Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | louwhopley's commentslogin

This is incredible. The amount of embedded and mobile systems that can utilise this is big. Think vehicle (car, ship, etc) tracking, IoT devices, remote sensors in the field, even remote cameras in the field. Search and rescue devices, etc.

Lots of use-cases already proved by the more limited Iridium modules that are available on the market.

I'm however curious what having orders of magnitude more low-bandwidth devices connected to a satellite would do compared to having fewer high-bandwidth devices.

How would that affect the individual satellite's capacity?


Thanks for sharing this. It creates a clear picture of its use cases and roll out plans.

GPS is such a critical infrastructure component to modern society- knowing that a redundancy system like this is in the works is great.


There doesn't seem to be any mention of 2006's Sid Meier's Railroads! which seems to be an evolution of Railroad Tycoon.

I've played "Railroads!" for countless hours - it's an incredible game, especially when LAN'ing with others.

Any reason why this game might be left out?


Same same but different


Given the size of the booster, what corrections would placing GNSS sensors in multiple places provide to increase positional accuracy?

Eg if you space sensors 20m’s apart.


It’s a really good idea! Unfortunately not too much, since the error is largely from atmospheric distortion of the signal and so the error for two receivers close by would be correlated. You’d need the error to be uncorrelated to gain accuracy with multiple receivers.


If you have the option to consider both, which visa would be the more seamless (and faster) path to green card?

L1A or O1?

(Coming from South Africa, running SaaS company with holding co in DE)


Every time an article on this subject pops up, I tend to wonder if the 2 astronauts will ever just 'call it' and go "this is enough, please send the Dragon and get us home"


> wonder if the 2 astronauts will ever just 'call it'

The forcing function is Crew 9, currently scheduled to launch no earlier than 24 September [1]. If they don’t want to fly Starliner, the face saving move is to delay signing off until then.

[1] https://www.space.com/space-force-1st-guardian-from-own-laun...


That decision has to be made well before the launch. Crew 9 has to launch with fewer crew onboard. The Boeing crew needs Space-X spacesuits made for them because Boeing's suits don't fit in Space-X seats.[1] What cargo goes up with Crew 9 would change.

Are those suits being made? Can they be made without the wearers present for fitting? Did someone think of this before the Boeing launch?

[1] https://jalopnik.com/stranded-astronauts-now-have-to-deal-wi...


Fairly certain the other user is misinformed and the general media reporting on this entire affair has continued to be so awful as to blow up the fact that the two capsules use incompatible IVA plug-ins.

If they choose to return on Crew-9, the associated IVA suits do exist and would be sent up. They already have both astronauts' measurements and have either made/adjusted a set for them, or have found ones that would be a good enough fit.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-...

Eric Berger and Arstechnica in general has a fairly reliable track record on space related reporting. So I would trust them more than all the "big" outlets which can't seem to live in their own reality.


> If they choose to return on Crew-9, the associated IVA suits do exist and would be sent up

This is SpaceX’s pitch. NASA hasn’t accepted it yet. The novel risks could favour using the Starliner suits in Dragon or no suit at all.


There's no benefit to using Starliner suits in Dragon since they can't be plugged in, and there is no risk to using Dragon IVA suits that are based on the measurements they already have of both of them.


> no benefit to using Starliner suits in Dragon

Of course there is. They already have them and we know they fit.

We also know, by the way, the measurements of the Starliner and Dragon ports. Making an adapter is theoretically easier than making a new suit. If you don’t think so, then map every argument for that scepticism to remotely tailoring a spacesuit.

> no risk to using Dragon IVA suits that are based on the measurements they already have of both of them

Measurements can change or be faulty or be critical at different parts of the body for different suit designs. “No risk” doesn’t exist in aerospace.

They should send up the new suits and then evaluate.


> Are those suits being made? Can they be made without the wearers present for fitting?

No. They'd have to come down not wearing suits.


Uh oh.


I wonder how quickly SpaceX could scramble an unscheduled Dragon launch if asked to? Do they have a completed Dragon waiting to go?


Wikipedia says they have 4 Crew Dragons in service, 1 under construction. - Crew 8 is docked at ISS - Polaris Dawn is on the launch pad scheduled for Monday. It is configured for a space walk, so I think that means it doesn't have the ISS docking adapter installed - Crew 9 is launching in September (with 2 or 4 astronauts) - Fram2 mission is in December. I think it is going to have the viewing cupola installed, so no port

I don't know how fast a Dragon could be refitted with the docking adapter so maybe the other 2 aren't available on any sort of emergency basis.

The emergency plan for Butch and Suni until Crew 9 gets there is either YOLO Starliner or lay on the bulkhead of Crew 8 below the 4 astronaut seats, not wearing space suits since the Starliner suits can't be hooked up to Dragon.


> wonder how quickly SpaceX could scramble an unscheduled Dragon launch if asked to?

The better question might be how much SpaceX would charge for having a Crew Dragon with ISS docking adapters standing ready for launch within one week. I'd guess that would cost SpaceX less than $100mm. (The actual mission would be billed at usual rates. You're paying for optionality.)

Last-minute rescue from orbit simply hasn't been something our species has had the technology to do until recently. (Space Shuttle needed 30 days on paper.)


There are four Crew Dragon. One is attached to ISS and one is preparing for Crew 9. The other two are scheduled for commercial flights, one launching in a few days. The later one would have be re-scheduled or do fast turnaround to come up with spare Dragon. There is also one for Crew 10 under construction.

The other question is how long it takes to make Crew Dragon ready.


Yes, but it's been sold to a billionaire for a joyride.[1] Launches next Monday.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/spacex-polaris-dawn-mi...


I wonder how the test pilots are going. If I were them I'd be a little stoked to get the extra time on station.


I'm sure they aren't exactly angry that they are stuck there, but, they were planning on a 9-day tour.

They are missing spouses, birthdays, weddings, they will miss thanksgiving and christmas with their families.

I'm sure it's great to be there and they are lucky to be there, but, it must also suck to miss out, especially unexpectedly and when you have no real choice in the matter.


I'd give up the rest of all of those holidays to be a human that lives any part of their lives in any part of space


You already are - space is where the Earth is. You are in a very nice and very inhabitable part of it, BTW.


Space travelers for the next several thousand years will yearn for the comforts of Earth (until we create habitats which are as nice)… it’s going to be a rough and tumble frontier for ages


If you haven't read The Green Hills of Earth (1947), this might be a good time. Fair warning, you might find something a little stuck in your throat near the end.



...and the websockets!?


Haha, exactly this. I've built and successfully been using Unspam[0] for this reason since about a year ago. In corporate/business world, anything where SDR sales are involved this form of automated AI outbound mail has picked up a lot. Tools like Apollo automates this AI process (both finding leads to mail, and then crafting the mail).

For interest sake, users of Unspam that have a title of CEO on their Linkedin see about ~10% of all mail making it into their inbox be categorised as spam (leadgen, recruitment, or software dev services).

[0] https://unspam.io


Just saw this, and as a small business owner in the B2B market, this sounds very useful. Gmail's existing spam filters do not reliably detect this type of marketing.

I wish your landing page had a simple "how it works" explanation with a screen shot or diagram, rather than forcing me to sign in directly, and also allowing the app to read *and* send emails. Also, I don't see any pricing?

Finally, signing up, I got an error:

Error 1101 Ray ID: 89d4e0957c2f5a44 • 2024-07-03 06:39:15 UTC - Worker threw exception


Thanks for the useful feedback! Totally forgot that pricing was never added to the landing page → have added to the todo list to fix up.

Where in the process did that error occur for you?

I see in the logs that an error registered, but unfortunately no detail attached. I've beefed up the logging a bit in the onboarding journey on my side to see what could be breaking here if we try again.

Mind trying to log-in/sign up again? You can use "HACKERNEWS" as a promo code, which would make the first month free.


The error occurred right after granting permissions from my Google account. The permissions were granted but I could never access your application page. I just tried again, now I got an "Error handling OAuth callback" after granting permissions. Signing in again does not work either. (I did remove all of the app's permissions in my Google security settings before, so to Google it looked like the application was requesting all of its permissions again.)


I do see it in the logs now. So weird, as dozens of people successfully signed up without this issue. Have added more logs now again to double down on that specific area where this issue is caused. Maybe another login attempt now will be able to uncover the gap.

Thanks for removing the permissions in Google, as that's also key in this debugging.

Mind if I send you an email to debug further there?


Quick shoutout to slhck for helping me debug and resolve this issue. Thank you!

tl;dr: Ran into issues because the DB was expecting a profile picture URL from Google auth (string) or NULL, but JavaScript being JavaScript tried to insert "undefined".


Most likely, SDR = Sales Development Representative, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_development#Process


Correct! :')


For solo-private projects, I constantly catch myself writing full commit messages even though I never read it again, and `git commit -m "."` would suffice.


git commit -mm works and is a bit quicker


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: