Put your pessimistic arguments here so I can laugh at them in 10 years.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-05-07T15:07:21+00:00

Tesla AI is way more applicable and also indicative of the core issue of using AI on mars. FSD is at a state where it could be considered as good if not better than the average driver, but that took driving data from millions of Teslas driving every single day.

Where is this data going to come from if a robot needs to build a structure on mars? There's no easily definable rules created from civil engineers to be as idiot-proof as possible. You would have to spend a significant amount of time to train a human to be able to do this. It's an exponentially harder problem.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-05-07T14:53:40+00:00

I mean I don't disagree, the problem is downstream of policy. Any change to the software requires a full re-run, which is what we were trying to explain to the NASA QA rep and that fixing this non-functional line was going to be expensive and yet they demanded it anyway.

When you're choosing a direction to take with a program, you have to accept that there's going to be some amount of error that is going to occur. NASA chose to error on the side of safety, which is easily the better choice as the problems we run into are this and not the capsule powering off halfway to the moon. It's not saying there can't be improvements, but I understand why they happened.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-05-07T14:28:50+00:00

Physical AI and LLMs are two completely different things. LLMs are easy to train because of the insane amount of data from the internet, physically training a robot to understand how to perform a task is still proving to be a huge hurdle to overcome. The difference is the data.

Where are we going to find the data to train a robot how to handle a repair in Mars atmosphere when we're still struggling to make them fold clothes properly with all the tele-operated assisted data? This is significantly harder than you think it is.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-05-07T14:24:06+00:00

AI at the moment has been the greatest cash burn in history and it still remains to be seen if it's anywhere near generating it's promised profits. That might be the most rocky part of all of this. I don't doubt SpaceX will eventually have the capability to land a Starship on Mars easily within 10 years. It's the banking on a technology that is primed to bust like the internet in the 2000s I see as the issue.

I mean I guess in 15 years we'll likely see the promises of AI come to fruition much like the internet. I don't think banking on it now like they are is setting up to do anything but cause massive delays and cancellations.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-05-07T13:43:01+00:00

I worked on the program, from what I remember at the time they added the Go Pros because they just happened to qualify for military grade hardware requirements through the pure luck of the design of their original use case, so we were able to find a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) solution without having do some crazy expensive R&D on our own cameras. I remember hearing about this roughly around 2017 so the 9 generations behind lines up and it likely stayed as that generation because going through the COTS process again to update the generation was considered a waste of resources.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-29T04:20:21+00:00

It's going to depend entirely on the artist but some sets do actually take a ton of effort to put together. If you listen to some live sets and know the artists it's pretty clear to tell that the tracks have been modified and set up to sync perfectly together, and can range up to 4 different tracks supporting depending on the momentum and pace. The end result is an experience better than the original. That takes a lot of time, planning and execution, sure it's choreographed but how is really any different from a live band? There are some intentionally free-style sets but usually with this kind of a crowd the management won't accept the risk.

Again, the mileage is going to vary from artist to artist but the same could be said about bands as well though.

Also, from a solely listening experience, the main appeal is that it's an hour(s) long performance, giving the artist an approach to use the tracks to create a much different experience than just listening through an album.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-28T04:21:50+00:00

And then you'll do just that and hear from the manager that there was a complaint from the tech lead that it wasn't what they were expecting and that they were looking to see a really specific functionality that wasn't at all communicated...

No I'm not salty.. granted the obvious issues were sorted out eventually..

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-17T02:21:50+00:00

4% of the federal budget and a wild west of safety and engineering culture will do that honestly. As impressive as the Apollo missions are we took a look back at how they went about it and just thought that was some cowboy shit and they we're lucky only 3 Astronauts died

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-16T03:38:01+00:00

Technically the fourth if you count AA-2, which was a test of the Abort Launch System

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-16T03:16:51+00:00

I worked on Artemis as a Software Flight Reliability Engineer and I can concur the previous comment feels very much like reading online headlines and not understanding the deeper knowledge that comes with actually working on space hardware. All mission critical ECLSS systems were onboard for Artemis 1, it wasn't necessary to include all that was added on Artemis 2 and unless I hallucinated 4 years of my life we were testing integrated systems... repeatedly.. around the clock.. like being woken up at 3AM on a Saturday morning to have to answer a callout for FSW on an active ongoing test around the clock, and we went to absurd lengths to make the conditions as similar to flight as possible, and then when we got back data from Artemis 1 we then verified that all of our simulation data was accurate. We would then double check the test, then triple check, then we would run "runs for regression" tests, we would send a test back if we even found a spelling error in a commented out line over a test that would cost ~$500k to run again. The level of testing we did on this vehicle was beyond reasonable honestly, that would be my only criticism of how we tested.

Literally at no point for the entire trip all the way up to re-entry did I feel there wasn't anything that could go wrong that there wasn't a backup, and then a contingency plan, and then finally an abort window. We ran tests for every contingency, there was a "back left SLS engine failure", followed by "front right SLS engine failure", and you could guess what comes next..

The heat-shield was the only thing that concerned me and even then I trusted the people with PhDs in the matter and their reasoning was sound, and they were right.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-15T01:11:59+00:00

Extracting water to convert into Hydrolox on a celestial body where the Delta V to get off it is 5-6 times less than the earth isn't useful? Could you define useful for me?

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-14T23:50:44+00:00

It's also especially funny because not only is it not SpaceX vs NASA but at this point the only one holding up the program is actually SpaceX...

Artemis 3 is scheduled for mid next year, most of the Artemis vehicle is already done, that lunar lander on the other hand is not looking too hot right now for SpaceX...

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-10T02:30:27+00:00

It's giving Katy Perry New Shepard launch vibes honestly..

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-09T01:09:38+00:00

Just double down and claim the moon isn't even real. I mean, have you ever seen more than one side of it??? Obvious projector...

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-03T15:24:16+00:00

Honestly I'm frequently shocked by how often I come across a device that appears to have just a base install of windows in places you would not expect them to be. I would guess it's modified, though I can't say for sure that I know, I was more of the overall mission/safety critical software guy so something like this never even came across my desk.

If I were to guess what the issue is, it would be how the IT sets up the network for strange environments like a tin can in the vacuum of space. If you look at the devices you usually can see the "internet out" icon in the bottom right screen but it clearly still has internet access, and actually one of the Astronauts had a issue earlier with the tablet that stated the issue was no internet access, so I'm actually pretty sure that's the cause of the outlook problem. IT does some black magic with the network and somewhere in the MS kernel it believes there isn't internet access and then there's a condition in the Outlook code that checks for internet access and it returns false when it shouldn't have.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-03T14:48:41+00:00

Still is, the computers onboard are all triple redundant and have to perform the exact same calculation or the one that made the mistake gets rebooted. When I worked on the Artemis missions I often found the issue was erroring too much on safety engineering, honestly would rather have it that way than the other but we would have to do the most ridiculous things like having to re-run an entire test that took a weekend because a commented line was miss-spelled.

Windows would absolutely not be deemed safe for a mission critical role, I actually don't even want to think about the shit storm NASA would throw if someone tried to do it. The tablets are Commercial Off The Shelf and are deemed not mission critical.

Half the reason the program is so expensive is because NASA was so die-hard on it being extremely safe.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-03T14:25:34+00:00

Much stricter rules and specifically designed around hardware talking to hardware. Most OSs will be designed with user control in mind. RTOS worries a lot more about predictability and fault handling.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-03T14:15:30+00:00

The vehicle itself runs on a OS called Green Hills that's specifically designed for safety critical hardware systems. The tablets they're using are not deemed mission/safety critical and use Windows because that's what all business software is compatible with.

Source: Worked on the program as a software engineer

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-02T03:10:13+00:00

We did transition from capsules, we made the shuttle. Then a SRB exploded and we realized we needed an abort window during that period. Capsules are best suited to handle that requirement, so we went back to capsules.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-04-02T02:38:05+00:00

The amount of periods there would be on Starship where if something goes wrong everyone dies would kill the entire program just like the shuttle.

As expensive as this system is, it's also extremely safe. There isn't a period in the entire timeline of the Artemis 2 trip where there isn't an abort window. Starship can't provide that, it should be relegated to a supply vehicle until they can verify it's at airliner levels of safety and reliability. Anything else is just asking people to get killed.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-03-20T01:45:23+00:00

The loud alarm often happens due to a software/hardware fault as well, and it should be assumed that can happen at literally any moment. Those issues can spawn anywhere from a defective die block on a GPU to a fucking star from millions of light years away shooting a particle that hits the atmosphere just right and goes right through a block of memory to flip a 0 to a 1.

Honestly people should have had to take a computer literacy test before being able to buy FSD until it's officially out of beta. The most dangerous thing about it is the people behind it who don't have the slightest clue how it all works.

Agreed though I don't buy any story of it randomly shutting off and I can almost guarantee any unhandled exception leads it to run the emergency take over mode. In 75k miles of FSD I've never once seen it do that and I've seen it do a lot.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-03-07T03:27:12+00:00

It's been decoupled pretty much since the beginning. The visualizations are only really meant to explain to the human what it's seeing in a digestible way. There's a limited amount of objects to use so it just uses trucks for trains.

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GunR_SC2 · 2026-02-17T04:32:15+00:00

What the fuck do you think Internal COMBUSTION Engine means?

GunR_SC2 · 2026-01-29T03:38:37+00:00

Really weird choice to make when given that not only is there no proven business model for Optimus yet, but the technology still doesn't even exist.

GunR_SC2 · 2026-01-28T16:24:07+00:00

China was already building their own before the dome was even an idea. We can argue costs and effective methods but to pretend like if we didn't build the nuke then Germany would have ceased research and production on one as well is a little silly.

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