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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

no employee protests against DOD projects :)

Not going to happen with SpaceX. Their work force skews very conservative/nationalist. They used to chant "USA! USA!" during every successful launch - you can hear it on their old webcasts. I think this got some media attention a while back and they mostly stopped for the more recent launches.

I would have chanted USA USA along with them but would never vote for a conservative American political candidate (at present)

I'd expect workers for a US space launch company to know that their work will likely be used to launch US national security payloads, and to be OK with it.

Unlike workers working for a company that explicitly had "don't be evil" as a motto, withdrew from the Chinese market after state-sponsored attacks targeted dissident's accounts, and that had very little previously known/discussed military involvement, nor activity in a typically highly military-related field.

yeh cause doing DOD projects from an American Company to increase GPS is a good thing

Not for those on the receiving end of JDAMs

SpaceX is taking defense money to launch satellites that are primarily for military use in guiding platforms that deliver things to lethal terminal effect. That's just as martial as Raytheon building the Tomahawk guidance module.

Thought experiment: would SpaceX take Russian money to launch GLONASS birds? I'd wager not because it would be 'immoral'.

So the signals from these GPS satellites are not available for public use? Because if they are then I would say it is hard to really say what is the primary use. The value of GPS for civilian use in the US economy is really high at this point.

Sort of like the US interstate highway system. Military use got the budget to build it, secondary use ends up being more important.

Beneficial civilian use of GPS is orders of magnitude more common than military uses. Military systems also never require GPS, because you can’t count on the enemy not to jam the signal or shoot down the satellites, so there are always alternate navigation methods. For example, JDAMs also use inertial navigation.

I would not want to work on a weapons system but I’d have no problem working on something like GPS.

I see no evidence for the conclusion to your thought experiment. You can’t just make up a conclusion to support your argument, it needs to actually be based on something.

Would Russia allow it? They wouldn't want Americans to get a close up look at their sensitive military hardware, and you can be sure SpaceX would allow them to.

Even if there's no novel or unusual technology on the Glonass sat, learning that is intelligence in itself.

SpaceX would almost certainly do so if Russia would let them. They launched PAZ, which was a Spanish spy satellite and have launched several cargoes for governments like Qatar and Thailand.

Edit: just to expand on this a bit, SpaceX is and always has been a US federal government contractor. If you have a problem with that as a potential hire you probably do not take that job. But if the US government doesn't have a problem with a launch, SpaceX is also a money-making enterprise and I would bet they'd take whatever launches people would pay them for.

I am no expert but me thinks more lives have been saved due to the much increased safety in navigation due to GPS system, than the lives lost due to JDAMs.

And not to mention the very existence of computer, CPU, internet and pretty much a lot of modern technology we take granted for were conceived, developed, refined with funding from various governments paying for them, because they involved in active/inactive wars, including US, UK, Russia etc.

i'm not arguing whether it is a good or bad thing - that mainly depends on whether you're on receiving end or not. I wonder how in one case employees determine that DOD/natsec project is a good thing and in the other that it is a bad thing.

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