribery). Here's the obvious counterexample which I didn't even think was necessary to include in my previous post:
if SpaceX has quite a lot of (unmanned) launch failures that cost them (or their insurers) a lot and set back their plans for demonstrating manned launch, the general public don't care and think that's overall a net positive and cost of SpaceX making progress on its plan (as long as the debris lands at sea and doesn't cause injuries or significant pollution). If SpaceX did too much of this, it would collapse, lose its launch contracts and its investors would lose their money. Compare to Facebook/Meta's failed Connectivity division [0], Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, et al.
> > Fundamentally the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture.
> Unless its about people in cars murdering people.
Sadly I disagree. Blame is almost inevitably assigned...to the victim. In NYC if you drive a truck you can flatten cyclists with impunity because the consensus is always that it was the cyclist's own fault.
>> what happened so we can address it, not punish
> I agree that addressing issue is first most important. But we should also hold people accountable too.
What we need is for motor vehicles to stop crushing the innocent. That's what I mean when I talk about punishment as a distraction.
A cycle is far, far easier to maneuver to avoid an accident than a truck.
Some years back in Seattle, a truck driver was charged with murder because he hit a cyclist that crossed in front of him.
It was established in the trial that the cyclist had darted out from between two cars, and it was impossible for the driver to have noticed, reacted, and stopped in time. He was acquitted.
Around here, they painted stripes for a bike lane. Good. Then the cyclists like to ride on the stripe, and randomly weave back and forth across it. As a driver, I have to spend all my attention trying not to hit those suicidal cyclists, who never look back to see if it is clear when they drift into the car lane.
Well in California law cyclists have the same right to the road* as a motorists (sadly the same does not apply to the laws of physics). And if you ride in the bike lanes, as I do, you discover they are often populated with debris (unsurprising due to road camber and automotive bow wave and wake) and untrimmed branches from live bushes, which one must move leftwards in order to avoid.
Many motorists act as if roads were built for cars and all others get to use them on sufferance, if at all.
* Excepting controlled-access roads, i.e. freeways.
All the debates about cars vs bikes are so stupid. Bicycles are vehicles according to law basically everywhere on earth. It's all very simple - you over take vehicles safely, vehicles signal where they are going and drive predictably, you don't overtake vehicles when stopped at an intersection, etc etc. It's just a smaller slower vehicle, that's it.
Honestly if the bike lane is full of debris, or has a line of parked cars too close such that their doors swing open into it, just ride fully in the next lane over. A bike lane is a lane that can be used by bikes, not a lane that must be used by bikes. And in general the vast majority of the complaints about cyclists swerving too much can and should be addressed by riding further out aka taking the lane.
> A cycle is far, far easier to maneuver to avoid an accident than a truck.
No, it isn't. Most all four-wheeled vehicles traveling at 25mph can stop much, much more quickly than a bicycle traveling at 25mph simply because they have a large total contact patch and antilock braking technology. A maneuver you might pull with a 4-wheeled motor vehicle behind you because they can probably slam on their brakes in time to keep from running into you will usually result in the cyclist smashing into the back of you and being seriously injured.
They can turn more sharply at speed, and they can accelerate much more quickly too.
> Around here, they painted stripes for a bike lane. Good.
As someone who tries to use them here and there, I generally don't view painted stripes being passed off as "cycling infrastructure" as a good thing.
> Then the cyclists like to ride on the stripe, and randomly weave back and forth across it.
Some cyclists are better than others at signaling before switching lanes. I used to be better about it before a motorist ignored my outstretched hand and broke it in two places once because they were trying really, really hard to stay in their lane rather than thinking about giving me the space I needed. That taught me that it's safer to just plop my butt directly in front of them when I need them to slow down or give me more space to pass.
> As a driver, I have to spend all my attention trying not to hit those suicidal cyclists, who never look back to see if it is clear when they drift into the car lane. It's madness. I don't understand them at all.
It can be perfectly rational and safer. The most dangerous situation for me is when a motorist disregards me. As in, they snap-judge that I'm somehow negligible, and they can continue in their zoned-out state of mind as they maneuver a multi-ton chunk of steel at a high speed around me. Cyclists are often run off the road or clipped by motorists whose brains don't register that they're something they need to pay attention to.
When I'm cycling on the road, I do everything I can to "throw an exception" in the minds of motorists around me. Override System 1, and get their System 2 to take over -- for those familiar with the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This almost always means riding much further to the left than one might instinctively ride.
Now getting to "bike lanes" -- a term that I don't really like that much because it implies that it's the only lane I should be using at any point in time. And because "bike lanes" are actually car infrastructure, if you think about it. But that aside, "bike lanes" are often better described as "door zones." They're often painted right next to parked motor vehicles, and virtually nobody checks to make sure there isn't an oncoming cyclist before they suddenly fling their doors open. Many cyclists have been killed or seriously injured as they've been flung into faster-moving traffic in the adjacent lane when that happens.
When I'm approaching a parked motor vehicle, My objective is not to stay within the paint on the road at all, because it's just paint. Instead I'm judging how wide the door of the parked vehicle would be when it's suddenly flung open, and move to the left by that distance plus maybe an extra foot as a safety measure. Often that means I'm crossing out of the "bike lane." If I'm doing that I will signal and merge into the lane next to me as safely as I can, but there's often a large differential between my speed and that of motorists in the lane next to me, as "bike lanes" encourage.
That means the approaching motorist will need to be prepared to slow down, assess when it is safe to pass, and then move over far enough to pass so that there's at least 3 feet of space between me and their vehicle.
System 1 tells motorists to "stay in their lane" and "keep going at speed....
> Some cyclists are better than others at signaling before switching lanes.
They're not "switching lanes". They are wandering randomly back and forth over the line, with no discernable purpose. It's not about parked cars, either. The stripe is fresh and new, it is not "nearly invisible", and it periodically has a bike painted on it so nobody can misunderstand that it is a bike lane.
I was a cycle commuter for a long time. I never seemed to have all the issues other cyclists have with auto traffic, and my area was pretty "middle of the road" for car-centrism (ie not suburban america, but not amsterdam either).
The reason i would sometimes ride at the outer edge of the bike line was because the middle of the bike lane was right in 'car door' range. Assuming that people are not only going to look before they open the door, but that they are going to look for a narrow, quiet vehicle, that requires them to look in the very corner of their mirror is naive. So if I couldn't see through the back windshield and confirm a parked car was empty, I just wouldn't ride there. Saved me a couple of times.
In another post below you mention "the road was free of debris". It's very unlikely you can tell, from a fast moving car, through a windshield, that the road is clear of debris that would effect the narrower, thinner tires of a bicycle. What might not even register for an automobile might be a repair job for a cyclist.
All the above having been said - I absolutely saw some very stupid behaviour from cyclists. But also realise people usually aren't doing things just to annoy you personally. And I'm a larger than average man, nothing remarkable, but I could bowl over old ladies walking slowly in-front of me at the supermarket if I wanted to. After all they are smaller, slower and in my way. Yet I never seem to fantasise about it like many automobile drivers do. Worth thinking about.
I've cycled to work for years. I know what debris looks like. There wasn't any in the cases I mentioned - the roads were dry and clear. I'm not talking about cars at a standstill opening doors, either, I'm talking about traffic moving at 35 mph.
No, I don't fantasize about mowing them down. I want nothing to do with that. Help me help you to avoid hurting you.
If people are threatened with punishment for making mistakes, they'll hide the mistakes.
I've heard of cases where a company would not fix a mistake, because by fixing it they were implicitly admitting the mistake, and would be liable in a lawsuit.
Really? You just have to look at how many people are locked in US prisons compared to elsewhere, and how little substantive discussion there is as to why that should be the case.
When they catch a mass shooter they lock them up (or execute them) rather than take steps that might reduce the incidence.
You'd have to compare it against some sort of measure of crime victimisation (crime rates are always a bit flawed, because if police don't respond to crimes -> people stop calling -> no crime officially happened).
At the opposite end, the lowest prison incarceration rate of any non-microstate is the Central African Republic. According to worldpopulationreview (first search engine result, happy to look at better sources if you have them), the CAR prison population per capita is a mere 2.5% of the USAs. The wikitravel article for this jurisdiction gives us this helpful warning:
Most Western governments have issued explicit warnings to not travel to the Central African Republic under any circumstances. Violent crime, such as armed robbery, aggravated battery, and homicide, is extremely common. Large parts of the country are controlled by armed warlord groups who regularly kidnap, injure, and/or kill civilians. In the event of unrest, airport, land border, and road closures may occur with little or no notice. Consular services are often either extremely limited or non-existent. In short, stay away, and if you have no choice be sure to exercise war zone safety.
It tells us that the USofA locks up more people per 100,000 than any other G20 country.
It tells us that you have to reach to Central African Republic make some kind of apples and oranges attempt to justify why the US is clearly more punitive than actual comparitive countries.
It tells us that the USofA locks up more people per 100,000 than any other G20 country.
Ok so we're getting somewhere. Let's compare crime victimisation rates of G20 countries, and see if the United States high-incarceration rate is:
A). Disproportionately high
B). Justified
C). Disproportionately low
You feel very strongly about this issue, so if you've already looked into this let me know.
It tells us that you have to reach to Central African Republic make some kind of apples and oranges attempt to justify why the US is clearly more punitive than actual comparitive countries.
As I said, it had the lowest crime rates of all jurisdictions on the list, with the exception of San Marino, which didn't seem statistically useful because of the tiny population.
If we're judging the attitudes of a whole nation by a single metric, might we not gain some knowledge from judging other nations by the same metric, and contrasting? Ie what might the wikitravel page for the USA say if it had the prison population rates of the CAR?
> the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture
Fwiw, here's a related outlier. I long ago had an anthropology professor who described his thesis on a small South American fishing community culture as, AFAIR very fuzzily ...
Sh-t happens wasn't a concept. Anything goes wrong, it's some individual's intentional fault. So not long-ago pacific island "let's war on the neighboring island - this was so unusual, they must have done it to us". And not even Papau's ongoing "let's gossip together to decide who here is the witch causing these notable problems". It's "everything", all the time, intentionally, by family members and coworkers and neighbors.
Some fish escaped the closing group net? Stop, figure out who intentionally let them go, and... I no longer recall the "and then what". But stub your toe? Rain harms your crop? Pay the local witch doctor to find out who put the whammy on you. And pay him to whammy them back.
Resulting in interpersonal relationships that, pervasively, were toxically hostile. Singularly so in his experience. An antithesis to community warm fuzzies, charity, and blameless postmortems.
Exploring broader context can be fun. In addition to saying, say, "extremely corrupt", there's "more corrupt than this other, less than that other, and similar in this way, different in that way". Nifty high-dimensional spaces. Are there Ashby-ish charts for subcultures? Is principle component clustering of culture surveys available? In customer design discussions, the differences between multiple proposals create a vocabulary for discussing the space.
Sometimes having a "yay, we're better than that" touchstone can be useful. Like perhaps the USA lost something valuable when the USSR folded - it seemed a helpful set of "that proposal would make us too much more like them - that's not who we are" and "they're making us look bad" arguments faded out.
NASA’s got a history of their rovers overperforming like this. Between this and Webb, it’s hard to argue they’re not the best out there.
That's like saying I could change this button's text color in 5 days of work, but I did it in 5 minutes instead.
It's underpromising and overdelivering. It's a smart strategy because it's just hard to get stuff to work in space and on another planet. So it's best to underpromise.
You can bet that the internal goal is a lot higher than the public goal.
While I think NASA is the most incredible organization in human history, be wary of simple underpromising-and-overdelivering:
If everything they build lasts longer than expected, not only are they giving bad estimates (which perverts allocation of resources), they are way too smart and experienced to be doing it unintentionally.
Now if Ford Motor underpromised on your car, telling you it would last 2 years, you wouldn't buy it in the first place - you'd never find out that it really lasts 10 years. But I suspect NASA gets away with it because everyone is blown away by even the underpromised result - helicopters on Mars, holy sh-! - and also nobody has experience with how long Martian helicopters typically fly.
Yeah, I've often wished organizations I've worked for would define what an "estimate" is. Do they want an estimate I think there's a 50% chance we'll hit, or do they want an estimate I think there's a 99% chance we'll hit? In my experience they want the 50% estimate and expect us to hit that estimate 99% of the time.
They never said the helicopter would break down after 5 flights. They said it was designed for 5 flights. Shipping it to Mars is expensive and slow, so they build in a lot of margin to increase the odds that they meet the requirements.
Take a much more common example: expiration dates. A product going bad before its expiration date is an issue. Potential a massive one that could kill people. A product that remains in good condition after its expiration date is fine. As a result, expiration dates almost always occur far before the product actually expires.
Your assessment of the estimates is basically MBA talk.
They designed the helicopter for 5 flights. It is very likely the case that the requirements that a rotary wing aircraft can operate for 5 flights with minimal operator intervention, and only between missions, resulted in an helicopter that had a longer lifespan. Could they have done it cheaper? Maybe, probably, but most likely with a much higher risk of failure, and given the time, distance, and cost, and the organization doing the work, I am pretty confident that the team made the right choice.
They designed the helicopter for at least 5 flights. It's just PR. Classic underpromising and overdelivering. NASA is a an entity that seeks public support and funding. Saying they over delivered by 16x is a good way to get the public, such as people in this thread, to think they're doing great.
It’s more than PR: it’s recognizing that there is a massively greater cost to failure because fixing even a small problem is impossible. When you’re designing something with sufficient robustness to hit that minimum success requirement, it’s almost certain that you’ll be able to exceed it by a large margin. NASA is willing to pay more to avoid failures, and given their funding model that’s almost certainly the right call.
Think about it like having to get across town after work for some reason. If it’s your buddy’s party and it’ll run all night, you might take the bus or call an Uber but it’s no big deal if you’re a few minutes late. If it’s your party, you might pay to park your car nearby or have a ride waiting for you. If it’s the meeting where you’re selling your company or announcing your presidential campaign, you might have a helicopter waiting on the roof. NASA’s stuff is all like that last case because the base costs are so high - shipping anything to another planet and waiting years to do it again, if you are given the chance, costs so much more that it makes sense to pay extra to build everything with deep safety margins just so you can say the odds of failure are comfortably low.
Again, nothing is incorrect here: a margin is only waste if you’re a Walmart MBA obsessed with lowering costs. If the DOT builds a bridge with a 70 ton rating and it doesn’t collapse when an 80 ton truck drives over it, that’s not waste but rather the engineers prudently including a safety margin in each component to protect against minor defects or inconsistencies meaning that one component being slightly under spec causes the entire system to fail.
NASA and aerospace as a field traditionally have a bias towards that kind of overlapping safety margins because the kinds of failures they get destroy the entire air/space-craft. If some MBA at GE cost-optimizes your dishwasher, they’re better off trimming “waste” until it dies the day after the warranty expires as long as it doesn’t fail in a way which causes you never to buy their brand again. NASA faces far more catastrophic failures and because their systems are all custom with economy of scale for large product runs and their missions by necessity have a hefty base cost so it doesn’t make sense to save $50k on rover parts when you are paying $500M to ship it to Mars.
Actively promising outcomes that push equipment to the brink of failure would be malpractice and the planners would deservedly be fired.
These are novel and truly unprecedented space missions. There may yet be a future in which we can confidently predict outcomes at scale, but we are not there yet. Being conservative in assumptions is a virtue, and hopefully is emulated in every future mission.
The PR is how they're reporting it. "We want an minimum of 20, but it could make upwards of 200 flights before giving out" isn't as punch as they want. They want to say, "We only are planning on 5 flight. WOW, 15 flights?! Wait wait wait...NOW IT'S UP TO 40 FLIGHTS?!?!"
(And if your target is at least 20 but you say it's 5, you can miss your target and still claim you succeeded.)
Look at the reporting from NASA. For instance[1]:
> “Less than a year ago we didn’t even know if powered, controlled flight of an aircraft at Mars was possible,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Now, we are looking forward to Ingenuity’s involvement in Perseverance’s second science campaign. Such a transformation of mindset in such a short period is simply amazing, and one of the most historic in the annals of air and space exploration.”
**
> “This upcoming flight will be my 22nd entry in our logbook,” said Ingenuity chief pilot Håvard Grip of JPL. “I remember thinking when this all started, we’d be lucky to have three entries and immensely fortunate to get five. Now, at the rate we’re going, I’m going to need a second book.”
"One of the most historic in the annals of air and space exploration"? Or here[2]:
> NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter completed 71 flights since first taking to the skies above the Red Planet on April 19, 2021, far exceeding its originally planned technology demonstration of up to five flights.
Of course, this makes it to the Wiki article[3]:
> The helicopter's performance and resilience in the harsh Martian environment have greatly exceeded expectations. The aircraft surpassed its required altitude and flight duration specifications soon after beginning operations on Mars. This allowed Ingenuity to perform far more flights than were initially expected of the aircraft.
Or look at how XKCD has a comic about "Wow, I can't believe this rover exceeded our expectations by so much!" for both Spirit[4] and Opportunity[5].
At this point, it's hard to not see this framing as NASA spin, one that people keep falling for over and over again.
The XKCD comics do not at all suggest that we are supposed to treat the unexpected longevity of the missions as spin from NASA.
One is a playfully satirical exaggeration of capabilities. To the extent it offers a commentary, is fully crediting a rover for it's toughness and longevity.
The other approaches the longevity from a perspective of sentimental affection for an innocent rover who grows increasingly lonely as it's mission grows longer and longer. It does not imply prior knowledge or PR spin on the past of NASA.
The whole reason why people think of it as being an incredible amount of longevity is because of the NASA spin. Both of those say the planned mission was for 90 days, and so you get things like the exchange in the Opportunity comic of "11 years, wow."/"Wasn't the original mission 90 days?"/"This is starting to get weird.", or things like the Spirit comic having "Day 1944 of 90."
Neither of these really work if NASA says, "We're hoping for a decade, but our minimum goals are 90 days." It works because of the NASA spin, "Wow, this was only supposed to be a 90 day mission/5 flights, but we can't believe how much these things have exceeded our expectations!"
If people are continuously telling you their work is so amazing that they're blown away by how much the results have exceeded their expectations, you should probably question how honest they're being with you.
I've found NASA's communication to be misleading in general. A while back I tried to dive into their spinoff claims, and there were a lot of exaggerations there. There's a reason why you hear press releases from NASA saying things like "Research done on the ISS could help cure Alzheimers!", but you don't hear Alzheimer researchers going "Man, that research on the ISS really helped us piece together what was happening."
Or "NASA says there's going to be a major announcement tomorrow about a discovery on Mars!", and the discoveries are usually "we've found yet more evidence that Mars used to be wet."
Even the missions themselves - there's been a lot of talk about how Perseverance is collecting samples as the first part of a mission to send them back to earth. But the difficulty is in launching a return flight from Mars, something we're nowhere close to being able to do at the moment. You have to wonder how much of the sample caching is really useful, and how much is just a way to look as if were making progress on something that's still incredibly far away.
It’s more like Ford sell you a car that’s guaranteed to have no breakdowns or need oil changes for the first two years. It might run a lot longer, but you they only promise two years so you plan to use it for that long.
If it broke in those two years you’d be very upset, but if it does last longer that’s a bonus.
I think it's more like guarantee. If it breaks down in less than 2 years, you get your money back. Still, no one buy a car to only use it for its guarantee period.
We’re talking about on-off speciality devices designed to perform a task where there is no possibility of repair or service. They’re overbuilt to provide the best chance that the main mission is accomplished. Once that’s done they can keep going until it breaks.
Also, why is "under promising and over delivering" a bad thing? There's a missing step in the argument where it would be necessary to explain why that is bad.
OR, it's design a thing to work for the mission that had been designed/approved/funded. Any science that can continue after the missions actual experiments have concluded is just bonus. Would you want the thing to be designed at any lower caliber just because it was only needing to do 5 short durations? Would it actually be any cheaper? Doubtful.
So, we keep having gear designed that shows us exactly what could happen for longevity while accomplishing the actual mission goals for the same budget
Ford knows how to build cars after building them for 100+ years. There's nobody who has ever tried to fly a helicopter on mars before.
NASA built in lots of margin to help ensure they met their objective, especially considering that it's really fucking hard to get a new helicopter to mars if it breaks.
You are proposing an interesting thought experiment or hypothetical (“to what extent was the design team expecting a 10x longer lifetime?”). That’s worth pondering.
Furthermore, you are answering it with a “they must have known!”
I just don’t see how you can know this. (For context, I work at JPL and interact regularly with some of the Perseverance team, but nobody from the helicopter team, which was very small.)
Some context. The helicopter was originally quite controversial because it had no clear science rationale (mission science requirements did not imply a need for a helicopter). My understanding is that it was put on as a tech demo and (paraphrasing) cool thing. The lab director at the time was a proponent.
Of course it was a huge success.
Because of its precarious status, it was not designed to fly a lot. Planning flights takes a lot of resources, coordination with the rover takes resources, etc. Bandwidth, time, and people. My point is that the “plan” was kept small partly because these ancillary costs had to be kept down. This would hold even if the hardware could last forever. The tech demo must not get in the way of the prime science mission, which had already been planned.
The use of COTS components is another factor. The effects of radiation on microprocessors (in the Mars-surface or deep space environment) are not really well known, as a practical matter. There is just not much engineering experience with how bad it can get. So the longevity of the Snapdragon was (AFAIK) highly uncertain, not to mention whatever other COTS components were on it.
Hey - thank you! I really appreciate hearing from someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
I know nothing about the helicopter in particular but as I pointed out, NASA seems to very frequently underestimates longevity and performance (not a crime at all and maybe politically wise); I can't remember when they've overestimated. Forget my impressions in prior posts - how and why does that actually happen?
> tech demo ... precarious ... not much engineering experience
Also, while I've taken the opportunity of spare resources to do experiments (though not usually on Mars), I'm careful about timing and appearances - I don't want to embarass my team or partners with a failure that's visible to outsiders who wouldn't understand it was an experiment, and would think we just failed at our jobs.
Everything NASA does seems to be on a very public stage, interpreted by endless outsiders (like on HN :) ). The whole world watched the helicopter's first flight. How can someone approve the helicopter, and promotion of its flight, and risk the world saying, for the next decade, 'that crazy helicopter embarassment shows we need to rein in NASA', blah blah blah? NASA's reputation is very important to humanity.
Thanks for sharing what you know. You guys do amazing things; people are so jaded that they don't realize how incredible it is.
For very expensive projects like mars landers, it's imperative that everything is very reliable. If the mission plan is 5 flights, that means the systems need to be reliable enough that there's a 99.9% chance that it will successfully complete those five flights. But that also means that there's, say, a 98% chance that it can successfully complete 20 flights and maybe a 80% chance that it could complete over 50 flights. So these extended missions are really a consequence of building things to complete the primary mission as effectively as possible.
As I tried to clarify above, the helicopter was a tech demo ($90M) and not subject to the same risk rules as “very expensive projects like mars landers” (Perseverance: $2.4B). Your first sentence is trying to equate them.
Heli was on board the lander but it was not subject to the same risk constraints.
I think your probabilistic risk assessment has something going for it, but not all risk would scale that way.
I’m surprised at the self assurance of some of these comments!
One key differentiator is if the mission is competed or directed.
Directed (in essence) means that the National Academies (NAS) decadal survey recommended that specific mission. (They specify the what but not too much about the how.) A directed mission is assigned to an implementing center (JPL , GSFC, etc.) And they build it to accomplish their best interpretation of the NAS DS guidance.
Sometimes this can be expensive, more expensive than the NAS expected (JWST). And sometimes the imperative to make it work to accomplish the “down from the NAS” guidance, with near 100% certainty, in a novel environment will result in over performance like you noted.
The noteworthy directed missions are mostly large flagship missions.
The other category is cost capped competed missions. (VERITAS is a recent one, so was New Horizons, but they exist in astrophysics and earth science as well as planetary; see for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Frontiers_program). “Tell us what you can build to accomplish some portion of the following high level science goals in $300M or less”
Over engineering is not really possible under those conditions! You will be competing against the absolute best concepts and teams in existence. So the budget is really squeezed.
These two mission types are complementary in the obvious way. The flagships push engineering capacity way forward, and the competed missions have a lot of innovative concepts within a cost cap.
There are also pure tech demonstrations (often piggybacking like the helicopter did) and certain other categories but the competed/directed split is primary.
when they get the funding for the mission is when they make the lowball estimates, but with the funding they build equipment that is much more durable. It's hard to see where any perversion takes place
Resources are allocated based on return on investment. If estimates are inaccurate, so are ROI projections. It's not just this project, but others too: How do you compare ROI of multiple projects all with inaccurate estimates?
Sure, there is less lift... But there is also less drag. So your rotors can go far faster with the same power input - and, roughly, it looks like the power needed to hover (for a craft of a given mass and size) is actually less on mars due to the lower gravity, despite the rotors moving super fast.
It's true that buoyancy helps, but even so swimming clearly provides a greater propulsive force than doing the same motion in air despite the greater drag in water.
You should be able to reason this out too. Think about how you generate lift. The blades spinning have to push something, right? What is it pushing? Then think about drag. What is that dragging against? Is it related to the thing you're also pushing against? I think you know the answer.
According to this ballpark calculation, it would take the same energy for a helicopter to fly on the Everest (with ultrafast rotors, which they don’t have) as in water (ultraslow rotors). Since the lack of helicopters in high mountains (>5000m) is a longstanding issue, it doesn’t look like a good approximation at initial glance.
Helicopters on Earth use internal combustion engines (often in particular jet engines) to provide power. Those engines' performance depends on the air pressure (and temperature and humidity).
Yep. Setting maths and motors aside... it's why helicopters have service ceilings and why no one has built a helicopter that can fly away into the stratosphere.
That is an extremely impressive achievement. It boggles my mind. Amazing job NASA, Godspeed. Badass engineers all around.
Great ROI, we should keep going on bigger projects. All that data...phew.
Working there must feel like pure Americana each time you tap a key. I'd be coding extra just to enjoy that, especially seeing the level of impact these teams have. I wonder if they drink coffee while they build or if they found that it reduces performance for the engineers or for the astronauts?
They used off-the-shelf components because they were low priority, low cost side projects that were not expected to last long anyway.
Similarly, the video (and associated audio which malfunctioned) of the skycrane-deployed landing was done by COTS components which otherwise would not have been present at all.
Also, by COTS, they're using components which would otherwise be meant for industrial use, so they're still likely to be more rugged than what might come to mind when thinking of off the shelf components.
While that is true, the tradeoff there involves throwing 1,000 state of the art at the enemy, vs. throwing 5,000 cheap and adequate. (not sure if the multiplier is 5x but something like that) NASA does not have exactly the same situation.
There was a time when they were going to try to do more, cheaper, faster missions, which IIRC lasted until the first one failed, and then that policy was abandoned.
It's astounding to me that we're capable of flying a remote vehicle on a literally other planet, but we also kill each other in large numbers over whose god is correct.
Genuinely astounding to me, and slightly disappointing.
"killing each other over whose god is correct" is a profound misunderstanding of humanity. That's not why humans kill each other now, or in any time in history. It is and always has been simple & rational game theory: fear of the other tribe killing you for your resources, or just simply because they're afraid you might kill them for _their_ resources.
For example, this is (one of) the core reasons of why peace in Israel/Palestine is so hard (each side fears accepting sovereignty of the other side means they will continue to encroach and wipe them out).
Humans are pretty clever and ingenious at all levels
That's true sometimes, but sometimes people just want to take what their neighbors have. Russia's government faced no risk of Ukraine attacking, or NATO for that matter. They just wanted Ukraine.
It's just false. There was no way NATO or Ukraine was attacking Russia, in ten thousand years. NATO can barely be bothered to fund their militaries even now, and the US Republican party can't be bothered to fund Ukraine. Even after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 (and Georgia before that) the NATO countries were still making gas and other trade deals, thinking they would bring Russia into the fold of peaceful, free-trading nations. Trump tried to work with Putin; Obama did the big 'reset', etc., etc.
The Soviets were military expansionists, aggressively threatening and preparing for conflict with NATO. They were moving nuclear weapons into Cuba.
NATO, as I pointed out, was trying to make Russia a trade partner even after they invaded Georgia and Ukraine, and to this day most countries can hardly fund their militaries (even though many individually have economies larger than Russia's and could fund larger militaries by themselves). NATO didn't conduct exercises, was very careful about putting forces near Russia's border - even on NATO territor, had no facilities in Ukraine (which has never been a member), and certainly didn't move nuclear weapons anywhere near Russia.
For the record, the US had put nukes in Turkey before the USSR put them in Cuba. The crisis was resolved by removing them from both, but only the withdrawal from Cuba was publicized.
Of course, the other stuff you said was accurate. This isn't (…or wasn't) the Cold War, nor was Russia's oppression of Eastern Europe okay during the Cold War either.
It is possible there are significant internal issues that became impossible to manage any longer unless fronting the need for a justified massive military offensive to distract the locals from something they were otherwise becoming preoccupied with. I do not foresee there being individuals who really hunger for acquisition of materials in that same way anymore as in the old days. These days, those energies are channeled almost entirely into acquiring as much valuable IP as possible and building the most bleeding edge platforms these days, which is usually good for the user/customer/consumer/investor/everyone. Fortunately, humanity's taste for that old type of aquisition has dwindled. I think the Internet and Democracy and the American Constitution have succeeded and some places that never wanted those things to succeed now need distractions at home so their populations don't start expecting the same types of possibilities or freedoms.
People noticed what changed during the pandemic and after and suddenly everyone is demanding the same type of lives and opportunities and freedoms that the free people of the West have, especially in the United States... so some places became less stable than others and needed to drum up nationalistic fervor to feign justification for a war in order to try to stymy the changing tides at home. It's like when Boris Yeltsin visited a supermarket in the USA and couldn't believe what he was experiencing here versus what he expected to experience based on what he was primed to believe, versus what he experienced in his own home...that story alone when he went back contributed a lot to the eventual downfall of the USSR when people learned the truth. I think what's happening right now except at a much larger and unavoidable scale because of smartphones and social media and more easy access to the open international web where everyone can see how the world works.
> I do not foresee there being individuals who really hunger for acquisition of materials in that same way anymore as in the old days.
Why not? Putin has clearly expressed a desire to restore Russian empire, and is doing it.
> everyone is demanding the same type of lives and opportunities and freedoms that the free people of the West have, especially in the United States...so some places became less stable than others and needed to drum up nationalistic fervor
That's happening all over the world: Russia, US, UK, India, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Israel, China, etc etc etc. It doesn't seem tied to a desire for US lifestyle.
> the Internet and Democracy and the American Constitution have succeeded
Have the latter two been under more threat in decades? And under threat arguably from the first one?
The war in Ukraine is about selling American shale gas. There are probably other reasons, like dividing Europe and Russia.
The second Gulf War was motivated by Saddam Hussein's desire to sell his oil in euros to fight American imperialism.
America is playing the marionnetist for all its benefits.
Remind me why we are killing each other? Is it for survival?
OT: We know everything we need to survive and prosper very well - imperfectly, but with margin of error to spare, including capable political systems. The people still killing are just criminals who want to steal and murder.
Could be worth plotting a chart that shows how many of those who kill over some deity related reasons could also be part of those who design, build and operate remote vehicles on another planet, and the other way around.
I dunno, some of these recent episodes of ‘the news’ feel a bit like lazy writing. Like this whole subplot where the humans kill each other fighting over the only part of the middle east that doesn’t have any oil. Who’d believe that would happen in real life?
There's the old joke that the biblical Jews escaped slavery in Egypt and wandered 40 years in the desert, only to find the one place in the Mideast without oil.
People find reasons to kill each other in large numbers even when God is not involved, so why that as your chosen foil to humanity's otherworldly helicopter? It is important to me that people move beyond blaming God for things like this. There are many more, and much more recent as well, examples where if people cared to seek what God thought the entire conflict would've been avoided. For example...where was the dispute about God, say, between the Chinese and the Japanese fronts during World War 2? Or between the Nazis and the Red Army? It wasn't a disagreement about God that resulted in dropping the atom bombs to end conflicts of that scale, unless you would agree with me that the only disagreement was that America kept believing in God and her adversaries no longer did...in which case I'd then just say that fundamentally it was disbelief in God that led to WW2's horrors, not disagreements over which God is correct. God is exonerated in all cases.
This approach would be more respectful of the engineers who believe in God and who also contribute to projects like the space vehicles and probes or other impactful projects, and certainly more respectful of the great names in human history who are remembered for their contributions and noted also in the record for their love for God...
Idk. If there were gods, which one is correct seems like it'd be a pretty important question. I wouldn't want to worship Beelzejuice Voorhees the Head-Chomper.
Of course, killing people because they privately worship the Head-Chomper is probably too far, unless they're actively chomping (your?) heads. Also, Beelzejuice isn't real.
But principles like human rights and freedom are worth fighting for, and necessary to sometimes fight for (or else we're all screwed)— Beliefs, certainly, if not anthropomorphized as "gods".
Also, religions are a pretty strong indicator of social in-groups and out-groups. If you removed the gods from some religious wars, they'd probably still be fighting each other over skin color, language, ethnicity, culture, social ties, Adidas vs. Nike preference, external political goals, land use, water contamination, domestic political pressures, fishing rights, economic disenfranchisement, etc. Theology may help divide and rationalize it, but control over resources and power are pretty concrete motivations for creatures that have to worry about starving/dying, and gods are a proxy for that.
Scarcity begets conflict. GDP per capita is ~$900 in Gaza, ~$350 in Afghanistan, ~$5,000 in Omsk. Doubt many would willingly sign up, or accept being conscripted, to murder unbelievers if they were more sure about having warm meals and meaningful works to cherish. Doubt NASA engineers would be "capable of flying a remote vehicle on a literally other planet" if they were busy scrounging for physical necessities.
Even Bin Laden introduced his 2001 statement by referencing the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and its effects on people. Kirill may talk of the "Antichrist", but what Putin wants is Sevastopol.
I think it's reductive to just say "we also kill each other in large numbers over whose god is correct". We kill each other for a variety of reasons, usually fear of ourselves being killed, and sometimes we bring gods into it but it's very rarely, if ever, the sole reason.
I forgot which probe and celestial objects it was, but at one point NASA was investigating a moon around Jupiter or Saturn, thought about dumping it there for nice photos (it was out of fuel iirc) and then they realized that it might have life on it.
So they intentionally crashed it into the planet instead as to not potentially contaminate said moon - possibly our first implementation of the prime directive!
We did that with Cassini on Saturn, and we intend to do that with Juno on Jupiter.
But, on the other hand, while measures are taken to ensure that spacecraft headed to other bodies are not contaminated, we've also found that life still often manages to find a way. So I thibk the various landings on Mars, and the lander on Titan (plus the quadcopter heading there later this decade) are somewhat likely to have brought along some extremely resilient (but dormant) life anyway.
It has lost contact before and come back online. Sometimes the communications signals can get blocked, expect the rover to more closer to get a visual and attempt to establish contact. If the helicopter lost signal it goes into an auto land mode similar to what drones do when they lose signal.
It is almost impossible to take space.com seriously with the ad bombardment (to wit: a 4s looping gif declaring “natures adderall is taking over the internet” with a woman and her tincture, shoveling the snow out of her driveway almost instantly)
For those who would rather not go to x.com, the text is:
Good news today: We've reestablished contact with the #MarsHelicopter after instructing
@NASAPersevere
to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal.
The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout during Flight 72.
192 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadI've been saving that one for years.
Question: Can Ingenuity autorotate to a landing in the Martian atmosphere?
"Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday.
Close inspection may not be advisable due to difficult terrain:
<https://mastodon.social/@65dBnoise/111789132803382896>
See: "How Ingenuity Knows Where It Is And Where It's Going" <https://picknik.ai/slam/localization/state%20estimation/mars...>
(*I don't necessarily mean the practice of shooting a rocket into space and launching a telescope, but the ability to build an object that can perform that exactly to its specifications under those kinds of circumstances.)
Nasa, congrats on successful mission, which now ended.
I see what you did there.
IMO, Webb is a bad example. It was super over budget, late, and experienced a litany of problems.
In contrast, most un-manned NASA projects are roughly on budget and generally have few issues. And even the ones that do, NASA often figures out how to correct them like the Hubble telescope.
This is simply not true. Maybe for some of the smallest Discovery or New Frontiers missions, but then those aren’t actually built by NASA/JPL.
Mars Sample Return is also famously insanely late and over budget, and so have been most flagship missions.
JWST was built by primarily Northrop Grumman engineers
Give other space agencies the budget of NASA, let experience marinate and you will see similar performance. NASA does not have some sort of magical intrinsic property that makes engineers perform better by sheer effect of working under its umbrella.
For example, what requirements for the Ingenuity helicopter were set for the engineers? Five flights or a 100 of flights?
Under promise, overdeliver, is a nice way to say that you're dishonest with the client. The fact you can overdeliver means you're making some trade-offs elsewhere, e.g. in design/production price, time, weight or somewhere else.
Overdelivering is a nice byproduct, but it shouldn't be the goal.
It has nothing to do with dishonesty. Though I have no doubt that it might be used that way, that's fraudulent and a whole different ball-game commercially.
In such a situation, why not say like it is? Just explain the client the situation, what's the risk and for what additional cost it can be lowered. And I have no doubt this is what was happening in NASA, in other words this was no "underpromise and overdeliver", this was "explain the situation and agree on trade-offs leading to the best ratio of positive outcome for the price".
I think the only situation where this approach is valid is when your client is not sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs and make an optimal decision.
But officially the statements are always set as an "underpromise and overdeliver" thing because the clients are not sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs.
By clients I mean politicians and the general public, who take even delays or testing-to-failure as being actual failure.
That doesn't work well when communicating indirectly, through politicians and journalists, to the public at large. It may not work when communicating to elected politicians.
That brought to mind the glass-half-full / half-empty (false) dichotomy: The engineer thinks the glass is twice as big as it needs to be (or maybe 30-40% bigger to allow for a safety margin).
Unfortunately this leads to uninformed reporters to make stupid claims like "a probe only designed to last 90 days...". There's no self destruct or planned obsolescence in NASA probes. They don't have an egg timer set to 90 days and then explode.
The probes are designed to last at least as long as the ability for their consumables/power supply lasts. Consider the stresses of launch, transit through space, and insertion/landing are way worse than day to day conditions for a lot of probes. If they can survive all of that rolling around a desert is relatively easy (in comparison). If Ingenuity made one successful flight there was little reason it couldn't make more so long as it had the appropriate power available and the Martian Space Defense didn't shoot it down.
Ingenuity didn't overperform, it performed according to its actual design and construction. It only overperformed misinformed media expectations.
C'mon let's not blame the reporters. NASA pushes this line - why do think everyone repeats it, using the same language almost every time? You can even see it here on HN.
NASA never wants to say a probe will probably last longer than its primary mission because then reporters go the complete opposite direction and claim NASA said a "probe failed to last the claimed X+Y flights".
Both basically true yet overdone. Fundamentally the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture. Too strong, in that it is a distraction, a spectacle, and inhibits resolution of an actual problem, if one even exists. I don't mean this just in government: it's a fundamental part of the American Weltanschauung, one oddly rarely discussed. It seems to be so fundamental that it's simply taken as a given, like the old "fish doesn't know it's wet" metaphor.
FAA is a good example of an organization that implements an opposite approach: crash investigations follow a "what happened so we can address it, not punish" in air crashes, sometimes causing people to complain that "nobody was punished." But without the threat of punishment people are more willing to speak freely, so that hardware or procedures that need changing can actually change.
My experience of communication and collaboration with individual Americans points to the opposite direction. They are focused on a problem solving, not on a blame assignment. I can compare with my fellow Russians, I can't play games with them, because they kill all the fun looking for someone to blame.
But at the same time, if we take a look at our Russian politicians... If they even look for someone to blame, they look for a blatant scapegoat.
So, I mean, it seems like a complete reverse. Probably it is a coincidence or a result of a flawed methodology, but still...
Compare the huge public scrutiny of Space Shuttle failures vs the FAA being out-to-lunch on oversight of Boeing 737MAX for over a decade.
Some people have commented that excessive scrutiny (e.g. at NASA) has resulted in changes in culture and the rise of risk-averse 'professional administrators'.
if SpaceX has quite a lot of (unmanned) launch failures that cost them (or their insurers) a lot and set back their plans for demonstrating manned launch, the general public don't care and think that's overall a net positive and cost of SpaceX making progress on its plan (as long as the debris lands at sea and doesn't cause injuries or significant pollution). If SpaceX did too much of this, it would collapse, lose its launch contracts and its investors would lose their money. Compare to Facebook/Meta's failed Connectivity division [0], Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, et al.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/meta-unplugs-connectivity-...
> Unless its about people in cars murdering people.
Sadly I disagree. Blame is almost inevitably assigned...to the victim. In NYC if you drive a truck you can flatten cyclists with impunity because the consensus is always that it was the cyclist's own fault.
>> what happened so we can address it, not punish
> I agree that addressing issue is first most important. But we should also hold people accountable too.
What we need is for motor vehicles to stop crushing the innocent. That's what I mean when I talk about punishment as a distraction.
Some years back in Seattle, a truck driver was charged with murder because he hit a cyclist that crossed in front of him.
It was established in the trial that the cyclist had darted out from between two cars, and it was impossible for the driver to have noticed, reacted, and stopped in time. He was acquitted.
Around here, they painted stripes for a bike lane. Good. Then the cyclists like to ride on the stripe, and randomly weave back and forth across it. As a driver, I have to spend all my attention trying not to hit those suicidal cyclists, who never look back to see if it is clear when they drift into the car lane.
It's madness. I don't understand them at all.
Many motorists act as if roads were built for cars and all others get to use them on sufferance, if at all.
* Excepting controlled-access roads, i.e. freeways.
> Many motorists act as if roads were built for cars and all others get to use them on sufferance, if at all.
Wandering over the line into traffic without looking is just stupid. No amount of lawsuit money is going to fix getting crippled.
No, it isn't. Most all four-wheeled vehicles traveling at 25mph can stop much, much more quickly than a bicycle traveling at 25mph simply because they have a large total contact patch and antilock braking technology. A maneuver you might pull with a 4-wheeled motor vehicle behind you because they can probably slam on their brakes in time to keep from running into you will usually result in the cyclist smashing into the back of you and being seriously injured.
They can turn more sharply at speed, and they can accelerate much more quickly too.
> Around here, they painted stripes for a bike lane. Good.
As someone who tries to use them here and there, I generally don't view painted stripes being passed off as "cycling infrastructure" as a good thing.
> Then the cyclists like to ride on the stripe, and randomly weave back and forth across it.
Some cyclists are better than others at signaling before switching lanes. I used to be better about it before a motorist ignored my outstretched hand and broke it in two places once because they were trying really, really hard to stay in their lane rather than thinking about giving me the space I needed. That taught me that it's safer to just plop my butt directly in front of them when I need them to slow down or give me more space to pass.
> As a driver, I have to spend all my attention trying not to hit those suicidal cyclists, who never look back to see if it is clear when they drift into the car lane. It's madness. I don't understand them at all.
It can be perfectly rational and safer. The most dangerous situation for me is when a motorist disregards me. As in, they snap-judge that I'm somehow negligible, and they can continue in their zoned-out state of mind as they maneuver a multi-ton chunk of steel at a high speed around me. Cyclists are often run off the road or clipped by motorists whose brains don't register that they're something they need to pay attention to.
When I'm cycling on the road, I do everything I can to "throw an exception" in the minds of motorists around me. Override System 1, and get their System 2 to take over -- for those familiar with the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This almost always means riding much further to the left than one might instinctively ride.
Now getting to "bike lanes" -- a term that I don't really like that much because it implies that it's the only lane I should be using at any point in time. And because "bike lanes" are actually car infrastructure, if you think about it. But that aside, "bike lanes" are often better described as "door zones." They're often painted right next to parked motor vehicles, and virtually nobody checks to make sure there isn't an oncoming cyclist before they suddenly fling their doors open. Many cyclists have been killed or seriously injured as they've been flung into faster-moving traffic in the adjacent lane when that happens.
When I'm approaching a parked motor vehicle, My objective is not to stay within the paint on the road at all, because it's just paint. Instead I'm judging how wide the door of the parked vehicle would be when it's suddenly flung open, and move to the left by that distance plus maybe an extra foot as a safety measure. Often that means I'm crossing out of the "bike lane." If I'm doing that I will signal and merge into the lane next to me as safely as I can, but there's often a large differential between my speed and that of motorists in the lane next to me, as "bike lanes" encourage.
That means the approaching motorist will need to be prepared to slow down, assess when it is safe to pass, and then move over far enough to pass so that there's at least 3 feet of space between me and their vehicle.
System 1 tells motorists to "stay in their lane" and "keep going at speed....
They're not "switching lanes". They are wandering randomly back and forth over the line, with no discernable purpose. It's not about parked cars, either. The stripe is fresh and new, it is not "nearly invisible", and it periodically has a bike painted on it so nobody can misunderstand that it is a bike lane.
The reason i would sometimes ride at the outer edge of the bike line was because the middle of the bike lane was right in 'car door' range. Assuming that people are not only going to look before they open the door, but that they are going to look for a narrow, quiet vehicle, that requires them to look in the very corner of their mirror is naive. So if I couldn't see through the back windshield and confirm a parked car was empty, I just wouldn't ride there. Saved me a couple of times.
In another post below you mention "the road was free of debris". It's very unlikely you can tell, from a fast moving car, through a windshield, that the road is clear of debris that would effect the narrower, thinner tires of a bicycle. What might not even register for an automobile might be a repair job for a cyclist.
All the above having been said - I absolutely saw some very stupid behaviour from cyclists. But also realise people usually aren't doing things just to annoy you personally. And I'm a larger than average man, nothing remarkable, but I could bowl over old ladies walking slowly in-front of me at the supermarket if I wanted to. After all they are smaller, slower and in my way. Yet I never seem to fantasise about it like many automobile drivers do. Worth thinking about.
No, I don't fantasize about mowing them down. I want nothing to do with that. Help me help you to avoid hurting you.
I've heard of cases where a company would not fix a mistake, because by fixing it they were implicitly admitting the mistake, and would be liable in a lawsuit.
When they catch a mass shooter they lock them up (or execute them) rather than take steps that might reduce the incidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prison_popul...
Your comment literally reads as "person from country with near highest incarceration rate globally feels that not enough people are being punished".
Any thoughts on why the USofA is so punitive (compared to damn near every where else)?
You'd have to compare it against some sort of measure of crime victimisation (crime rates are always a bit flawed, because if police don't respond to crimes -> people stop calling -> no crime officially happened).
At the opposite end, the lowest prison incarceration rate of any non-microstate is the Central African Republic. According to worldpopulationreview (first search engine result, happy to look at better sources if you have them), the CAR prison population per capita is a mere 2.5% of the USAs. The wikitravel article for this jurisdiction gives us this helpful warning:
Most Western governments have issued explicit warnings to not travel to the Central African Republic under any circumstances. Violent crime, such as armed robbery, aggravated battery, and homicide, is extremely common. Large parts of the country are controlled by armed warlord groups who regularly kidnap, injure, and/or kill civilians. In the event of unrest, airport, land border, and road closures may occur with little or no notice. Consular services are often either extremely limited or non-existent. In short, stay away, and if you have no choice be sure to exercise war zone safety.
So it's really not as simple as single statistic.
It tells us that you have to reach to Central African Republic make some kind of apples and oranges attempt to justify why the US is clearly more punitive than actual comparitive countries.
Ok so we're getting somewhere. Let's compare crime victimisation rates of G20 countries, and see if the United States high-incarceration rate is:
A). Disproportionately high B). Justified C). Disproportionately low
You feel very strongly about this issue, so if you've already looked into this let me know.
It tells us that you have to reach to Central African Republic make some kind of apples and oranges attempt to justify why the US is clearly more punitive than actual comparitive countries.
As I said, it had the lowest crime rates of all jurisdictions on the list, with the exception of San Marino, which didn't seem statistically useful because of the tiny population.
If we're judging the attitudes of a whole nation by a single metric, might we not gain some knowledge from judging other nations by the same metric, and contrasting? Ie what might the wikitravel page for the USA say if it had the prison population rates of the CAR?
Fwiw, here's a related outlier. I long ago had an anthropology professor who described his thesis on a small South American fishing community culture as, AFAIR very fuzzily ...
Sh-t happens wasn't a concept. Anything goes wrong, it's some individual's intentional fault. So not long-ago pacific island "let's war on the neighboring island - this was so unusual, they must have done it to us". And not even Papau's ongoing "let's gossip together to decide who here is the witch causing these notable problems". It's "everything", all the time, intentionally, by family members and coworkers and neighbors.
Some fish escaped the closing group net? Stop, figure out who intentionally let them go, and... I no longer recall the "and then what". But stub your toe? Rain harms your crop? Pay the local witch doctor to find out who put the whammy on you. And pay him to whammy them back.
Resulting in interpersonal relationships that, pervasively, were toxically hostile. Singularly so in his experience. An antithesis to community warm fuzzies, charity, and blameless postmortems.
Exploring broader context can be fun. In addition to saying, say, "extremely corrupt", there's "more corrupt than this other, less than that other, and similar in this way, different in that way". Nifty high-dimensional spaces. Are there Ashby-ish charts for subcultures? Is principle component clustering of culture surveys available? In customer design discussions, the differences between multiple proposals create a vocabulary for discussing the space.
Sometimes having a "yay, we're better than that" touchstone can be useful. Like perhaps the USA lost something valuable when the USSR folded - it seemed a helpful set of "that proposal would make us too much more like them - that's not who we are" and "they're making us look bad" arguments faded out.
It's underpromising and overdelivering. It's a smart strategy because it's just hard to get stuff to work in space and on another planet. So it's best to underpromise.
You can bet that the internal goal is a lot higher than the public goal.
That's the wrong kind of overperforming.
If everything they build lasts longer than expected, not only are they giving bad estimates (which perverts allocation of resources), they are way too smart and experienced to be doing it unintentionally.
Now if Ford Motor underpromised on your car, telling you it would last 2 years, you wouldn't buy it in the first place - you'd never find out that it really lasts 10 years. But I suspect NASA gets away with it because everyone is blown away by even the underpromised result - helicopters on Mars, holy sh-! - and also nobody has experience with how long Martian helicopters typically fly.
OTOH there is approximately 0% chance a Ford is going to last 10 years without any maintenance or repairs.
Take a much more common example: expiration dates. A product going bad before its expiration date is an issue. Potential a massive one that could kill people. A product that remains in good condition after its expiration date is fine. As a result, expiration dates almost always occur far before the product actually expires.
That is salesperson talk. NASA has been doing public communication half a century too, and they know what people will take from it.
Your assessment of the estimates is basically MBA talk.
They designed the helicopter for 5 flights. It is very likely the case that the requirements that a rotary wing aircraft can operate for 5 flights with minimal operator intervention, and only between missions, resulted in an helicopter that had a longer lifespan. Could they have done it cheaper? Maybe, probably, but most likely with a much higher risk of failure, and given the time, distance, and cost, and the organization doing the work, I am pretty confident that the team made the right choice.
Think about it like having to get across town after work for some reason. If it’s your buddy’s party and it’ll run all night, you might take the bus or call an Uber but it’s no big deal if you’re a few minutes late. If it’s your party, you might pay to park your car nearby or have a ride waiting for you. If it’s the meeting where you’re selling your company or announcing your presidential campaign, you might have a helicopter waiting on the roof. NASA’s stuff is all like that last case because the base costs are so high - shipping anything to another planet and waiting years to do it again, if you are given the chance, costs so much more that it makes sense to pay extra to build everything with deep safety margins just so you can say the odds of failure are comfortably low.
They knew internally that it could fly 16x more. They just didn’t want to say it in a statement publicly.
NASA and aerospace as a field traditionally have a bias towards that kind of overlapping safety margins because the kinds of failures they get destroy the entire air/space-craft. If some MBA at GE cost-optimizes your dishwasher, they’re better off trimming “waste” until it dies the day after the warranty expires as long as it doesn’t fail in a way which causes you never to buy their brand again. NASA faces far more catastrophic failures and because their systems are all custom with economy of scale for large product runs and their missions by necessity have a hefty base cost so it doesn’t make sense to save $50k on rover parts when you are paying $500M to ship it to Mars.
These are novel and truly unprecedented space missions. There may yet be a future in which we can confidently predict outcomes at scale, but we are not there yet. Being conservative in assumptions is a virtue, and hopefully is emulated in every future mission.
(And if your target is at least 20 but you say it's 5, you can miss your target and still claim you succeeded.)
Look at the reporting from NASA. For instance[1]:
> “Less than a year ago we didn’t even know if powered, controlled flight of an aircraft at Mars was possible,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Now, we are looking forward to Ingenuity’s involvement in Perseverance’s second science campaign. Such a transformation of mindset in such a short period is simply amazing, and one of the most historic in the annals of air and space exploration.” ** > “This upcoming flight will be my 22nd entry in our logbook,” said Ingenuity chief pilot Håvard Grip of JPL. “I remember thinking when this all started, we’d be lucky to have three entries and immensely fortunate to get five. Now, at the rate we’re going, I’m going to need a second book.”
"One of the most historic in the annals of air and space exploration"? Or here[2]:
> NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter completed 71 flights since first taking to the skies above the Red Planet on April 19, 2021, far exceeding its originally planned technology demonstration of up to five flights.
Of course, this makes it to the Wiki article[3]:
> The helicopter's performance and resilience in the harsh Martian environment have greatly exceeded expectations. The aircraft surpassed its required altitude and flight duration specifications soon after beginning operations on Mars. This allowed Ingenuity to perform far more flights than were initially expected of the aircraft.
Or look at how XKCD has a comic about "Wow, I can't believe this rover exceeded our expectations by so much!" for both Spirit[4] and Opportunity[5].
At this point, it's hard to not see this framing as NASA spin, one that people keep falling for over and over again.
[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9146/nasa-extends-ingenuity-helic... [2] https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Helicopter-High... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter) [4] https://xkcd.com/695/ [5] https://xkcd.com/1504/
One is a playfully satirical exaggeration of capabilities. To the extent it offers a commentary, is fully crediting a rover for it's toughness and longevity.
The other approaches the longevity from a perspective of sentimental affection for an innocent rover who grows increasingly lonely as it's mission grows longer and longer. It does not imply prior knowledge or PR spin on the past of NASA.
Neither of these really work if NASA says, "We're hoping for a decade, but our minimum goals are 90 days." It works because of the NASA spin, "Wow, this was only supposed to be a 90 day mission/5 flights, but we can't believe how much these things have exceeded our expectations!"
If people are continuously telling you their work is so amazing that they're blown away by how much the results have exceeded their expectations, you should probably question how honest they're being with you.
Or "NASA says there's going to be a major announcement tomorrow about a discovery on Mars!", and the discoveries are usually "we've found yet more evidence that Mars used to be wet."
Even the missions themselves - there's been a lot of talk about how Perseverance is collecting samples as the first part of a mission to send them back to earth. But the difficulty is in launching a return flight from Mars, something we're nowhere close to being able to do at the moment. You have to wonder how much of the sample caching is really useful, and how much is just a way to look as if were making progress on something that's still incredibly far away.
Cyberdyne industries: I never said you would die at the end! Aieee my eyes!
If it broke in those two years you’d be very upset, but if it does last longer that’s a bonus.
Unlike with software, where they call that "support" and try to scare you into their next version immediately after that ends.
Unfortunately, the automakers are slowly picking up those practices from software.
We’re talking about on-off speciality devices designed to perform a task where there is no possibility of repair or service. They’re overbuilt to provide the best chance that the main mission is accomplished. Once that’s done they can keep going until it breaks.
Is that actually the case when it comes to the helicopter in question?
So, we keep having gear designed that shows us exactly what could happen for longevity while accomplishing the actual mission goals for the same budget
NASA built in lots of margin to help ensure they met their objective, especially considering that it's really fucking hard to get a new helicopter to mars if it breaks.
Furthermore, you are answering it with a “they must have known!”
I just don’t see how you can know this. (For context, I work at JPL and interact regularly with some of the Perseverance team, but nobody from the helicopter team, which was very small.)
Some context. The helicopter was originally quite controversial because it had no clear science rationale (mission science requirements did not imply a need for a helicopter). My understanding is that it was put on as a tech demo and (paraphrasing) cool thing. The lab director at the time was a proponent.
Of course it was a huge success.
Because of its precarious status, it was not designed to fly a lot. Planning flights takes a lot of resources, coordination with the rover takes resources, etc. Bandwidth, time, and people. My point is that the “plan” was kept small partly because these ancillary costs had to be kept down. This would hold even if the hardware could last forever. The tech demo must not get in the way of the prime science mission, which had already been planned.
The use of COTS components is another factor. The effects of radiation on microprocessors (in the Mars-surface or deep space environment) are not really well known, as a practical matter. There is just not much engineering experience with how bad it can get. So the longevity of the Snapdragon was (AFAIK) highly uncertain, not to mention whatever other COTS components were on it.
Hope this context is helpful.
I know nothing about the helicopter in particular but as I pointed out, NASA seems to very frequently underestimates longevity and performance (not a crime at all and maybe politically wise); I can't remember when they've overestimated. Forget my impressions in prior posts - how and why does that actually happen?
> tech demo ... precarious ... not much engineering experience
Also, while I've taken the opportunity of spare resources to do experiments (though not usually on Mars), I'm careful about timing and appearances - I don't want to embarass my team or partners with a failure that's visible to outsiders who wouldn't understand it was an experiment, and would think we just failed at our jobs.
Everything NASA does seems to be on a very public stage, interpreted by endless outsiders (like on HN :) ). The whole world watched the helicopter's first flight. How can someone approve the helicopter, and promotion of its flight, and risk the world saying, for the next decade, 'that crazy helicopter embarassment shows we need to rein in NASA', blah blah blah? NASA's reputation is very important to humanity.
Thanks for sharing what you know. You guys do amazing things; people are so jaded that they don't realize how incredible it is.
Heli was on board the lander but it was not subject to the same risk constraints.
I think your probabilistic risk assessment has something going for it, but not all risk would scale that way.
I’m surprised at the self assurance of some of these comments!
Directed (in essence) means that the National Academies (NAS) decadal survey recommended that specific mission. (They specify the what but not too much about the how.) A directed mission is assigned to an implementing center (JPL , GSFC, etc.) And they build it to accomplish their best interpretation of the NAS DS guidance.
Sometimes this can be expensive, more expensive than the NAS expected (JWST). And sometimes the imperative to make it work to accomplish the “down from the NAS” guidance, with near 100% certainty, in a novel environment will result in over performance like you noted.
The noteworthy directed missions are mostly large flagship missions.
The other category is cost capped competed missions. (VERITAS is a recent one, so was New Horizons, but they exist in astrophysics and earth science as well as planetary; see for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Frontiers_program). “Tell us what you can build to accomplish some portion of the following high level science goals in $300M or less”
Over engineering is not really possible under those conditions! You will be competing against the absolute best concepts and teams in existence. So the budget is really squeezed.
These two mission types are complementary in the obvious way. The flagships push engineering capacity way forward, and the competed missions have a lot of innovative concepts within a cost cap.
There are also pure tech demonstrations (often piggybacking like the helicopter did) and certain other categories but the competed/directed split is primary.
when they get the funding for the mission is when they make the lowball estimates, but with the funding they build equipment that is much more durable. It's hard to see where any perversion takes place
Sure, there is less lift... But there is also less drag. So your rotors can go far faster with the same power input - and, roughly, it looks like the power needed to hover (for a craft of a given mass and size) is actually less on mars due to the lower gravity, despite the rotors moving super fast.
https://xkcd.com/620/
I think this is a misconception. Even in water, you cannot provide lift equal to your bodyweight.
It is easier to swim (vs sink) in water because the water gives a large amount of buoyancy.
However, in air and on mars, buoyancy is small enough to be negligible.
FYI, these two things are __directly__ related.
Lift = c0 r v^2 A
Drag = c1 r v^2 A
=> Lift = c0/c1 Drag
You should be able to reason this out too. Think about how you generate lift. The blades spinning have to push something, right? What is it pushing? Then think about drag. What is that dragging against? Is it related to the thing you're also pushing against? I think you know the answer.
Yep. Setting maths and motors aside... it's why helicopters have service ceilings and why no one has built a helicopter that can fly away into the stratosphere.
Just like the mars helicopter cannot fly on earth.
Great ROI, we should keep going on bigger projects. All that data...phew.
Working there must feel like pure Americana each time you tap a key. I'd be coding extra just to enjoy that, especially seeing the level of impact these teams have. I wonder if they drink coffee while they build or if they found that it reduces performance for the engineers or for the astronauts?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39075315
Similarly, the video (and associated audio which malfunctioned) of the skycrane-deployed landing was done by COTS components which otherwise would not have been present at all.
Also, by COTS, they're using components which would otherwise be meant for industrial use, so they're still likely to be more rugged than what might come to mind when thinking of off the shelf components.
There's a big argument going on in military procurement right now about the high $ state of the art drones vs cheap & adequate.
There was a time when they were going to try to do more, cheaper, faster missions, which IIRC lasted until the first one failed, and then that policy was abandoned.
Genuinely astounding to me, and slightly disappointing.
For example, this is (one of) the core reasons of why peace in Israel/Palestine is so hard (each side fears accepting sovereignty of the other side means they will continue to encroach and wipe them out).
Humans are pretty clever and ingenious at all levels
Russia is the one pointing the gun is this scenario, but they sure do love to pretend otherwise.
NATO, as I pointed out, was trying to make Russia a trade partner even after they invaded Georgia and Ukraine, and to this day most countries can hardly fund their militaries (even though many individually have economies larger than Russia's and could fund larger militaries by themselves). NATO didn't conduct exercises, was very careful about putting forces near Russia's border - even on NATO territor, had no facilities in Ukraine (which has never been a member), and certainly didn't move nuclear weapons anywhere near Russia.
For the record, the US had put nukes in Turkey before the USSR put them in Cuba. The crisis was resolved by removing them from both, but only the withdrawal from Cuba was publicized.
Of course, the other stuff you said was accurate. This isn't (…or wasn't) the Cold War, nor was Russia's oppression of Eastern Europe okay during the Cold War either.
Good point.
Usually it takes quite a few years of hand-wringing from the NATO side to even agree to consider letting them in.
People noticed what changed during the pandemic and after and suddenly everyone is demanding the same type of lives and opportunities and freedoms that the free people of the West have, especially in the United States... so some places became less stable than others and needed to drum up nationalistic fervor to feign justification for a war in order to try to stymy the changing tides at home. It's like when Boris Yeltsin visited a supermarket in the USA and couldn't believe what he was experiencing here versus what he expected to experience based on what he was primed to believe, versus what he experienced in his own home...that story alone when he went back contributed a lot to the eventual downfall of the USSR when people learned the truth. I think what's happening right now except at a much larger and unavoidable scale because of smartphones and social media and more easy access to the open international web where everyone can see how the world works.
Why not? Putin has clearly expressed a desire to restore Russian empire, and is doing it.
> everyone is demanding the same type of lives and opportunities and freedoms that the free people of the West have, especially in the United States...so some places became less stable than others and needed to drum up nationalistic fervor
That's happening all over the world: Russia, US, UK, India, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Israel, China, etc etc etc. It doesn't seem tied to a desire for US lifestyle.
> the Internet and Democracy and the American Constitution have succeeded
Have the latter two been under more threat in decades? And under threat arguably from the first one?
OT: We know everything we need to survive and prosper very well - imperfectly, but with margin of error to spare, including capable political systems. The people still killing are just criminals who want to steal and murder.
> in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
This approach would be more respectful of the engineers who believe in God and who also contribute to projects like the space vehicles and probes or other impactful projects, and certainly more respectful of the great names in human history who are remembered for their contributions and noted also in the record for their love for God...
Of course, killing people because they privately worship the Head-Chomper is probably too far, unless they're actively chomping (your?) heads. Also, Beelzejuice isn't real.
But principles like human rights and freedom are worth fighting for, and necessary to sometimes fight for (or else we're all screwed)— Beliefs, certainly, if not anthropomorphized as "gods".
Also, religions are a pretty strong indicator of social in-groups and out-groups. If you removed the gods from some religious wars, they'd probably still be fighting each other over skin color, language, ethnicity, culture, social ties, Adidas vs. Nike preference, external political goals, land use, water contamination, domestic political pressures, fishing rights, economic disenfranchisement, etc. Theology may help divide and rationalize it, but control over resources and power are pretty concrete motivations for creatures that have to worry about starving/dying, and gods are a proxy for that.
Scarcity begets conflict. GDP per capita is ~$900 in Gaza, ~$350 in Afghanistan, ~$5,000 in Omsk. Doubt many would willingly sign up, or accept being conscripted, to murder unbelievers if they were more sure about having warm meals and meaningful works to cherish. Doubt NASA engineers would be "capable of flying a remote vehicle on a literally other planet" if they were busy scrounging for physical necessities.
Even Bin Laden introduced his 2001 statement by referencing the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and its effects on people. Kirill may talk of the "Antichrist", but what Putin wants is Sevastopol.
I think it's reductive to just say "we also kill each other in large numbers over whose god is correct". We kill each other for a variety of reasons, usually fear of ourselves being killed, and sometimes we bring gods into it but it's very rarely, if ever, the sole reason.
So they intentionally crashed it into the planet instead as to not potentially contaminate said moon - possibly our first implementation of the prime directive!
But, on the other hand, while measures are taken to ensure that spacecraft headed to other bodies are not contaminated, we've also found that life still often manages to find a way. So I thibk the various landings on Mars, and the lander on Titan (plus the quadcopter heading there later this decade) are somewhat likely to have brought along some extremely resilient (but dormant) life anyway.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291324/linux-perseveran...
It has already happened before, when the helicopter flew far ahead of the rover and just stayed there until rover caught up
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@MarsGuy
I trust dedicated journalist more than generalist run-by ones that clickbait another working moment like it's the end of the world
[0] https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281
https://x.com/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281?s=20
For those who would rather not go to x.com, the text is:
Good news today: We've reestablished contact with the #MarsHelicopter after instructing @NASAPersevere to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal.
The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout during Flight 72.
Also, replacing the domain with nitter.net always works.
https://nitter.net/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281#m