seeking_perhaps [he/him]

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  • 23 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I thought it was solid. I agree with some of the criticisms about the acting and lack of mystery/intrigue, but you can blame the book for that. I think the characters had to be split up because IIRC there is a lot of internal thinking and strategy that happens in the book that works better as dialogue in a TV show. Overall, the more interesting ideas and scenes come the further off the rails the trilogy goes, so I’m glad they got through a lot of the early wallfacer stuff in this first season.








  • As someone in the industry, you missed the forest for the trees. There’s a lot more to space exploration than just launch vehicle development. SpaceX isn’t going to be doing bespoke Mars rover missions anytime soon unless it has a profit motive. JPL offers a very unique product in these one-off science-driven missions that the private industry has yet to be able to replicate and may never have the incentive to do so. Further gutting JPL just means losing out on those missions, which offer valuable scientific returns to the world. JPL is the reason we have rovers driving and a helicopter flying on Mars, oribters around the gas giants, satellites in interstellar space. The list goes on.


  • This is nice in theory, but isn’t how knowledge transfer of this variety tends to happen in the aerospace industry. Many of those laid off have very specific expertise in niche areas of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Some of that is transferrable, but a lot is specific to things like Mars rovers and planetary science. Tearing those people away from JPL will result in the loss of a ton of institutional knowledge and much of it will not be applicable to the private sector and might just be lost all together.