It can be very useful for grid stabilization at the scale of seconds to minutes (both with charge and discharge).You don't need that much capacity to do that.

They do have to be wide open and close pretty fast once the end on the booster had passed them.

The rocket is not filled until the last minute, by fueling arms on the tower. And the weight is like 90% fuel, so it makes a pretty big difference.

They said in the event that they will first deliver 3s and Ys. They just add a 2 seater and 20 seater van later to fill other use cases.

The mentionned the show that they will have autonomous versions of 3 and Y first.

If you use something like ArgoCD (and maybe also Argo Rollouts) you can do the diffing from Git automatically but either put a manual validation step where you have a chance to review the diff or implement some gradual rollout strategy. Also, it's probably wise to use a branch/tagging strategy and not read from head.

Bottom line is: GitOps means the source of truth is Git and automation makes sure to avoid drifts. You still have to have a rollout strategy and schedule that makes sense for your usecase.

> Bottom line is: GitOps means the source of truth is Git and automation makes sure to avoid drifts. You still have to have a rollout strategy and schedule that makes sense for your usecase.

THIS.

You lose people, expertise and organizational structure. Those are more important than the "plans of the rocket". Not to mention, would nowadays engineers be able to work from the methods of back then? A lot of stuff would be faster to redesign from scratch (all the software and electronics for sure).

NASA a radically changed it's focus an functions since the space race. Suppliers have changed too.

They could do it again with enough funds and time, but it will take many years.

If you use it correctly, with multiple availability zones and even multi regions you can reach very high reliability. They surely don't offer five 9s for a single zone. I am not aware of many multi regions outages. And they are also getting better over time, spending a lot more engineering hours on reliability that most companies. And if they fail to deliver on SLA they might give you money (depending on your contract I guess).