SpaceX

Just like landings have become routine, it appears manned dragon launches are boring now too. There are news articles but buried at the bottom of pages. No one here is discussing it and honestly not even much in the main sub either. Just thought it was curious!

In case you are not familiar with the WeWork story, it was a real estate company that claimed that it is revolutionizing shared work space or whatever, it basically rented office buildings for long term from owners, and then rented out offices separately for individuals.
The company grew very quickly and at some point I believe they were the largest real estate company in the world, but after a few years of activity it turned out that they were losing money. They basically used the investors money for rapid expansion, and when they went to IPO and had to disclose their books they were exposed.

I think something like that may be happening at SpaceX. First it's a private company that keeps its financial affairs in secret, therefore one can only guess what is going on over there. But recent report by WSJ claimed that SpaceX is losing money. They lost a billion in 2021, and half a billion in 2022.
Now I find it very strange. They are the company that claims that they reinvented the space industry, that they managed to drastically cut the cost of rockets by preserving them by being able to land them safely. Taking this into account, that they are the only space company in the world that is able to reuse rockets, and they are very busy and getting new orders all the time, but nevertheless they still lose money?
They are supposed to be making bank, or at least to break even by now, instead they lose hundreds of millions each year. If they are not profitable by this point, when will they be?

Also all this talk about Starlink... but it was also subsidized, and now the US goverment decided to pull the plug by not renewing the 900 mil grant for next year. It's not a commercially viable product on its own. Is SpaceX going to lose money on it too without the subsidies? 900 mil is a lot of money.

I mean I don't know... maybe they invest extensively in their next rocket "Starship" and maybe that's why they lose money, and when it will be finished then maybe they'll become profitable. I don't know. That's if I'm trying to be optimistic.

But something is fishy about this spaceX. I won't be surprised if it goes bust if the US government decides to pull the plug on it. A revolutionary company that redefined the industry is supposed to be profitable and not depend on government subsidies, which is not the case with SpaceX. Something fishy is going on over there.

Musk also had to attract a shitload of money to be able to develope all those rockets, I'm sure he had to sell a lot of shares to get that money. I won't be surprised if he only owns like 10% of SpaceX.

I recently got a coding assessment for a sensor firmware position at SpaceX and pretty much bombed it. I wanted to outline what the assessment was and to ask if it seems more like a “Leet Code” type question or if you think it was something that is good to vet for a position like this?

Some additional background. I had an initial phone screen to talk about my background and work history with the recruiter and then moved on to a technical phone screen with the team manager and a senior engineer. That phone screen was very good in that both asked probing questions about basics of bare-metal development and also a good bit on signal processing, filtering, and sampling since it was very relevant for their teams job of sensor development. Both interviewers were asking really good questions and I felt like I was being asked about stuff relevant for the job. I thought I had bombed that part because I only vaguely knew about the signal processing stuff way back from uni days but seemed to do well enough that I got the take home assessment.

The take home assessment itself was coding done in either C or C++ (your choice). It was a gene sequencing program where you’re given a file that contains a long sequence of nucleotides (A, T, C, G) along with spaces, new lines, other irrelevant characters or numbers. You need to read the file, detect the start codon (ATG), process it codons following that start codon until you hit an end codon (3 possible codon combinations, I forget what they were). As you’re reading and processing the gene you need to translate the codons to the appropriate amino acid (you’re given a translation table in the problem statement and can also look it up online) and basically construct the protein (amino acid combination, another series of letters/characters) based on each three letter codon with in an appropriate gene (defined by a proper start and end codon). Then the final output should be the protein, the gene sequence (with start and end codons) that it got translated from (and there could be one or more genes with slightly different codons that map to the same protein so you need to list all of them), and the number of times that protein appears.

All of this should work within O(N²⁾ time. And you’re given 6 hours to complete the program with the first hour given to write up a plan for how you’re going to code it and estimate the big-O performance.

I chose to do it in C and build up a linked list of the full sequence and then do a one time traversal through that linked list and build out another linked list of the protein, associated gene(s), and gene count….and botched it badly because of confusion with managing the multiple linked lists head node. (One big take away for me is that my C coding really needs to be stepped up).

My question (from before) is do you guys think this is more of a “Leet Code” style question or something that is fair for a primarily bare-metal position? (I even asked about RTOS use and they said it’s not as much).

I’m not complaining about this as it was pretty fun honestly and at least I know I need a lot more work on my C now. But I wanted to get other peoples thoughts on this.

I sometime think the long term prospect of SpaceX.

Many thing can happen in long term. Even though we do not want it, and god forbid, there could be a astraunauts launch fail. As they have really high launch manifest, it also increases the probability of a launch failure.

Elon could die in accident or may decide to retire. There might be some event like boeing or something else.

What do you think will happen in 20 years time frame? Many big company/industry leader died over long term. Do you think SpaceX will be around long term?

I've always wondered how Dishy knows WHERE to point RF beams.. especially when it's on boats and cars. Old timer dishes needed to be aligned very precisely by an installer to fractions of a degree in angle. Meanwhile the Starlink satellites are moving all over the sky! Yet you can pick up a Dishy from Costco, point it anywhere and turn it on, and it works. It can't possibly know where the satellites are years in advance? So how does Dishy connect to Starlink satellites in seconds when you plug it in?

We also know the Dishy works in GPS-denied environments like Ukraine.

A new SpaceX patent explains,

Let's put on our tinfoil hats and assume that the secret boardroom rationale for starting SpaceX was always to make a ton of money from internet access via satellite. Sure, the other things Falcon9 does are nice but wouldn't alone be worth the initial investment risk. Following this cynical streak, what is the real, eventual, achieveable driver for bigger, cheaper, vastly-scaled Starship rockets? Is it even better internet? High end orbital manufacturing? Power beaming? Climate control? Rapid point to point earthly travel? Asteroid mining? Tax havens on Mars? Overwhelming economies of scale wiping out the launch competition? Sheer Bond villainy?
Interested in suggestions.