Man, that project is such bait for my particular sensibilities but just looking at the copy about not sharing your data and only sharing weights has me feeling very disappointed in the project already. I would want a project like this to not elide fact that sharing your weight updates probably effectively means sharing your data too.
To actually follow through with this fully they would have had to revoke all kinds of internal access for foreign nationals and demand they immediately return their hardware (at 5pm on a Friday no less), no?
Unless folks are hearing that they did this I smell marketing and/or PR as the main driver of the action.
Earthquake early warning systems are a top 10 peak human achievement in my book. No joke, I tear up watching videos of Japan's EEW system alerting people of possible danger just in time.
There are streamers who's whole thing is watching these alerts and setting up bobbleheads and glasses of water and stuff to show the shaking. It's so so so cool. Look at what we can do for each other you guys :')
This article is plagued by several almost-truths, and gets a lot mixed up.
The thing that is happening for the first time on this mission is humans personally observing much of the far side in daylight. For the Apollo missions the far side was mostly dark because they wanted a high sun angle at the landing site on the near side. Many uncrewed orbiting cameras and even a recent Chinese lander & rover have taken photos of the far side.
It also states that these will be images "from the surface" of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it's true that this O2O technology could be used for high bandwidth livestreams from the surface on future missions, if this test works well.
I don't even think this O2O system will be used for live video during Artemis II. This and several other similar articles all appear to reference a NASA press release that is about the technology in general. The mission-specific NASA reference I found[1] says they will transmit a pre-recorded video "in the lunar vicinity" at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a "livestream" is just misstated.
But Artemis II launched during passover - so a day before the full moon. That means that for a 10 day mission, the flyby will be four days after the full moon. And the flyby is necessarily on the far side of the moon, that's how physics works. So they'll be passing over the far side of the moon four days after a full moon - the far side of the moon will be in almost complete darkness. Not even Earthshine lights the dark side of the moon when it is full.
My understanding is that even that small amount is more than the Apollo crews had. It's all a bit of a marketing line anyway. We can see a good portion of the "far side" from Earth due to the Moon's libration.
Still, it's true that parts of the far side are still unseen by human eyes (if you consider pitch black landscape to be "unseen" which I think is fair given the lack of any significant illumination as you point out).
I believe that Apollo 17 spent six days in lunar orbit. I'm not sure at what phase they arrived or left, but worst case they saw the far side three days away from full darkness.
The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to.
The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.
Yes, while I was reading the article I couldn't help but think about notaries public. Seems like something like that would be government's go-to for this if they weren't quite so overfed on tech industry contributions that lead them down the path of AI solutions.
I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it ticks a lot boxes for the state.
Reading between the lines of the summary a bit, it sure sounds like NASA program leadership was essentially doing pro bono PR for ol' pal Boeing at the expense of crew safety to placate Boeing's feeling of SpaceX being NASA's new favorite. Followed by Boeing again falling on the sea of sharp daggers held by their army of subcontractors.
That said, the announcement of this mishap reclassification does have a certain fleeting, bias-shaped odor, given Isaacman's proximity to Musk.
The report was released internally last November, before Isaacman’s appointment. It’s a timely reminder of past shortcomings as NASA is preparing for high risk Artemis flights. Boeing itself didn’t dispute it. Would you rather they put it under the rug?
We could probably spin this around in the other direction, too. NASA and prior administrator behavior has a certain bias against SpaceX and Musk. It’s no secret that Musk’s, shall we say, eccentric personality caused him to find few friends in Washington up until he cozied up to Trump. It makes sense that there would be pressure to get an alternative to Falcon 9 and Dragon ready with that additional context in mind.
reply