Key details of Galileo satellite summer failure emerge | Hacker News Reader

Key details of Galileo satellite summer failure emerge

theregister.co.uk

94 pointssohkamyung40 comments

This is really a re-write of Bert's great piece on the outage, which was discussed a couple of days ago - if you're interested, I strongly recommend you go read it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476451

The article mentions Bert and links to his post.

El Reg is an IT(-ish) site, and so tries to summarize things for the general tech-y public that may be of interest.

In fact Bert himself is answering questions in the comments.

I'm not sure how a system with complex and tight requirements is able to run with so many organizations taking care of pieces...

It doesn’t run, you aren’t missing anything. :)

Purely by luck. As the report the article is writing about outlines...

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/state-of-galileo-and-accid...

What is luck?

Typically a technically competent underground develops that can tunnel through the organizational morass imposed by the homo bureaucratus infestation expressed in the org chart, and somehow accomplish the mission.

Should be titled: “Project being run in part by Thales so of course it failed”

A few defence companies have noticed that failed projects tend to lead to them getting given more money to fix the problem.

They now deliberately make their projects useless (but still technically meeting the contractual requirements) simply so they get the followup contract to make things better.

One project I worked on had 10 times we had deliberately gimped the system and the client had come and paid us more money to ungimp it. (For example, we designed an email client, but "@dhs.gov" was hardcoded in the address field so you couldn't send an email to anywhere else from the system. Then it cost millions of taxpayer money to un-hardcode that, despite it being a 1 line code change)

About software, it is not typical to defense companies and it does not need to be deliberate: most consultancy and subcontracting companies have no incentive to exceed a crappy average level:

Indeed, as you explain, being fast and excellent makes you poorer when you have a day rate and when your next contract depends on the maintenance of the software you create (since you are the only expert).

So in a way, the Peter principle makes money ?

That’s a bit too precise for comfort, if I were you I’d anonymize it a bit more. Civil liability for fraud is a thing.

I changed the hardcoded domain in my example... Either way, it was no secret that or system could only send emails to a specific domain - both we and the customer knew that. And they paid us $XM to give it the ability to send emails to anywhere.

This sounds too blatant to be true, but even so I imagine it's the decision-maker that would be responsible.

Most of the things managed by the EU end up this way. When you are trying to manage a project with 28different votes and political powers, all pulling in a different direction, this happens.

It really doesn't seem like the EU membership of, say, Portugal has anything to do with these problems. That organisational chart may appear overly complicated, but it's no different than any other chart for any other project of this size.

So apart from n=1 always being on the low side to draw vast conclusions, any comparison with similar projects will show that this kind of thing simply happens with complex projects. How's the F-35 these days? Or the 737-MAX?

The Airbus/Boeing comparison may actually be the most informative here, Airbus being the quintessential pan-European technology project. And if you compare them over the decades of their existence, I believe the only conclusion one can be confident in is that then national/international difference in their respective setups just doesn't matter that much.

Airbus is NOT a european project, it is a private company, with many entities being in China or the US, while many european countries don’t contribute to it at all.

Galileo on the other hand is a Commission project, with a budget agreed upon by members, with different views on what it should be (Germany wants it business oriented, France wants it military-oriented).

"It had been originally formed by a government initiative between France, West Germany and the UK that originated in 1967."

While not an EU project, it's roots come from European integration. It's not a company that sprung up on random private initiative a la Amazon

Technically it is a private company, yes, but it originated as a project created and owned by several European countries, and more than a quarter of Airbus' shares are still owned by these countries.

Is there a better alternative than democracy?

Perhaps no cooperation, every country for itself. That seems like a sure fire way to constantly lose to bigger blocs of countries at every turn.

Single ruler is another obvious but seems like an unfavourable outcome.

Yeah, people tend to forget that any equivalent superpower is dramatically more undemocratic than the EU. Electoral college and presidential prerogatives, anyone?

It's not so much democracy, but the lack of a rational governmental framework that's the problem. The EU is what you get when you try to integrate a couple dozen countries, but end up making a bunch of dirty compromises and band-aid solutions, and when nobody even agrees on what the end goal of is (The United States of Europe? A loose confederation of independent states?). It's not what you'd get if you were to design a reasonable federal constitution from scratch.

> dirty compromises and band-aid solutions

Were the US or UK any different at the start? Founded by conquest and agreements, they involved a lot of give and take on all sides. Even ~100 years after independence and signing the Constitution the US was in the middle of a civil war with the compromises that followed.

The only way to have a union that doesn't require compromises is if everyone is on the exact same page. And that simply can't happen the second you cross a border (most times even inside that border). Once the union is created you start trying to homogenize and give it time.

I'd argue that the Constitution provided a much more rational basis for government than the hodge-podge of treaties and agreements that make up the EU right now. At the very least, the US had a well defined system of government that was relatively easy to understand, and at least the US was clearly a country, as opposed to whatever the EU is.

In contrast to what the other poster in this thread is saying, there is no clear end goal for the EU. There are people who want a federal state and people who want a loose set of agreements between sovereign states.

I'm not saying that the EU is entirely bad. I'm just saying that it's a mess. It's very useful in some ways (freedom of movement of people and goods), and damaging in other ways (monetary union without fiscal union is a big problem, and austerity policies imposed on Greece et al.).

There is a middle ground. Why people only think about two options: a federation of states like the US of EU, or every nation by itself? Why can't EU be a free trade zone and a way to align national laws in accordance with a common standard?

EU seems to have entered the wrong path when Euro currency was established. There is no way in hell that countries with stable (very slightly growing) economies, and countries with a lot of catching up to do (fairly high growth) can coexist in a single system of money supply that is pegged either to one or the other requirement, but not both. This is a purely economic issue that will kill EU in the long run unless some countries agree(or are forces to) take a hit for the team.

Second, the bloody arrogance of the (now previous)EU council. If they at least tried to demonstrate some wilingness to reform before the brexit referendum the result might have been different. Also, multiple examples of extreme hypocrisy.Few are: - Pointing out "issues with the rule of law" in Poland for example, while being completely quiet about police brutality in France and violation of human rights in Spain where people got 20 years in jail because they organised a referendum! - Threatening sanctions over Italy's budget not meeting EU requirements and at the same time chuckling answer "because it is France ;-)" when asked why same measures are not applied to France when their budget also doesn't meet the deficit requirements. - Crying about lack of "solidarity" when Eastern EU countries didn't want to take Syrian migrants that were supposed to be forcefully relocated there (despite countries such as PL having and supporting over a million genuine war refugees from Ukraine) and at the same time Germany attempting to circumvent solidarity in EU and EnC energy policy by changing its law in an illegal way (it is an EU wide law that everyone agreed to). - Crying about "issues with democracy" in Poland because their friends loose every election(despite the highest voter turnout in 20 years and much higher than previous diversity of parties voted into the parliament). One of the chief "issues" is politicians becoming responsible for electing some of the high court judges - while in other EU countries ALL court judges are either elected, or straight nominated by politicians and there are no "issues" with that. - One day supporting green technologies and solutions, the next day trying to force in a law that requires trucking operators to "come to base" at least once per month (even when empty) that would very signifficantly increase waste of fuel and increase co2 emissions by the trucking industry - why do they want that? A hint is that west EU trucking companies are loosing 90% of its business to Eastern companies. Western politicians are willing to throw the climate issues under the bus if it means helping their own truckers.

Those are the problems that are killing the EU. However, there are many people, me included, that don't want EU to be destroyed. We want logical reforms, not propaganda, no arrogance, going back to EU's roots when being in it was an advantage for all of its members. There are still millions of people that still believe EU should be about free market, freedom of movement, standarisation of law, true democracy and benefit to all of its member states and nations. There is no reason why it can't fulfill that purpose.

>> a federation of states like the US o[r?] EU

The EU is a confederation not a federation like the US.

> Is there a better alternative than democracy?

Isn't that a false dichotomy? The EU is not the only form of democracy, indeed some criticise it specifically for deficiencies of democracy.

The parent requests that you supply an example of something better, which you haven't done.

I think this is a trollish response.

The answer needed was "this is better than democracy" and at the very least you could have given an example of a better implementation. Not only you did not, but you gave a "some say" type answer which has absolutely no value. Any thing will be eventually said by "some people".

Many people. We had a vote on it in the UK, don't know if you heard about it...

It's odd you describe this as democracy, the power-distance from the people voting has some of the highest levels in the world (i.e in terms of you voting someone who nominates someone who nominates someone, etc)

Is it really different from the US? Does NASA enjoy autonomy in running the project after getting funding approval?

Sometimes.

Look at the SLS boondoggle of late: more than $2B per launch. That criminal amount of waste is not their idea. If they had free reign they might choose a more competitive option.

Hear, hear. If every U.S. space project needed 50 state governors to buy off on how the work was divided, we would be no better.

Meanwhile in the US, NASA has had to throw certain projects to certain states to keep senators voting for x, y and z...

The title makes it sound like galileo went down again. Can someone please change it?

Since the whole original headline is too long, I'd suggest "The tale of Europe’s Galileo satellites going dark"

Emailing hn@ycombinator.com frequently produces a fairly quick remedy.

I've suggested borrowing from the lede: "Key details about the failure of Europe’s Galileo satellite system over the summer have started to emerge - and it’s not pretty."

"Key details of Galileo satellite summer failure emerge" should work, at 55 characters (limit is 80).

That's the suggestion I'd submitted.

We'll take it. Thanks!

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