news
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
view the rest of the comments
I hate to bring this up, but SpaceX (and I’m not giving Elon any credit here) as a private space company has done more significant advances than NASA has done in a long time.
NASA has no spacecrafts right now! American astronauts are riding SpaceX Crew Dragon to dock with the ISS. And before Crew Dragon’s first flight in 2020, they had to book Russian Soyuz to fly their astronauts into space.
Look at the SLS/Artemis, an over-bloated project in both time and money, while simultaneously managing to accomplish zero new innovation at all. It’s literally strapping 4 Space Shuttle’s rocket engines together (from literally the very same engines scrapped from the retired Space Shuttles) and using the same Solid Rocket Boosters (the very same defective booster design that caused the Challenger explosion) to get American astronauts back to the moon again (at least this is how it’s planned).
Where is the innovation? Where are the advancements? The same Space Shuttle rockets that are inferior to the Soviet rockets built in the 1980s, a country that has not existed for over 30 years!
At least SpaceX is trying something new with their Raptor engines. NASA is still stuck in their past glory, at least in terms of launch vehicles and spacecrafts. I’m not denying that there are some cool satellites and telescopes and stuff, but the heavy engineering that is going to blow everyone’s minds by achieving some incredible breakthroughs is not there anymore.
NASA is bloated by government bureaucracy and red tape. They're also limited by their engineers and scientists because they pay poorly (don't get the best talent) and don't offer incentives such as promotions and there's no equity to grow multiples of if they succeed (no motivation to work hard). And until now, there was guaranteed job security no matter how little they worked so there was also no fear instilled into the employees. Glad they're letting the workers know now though that they actually have to produce something of value to earn their paychecks
SpaceX fixes literally all of these problems by virtue of being a private sector corporation participating in the free market rather than a publicly funded state apparatus with 0 interest of generating profits
is this a parody comment wut
I'm a libertarian socialist that believes in the power of free markets, infinite growth, and profits chasing
I'm not sure if you're agreeing that you're a parody or not so I'll give a short serious answer.
NASA being underfunded and bloated is intentional. It was neither of those things in the 1950s and 60s, but since Nixon got the moon landing he wanted the whole point of NASA has shifted from pushing the boundaries of space exploration to providing key technologies to the private sector, and over time everything NASA does has become about feeding money to private corporations.
Meanwhile SpaceX underpays and overworks its engineers to the point of a psychotic break as its normal policy. It is currently the place that you tough out for a year or two to get it on your resume, and then flee as fast and as far as you can to a more reasonable job. Everything SpaceX is doing could be done for half price without giving a generation of aerospace scientists PTSD by NASA if they were funded properly and not intentionally hogtied by Congress and the military.
SpaceX lists entry level Engineering positions for $115-185k and is hiring an incredibly young crowd (i.e. this isn't gated by a huge amount of experience) so I don't know that you could say they are underpaid but the hours are clearly hellish and it seems unbelievably disorganized. But yes to the rest, it seems a lot like what Amazon was to software devs.
You're not getting paid $115k as an early career hire there for most roles. Have several friends there and, compared to the rest of the LA aersopace market, it's probably a $10-20k cut.