nortex97 said:

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So, is Elon also now going to be a Mayor?

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Just add it to one of his jobs

Quote:

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For some employees, the lack of prior warning has been particularly jarring. "The vibe at work last night was rough...we were all sideswiped by this. I had no clue... I'm worried [my team] might be less than 30 after today."

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"Prior warning" drives me up the wall. Isn't that the only kind?

Starship program at the cape kicking into gear:

Quote:

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SpaceX has been clearing out land just north of its Falcon 9 refurbishment hangar, otherwise known as Hangar X. This land will become the Production Site for the Starship program at Cape Canaveral. At Starbase, the production site includes a one million square foot Starfactory with two Mega Bays, one for Boosters and one for Ships, and an older High Bay, which is rarely used anymore.

Roberts Road is set to get a Gigabay, 130 meters by 110 meters and 115 meters tall. In comparison, the Mega Bays at Starbase are around 38 meters by 54 meters and 99 meters tall. These numbers mean that SpaceX can fit around 28 separate workstations inside this bay compared to the five that are currently in the Mega Bays. The height increase will also allow for the production of the stretched Boosters and Ships that SpaceX has planned, as the current Mega Bays aren't tall enough.

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The extended firing tested new hardware and cycled the six Raptor engines through multiple thrust levels to recreate different conditions seen within the propulsion system during flight. Data from the test will inform upgrades to the ship’s hardware and flight profile ahead of… pic.twitter.com/MZugcU3jkW

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 12, 2025

Still looking like the 24th I guess:

Quote:

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This STA uses information from previous grant 2179-EX-ST-2024 and is necessary to authorize an additional power level for uplink frequencies 2090 MHz and 2085.6875 MHz for Starship Test Flight 8 launching from Starbase TX. This STA is necessary for Starship Super Heavy vehicle communications at SpaceX facilities located in Boca Chica TX.

Operation Start Date: 02/24/2025
Operation End Date: 08/24/2025

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NSF mentioned on a video that based on previous static fires they dont expect the launch before March however who knows how fast SpaceX is ramping up their processes.

Images / stitched video of Firefly Blue Ghost lunar orbit insertion.

I love you to the Moon, but not back - I'm staying there," 💙 Blue Ghost. We captured our first shots of the Moon following a successful Lunar Orbit Insertion. The lander will soon begin to circularize its orbit in preparation for landing on March 2. #BGM1 pic.twitter.com/2FclZ1hnvb

— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) February 14, 2025

Elon Musk playing Elon Musk in the tv series The Big Bang Theory pic.twitter.com/16Cfsh1Lmu

— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) February 13, 2025

Mathguy64 said:

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Stat Monitor Repairman said:

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https://viewer.mars.asu.edu/planetview/inst/moc/E1000462#T=2&P=E1000462

What you make of these straight lines found on Mars?

Is this legit?

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Valentine Michael Smith's summer home.

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They talking about this on the Rogan show the other day.

Said the right angle square site is in the same general area of 'the face' on Mars of Weekly World News and Art Bell / Richard C Hoagland fame.

Kind of cool site for updates if interested (hopefully ok as far as language?):
https://sh.itjust.works/post/32088156?sort=New



I haven't followed vast at all, sort of interesting.

NASA just dropped the closest image ever taken of Jupiter... pic.twitter.com/dZVWeDVO3u

— All day Astronomy (@forallcurious) February 14, 2025

New phone wallpaper

NASA Expected to "fire" probationary employees

Rough situation for any new NASA employees that were brought in for critical gaps if this is indeed the case. This, if it happens, will affect human-spaceflight missions.

Womp womp community noted don't care still phone backdrop

We are gonna be in Orlando when they are supposed to launch the crew to the ISS. Oh man I have got to go. Any tips on watching a launch from Kennedy?

Also how is Kennedy space center? Considering making a day of it but not sure if it will hold my kids interest well enough.

Every agency is being instructed to fire probationary employees. If they're deemed worthy, they'll be asked back.

Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center is fantastic for all ages. The Space Shuttle exhibit by itself is worth the price of admission.

For launch viewing, there are many different spots to watch from, I think Jetty Park is probably the best for launches from 39A.

Decay said:

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Every agency is being instructed to fire probationary employees. If they're deemed worthy, they'll be asked back.

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If they are deemed worthy why "fire' them in the first place. We will see if they are able to protect mission critical positions, but any type of RIF through Human Spaceflight Missions put SpaceX in an even better position than they are already in.

Awesome thank you. I assume the crowds aren't that big anymore for the launches because they are so frequent. Any idea on what to expect there? I'm extra stoked because the astronauts will be on this one. I just hope the launch happens as scheduled. What an absolute bonus for this trip I wasn't that excited about.

clw04 said:

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Decay said:

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Every agency is being instructed to fire probationary employees. If they're deemed worthy, they'll be asked back.

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If they are deemed worthy why "fire' them in the first place. We will see if they are able to protect mission critical positions, but any type of RIF through Human Spaceflight Missions put SpaceX in an even better position than they are already in.

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Because we don't know what is and what isn't, and when we're up to our eyeballs in debt, the agencies have lost the benefit of the doubt.

We spent billions for SLS to make one unmanned fly by of the moon and everyone kept throwing taxpayer money at it. That massive jobs program is the reason we now have to scratch and claw for every penny.

Decay said:

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clw04 said:

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Decay said:

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Every agency is being instructed to fire probationary employees. If they're deemed worthy, they'll be asked back.

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If they are deemed worthy why "fire' them in the first place. We will see if they are able to protect mission critical positions, but any type of RIF through Human Spaceflight Missions put SpaceX in an even better position than they are already in.

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Because we don't know what is and what isn't, and when we're up to our eyeballs in debt, the agencies have lost the benefit of the doubt.

We spent billions for SLS to make one unmanned fly by of the moon and everyone kept throwing taxpayer money at it. That massive jobs program is the reason we now have to scratch and claw for every penny.

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Those aren't the people that are getting fired- SLS costs from NASA employees is super small as all the money goes to Boeing. If DOGE driven items do stupid stuff by firing the wrong people (not the "wastes of money" that are mandated by Congress) then you are putting active missions at risk.

There's still a good amount of people out there for every launch, especially when there are humans on board because the rocket will come back to land instead of the drone ship. Crew-10 will be crowded because it's at a decent hour (right after sunset) as well.

Where you end up watching should be based on what is more important to you: the rocket lifting off from the pad or having a good view of the booster coming back to land and the accompanying sonic booms.

Ben Cooper has the authoritative guide to rocket launch viewing: Rocket Launch Viewing Guide: SpaceX launch viewing, ULA launches at Cape Canaveral.

Obviously caveats abound re: weather and delays and all that.

My wife and I did KSC on our last day. 5 nights at WDW...last morning checked out and took Lyft to the airport, rented a car to get to KSC and back with a late afternoon flight back to Houston.

Never watched one from the eastern range but seeing plenty out of the western range I'd prioritize seeing the booster return/landing 100%. Not much of a difference at Vandenberg as the landing pad is right next to SLC 4

I'm sorry to hear that. Is there any chance of your previous employer taking you back (assuming you'd be willing to pursue that)? There are a couple people in my org in the same situation.

I've been at JSC almost 40 years (I can't believe I'm typing that) - 21 as a civil servant. It's chaotic right now, to say the least.

Decay said:

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Every agency is being instructed to fire probationary employees. If they're deemed worthy, they'll be asked back.

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People don't tend to want to come back when you get them to leave a job and then **** them over by almost immediately firing them. Personally, if that happened to me, I'd accept any return invite and then ghost just to return the favor

That's the typical path of most bigger orgs though, cut what is probably too much, re-assess, and boomerang back those who you need. It's how Musk has always done it and plenty of other large firms as well.

Watching the booster come back is 100% my priority.

I can not emphasize enough how stoked that I am that this happens to be when we are there. Makes the whole trip worth it. Thanks for the link.

Dang looks like playa Linda Beach will most likely be closed. I really hope this gets my kids interested in space flight. They hear me talk about space enough it's probably just annoying to them now.

Seeing the booster come back is incredible, you'll probably be able to see the boostback burn briefly and then won't see it again until the landing burn, then BOOM the sonic booms hit (just make sure you're looking towards the landing zones). Absolutely incredible experience.

Where did you watch it from there? Seems like jetty park may be the best spot from what I was watching on that link. Really wish that beach would be opened but they said it essentially never is for crewed flights but even then it closes at 2000 and launch is scheduled for 1948

I cheated and had special media access to the causeway for that one.

I think Jetty Park will be your best bet. It's a great spot, don't worry too much about making it perfect, if you see one I promise it won't be your last.

A buddy runs Starfleet Tours as well, they do charter boats for some of the bigger launches that get you as close as civilian boats are allowed.

clw04 said:

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Decay said:

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clw04 said:

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Decay said:

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Every agency is being instructed to fire probationary employees. If they're deemed worthy, they'll be asked back.

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If they are deemed worthy why "fire' them in the first place. We will see if they are able to protect mission critical positions, but any type of RIF through Human Spaceflight Missions put SpaceX in an even better position than they are already in.

---

Because we don't know what is and what isn't, and when we're up to our eyeballs in debt, the agencies have lost the benefit of the doubt.

We spent billions for SLS to make one unmanned fly by of the moon and everyone kept throwing taxpayer money at it. That massive jobs program is the reason we now have to scratch and claw for every penny.

---

Those aren't the people that are getting fired- SLS costs from NASA employees is super small as all the money goes to Boeing. If DOGE driven items do stupid stuff by firing the wrong people (not the "wastes of money" that are mandated by Congress) then you are putting active missions at risk.

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I've argued for years that the only way for NASA to fulfill its mission is to either triple the budget or cut it by 75% to destroy the bureaucracy.

I'll share one of my stories now. I was just starting as a flight controller and working in the back room when the crew called down annoyed at a pop-up message on their laptop that kept interfering with their work.

We couldn't remote into PCs back then so we had the crew take a picture of the pop-up for us. Turns out it was a Norton Anti-Virus nagware message saying that the license had not yet been activated. I was pretty annoyed that the engineering office hadn't activated the software before burning the disk image. I searched for the activation code in my console's documentation and even in engineering's cert package but found nothing.

Undeterred I wrote a quick procedure to have the crew call down the product ID number and being an exuberant new flight controller I grabbed my personal credit card and called Symantec to obtain the activation code. A few minutes and $29.99 later I had the activation code.

At that moment my front room controller got cold feed and asked Engineering to verify the activation code was correct.

Eleven and a half months later [insert Sponge Bob Meme] Engineering finally approved of us activating the Norton Anti-Virus software. In that meeting I notified them that I had already tested the activation code on the computer mirror we had in the mission support room and that after activating the software it immediately started generating pop-up messages indicating that the definition files were out of date. To resolve that I contacted the OCA officer (the guy responsible for file transfers on ISS) and gave him the path to the definition file upload directory and had that path added to the batch file used for weekly Norton Anti-Virus updates on all the other laptops.

At this moment the system manager lost his **** and exclaimed that antivirus definition files contained .dll files which were executable files and that they would put the computer out of its certified configuration and that he didn't have the budget to recertify the software every week.

I laughed and exclaimed that by that logic, the first time a computer is powered on it writes log files which means the hard disk image no longer matches what they certified and that we should be prohibited from ever turning the computer on. I then asked how the Crew Systems office in the same Engineering Directorate was able to update their virus definition files every week.

I got some song and dance about how the Crew Systems office who were using the exact same laptop model were configured to different requirements.

We ended up decommissioning that computer 8 or 9 months later without ever getting permission to load new virus definition files.

The moral of this story is that NASA's siloed organizational structures can create a Byzantine labyrinth of duplicative working groups, panels, and boards all requiring approval which results in even simple non-critical changes taking months to gain approval.

Then you add in that various directorates often have different priorities and budgets and you can quickly see how these train wrecks happen.

In the situations like I outlined above we have an engineering organization that exhausted their sustaining budget for the year refusing to dedicate any resources to non-critical issues like Norton Anti-Virus pop-ups and an ops organization that has young energetic flight controllers working in shifts 24/7 trying to hammer flat every nail that slows down completing the ops mission.

All of the above shows what can go wrong when smart well meaning people are operating off different sheets of music. Imagine what can happen when egos and turf wars get involved. This was the toxic brew that led to what I call the MER Wars during the 2006-2009 timeframe which saw increasingly antagonistic and occasionally, outright hostility between the divisions.

It got so bad at one point that NASA had to bring in outside consultants to run workshops to help restore the frayed relationships between divisions.

Our org structure worked in the 60s when NASA had basically unlimited budgets, a disciplined military descended culture, and strong leaders. I'll let y'all decide how many of those still exist today.

lb3 said:

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clw04 said:

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Decay said:

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clw04 said:

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Decay said:

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Every agency is being instructed to fire probationary employees. If they're deemed worthy, they'll be asked back.

---

If they are deemed worthy why "fire' them in the first place. We will see if they are able to protect mission critical positions, but any type of RIF through Human Spaceflight Missions put SpaceX in an even better position than they are already in.

---

Because we don't know what is and what isn't, and when we're up to our eyeballs in debt, the agencies have lost the benefit of the doubt.

We spent billions for SLS to make one unmanned fly by of the moon and everyone kept throwing taxpayer money at it. That massive jobs program is the reason we now have to scratch and claw for every penny.

---

Those aren't the people that are getting fired- SLS costs from NASA employees is super small as all the money goes to Boeing. If DOGE driven items do stupid stuff by firing the wrong people (not the "wastes of money" that are mandated by Congress) then you are putting active missions at risk.

---

I've argued for years that the only way for NASA to fulfill its mission is to either triple the budget or cut it by 75%.

I'll share one of my stories now. I was just starting as a flight controller and working in the back room when the crew called down annoyed at a pop-up message on their laptop that kept interfering with their work.

We couldn't remote into PCs back then so we had the crew take a picture of the pop-up for us. Turns out it was a Norton Anti-Virus nagware message saying that the license had not yet been activated. I was pretty annoyed that the engineering office hadn't activated the software before burning the disk image. I searched for the activation code in my console's documentation and even in engineering's cert package but found nothing.

Undeterred I wrote a quick procedure to have the crew call down the product ID number and being an exuberant new flight controller I grabbed my personal credit card and called Symantec to obtain the activation code. A few minutes and $29.99 later I had the activation code.

At that moment my front room controller got cold feed and asked Engineering to verify the activation code was correct.

Eleven and a half months later Engineering finally approved of us activating the Norton Anti-Virus software. In that meeting I notified them that I had already tested the activation code on the computer mirror we had in the mission support room and that after activating the software it immediately started generating pop-up messages indicating that the definition files were out of date. To resolve that I contacted the OCA officer (the guy responsible for file transfers on ISS) and gave him the path to the definition file upload directory and had that path added to the batch file used for weekly Norton Anti-Virus updates on all the other laptops.

At this moment the system manager lost his **** and exclaimed that antivirus definition files contained .dll files which were executable files and that they would put the computer out of its certified configuration and that he didn't have the budget to recertify the software every week.

I laughed and exclaimed that by that logic, the first time a computer is powered on it writes log files which means the hard disk image no longer matches what they certified and that we should. E prohibited from ever turning the computer on. I then asked how the Crew Systems office in the same Engineering Directorate was able to update their virus definition files every week.

I got some song and dance about how the Crew Systems office who were using the exact same laptop model were configured to different requirements.

We ended up decommissioning that computer before we ever got permission to load new virus definition files.

The moral of this story is that NASA's siloed organizational structures can create a Byzantine labyrinth of duplicative working groups, panels, and boards all requiring approval which results in even simple non-critical changes taking months to gain approval.

Then you add in that various directorates often have different priorities and budgets and you can quickly see how these train wrecks happen.

In the situations like I outlined above we have an engineering organization that exhausted their sustaining budget for the year refusing to dedicate any resources to non-critical issues like Norton Anti-Virus pop-ups and an ops organization that has young energetic flight controllers working in shifts 24/7 trying to hammer flat every nail that slows down completing the ops mission.

All of the above shows what can go wrong when smart well meaning people are operating off different sheets of music. Imagine what can happen when egos and turf wars get involved. This was the toxic brew that led to what I call the MER Wars during the 2006-2009 timeframe which saw increasingly antagonistic and occasionally, outright hostility between the divisions.

It got so bad at one point that NASA had to bring in outside consultants to run workshops to help restore the frayed relationships between divisions.

Our org structure worked in the 60s when NASA had basically unlimited budgets, a disciplined military descended culture, and strong leaders. I'll let y'all decide how many of those still exist today.

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I've seen all those things, but a lot of this you likely don't get a lot of traction now without removing the technical authorities as the directorates heavily link themselves to them for R&Rs. I don't know how you cut any of the workforce I've seen for human spaceflight programs without issues as the everyone that I work with are all over-worked and putting in extra hours.