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Comment by Ianworld | Hacker News Reader

I remember talking to a high up on the program at a FIRST robotics event who complained about them running so long. They weren't making any major new discoveries and sucking up resources and mindshare stopping him for kicking off and focusing on new projects. He said nobody would take the PR hit to decide to just end a mission like this so he was stuck.

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Sounds like that person doesn't really understand that NASA is a political entity and the Public Relations of an ongoing successful mission is more valuable long term than more scientifically pragmatic experiments in the immediate.

Sounds like s/he perfectly understood that, but still didn't like it. Often (always?) politics get in the way of actually getting things done in a smart fast efficient manner.

The thing is, you can substitute "politics" for "people" and get the same statement, which is why NASA's political work is at least as important to human space exploration (and, I would argue, long-term species survival) as the raw scientific work.

People have to be continually convinced that exploration of the solar system is a worthwhile expenditure of a lot of money that could be spent on other things. Seems obvious to those who are already thinking in the direction of where humanity is going, but most people do not.

It's still possible to simultaneously acknowledge the fact that we need to repeatedly convince people of space exploration being important while also disliking that this is necessary.

Politics also affords the collective resources to engage on such projects. It's more chicken-egg than most think.

Not to mention, science without proper PR has a disastrous level of near-term utility. See: climate science

What's the limiting factor on just running with reduced staff support? (Honest question.)

A small handful of people can still easily cost millions of dollars per year. And DSN time to talk to the rovers is expensive, probably in the neighborhood of $2,000 per hour.

How much DSN time do you need. Given the deley, I assume the only use is batch transfers, so cost per bit seems like the more useful metric (along with how much data is involved)

$5M a year seems like it would be very reasonable. The original 90-day price tag was $820M, and they've spent an additional ~$200M over the past decade and a half. Maybe it's really not worth it to spend $5M/year to extend the life further, but the scientific returns would have to be quite severely diminishing.

I had the same question, I don't imagine it takes too many people to decide what it should do and give the robot commands while monitoring it.

Looks like according to an old article linked on wikipedia they spent another $100+ million over 5-6 years to keep it going. So not wildly expensive, but not cheap either.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120504171453/http://www.msnbc....

> I remember talking to a high up on the program at a FIRST robotics event who complained about them running so long.

Not surprising at all. Coached a FIRST team for several years. At this point they sell licensed robotics kits with canned instructions for kids to put together and those kids win because of time limitations. The teams that build from scratch and actually contribute discover or learn anything at all are intentionally blocked from winning. The entire program is total crap for retarded children. Meanwhile smart kids are off doing their own projects that are 1000x as complicated as the most challenging FIRST challenges. It's just turned into a money burn.

Retarded is a bit much, don't you think? We are talking about children here after all.

...what? They've always given out the Kit Of Parts and I don't recall those teams that relied on them ever winning anything substantial.

> The teams that build from scratch and actually contribute discover or learn anything at all are intentionally blocked from winning

This is ridiculous, and I'm saying it is from the perspective of having been a student whose team finished fourth in FRC in a recent year (and won multiple events per year), and having volunteered and assisted multiple teams.

While it is true that a lot of lower resources teams may be better off going with commerical off the shelf (COTS) components, such as the Greyt Elevator and Greyt Intake, teams that perform at a higher level will build everything from scratch. Whether this means utilizing gussets or welding, building your own drive train or using the AndyMark prebuilt chassis.

While it is true that some kids may be better off doing research projects, there is nothing wrong with participating in a team. From my three years as a student, I was exposed to developing solutions to split messages up and verify data integrity when communicating over serial with external microprocessors, utilizing version control, setting up Continuous Integration on our repositories, first deploying apps from Cordova to developing Progressive Web Apps, which forced me to learn to use a VPS on Digital Ocean, running a docker swam on hyper.sh, and storing files on S3 and using RDS.

FIRST is what you make of it, and I'm personally glad that someone holding your opinions towards the program is no longer actively interacting with kids in the program.

It's well known that the best teams are the ones that eschew using the kit of parts and have their NASA/SpaceX/Autocorp sponsors laser cut their robot chassis for them.

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