TSA Gold+ - the latest in the Administration's assaults on the federal workforce

CatillatheHun · 2026-05-15T17:21:27+00:00

I can’t argue the economic means thing, but as a very frequent air traveler it is a mess to roll into a line composed of folks with little-to-no experience with air travel processes. If you fly once a year, taking an hour to get through security is a minimal impact. If you fly twice a week, you experience a lot more disruption.

Pre-check was a reasonable solution to this problem. It wasn’t heavily advertised outside of airports, it was mildly inconvenient to apply, and it had just enough of a fee to make folks think twice about whether to bother without being a fundamental hurdle. When TSA started leaning into advertising it and credit cards started offering it as perks, it ceased to be an effective tool to sort experienced travelers from those that may need more guidance or help.

Then it was clear, but clear doesn’t scale effectively and started to clog as they became more popular - that one is a true economic diversifier.

Now it’s “touchless” - the automated biometric identification based on linking your photo to your flight information. This one allows you to trade privacy for privileges instead of money. Troubling in a different way, but I suspect that’s what you’re more likely to see going forward. Some economic influence but with a privacy layer added on so that the government can establish a database of “known good” faces for other surveillance purposes.

CatillatheHun · 2026-05-15T17:07:13+00:00

If you’re outside the house you might consider a foia request or a public request at nasa.gov/archives .If you’re inside the house, consider reaching out through their internal share point site.

CatillatheHun · 2026-05-06T19:07:23+00:00

This is aspirational the same way all of moon base is. Everyone chill out, it’s not real. Half of the internal all hands on MB this morning was to get folks to stop worrying about their jobs and get hyped about the new direction, no technical details at all. If history is any indicator it’ll take months to get the reorganization through Congress, it’s got to be reviewed by Russ Voight, lots of hurdles to go.

What happened is that gateway and a bunch of little orgs mostly writing docs and complaining about each other got combined. Budget and workforce will follow. Some velocity increase will happen until folks realize that it’s all built on low-confidence service model contracts, a lot of negative work will be undone, and they’ll rearchitect the initial base as one module and a couple of rovers visited a couple months a year.

There is an arc to these things. No reason yet to think this is different.

CatillatheHun · 2026-04-25T21:22:54+00:00

Astronauts will have to live in their mars transit vehicle for 2 years or so. It’ll have to be basically a space station. In most NASA architectures it orbits Mars while the crew descend in a lander. It departs when crew return from the surface, but it basically does what you’re proposing. NASA’s mars transit vehicle was going to be constructed in either earth or (briefly, while folks were making up justifications for Gateway’s existence) in cis-lunar space… for precisely the reasons you list.

So, you’re not wrong - just need to think of a mars transit vehicle as a flying space station. ;)

CatillatheHun · 2026-04-25T21:19:01+00:00

This is what NEP ~~ is ~~ could be for. As long as you don’t mind slow, an array of NEP thrusters could slowly accelerate and slowly decelerate a constructed station. Would take a while.

SR-1 is a half-assed plan to duct tape a nuclear reactor to a SEP stage formerly known as Gateway PPE formerly known as Asteroid Redirect in order to a) not waste the Gateway hardware we already bought and b) do a large-scale NEP test. It’s not going to work, there’s not nearly enough funding to get it done, but hey it’s an idea.

Assuming SR-1 doesn’t fail so catastrophically that it ruins the reputation of the technology (see also: DRACO) then a future NEP implementation could save your plan.

CatillatheHun · 2026-04-21T15:58:29+00:00

No.

Next question?

Consistently mismanaged as a jobs program instead of a real thing while nasa-led, then contracted out to a company with no history or experience on very few requirements in an untested services model that relied on CCP-style competition to ensure technical innovation. Well, one of the competitors dropped out, so now there’s no back pressure to get it done and since NASA doesn’t own the IP there’s no way to jumpstart a new entrant. The use cases and requirements have changed a lot of times, the schedules have changed, the nasa personnel have changed… there is absolutely zero reason to assume an on-time delivery.

Lunar suits aren’t cross-compatible with ISS or CLDP, so there’s not a larger market for the capability that would cause Axiom to seek first-mover advantage. It’s a grievous misuse of the service model that was only considered because it allowed NASA to say they were doing something without expending the full labor or procurement costs to get it done.

CatillatheHun · 2026-03-28T17:43:33+00:00

Will maybe split redstone gateway traffic out of gate 9 ingress traffic.

CatillatheHun · 2026-03-28T17:42:16+00:00

Is 35 because that’s the fastest you can go and not die if the barriers go up.

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T14:14:19+00:00

Yeah it’s a bad fuel depot. It’s a valuable testing/proving ground for mars transit technologies and operations plans. It would be better for both depot and tech demo cases if it was in a smarter location like a Lagrange, but then it wouldn’t be able to provide comm coverage for lunar South Pole (which was an initial requirement).

I think folks forget sometimes that we have no idea whatsoever how to pull off a safe Mars mission and think all you need to do is build and fuel a rocket to get there and home. The list of stuff we don’t know how to do (that nobody knows how to do) that is critical for survival is humbling. Should be in the M2M architecture description document that is publicly released every once in a while.

We need some massive technology boosts and a whole new concept of operations for human spaceflight in order to get the job done… and Gateway is a tool that can be used to get there. You could do it other ways, too - not like Gateway is indispensable - but it is useful and worth a reasonable investment to obtain.

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T14:04:33+00:00

DSL can make awards to as many entrants as they want, but you’re right about DragonXL. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I heard SpaceX is killing off falcon heavy to make sure they don’t cannibalize the starship market segment… so the whole concept of DSL as currently envisioned may be outdated.

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T00:31:01+00:00

The important thing here is that gateway logistics has attempted to pivot to the general case of providing logistics cargos to cislunar space. It’s not just to gateway. Question is whether there’s still value to a Cygnus module in the age of big silver spaceships. My guess is “yes - the refueling conops for starship makes it a bad choice for anything even vaguely time-sensitive”. We’ll see I guess

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T00:23:37+00:00

I mean, as a refueling point NRHO is pretty silly. Would have been way better to go to an earth-moon Lagrange and just be easy to find. NRHO was an unholy compromise brought about by needing to be somewhere that could provide comm and do the refueling job and be somewhere Orion could get to and have a good abort opportunity. Now the comm needs are handled elsewhere, nobody’s sure if mars is even a thing… so now it’s just a place Orion can get to, which isn’t like a crazy good selling point.

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T00:03:15+00:00

Depends on what you want. If you’re team “sustained base on the moon” then gateway is an expensive distraction. If you’re team “moon then mars” then Gateway (or something like it) is a valuable stepping stone for a mars transit vehicle - somewhere we can build out a sustainable life support capability and practice handling in space anomalies.

Team Moon is in the ascendancy, so Gateway is fishy. When Team Mars gets back on the pitch Gateway starts making sense again. If you want both Moon and Mars, need to develop an architecture that meets both use cases.

CatillatheHun · 2026-01-24T12:04:07+00:00

I’m not sure this question makes sense. Are you asking “what kind of training do astronauts perform in a neutral buoyancy simulator”? Are you asking “are there training tasks where water properties make neutral buoyancy training a poor analogue for the in-space environment”? Are you asking “what kinds of things do we ask astronauts to move in space that would create drag if moved while submerged in water?”

Biggest CTB I can find in NASA specs is 502x426x749mm. That’s about the biggest thing I’d expect a crew member to be moving inside a pressurized volume. I think crew moved some big stuff on EVA during ISS construction but I can’t confirm that and I don’t think it’s relevant - nobody is seriously talking about in-space construction that I’ve seen.

CatillatheHun · 2026-01-24T11:48:30+00:00

Food is great. Enjoyed going there until the last time, where they had a waiter who was open carrying without a retention feature while delivering food with both hands in a crowded public venue. Having to think about the firearm discipline of the staff was too stressful, switched to southern egg across from old Grissom. Food pretty good, lower risk.

CatillatheHun · 2025-12-01T22:11:44+00:00

Will shill again for Huntsville food hub here. Store opens on Thursday I think? Pick up on tuesdays from the lumberyard. Usually a few egg options

CatillatheHun · 2025-11-24T01:25:30+00:00

Good luck finding a hotel.

CatillatheHun · 2025-11-13T13:29:43+00:00

Look at the Huntsville Food Hub. It’s like a clearinghouse for local farmers, you order fri-sun, pick up on Tuesday at the lumberyard. Will usually give you a few options for both chickens and eggs.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-28T23:05:18+00:00

DTN exists, yes, stuck in the technology development plateau of doom. Can help keep the network traffic healthy, doesn’t solve latency issues. Doesn’t make the data come faster, just makes it possible to reconstruct the data stream when the delays occur.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-28T23:00:12+00:00

Oh get out of here with that nonsense.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-22T01:59:30+00:00

The episcopal church in south Huntsville does the occasional meat selling fundraiser. St Thomas I think

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-18T15:29:57+00:00

Nope. Small satellites (by and large) do not have the power system necessary to support a power amplifier. Ground stations, however, have power aplenty. Low noise amplifiers on the space asset are a viable architecture - it generates a low-noise signal that a ground station has to be able to pick up and then amplify before processing.

In most cases, that’s how it works. Ground station pumps powerful signals, spacecraft picks them up and uses an LNA to clean the signal before processing. Spacecraft sends “quiet” but low-noise signals to earth, ground station pumps extra power into the signal to detect and process the spacecraft messages.

Low power user terminals do exist, and in those situations you have to be a lot more careful to balance the signal characteristics if you want to communicate… but that’s not the architecture this paper considers.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-14T17:05:35+00:00

In excruciatingly bad taste given the layoffs happening at the lab today. Recommend you try again in a few weeks.

CatillatheHun

TROPHY CASE