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Comment by usermac | Hacker News Reader

The engineer(s)/tech(s) name was never mentioned or the group members who came up with this. Why no credit? I'd be nice to read about a human with a name, a history, a story. I see that a lot in stories.

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It is actually quite deliberate. NASA and JPL are big on always communicating their work as a team effort, rather than highlighting individual contributors. As a practical example, notice how, during critical events (anytime you have a live-stream from Mission Control), everyone in the room wears the same shirt. Another fun anecdote on the "one NASA" philosophy (albeit at a different scale) is that the Pathfinder lander (if memory serves me right) had a JPL sticker visible from the cameras at landing. NASA was not impressed: although designed, built and managed by JPL, this was a NASA mission. So Curiosity (also designed, built and managed by JPL) only has NASA stickers - but the wheels have a pattern that spells out "JPL" in Morse code and is visible in the rover tracks.

There's a reason everyone wears the same shirt now, after all the attention the guy got on the rosseta comet mission for his shirt.

https://i.imgur.com/vEhcUjr.jpg

I hope everybody sports a mohawk after curiosity's mohawk guy got all that attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobak_Ferdowsi

Bobak is so cool

Different agency, though, right? NASA’s ethos predates the Matt Taylor situation.

That whole incident was such a farce.

The holes were for (to paraphrase) “allowing sand to fall out of the wheels”. Very sneaky :)

This is not true - their original (and current) purpose is to calibrate the distance travelled by looking at the marks the tracks make - you can look at the distance between marks and use the circumference of the wheel to determine the distance travelled.

The actual pattern meaning was snuck in by the engineers and the director was only told about it after he had approved the design.

I'm reminded of Caltech vs MIT. And DEI vs FEIF :)

I am ambivalent about this. You often see people getting public credit for something that was actually done by a lot of people working together which is also not good. Maybe a team photo would be nice. My favorite stories are where you hear the perspective of the different contributors.

But then that one very eloquent guy gets all the play in the stories and his contribution seems out-sized while implicitly diminishing the contributions of others, especially the really camera-awkward guy who made a huge contribution but no reporters can handle listening to him long enough to tell his story.

In good teams the eloquent guy heaps adequate praise on the camera awkward guy to make it known how large their contribution was.

This happens, but not enough.

Personally that seems like a better alternative to the PR downplay of engineering accomplishments to make space for the praise and glory of managers and funders.

SpaceX and Tesla are good examples for this. If you read the news about them you could easily thing that Musk is pretty much developing everything in his basement.

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