NASA Reestablishes Communication with CAPSTONE Satellite after Brief Blackout

[Peter_Brosdahl]

NASA has re-established contact with its Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) CubeSat after it went silent on July 4.

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[Grimlakin]

Man I would LOVE to be a fly on the wall on the design and programming of these things. Imagine the data paths and redundancy that has to exist for even troubleshooting let alone actually solving problems for a object in space with no humans or hands near by for Millions of miles.

I want NASA engineers to build a refrigerator and home AC unit designed with that kind of resiliency.

 

[Brian_B]

I want NASA engineers to build a refrigerator and home AC unit designed with that kind of resiliency.

They exist, you can't afford them.

 

[Grimlakin]

They exist, you can't afford them.

You know what thats very true. Bought a water heater with a 30 year warranty. Regular one 500 bucks. That one.. 2500.

 

[Endgame]

You get what you pay for. The part that sucks is that if they would take the same margin for the better part, you’d probably only pay 1500 - but they have to make sure they really screw you on the high end.

 

[Brian_B]

You get what you pay for. The part that sucks is that if they would take the same margin for the better part, you’d probably only pay 1500 - but they have to make sure they really screw you on the high end.

The biggest part of that cost is recouping the engineering and design / R&D. And that subsidizes the lower end products as that work trickles down to them. That isn't all of it - a good bit is margin, but you gotta make some money in order to keep the company going. It takes a whole lot of failures to come up with a version that works well enough to compete.

I like to point at Dyson as a good example: I have no idea how long it came to come up with the design of their first hand-held vacuum. But I'm sure it took a while. Now they just kinda iterate on that design, trying to bring efficiency up and costs down. But dozens of other companies see what they did, copy that design for much much less than it took Dyson to develop it and bring it to market - and Dyson has to compete with that somehow. Dyson chose to compete on quality rather than slash margins: they have a premium product, they have premium tech support, and it seems to be working for them - but it doesn't work for every innovative company.

It's easy to make money if your a Chinese company and you just "borrow" the design from whatever foreign company has contracted your factory to mass produce the product, and you know exactly where you can cut corners in order to bring production costs down even further. No R&D at all to fund there.