Can you be more specific? If you have a partial piece of data (say because the data was streaming and a rocket exploded), the parser for that data is unlikely to work out of the box. Hence the use of a hex editor.
Yeah, but why not write your own temporary parser or whatever. They (should) have top-class software engineers in there, why they don't just make a quick and dirty script to sort out whatever they're looking for?
IDK, that tweet felt like when you're watching a movie and then the 'hacker' comes around and you see a lot of props on the screen that are designed to excite 'geeks'. Like, right now, a lot of guys should be like: "OMG OMG! They are looking at the hex code directly! Damn, that is so looooooow-level, they call it rocket science for a reason!"
Anyway, hopefully they find the problem; whether with hex editors or not SpaceX is really doing cool stuff.
Some hex editors allow you to actually define an ad-hoc data format to parse, e.g. http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/templates.html – it doesn't have to be ed(1) for hex data. Besides, it could just have been a choice of words meant to convey that they have a bunch of incomplete/corrupted data that needs manual interpretation.
How are you going to figure out how to write that quick and dirty script without looking at the raw data in a hex editor to figure out how it's been corrupted?
Far from BS, pointing a hex editor at your data dump sounds like the very first thing you'd do when you get some data that your software can't immediately read.
IDK, that tweet felt like when you're watching a movie and then the 'hacker' comes around and you see a lot of props on the screen that are designed to excite 'geeks'. Like, right now, a lot of guys should be like: "OMG OMG! They are looking at the hex code directly! Damn, that is so looooooow-level, they call it rocket science for a reason!"
Anyway, hopefully they find the problem; whether with hex editors or not SpaceX is really doing cool stuff.