Why SpaceX non hire non-US Citizens even if Elon Musk himself is non American but South African citizen, I heard about ITAR but why?

[tater]

54 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

NASA does a lot more than rockets.  The full name is National Aeronautical and Space Administration.  I suggest you take a look at the budget before equating NASA's budget with the ESA's budget

Aeronautics is ~790 M$ of the NASA budget. So under 5%.

[DerekL1963]

10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Don't forget that KSP community knows about rockets and space flights much, much more than rocket scientists knew in early 1950s...

Absolutely not.   KSP abstracts aways virtually everything of significance, and rocket scientists of the 1950's were actually engineers.  And KSP (as a game/simulator) with it's Lego block construction system is almost completely innocent of engineering.
 

7 hours ago, KSK said:

My point was that the KSP community would be no better or worse than constructing it than many other groups of people. The notion that playing KSP makes you a competent rocket engineer is about as credible as the notion that playing SimCity makes you an architect.

Precisely this.  Hanging about here in the Science & Spaceflight sub-forum, it's abundantly clear the KSP community is largely ignorant when it comes to the practical details of spaceflight.  (There are individual exceptions, but they are not the norm.)

[kerbiloid]

So, that's additional answer to the OP's question.

If even on KSP forum they don't believe into KSP community...

[KSK]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

So, that's additional answer to the OP's question.

If even on KSP forum they don't believe into KSP community...

As a creative, generally polite and civilized, fun gaming forum - yes I do believe in the KSP community. As a group of spaceflight enthusiasts - yes I do believe in the KSP community. It's just the notion that gaming and enthusiasm for spaceflight automatically translates into special competence at spaceflight that I have a problem with.  

[kerbiloid]

Well, at least KSP community is in Top 1% of mankind in this regard. .

Edited August 28, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Hannu2]

On 25.8.2017 at 4:06 PM, Pawelk198604 said:

Brexit would not affect anything because ESA is not part of EU but separate organization, but some of eurocreats want take care of ESA too, but ESA was not interested.

I'm from Poland, my country is full member of it since 2011 i wonder does this mean that my countryman could apply for Astronaut positions during next selection?  

It is not so simple. Finland is member of ESA and some Finnish companies and public departments make stuff for ESA (and also some components for US probes) but our country does not take part in manned programs. Therefore Finnish people can not apply for astronauts. You should check if Poland takes part in ESA's manned operations if you consider astronaut's career.

I agree with tater that the first priority for Europeans should be to vote politicians who have positive attitude for ESA and are ready to pay tax money for space technology. USA will certainly not change their laws for us and it is not very fair to demand it. Unfortunately it seems that whole EU is in severe political crisis. Radical parties with negative attitude for EU (and science and high tech too) increase their power in many countries, including Finland. It may not be very realistic to expect significantly more spending to European space cooperation in next decade or two.

[Pawelk198604]

2 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

It is not so simple. Finland is member of ESA and some Finnish companies and public departments make stuff for ESA (and also some components for US probes) but our country does not take part in manned programs. Therefore Finnish people can not apply for astronauts. You should check if Poland takes part in ESA's manned operations if you consider astronaut's career.

I agree with tater that the first priority for Europeans should be to vote politicians who have positive attitude for ESA and are ready to pay tax money for space technology. USA will certainly not change their laws for us and it is not very fair to demand it. Unfortunately it seems that whole EU is in severe political crisis. Radical parties with negative attitude for EU (and science and high tech too) increase their power in many countries, including Finland. It may not be very realistic to expect significantly more spending to European space cooperation in next decade or two.

Poland become full member of ESA in 2012, (Finland is member since 1994) 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency#International_Space_Station

 

But we don't participate on ISS because we join after it was completed, but from i know to be ESA astronaut it's just require to be citizen of full member state of ESA, so being Finnish or Polish is not the problem, maybe people from country that participate more in ESA manned programs are more likely to be ESA Astronaut, but the only official requirement is being Citizen of ESA member state, as for Poland, but even before full membership we participated actively in unnamed ESA activities, Polish scientist created scientific instrumentation for Cassini-Huygens mission, for Huygens probe that landed on Titan, the Jupiter Moon  

[wumpus]

9 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

Absolutely not.   KSP abstracts aways virtually everything of significance, and rocket scientists of the 1950's were actually engineers.  And KSP (as a game/simulator) with it's Lego block construction system is almost completely innocent of engineering.

Precisely this.  Hanging about here in the Science & Spaceflight sub-forum, it's abundantly clear the KSP community is largely ignorant when it comes to the practical details of spaceflight.  (There are individual exceptions, but they are not the norm.)

"Innocent of engineering" largely depends on the discipline of engineering.  KSP appears to fit well with an iterative design process.  Engineers of any discipline should be able to analyze each design without actually building it (civil and chemical engineers being extreme examples) while KSP prefers a more experimental process.  I pointed out that KSP players in charge of NASA would kill all the astronaut corps in a few launches, but it should also be obvious that the KSP design process would also kill even Apollo level budgets (and Mercury/Gemini/Apollo used a more iterative design process thanks to engineering practices of the time and computers only slowly being developed at the same time) by building too many failed rockets and changing them too significantly.  Changing an engine type is prohibitively expensive.  Demo players might have a much better "could be converted to early rockets" type of design than anything with recent releases that allow picking from a huge variety of engine types (although this ignores the necessity of "mad science contraptions" that these lack or parts require).

KSP does teach some basics of what a good design is, but not only does KSP encourage avoiding engineering, Squad actively prevents it by requiring mods to see even basics like delta-v.  Obviously this wouldn't stop a real engineering approach as you would need to calculate so much other stuff with the same data that adding the rocket equation would be the easiest equation to add.  KSP, being a game, also concentrates on the easiest aspects of spaceflight.  If NASA developed a "rocket science teaching tool" (to train actual rocket scientists, not a propaganda tool) it would probably concentrate on turbopumps and slowly expand to the various plumbing that feeds/are fed by them and completely abstract everything that KSP does.

The economics of KSP are also a joke.  Spacex could only afford to launch 3 unpaid falcon1s before closing up shop without proof of being able to launch a bird.  Compared to any realistic budget, KSP has unlimited funds.  I'd expect NASA and ULA pay at least a billion to design each engine, and then another billion to design the rocket (and hundreds of millions to build a rocket with absolutely no changes from the last, and don't even ask about the cost of Space Shuttle reuse).  In KSP, Falcon Heavy is two alt-clicks from Falcon 9.  IRL, Falcon Heavy took years and probably hundreds of millions of dollars (and we don't even know if the first will get into orbit).

I suspect a better analogy to KSP and rocket science is Guitar Hero to music.  Each might be great fun, and they might inspire you to try to do the "real thing", but what they teach you is only a tiny sliver of what you need to know while taking care of the rest for you.  Much of the game works by hiding how huge that gulf is.  And while RO/RSS might replace much of the "little green men" bits of KSP for historically accurate rockets, don't assume that it significantly changes the rocket science.  To use a "KSP level" example, I'm pretty sure you don't even have to deal with pogo.

Finally, while KSP might not teach everything about rocket science, it would be complete folly to ignore what it does teach.  Since 2011, the best way to start to learn rocket science has been to start with KSP.  While those 'little LEGO blocks' might require intense study and practice to learn how to build them, KSP at least gives you a great deal of insight on exactly what they have to perform and why.  It gives a great foundation and overview of what needs to work and where.  Finally it teaches the basics of design, although its methods are obviously much more applicable to fields more like software and less like civil or chemical engineering or even "entire rocket design".

[Pawelk198604]

40 minutes ago, wumpus said:

KSP prefers a more experimental process.  I pointed out that KSP players in charge of NASA would kill all the astronaut corps in a few launches...

Not me i always try to launch my early design without kerbals on it, using probes cores, i know some of us consider this a bit lame, and we should let our kerbals be kerbals  

but i'm always sad when something bad happened to them  

BTW i wonder does is any mod that make random failure possible like faulty boster, faulty coil in fuel cells, depressurization on re-entry, of fire on oxygen rich environment, and so on.

It would be challenging if we had limited life support like it was in real life spacecraft   

[wumpus]

1 minute ago, Pawelk198604 said:

It would be challenging if we had limited life support like it was in real life spacecraft   

While it certainly would be more challenging, it also would pretty much eliminate dramatic rescue missions unless you had something like the "rescue shuttle on a different pad" system that NASA used at the very end of the Shuttle era (and even then only work for LKO missions).  I think that rescue missions are a great (if completely unrealistic) part of KSP and don't think they should be sacrificed to make certain mistakes more punishing.

Mod all you want, but I think Squad is wise to remember it is first and foremost a game.

[linuxgurugamer]

1 hour ago, Pawelk198604 said:

It would be challenging if we had limited life support like it was in real life spacecraft   

Add any life support mod

 

1 hour ago, Pawelk198604 said:

BTW i wonder does is any mod that make random failure possible like faulty boster, faulty coil in fuel cells, depressurization on re-entry, of fire on oxygen rich environment, and so on.

Dang It!, UPFM, and Test Flight are what you are looking for

[DerekL1963]

12 hours ago, wumpus said:

Finally, while KSP might not teach everything about rocket science, it would be complete folly to ignore what it does teach.

You are correct, we should not underestimate how little it teaches.  But that's not the problem here, the problem is the widespread and incorrect notion that playing KSP places you anywhere significantly past the hump of the bell curve.

 

[Bill Phil]

16 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

You are correct, we should not underestimate how little it teaches.  But that's not the problem here, the problem is the widespread and incorrect notion that playing KSP places you anywhere significantly past the hump of the bell curve.

 

Yeah. Teaching the paperwork and approval process wouldn't make for a good game.

[tater]

I was having this discussion with another parent at the maker fair last weekend (their kid in HS has recently become very interested in KSP), and I told them that what KSP does for kids is:

1. Increase their interest in the subject (which is certainly useful if they follow through on that interest).

2. Gives them an intuitive feel for some counterintuitive aspects of orbital mechanics.

Those were my 2 bullet points. I think the feel thing is certainly valuable to later understanding, but it's not like you're then ready to tell Cassini what to do, lol.

Edited August 29, 2017 by tater

[wumpus]

57 minutes ago, tater said:

I think the feel thing is certainly valuable to later understanding, but it's not like you're then ready to tell Cassini what to do, lol.

While I'm sure Cassini took full advantage of modern computing and understanding of gravity, both Voyagers were almost certainly navigating by patched conics.

But the real issue in "telling a probe what to do" are deeper than what even more experienced engineers might suspect.  On another site I've read reports/blogs of an engineer responsible for maintaining gyroscopic lock on a probe (solar telescope?  I forget), and I suspect the process is derived from Naval command.  Probably the biggest issue is that "telling [probe] what to do" only happens during those brief periods when you have a slot on the deep space network to turn the big antennas on your spacecraft.  Once you've targeted the thing, you have to begin communication.  As you might expect, this can be nail biting as you need a response from you craft, and then whatever commands needed to operate (I think the descriptions I got were for a probe no further than Earth-Sun Lagrange points, or Earth-Moon ones.  I doubt they allow dead time on the deep space network for the two hour communication delay to/from Saturn).

Cassini operators have a certain advantage in that they will plunge it into Saturn before it dies.  For most other probes, expect a long, drawn out process of getting communication, attempting to recover, and finally complete inability to affect the thing as it finally dies (recovering a probe isn't for newbies.  You need to come up with the right answer before your communication window closes and it might be as obscure as SCE to AUX).

Probe communication can get pretty deep as well.  I think either Reed-Solomon error correction was invented after Voyager left, or was too new to be included or verified.  I doubt we could have received all the data we got without it, much less continue to track the probe with the original ECC.  Somebody had to write the new code in Mel-level assembler (for what had to be one of the most primitive CPUs of all time, check the year and power requirements).  A bug in the code would end communication on board and thus couldn't be fixed, but this was done more than once.

[mikegarrison]

On 8/26/2017 at 3:51 AM, Pawelk198604 said:

I heard that people working on aerospace industry in USA cannot leave their country to work in another country, they must wait several years to do so.

This is not true. There is no law that prohibits US aerospace workers from going to work in another country. There are laws that prohibit us from exporting commercially sensitive data to other countries. So I could go work for Airbus, but legally I would have to be very careful about the distinction between general aeronautical engineering knowledge and skill and any particular data or knowledge that I have from my current employer.

That being said, it's not really all that different from changing employers within a country. It's unethical and potentially illegal to start telling your new company all the secrets from your old company.

[Pawelk198604]

4 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

This is not true. There is no law that prohibits US aerospace workers from going to work in another country. There are laws that prohibit us from exporting commercially sensitive data to other countries. So I could go work for Airbus, but legally I would have to be very careful about the distinction between general aeronautical engineering knowledge and skill and any particular data or knowledge that I have from my current employer.

That being said, it's not really all that different from changing employers within a country. It's unethical and potentially illegal to start telling your new company all the secrets from your old company.

The same is Poland and was even i communist time despite all companies was State owned

The prohibition prevision written in employee contract prohibiting them for working in certain fields for specific time, but former employer must paid them for duration of that time portion of their last salary. It's very common in Poland especially in IT, high-tech, and adverting businesses   

On 29.08.2017 at 2:50 PM, tater said:

I was having this discussion with another parent at the maker fair last weekend (their kid in HS has recently become very interested in KSP), and I told them that what KSP does for kids is:

1. Increase their interest in the subject (which is certainly useful if they follow through on that interest).

2. Gives them an intuitive feel for some counterintuitive aspects of orbital mechanics.

Those were my 2 bullet points. I think the feel thing is certainly valuable to later understanding, but it's not like you're then ready to tell Cassini what to do, lol.

KSP is very good teaching tool for kids i read that is even a educational version of KSP

http://kerbaledu.com/

It's Especially true if said kid (or adult) for that matter have Asperger   

Edited August 30, 2017 by Pawelk198604

[tater]

I said it was a teaching tool, but it's only good for limited things, like the 2 I pointed out.