"They've been Ford Aerospace, Space Systems/Loral, Maxar, Lanteris, and now it'll be Intuitive Machines."
See full article...
See full article...
Intuitive Machines—known for its Moon landers—will become a military contractor
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
It never ceases to profoundly disappoint me that engineers will use their hands and minds, their uniquely human talents, in order to construct weapons of war for the ruling class.
Upvote
8
(51
/
-43)
Space is cool. In my education and professional field, working on space stuff would be pretty cool. The fact that the industry is either fringe open source stuff or Military/Aerospace is why I won't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Alas.
Being a hot potato business division certainly wouldn't help, either.
Being a hot potato business division certainly wouldn't help, either.
Upvote
21
(32
/
-11)
ubercurmudgeon
Ars Tribunus Militum
And now they want to produce products for the military? Maybe it is time to skip a few iterations and start work on IM-209...
Upvote
24
(28
/
-4)
Upvote
18
(18
/
0)
So why did Maxar have to rename as Lanteris? Was this because it was all going pear-shaped (eg. Anderson Consulting->Accenture); or just a corporate brain fart (eg. HBO->MAX, or Royal Mail -> Consignor)?
Upvote
20
(20
/
0)
I was shocked that Maxar could sell for that small amount after going private for $6.4 billion in 2023, but it turns out only part of it is being sold. Intuitive Machines is buying Lanternis Space Systems (nee Maxar Space Systems nee Space Systems / Loral purchased by MDA in 2012 for $875 million). Remaining is Vantor (nee Maxar Intelligence, nee DigitalGlobe purchased by MDA in 2017 for $2.4 billion).
Last edited:
Upvote
73
(73
/
0)
No money in hardware; the profit is in the services the hardware enables. Lanteris/Maxar/SSL/etc was always a commercial satellite company that made satellites for big commercial operators with essentially no government work - that seems to have changed in recent years but I bet it’s not particularly profitable.
Upvote
-3
(3
/
-6)
Speaking of corporate brain farts, PricewaterhouseCooper once briefly renamed itself to "Monday."
Upvote
21
(22
/
-1)
Just like GPS, and the internet huh?
Sometimes the only way to get funding (and put food on the table) is to embellish the "military" applications of your project
Upvote
24
(30
/
-6)
Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
Some of the original Los Alamos physicists had moral qualms along those lines. But there was a war under way, so...
Upvote
21
(23
/
-2)
New Space companies unable to make a business using their SPAC money to get on the DoD gravy train is a common outcome.
Upvote
10
(12
/
-2)
I dealt with the company that became Lanteris more than once when they were Philco Aeroneutronic and then Ford Aeroneutronic. Among other things, they made comm gear for NASA. They were famous (infamous?) for hiring Lockheed cast-offs at the Palo Alto facility which was a few miles up the road from Lockheed's Sunnyvale campus.
Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronutronic
Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronutronic
Upvote
19
(19
/
0)
boydwaters
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Ford Aerospace→ Space Sytems/Loral → Maxar
It's down there at the border of Palo Alto and Mountain View, across the freeway from Moffett Field. Is a grand old campus. Next door neighbors were the original offices for Sun Microsystems.
There used to be bicycles all over the place, painted with flat white latex paint, to get from place to place; I don't know if they still have those. (They also had a token-switch computer network for a database that hosted their corporate directory. The token was a door knob. If you wanted to update the database, you needed to find the person currently holding the door knob and get it from them. The database front end would require you to solemnly swear that you had the knob in your possession before letting you commit updates. Woe betide the user who caused database corruption by false claims of token possession...)
I was an intern and computer flunky for a branch office of Intelsat, who had rented an office across the street on Fabian Way as they were building Intelsat 7. It was still Ford Aerospace, but the very next year they were recast as part of Loral.
Ford → Loral were doing some of the initial development work for Space Station Freedom, holy cow Ronald Reagan was still President.
One of Maxar's more recent builds is the Psyche asteroid probe.
It's down there at the border of Palo Alto and Mountain View, across the freeway from Moffett Field. Is a grand old campus. Next door neighbors were the original offices for Sun Microsystems.
There used to be bicycles all over the place, painted with flat white latex paint, to get from place to place; I don't know if they still have those. (They also had a token-switch computer network for a database that hosted their corporate directory. The token was a door knob. If you wanted to update the database, you needed to find the person currently holding the door knob and get it from them. The database front end would require you to solemnly swear that you had the knob in your possession before letting you commit updates. Woe betide the user who caused database corruption by false claims of token possession...)
I was an intern and computer flunky for a branch office of Intelsat, who had rented an office across the street on Fabian Way as they were building Intelsat 7. It was still Ford Aerospace, but the very next year they were recast as part of Loral.
Ford → Loral were doing some of the initial development work for Space Station Freedom, holy cow Ronald Reagan was still President.
One of Maxar's more recent builds is the Psyche asteroid probe.
Upvote
59
(59
/
0)
Living the dream. There's a lot of money in that so I assume it's an enviable position in that industry.
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
That lovely story needs to go in the annals of computer history.
PS are you sure it was a doorknob, not an onion that you needed to tie to your belt before updating the database?
Upvote
20
(21
/
-1)
And so the blindingly obvious evolution continues, while a crowd of naive suckers delude themselves with the fantasy that something like NASA will still exist in 5 years (beyond the 4 letters and their particular order)
Upvote
-15
(2
/
-17)
Well, the "ruling class" is the only entity that can afford to sponsor initiatives like venturing into space. For anyone wanting to be active in this field, they are going to have to work with them.
Upvote
15
(16
/
-1)
While I understand the sentiment, I wouldn't paint it so black and white.
The best way to avoid war is to be prepared for it.
Show weakness and vultures will flock around you.
It's law of the jungle that bigger and stronger are devouring smaller and weaker. (See Ukraine today.)
Engineering talents (and education itself) were considered significant weapon and tool for making nation stronger and richer, back in medieval times already (Siete partidas, book II).
Piles and piles of day to day technology we use are products of military development drive.
Upvote
21
(27
/
-6)
And for those wanting a more verbose list (and some history of the top ones) there's a NATO website about the subject!
"Military inventions that we use every day" - https://www.nato.int/cps/fr/natohq/declassified_215371.htm?msg_pos=1
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
cough ED-209And now they want to produce products for the military? Maybe it is time to skip a few iterations and start work on IM-209...
Upvote
-3
(4
/
-7)
Upvote
-5
(0
/
-5)
ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
This is why Trump's idiot 'defense' project is called 'Golden Dome'. If you are part of it, you're going to rake in the gold.
Upvote
2
(5
/
-3)
Along with what others pointed out RE the military/ruling echelon & availability of funding, I think there are two quasi-contradictory factors to consider.
1. Plenty of engineers are just people. Being an engineer (being smart in any way) doesn't necessarily make a person smarter, more ethical, or more able to think long-term than the average bear.
2. At the same time, plenty of engineering types do skew towards what I think of as academic-flavored smarts. (Intelligence rather than wisdom, if you will.) And unfortunately that seems heavily tied to a mindset of always trying to do new things, without regard for their ultimate end-use. The classic "just because you could, didn't mean you should", combined with a failure to imagine that others who will use this technology will almost certainly have fewer moral qualms than its creator.
Upvote
4
(7
/
-3)
The problem with aerospace fields is that everything requires vast capital investment, more than one person or family or local community organization can feasibly muster. This means that if you want to do anything at all, then you will have to rely on the whims of political elites for resources. I doubt that many of their staff are Edward Tellers excited about blowing up brown people (indeed, many of them likely are or have relatives that are brown people).
I think that this is more a criticism of what kinds of elites our society has de facto chosen to produce. You can see a similar phenomenon in the tech industry, where startups choose to focus on issues that are important to VCs and not anyone else.
Upvote
5
(7
/
-2)
Hopefully the acquisition includes an engineer who has a better grasp on weight and balance issues.
Upvote
-4
(1
/
-5)
Don't worry - They (I mean Lanteris/Maxar/SSL, whatever) have a very good "Mass Properties" set of engineers (and no, I didn't work in their group, but I did work with them).
Upvote
11
(11
/
0)
There's also a lot of us engineers who have read history, and have watched current events like Ukraine and the South China Sea, and gone, "Oh yeah, being weaponless and incredibly self-righteous doesn't actually protect my family or country from getting killed and/or conquered by a hostile power."
Upvote
29
(30
/
-1)
Exactly. Being self-righteous from the privileged position of taking advantage of others work and sacrifice is more than a bit hypocritical.
Upvote
1
(3
/
-2)
That's a lot of words/names. Does that mean the Maxar imaging service that uses satellites to take pictures of Earth as a tier 1 supplier of satellite data is remaining independent (as "Vantor")?
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Yes. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the two companies were spun out of the old Maxar specifically so they could sell off what became Lanteris.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I gues Intutive Machines confused with Impulse Machines and Innovative Machines. They should have stuck with Maxar, That was a name one could remember.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
I really don't understand how this industry works, despite being in it. It just seems like the vast majority of the capital goes to vaporware companies that seem somewhat short on knowhow, and the vast majority of the revenue goes to the large primes that intentionally make programs as inefficient as possible (which is doubly crazy because part of that is employing as many people as possible which means comp/benefits per employee are also bad).
Anyway, then you see a company like Maxar — an established name which is very competent and seems neither overly great nor overly bad to work for — get bought up by a company that hasn't even really proven their business case, and it's just a bit of a WTF moment.
Also, when I say vaporware, I really mean companies like Lilium which had billions, with a B, poured into it, and somehow spent on a design that was awful from the get-go and had absolutely no basis in physical reality.
Anyway, then you see a company like Maxar — an established name which is very competent and seems neither overly great nor overly bad to work for — get bought up by a company that hasn't even really proven their business case, and it's just a bit of a WTF moment.
Also, when I say vaporware, I really mean companies like Lilium which had billions, with a B, poured into it, and somehow spent on a design that was awful from the get-go and had absolutely no basis in physical reality.
Upvote
7
(8
/
-1)