NASA: Telework doesn't work when you're building a Moon rover

Progress on NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission to search for useful chemicals at the Moon's South Pole has been delayed by two tech-related issues springing from the COVID-19 pandemic. As explained by the space agency's Office of Inspector General and Office of Audits in a report [PDF] …

[lglethal]

Space is hard...

Lets all acknowledge Space is Hard. And even harder to do right. Supply chain issues are causing problems everywhere at the moment, especially anything specialised. So none of that should come as a surprise to any of us.

I'm not sure I would conclude that designing spacecraft is something that shouldnt be done with Hybrid working. I'm sure a lot of the delays involved where during the period when people were still getting up to speed with remote working. There are definitely things that cant be done from home (building things, testing, etc.) but with the right hardware at home - design and analysis are pretty easy to do remotely. Project management as well.

So Hybrid definitely looks to be the way of the future, but it certainly has a learning curve associated with it...

[innominatus]

Re: Space is hard...

Shirley they could build a robot that assembles other robots remotely (but probably best not to give that robot autonomy because next step is the robot uprising)