It's crazy the US could soon have up to 5 different spacecraft/launch systems that can take humans to orbit with 2 more in development:
Falcon 9 + Dragon, SLS + Orion, Atlas V (Vulcan Centaur) + Starliner
Close to orbital payload launch, likely human rated in the future: Vulcan Centaur + Dream Chaser, Superheavy + Starship
Under development: New Glenn + Space Vehicle (?), Neutron
I would say that the one redeeming quality of Elon Musk (in a sea of otherwise awful personality traits) is that for at least Tesla and SpaceX, that he was interested in running those companies primarily to produce a product. Like that was the primary focus and raison d'être of both of those companies, especially SpaceX I think. This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money" ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it anymore. The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and ultimately bad for business.
I don't know if he still takes that approach. In fact, I kind of doubt he ever really did, but he certainly projected that image publicly, and most importantly to workers of those companies - whether he "really believed" it I guess is a moot point.
When you take the "businesses exist to return a profit to shareholders" approach you're always going to focus on leadership that has a track record of doing that, even if that excludes building a good product or for that matter even the long-term viability of the business. Thus, you see these CEO hires that don't seem to make sense - most of us unconsciously still think of businesses as things created to make a thing or do a specific thing, because that's a natural thing to believe.
Anyway I think you can attribute some of the success of both to this, as well as Musk's public image at least ca 2008-2018 or so.
Why do people always have to preface Elon praise with some initial criticism. The man has objectively created some incredible businesses.
The man has objectively created some incredible businesses.
What an understatement. He’s one of the most impactful humans in the world and one of the greatest entrepreneurs America can claim as our own (despite him not being born here). I find it beyond unfortunate that so many in this community constantly feel the need to belittle Elon or downplay his accomplishments simply because they don’t like the guy, his politics, etc.
He has an extremely dark side that impedes him and everyone around him, regardless of the extraordinary success he experienced.
That man need a therapist.
The public hatred he has gotten is his making, ultimately.
He has an extremely dark side that impedes him and everyone around him, regardless of the extraordinary success he experienced.
I think people have a hard time separating out the good work someone has done vs the bad. We humans are imperfect, but ironically have the tendency to put a binary label on people as good or bad without leaving much room for gray area.
Ex. Shockley got a Nobel prize for his foundational work on transistors and semiconductors - inarguably one of the most important 20th century inventions, but he was also an extremely vocal racist and eugenicist. Was Shockley a brilliant scientist or a vociferous racist? He can be both while acknowledging the good contributions to society he made.
I find this is often the case of many historical figures that made their mark on humanity. Is Elon Musk a brilliant entrepreneur or a micromanaging arrogant narcissist who carries some deeply rooted insecurities? (Among other "flaws" such as being an absentee father) Why not both? Perhaps the dark side has enabled their success to some degree? Who knows.
Its hard to do anything important without a carrying a little bit of controversy in life.
Why waste admiration on someone who has been very well rewarded for what they did? I'd rather admire people who acted out of altruism.
A soldier dying to save his friends - nobody can give more than their life and nothing can compensate a person for losing it. That's an example of 'admirable' to me...or a doctor working for Medecins sans Frontiers.
he was also an extremely vocal racist and eugenicist.
He was vocal about scientific evidence and what conclusions he drew from that evidence. I wouldn't draw the same conclusions but the evidence was quite clear (and is now clearer still).
He has an extremely dark side that impedes him and everyone around him,
His dark side is out in the open for everyone to see. What you are saying is the people prefer someone who is apparently appears not have a dark side. IMO such people are just adept at camouflaging their dark side, politicians do it routinely.
That man need a therapist.
Well, IMO it's mostly the public that needs therapists.
Quote: It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
The public hatred he has gotten is his making, ultimately.
Agreed.
you are saying is the people prefer someone who is apparently appears not have a dark side. IMO such people are just adept at camouflaging their dark side, politicians do it routinely.
When this person owns one of the largest communication platforms on Earth and regularly spreads conspiracy theories, disinformation, and transphobia... yes, I would prefer they hide that. That rhetoric does real harm to people.
Accusing someone of being a pedophile without evidence isn't something you just say "Well at least he's speaking his mind!" to.
The richest man on Earth should be able to afford a therapist, or at least a PR firm. If his ego is preventing him from doing so, well, that's a fair thing to criticize.
He's the worst kind of megalomaniac narcissist CEO - the kind that everyone hides from and works around, because of a compulsive addiction to self-important thinkfluencer larping.
Cybertruck. That's the real Elon. A child's fridge drawing of a fantasy car whose build quality seethes with barely hidden contempt for his adoring stans.
Mars? From the man who gave the world a car that can't handle rain?
How many cars have you given the world?
I think it quite stifles discourse to require everyone to have done the exact same things as a person before commenting about a person. We don’t require you to kill a man before commenting about a murder. You don’t require someone to run for office before they are allowed to comment on a public official.
Good point, but that’s not what I did. I just responded in kind to someone using the absurd rhetoric that because Tesla’s cars supposedly can’t handle rain*, Elon is too incompetent to accomplish his goals re Mars. While we don’t [to quote you] “require everyone to have done the exact same things as a person before commenting about a person,” for certain arguments to carry any weight, the credibility of the person making them does, in fact, matter. If someone was criticizing Bjarne Stroustrup and how exceptions work in C++, but has never even written a single line of code in any systems language, it’d be completely reasonable to dismiss every single word out of that person’s mouth.
* Please note that I’ve driven a Tesla in rain just fine, but I’ll pretend the critique is legit and in good faith for the sake of the argument.
There are too many cars in this world.
Do you see a therapist about this? Genuine question.
Those things are exclusive no?
The guy is a huge asshole. He gets away with being blatantly libellous by accusing someone of being a pedophile because they didn't think his idea was realistic. Which is all feasible when you're the richest guy in the world with good lawyers. Some people need to experience what it's like to be punched in the face.
He gets away with being libelous because he's rich and famous, while I get away with being libelous because I'm a poor nobody. Funny how the world works.
I agree and further to your point, I’d suggest he would never have achieved anything like what he has achieved in any other country other than the USA. Imagine SpaceX was based in the UK, EU, or Asia. It would be shackled beyond recognition.
UK Country > EU trade union, kinda > Asia Continent
You're well versed in all the possible hurdles he'd run in to in all of Asia, are you? If you are, you're more impressive than Elon Musk I think.
He is successful. His values don't align with my values. There are many others whose values Elon's values don't align with.
Values are important. A business that is successful that embraces values which differ from those many people hold is going to be seen as "bad."
It's not unfortunate that people belittle Elon. They don't belittle his business acumen. They belittle the values that he holds dear.
There are many other successful people whose values don't align with society's values. It's OK to critique that.
This community is largely full of old, cynical engineers, many of whom have moved into management and no longer build anything. The young, optimisic people working in tech are not here anymore. The Musk hate is just part of that. The average poster here sounds like Grady Booch, and that's not a complement.
Because he is a complex human being with a very visible dark side and any praise of his achievements will make his terrible personality traits stain you like a soggy barf bag on an overnight flight
But you know... they're all complex. Even you are a complex human being... maybe not so visible as Elon Musk... but... so what?
You know why people really do it? It has nothing to do with Elon Musk, but rather is a response to our own fears for our own social standing. We fear that if we say something good about a person that our social group has, in defiance of your complex human point, decided is "a bad guy" that we'll just as cavalierly be excluded or derided from that group.
So when you acknowledge that complexity or something good that this "good for nothing" person has done, you have to start off with with virtual signaling: "oh this guy is terrible, but... ", (meaning "please see that I'm still one of you").
I find the whole act kinda craven, perhaps even moreso than a social group that demands it.
The hive mind has decided he’s bad, so you have to make sure everyone knows you hate him too otherwise you risk being ostracized as well
Nah, I dislike him regardless of what the hive mind thinks.
That might be what you would do but I think the man is a shit and I only mention his achievements out of duty to try to be fair. If I wasn't interested in being fair I'd just say I don't care what he has done - he has been paid well for whatever it is and doesn't need any admiration from anyone.
A more gratuitous interpretation is that someone who does this is making an attempt to stave off the expected vapid replies that occur whenever you mention polarizing topics or people.
It's very much a "religion of society". There is dogma, sins, shunning, confession, penance, blasphemy, heretics, etc. Just because it doesn't have a creation myth doesn't make it not religious.
This is so silly. Reading comments like these, you’d think everyone on HN is a perfect human, without flaws and liked by everyone. I’m glad someone like Elon doesn’t spend his time reading stuff like this and instead spends most of his time kicking ass. In the long run, his results will continue to speak for him.
Half the problem with Elon is that he does spend some of his time reading stuff like this and shitposting on the website formerly known as Twitter about it, instead of going to work or sitting on a beach reading something more useful.
Upon reflection this is also a problem with me, but I don't own SpaceX or Tesla, so fewer people are going to call me out on it.
That is the tiniest problem imaginable. If that's half the problem then is it even worth the gossip on HN?
I mean, yes and no. In principle I agree with you but Musk very much does also spend his time reading stuff like this and getting into internet slap fights. Last time I checked he was tweeting 29.2 times a day, or roughly once every thirty minutes of wake time.
I do it very deliberately and I think it is good practice. It ads nuance and balance to Internet discussions which often tend to be very polarised with people shouting at each other. In my view Musk is a very flawed person but that doesn't justify spreading misinformation about SpaceX's very real and important accomplishments. Crazed evangelism over SpaceX also doesn't negate Musk's troubling history of public statements and actions.
Musk's troubling history of public statements
He says what he thinks. Unlike most public figures who filter everything through their PR person.
I’m not sure saying everything you think is necessarily a virtue.
I didn't say it was a virtue. Nobody thinks virtuous thoughts all the time. But I do find Musk more engaging because the pablum coming through a PR firm is boring.
He's objectively ruined some incredible businesses as well
Like what?
Tesla and Twitter come to mind.
Boring Company was always bad so I guess that doesn't count.
He created Tesla.
Twitter is doing fine.
The man has objectively created some incredible businesses
Even this, you need to put asterisks on "created" because he spends so much time building out lies about the companies he runs/ran because the creation myth is so important. The amount of unforced errors behind his tenure at Paypal, a lot of it around trying to be taken as the guy who "made Paypal"... it's just very silly!
And I think ultimately in a place like HN, where there are supposedly a lot of "builder" types, when you hear every Musk company say "yeah the way we stay productive is to keep Musk out of things...." everyone's natural bias against bullshitters kick in!
I think it's hard to discount Tesla really pushing forward EVs. I think it's extremely easy to discount all of his other stuff if you're cynical (yes I include SpaceX in there, though it's easy for me because I think manned spaceflight, let alone "going to Mars", is extremely silly). But this stuff isn't really fungible...
keep Musk out of things
Never heard that from people at Tesla or SpaceX.
The man has objectively created some incredible businesses.
... and since then called a rescue diver a pedo, got into quite the mess regarding his partnerships and offspring [1], burned dozens of billions of dollars in Twitter, seems to be doing the public customer service for a bunch of literal neo-Nazis on Twitter [2], and is apparently on a truckload of drugs on the regular [3].
It takes years to build up trust, but it's very easy to completely erode it in a few weeks.
Why do people always have to preface Elon praise with some initial criticism.
Because otherwise, people might accuse one of being a Musk shill, and there's unfortunately quite a bunch of these, completely ignoring any of the countless issues with Musk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Relationships_and_ch...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/12/19/c...
[3] https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...
apparently on a truckload of drugs on the regular
He does remarkably well for someone on a truckload of drugs on the regular. Perhaps other CEOs should copy that? ;)
People are obsessed with perfect role models. They hate that Elon Musk has refused to be a media robot they can worship
All this shows is his PR spin is being a 14 year old boy rather than a more wide appeal spin. And that it’s working on you
Because he’s an easy person to dislike. And he’s spent a lot of his career taking credit for other people’s work.
He also has a section of people that are cult-like in their defense of him which adds fuel to the fire. “You’re jealous” or “you’re just angry he’s rich” or some other such nonsense seems to come out of the woodwork for anyone who has anything even slightly negative to say about him.
Because they want to be seen as a moderate rather than an uncritical fan.
This happens for many online debates where extreme positions are common.
No doubt, but Tesla would not be where it is today without Musk's deceptive marketing, stock manipulation, disregard for labor laws, and just generally acting like he's above the law. One can admire the products he's had a hand in building without admiring the man himself. And the moment he got involved in politics it was inevitable that people would distance themselves from him.
Because he's living in their heads in the same bucket as Trump at this point. It's deranged.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic flamewar. This subthread was noticeably even worse than its surroundings.
Because he’s the worlds oldest 14 year old boy
I don't want to go deep down this rabbit hole but IMHO there has been a whole lot of historical revisionism and propaganda regarding the history of both Tesla and SpaceX.
Tesla lists Elon Musk as a founder but he didn't found it. He was an early investor who essentially took over the company. Tesla only exists through government largesse, specifically carbon tax credits. Also, it arguably only survived thanks to a 2009 Department of Energy loan (for $465 million). If you look at the history here, this loan is under a cloud.
This is particularly funny given Elon's self-made propaganda.
SpaceX succeeded (IMHO) in spite of Elon not because of him. I've read (admittedly unverified) accounts where someone in SpaceX's leadership essentially built a wall around Elon to insulate the rest of the company from him. SpaceX engineers themselves are a byproduct of NASA to a large degree. Also, SpaceX could not have succeeded without government loans, grants and contracts. Even today, it's completely reliant on the government purse.
Both Tesla and SpaceX have made huge promises and under-delivered on them or delivered late. People forget how delayed the Falcon timeline was. It just didn't matter because there was no competition: the ULA, for example, is a jobs program with no interest in competing on price or features.
And self-driving Telsas, anyone? Anyone?
I own a Tesla, for practical purposes it is self-driving.
Seriously? Your definition of "self-driving" must be different from normal.
Any proper understanding of the term "self driving", including the way Musk advertises it, is 'tell car through the UI where you want it to go, sit back and it reliably gets you there with zero further input, better than the average human driver'.
Please post a video of it doing this for any route on real roads, with no driver input. Seriously. I'd love to see it, because I never have.
I've seen Tesla videos with few required driver interventions. But not none. And from the accidents I've read about, I sure as shirt would not give it a destination and recline reading a book. Especially on left-turns and near emergency vehicles, turning trucks, or construction barriers.
So, what is your definition of self-driving, and what performance can you show? And in what road conditions?
I drove the Mercedes with officially regulated L2 self driving capability and it was much worse than the old Tesla model I tested years before... The current version is supposedly much further based on the online feedback, while the Mercedes is still bad.
OK, that tells me that the Tesla seems better than the Mercedes.
It does NOT tell me that either have achieved anything near the stated standard: "for practical purposes it is self-driving."
I don't think anyone promotes (or any reasonable person understands) L2 as self driving. SAE defines L2 assist [0] as "You ARE driving... you must constantly supervise and support these features ... lane centering and adaptive cruise control at the same time".
"Self driving" implies to me and everyone I know as "the car drives itself". As in I can safely sleep in the back seat as if another human were driving, or I could ask the car to come or go to a destination, as I could ask another human to drive my car to/from a destination.
Can you provide an example of ANY car doing this yet?
L2 isn't marketed as Full Self Driving
Including into the back of emergency vehicles?
"Tesla only exists through government largesse, specifically carbon tax credits."
This assumes no subsidies for oil and gas (plenty, including depreciation below cost basis!)
In terms of credits - those are in the 2%-3% range of revenue.
In terms of SpaceX being the most dependent on the govt - totally false. Things like SLS are cost plus, have cost $20 billion with almost nothing to show for it. SpaceX is so available, cheap and reliable they are literally launching ESA payloads (ESA won't even mention them its so embarrassing), most commercial payloads that can actually go to bid and competitors payloads (looking at you Amazon).
US government contracts account for 70%+ of SpaceX’s revenues through 2018. Can’t speculate about since. I like SpaceX but it’s just untrue that they weren’t highly dependent on US gov’t contracts for a long time (which itself is the product of space market liberalization by Obama in 2010).
Seems like SpaceX was also the lowest cost provider of launch services during that entire time period. Can't blame the government for shopping around.
I don't want to go deep down this rabbit hole, but when Elon "took over the company" it had no IP, or products, or employees and had produced nothing of value.
Attributing the success of Tesla to a government loan they paid back early is also joke and insulting to all the hard work of the employees and other investors.
This rings true but in Elon's defense:
- None of the markets he participates in could ever truly be free markets no matter what due to their very high (and necessarily high) capital requirements. It's not like other tech companies which use government money to monopolize markets that have low entry barriers and end up messing with millions of little guys who think they're operating in a free market... Then it takes a decade for them to learn that they actually had 0 chance of ever competing in that market due to asymmetries in margins caused by gov subsidies.
- He consistently gave the government value for money. If his companies weren't there, the government would have spent the same amount of money (or more) and obtained worse results.
You have good points, but I really feel like most of those things could be said about any successful company in the aerospace business.
Yeah I mean, I agree with you on this stuff - I just wanted to make a point about production for use vs production for profit and how a manic fixation on the latter can lead to adverse outcomes. And, like I hinted at, I don't think Elon Musk really prioritized the former - in fact I don't think he understands the difference between the two - but he did cultivate a narrative around his personality and management style that led a lot of people to believe that he valued the former, including at his companies which shaped the culture there to some extent.
Tesla lists Elon Musk as a founder but he didn't found it. He was an early investor who essentially took over the company.
He invested in a 6 month startup that consisted of an office and desk. Tesla had no money, no plan, and a borrowed electric kit car. Musk was the early investor.
From a practical point of view, Musk was indeed the founder.
In spite of all your criticism, neither Tesla nor SpaceX would exist without Musk, and Musk has greatly pushed forward the technology of both, creating two new major industries.
He is a founder at Tesla, as when he entered the round A financing Tesla was just three guys, some networking, and nothing more. Even the "Tesla" trademark and logo registration was made by SpaceX people. He didn't found his own car company with just J. B. Straubel (another Tesla founder who was being paid by him to develop electric car batteries at the time) because he thought it would be better to cooperate with that other group that was was inspired by the same idea and he though he would be able to concentrate more on SpaceX that way. He was wrong and had to take "take over the company" later to avoid bankrupcy, move the Model S design headquarters to SpaceX, etc. And it's now nothing like what it was when he first put money on it.
As for the loan, Fisker got an even bigger one and went bankrupt[1]. Ford took a much bigger one (justified by their size) and in 2020 still didn't manage to pay it back[2]. What is wrong with the loan Tesla took, kept it alive, and it paid back early with interest?
USA likes to tout free markets and lobby against protectionism, but aside from the UK as a first mover nobody ever industrialized without protectionism and directed industrial policy, and I would argue it is impossible or at very least inefficient.
I agree SpaceX could not have succeeded w/o the government contracts, but that is true to any space launch company. All SpaceX contracts were acquired as the lowest bidder, often offering dramatically lower prices and higher value than anyone. Just look at the Commercial Crew where Boeing got $4.49B, SpaceX got $2.6B and did a better job.
Elon time is a known phenomenon. "At SpaceX we specialize at converting the impossible to late". And delays are a common thing in the aerospace industry. Can you name a rocket in recent times that was developed faster, or even just less delayed than Falcon 1? Or than Falcon 9? I bet you find much easier to name those who were more.
Musk succeeded in two industries that were certified money pits. You have a big graveyard both before and after 2002 of bankrupt companies in both fields.
It's ludicrous to believe SpaceX succeeded despite Musk when all other "new space" companies started before or around the same time, with the same NASA/Military complex boosted engineers and contracts available to them, failed, and when Musk has been so involved in SpaceX. Instead of unverified accounts, what about hearing about the organizational structure of early Spacex from a senior NASA scientist that worked with them[3] (the whole series of videos with him is very interesting), or many other similar accounts [4]?
[1]https://publicintegrity.org/politics/two-doe-electric-car-lo...
[2]https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2020/07/29/ford-...
[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P06X2TZUKZU&t=197s
[4]https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Elon absolutely focuses on making money, which is why it was successful. I don’t know why your conclusion is completely backwards.
Do you think blue origin is focused on making money? They haven’t done anything that would indicate that.
SpaceX on the other hand focused on landing rockets completely to make money. There is no other reason to do it and it’s why NASA never focused on it.
Starlink is entirely to make money to feed the mars mission long term.
You might say that his visions aren’t focused on money, but the execution is ruthlessly so. It’s why both companies are famous for squeezing their suppliers so hard and inhousing when they can.
Yea I have a hard time distinguishing focusing on return vs focusing on product. They’re complimentary, not mutually exclusive. I hope those implementing my investments are focused on both.
Disagree; consider enshittification; that process embodies the essence of focusing on return vs product.
In context it is too early in the cycle for SpaceX to begin enshittification. Wait until they start cutting Mars passenger’s legroom…
Oh gawd, now that's a not pleasant thought. Thinking of long haul space flights in terms of today's air travels. I shudder at the thought of being in the middle seat for the duration of that trip
There’s no reason for that. There’s no shortage of space in transit, and plenty of ideas for making transit comfortable (inflatable habitats or reusable cyclers, for example).
There’s no reason for that.
It's the exact same reason as it is now for air travel...profits. It doesn't matter the size of the ship. If you can squeeze the space to increase the number of occupants per flight on the same ship, you increase revenue. That's all corporate bean counters will care about. I would not be surprised if they hire a similar team that airlines have now that get paid to specifically redesign seats to squeeze more in per flight.
Hopefully they won't change propellant to high pressure cow manure
Yes this exactly. Our entire economy is enshittified and becoming more so daily, and it's precisely because we've become a 100% production for profit economy. Eventually you lose the plot when you do that.
I cant say I'm a fan of Elon but he got it right with SpaceX. Space is expensive, stupidly expensive. There was zero chance SpaceX would've been able to survive this long if they'd not focused on profits. Reusable rockets brought general launch costs down by millions, reusable farings even more (people underestimate how much they cost. $6 million a pair. At ~$62 million a launch thats a fairly sizable chunk of money to be throwing away).
Starlink was a fantastic way to ensure long term high profitability, and is set to bring them $6.6bn this year alone. For some context the Falcon 9 development costs were estimated by Nasa to be around $300 million, and Starship's development is estimated to going to have cost anywhere from $5-$10 billion by the time its fully operational.
Starlink's profitability is what's going to make it possible for some monumentally huge projects once Starship is in full swing.
In terms of Elons involvement in SpaceX it does seem to be a bit more than just a money making venture for him.
This comment is misleading, unintentionally of course.
The comment starts out with "long term high profitability", then offers "bring them 6.6B", and the central proposition of the comment is extremely high Starlink profits allows for free moonshots.
6.6B is a recent revenue projection, not profit.[1]
Their finance people say it's unprofitable, still. (off the record) [2]
Rooting for them and it will be profitable IMHO, but I've never heard any reporting it's profitable.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1co60j0/starl...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-10/is-elon-m...
I don't get the same sense from it you do. It looks to me like they realized they needed more income than launches could get them in the time they needed. Rather than solely depending on investors, they came up with a business that plays to their strength that can be a steady/recurring source of income to be less dependent on investors. I don't see SpaceX so focused on profiting from Starlink that they've lost any momentum towards any of the other SpaceX plans. From where I sit, it looks like a pretty smart play on their part. It also just happens to be a very beneficial service that so many other players in the market refused to do.
"SpaceX’s prized Starlink satellite business is still burning through more cash than it brings in" has a fairly plain meaning! And it's that it's not profitable. I'm not sure I have any sense at all other than relaying content. :)
But Starlink is profitable so you’re whole point is wrong
Source?
Note: I don't have a point, I'm just relying content!
Note #2: *your
When I read that, I thought it was referring to SpaceX in general not Starlink specific. Reading comprehension let me down yet again
Spacex still burning investor cash hence the capital raise recently on the backs of another capital raise. Building rockets is a great way to burn capital and also the end product, when working, is a great goal for humanity.
A big chunk of these investment rounds are tender offers for employees looking to cash out.
This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money" ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it anymore. >The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and ultimately bad for business.
Thanks for putting it words that I could not normally articulate. On HN, I find people are quick to label capitalism=only for profit,hence bad for people and the supposed opposite i.e socialism=good for people. The lack of nuance among cranial challenged is annoying, without realizing that the later embodies the quintessential the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions.
I mean, for what it's worth I'm a Marxist and that fact definitely influenced my choice of words there and how I think about this stuff. That said, while I'm also a communist (because I can't think of anything else that describes me better), I do think that Marx's critique of capitalism is his most enduring body of work that remains relevant to this day, while his contributions to how to build socialism are important for historical purposes but have been mostly superseded by later theorists. I don't think he would have found that particularly surprising, either.
Capitalism is about the accumulation of capital goods into private hands and centralization and socialization of production. To my mind, that's what it does and what drives it forward - most everything else is secondary. That's not quite the same as "only for profit" but it's close. People under capitalism don't all think of it that way, but unfortunately the humans aren't in charge. The logic of capitalism, is.
People under capitalism don't all think of it that way, but unfortunately the humans aren't in charge. The logic of capitalism, is.
What you are saying is that if people are told that meaning of life = make money, then they will do so, with little or no compassion for their fellow humans? ( it's not a rhetorical question, so please answer)
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your comment wouldn't be so bad if you had taken out the obvious provocations ("awful personality traits" etc.), but in any case it flew too close to the planet Musk and the whole thread got sucked in. We don't want to die that way.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589501.)
I did that more in a "let's take this as read and focus on the other things" way i.e. I knew I was going to give Musk a sort of backhanded compliment, and didn't want a bunch of replies from people who hate him, explaining to me carefully and in great detail why they hate him (even though I probably agree with them, it doesn't seem like an interesting discussion to have).
Alas, my efforts were in vain.
I think you really put this well:
This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money" ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it anymore. The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and ultimately bad for business.
Call it cynicism, but decision calculus from upstairs always work in that direction (i.e. gotta hit arbitrary financial goals for this quarter because that's how bonuses and comp gets dictated) so I think in that mindset so I don't setup myself for disappointment or surprise if a decision that doesn't appeal to that shorted-sighted thinking doesn't gain traction.
Most people who have worked close to him generally note that he has intimate knowledge up and down the entire product side (at minimum) of the company. This can lead to micro-management, but leads to far better results than most companies could ever hope to achieve.
Communication and agreement are what add cost and misdirection to development. When a tiny set of people with one clear goal pull the strings, it is much more efficient to reach the north star product.
IMO he is the main design engineer of all products in all his companies. This is why I admire him greatly and don't get the MSM parotting about him being a terrible person because -insert random half true MSM story about some emerald mine or being born into a rich family- or whatever other clickbait bs.
His companies where all founded based on his own engineering idea about how an important (existing) product/service could be fundamentally !at least an order of magnitude! better in multiple areas by designing it with a different approach or even different goal (going to space as a country vs commercially building a precense on mars for example).
His vision about the future, substantiated by (simple) physics calculations + drive to actually do it make him outright unique in the world right now.
There would be no SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, etc without Elon Musk. Period. I don't get why people must insist on what a terrible personality he has (often based on gossip and outright lies).
in a sea of otherwise awful personality traits
This popular meme is all a gross exaggeration.
I find it amazing that this is treated as such a trivial achievement, with an attitude as if any one of us could have done this. Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps.
It's a nice new capsule launching on top of a 20+ year old launch system (Atlas V).
It's a great accomplishment but it's not "super crazy"
It took them a decade and a half to make this thing. I think that alone speaks to the complexity of this achievement.
How long did it take Spacex to develop their human rated capsule? I think that was 10+ years as well
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17509988 ("Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew" (2018))
In retrospect those defending Boeing there and attacking SpaceX (and Eric Berger's reporting) are just hilarious.
Its Hacker News Dropbox over and over and over again.
IIRC it took SpaceX ~7 years.
It's kind of useful perspective that when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced upstart. Plus the extra $400M they extorted out of NASA despite this being a fixed price, milestone based contract.
when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced upstart.
I think it's useful to note that this wasn't just Boeing's opinion - it was pretty widely believed in the industry. And not without reason - Boeing had Shuttle heritage.
Thankfully, NASA kept both awards.
It wan’t an inaccurate assessment. SpaceX was working on life support for a crewed module 14+ years before their first successful manned launch. IE: It took them longer than Boeing.
However the missing context is SpaceX put in 8+ years into the project before getting the award which offset most of the issues.
So it worked out well for NASA, but SpaceX was approaching it more as a prestige project than a profitable one.
They got the contracts at the same time, and Boeing has been building rockets since the 60s...
Depends on what you consider starting. 16 years is probably the most reasonable number, but you could argue for as little as 6.
Initial work on Dragon began in 2004, it ‘entered service’ in 2009, had its first mission in 2010, but first connected to the ISS in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon
Work on a crewed version was officially mentioned in 2006 though they only got a contract for manned missions in 2014 and the first manned mission was 16 November 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1
I'm not shitting on Starliner, it's great that we have another person-rated capsule for spaceflight.
I'm just pointing this out because there are many people apparently who are confusing Starliner for Boeing's version of Starship, i.e. a whole rocket plus crew rated capsule.
Starliner would be more rightly compared to Crew Dragon. Why would anyone compare to Starship?
Well, "ocean liner" means a large oceangoing ship, "airliner" means large airplane, so people could be forgiven for thinking a "starliner" was a large spaceship and not a tiny pod.
But Star Dingy doesn't have the same ring to it.
Haha zodiac would be a good fit, though.
The names are very similar.
Let's not forget that this is modern Boeing we're talking about... the long timeline could just be incompetence.
It took them a decade and a half because Boeing learned the hard way that you have to actually be efficient when you don’t get a cost plus contract. Their entire system was setup to extract as much money from the government as possible, not to deliver product on time.
Late and over a budget is how you maximize profit in cost plus contracts.
it speaks to the lamentable state of boeing
Yes, one year for each unnecessary layer of middle management at Boeing.
I think it is materially less exciting than it would have been if it had launched years ago when it was scheduled to. It provides competition with SpaceX in one very small niche of space travel with no applications to any other niche. Meanwhile SpaceX is building a Mars rocket with in flight refueling. I really wish they did have more competition, and I also hope they succeed.
I think one of the challenges (and let's be really clear, Boeing has MANY issues) is that there's a double standard (or at least different expectations).
How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled explosion' is going to be a challenge).
But as a NASA person said - NASA-funded contracts "can't" have failures. They obviously do, but he was more talking to the acceptability, political and otherwise. One or two launchpad explosions of a taxpayer funded vehicle and you're fighting Congressional demands to shut down the entire program. SpaceX provides a layer of abstraction and indirection to that, so they can move faster - "Who cares if we blow up 10 in the next couple of years to get to one that works".
I think you're conflating the way SpaceX is developing Starship with the way the rest of their business operates (and has operated). Their Falcon rockets (i.e. the ones they actually sell launches on) have an outstanding reliability record, and the Dragon 2 development program (the direct analogue to Starliner) didn't lose any test missions. IIRC the only major hardware loss was during a static fire test of the abort motors on the capsule, which is unfortunate, but not so far out of the ordinary.
It's not about the specific program, it's about the overall perspective.
Looking at https://www.space.com/every-spacex-starship-explosion-lesson...
there have been many many prototype and other losses. And incidents, some catastrophic, some less so.
SN1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15 and the orbital Starship launch attempt all had failures losing hardware. If NASA/publicly funded work had that many failures (or a fraction of them) there'd be Congressional enquiries and calls to shut down the program and stop burning tax dollars.
What are you even talking about? NASA has directly publicly funded Starship development to the tune of ~4 Billion with the Artemis Moonlander contract and extension.
The overall perspective is that SpaceX developed their crewed capsule much much faster and cheaper than Boeing. The data also indicates that flying with SpaceX is safer.
Congress doesn't care about buring tax dollars as long as it is spent in their districts. Otherwise Artemis and SLS wouldn't exist.
If NASA had that many failures while working on a program explicitly not intended to experience failures and it wasn't being run by Boing, Lockmart or any other defense contractor that has Congress in its pockets, yeah, they'd be getting hell from Congress. But, NASA did used to work on regular old development programs akin to Starship, where perceived failure was completely acceptable to push understanding. For example, there were the Ranger series of lunar impactors, the first 6 of which all failed in various ways, and of course they blew up plenty of rockets and rocket engines back then too.
The issue isn't "burning tax dollars". Congress is too busy selling out the country's future to give a shit about that. The issue is that they'd already rather not be giving any money to NASA in the first place. They'd just give the defense contractors tax payer funded 'donations' directly if they could.
You are simply underlining my point that your perspective is disproportionately (and inappropriately, in this context) focused on the Starship program, which is completely irrelevant to NASA's Commercial Crew program.
It's true that SpaceX enjoys more latitude to destroy test hardware in its private development programs that aren't funded with somebody else's money (public or private), but why is that relevant here? Commercial Crew was funded by NASA with public money, and SpaceX developed Dragon 2 in a relatively conservative and conventional program with NASA looking over their shoulder the whole time. There is no double standard.
there have been many many prototype and other losses
SpaceX has an assembly line in Hawthorne and test site in Texas. (Both send kit to the space coast for launch.)
The reliability of what comes out of the former exceed’s Boeing’s. The innovativeness of what comes out of the latter exceeds them once again. Muddling statistics between the two would be like considering Boeing’s experimental drones when measuring its commercial airliners’ reliability. They’re totally different departments.
Different design philosophy. Those launches were expected to fail. None of those were a finished product. It’s more like “let’s see how far we can get with what we have built so far”.
Well, that's how you build rockets successfully.
Either you make fast iteration acceptable, regardless of politics, or you fail.
It's not just political process either, it's the technical process. You need to be able to debug, fix, and manufacture the iterations quickly.
No, I totally agree. I'm talking about the mindset difference. I'm not saying "SpaceX is 'cheating'" or anything like that. Just the mindset differences are leading to what we see here in terms of iteration cadence.
The Falcon 9 is, by a wide margin, the most reliable rocket ever built. It's had 341 successful launches and 2 failures. The Atlas V (what is flying on this mission) has had 99 successes and 1 failure. It's also slightly misleading, because its first stage is using a Russian made RD-180 engine. And similarly the SLS (another Boeing et al project) is literally using the exact same engines (RS-25) that the Space Shuttle used.
So SpaceX is the only company truly innovating on all fields, has the highest launch success rate, highest launch cadence, the most capable rockets, and launches for far cheaper than any other company (or country).
The Falcon 9 is, by a wide margin, the most reliable rocket ever built. It's had 341 successful launches and 2 failures.
I think it's worth pointing out that the failures were early in F9's life, and that the current configuration "F9 v1.2FT Block 5" has had no failures to launch and remarkable success when it comes to landing the booster.
Boeing and SpaceX are both not NASA, so same level of indirection. If Boeing went the iterative route with some failed experimental launches, that could/should be just as acceptable.
But they didn't, they went for the first time right approach, but that failed too. If you are going to have failures, maybe just accept that first time right doesn't exist, or just takes much much longer.
I think one of the challenges (and let's be really clear, Boeing has MANY issues) is that there's a double standard (or at least different expectations).
How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled explosion' is going to be a challenge).
IMO, this really misunderstands the two kinds of "tests".
SpaceX is engaged in a development program. And as a part of that development program, they're doing test flights to discover how to properly build Starship. Those flights are expected to fail in various ways. The exact way they fail gives SpaceX vital information that's used to improve the rocket.
A big part of the reason SpaceX is doing this is because simulation and modeling have a limited ability to give good answers to questions about novel behaviors when it comes to rockets - the speeds and just too high. And the only way to find the true unknown unknowns is to interact with reality.
In contrast, Starliner's tests are supposed to be demonstrations that the system is complete, functional, and ready for service. They are not supposed to have anything wrong with them at all.
It's worth pointing out that Boeing chose to do less testing and more paperwork as part of Starliner's certification. If Boeing had done an in-flight abort test instead of a pad abort test like SpaceX did, they probably would have caught the OFT-1 problems then.
At some point we'll have to think of it as trivial, otherwise what progress are we making?
Unlike science (and particularly math) where everything is trivial unless novel, in most endeavors these are too separate axes. For example, there's no progress or novelty in a sports team winning a championship, but it's definitely not trivial to win. Same for an engineering project - there are many cathedrals out there, but building a new one never became trivial.
Let's say: if you can just open the manual and start building, then it is trivial.
We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
Let's say: if you can just open the manual and start building, then it is trivial.
We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
Except that you're wrong.
Because it's very common for the first launch of a company's first orbital rocket to fail to make it to orbit. So you can't "just open the manual and start building".
Because it's very common for the first launch of a company's first orbital rocket to fail to make it to orbit.
It is also very common for the first pancake to be a total failure.
That doesn't mean it is non-trivial to make pancakes.
It is also very common for the first pancake to be a total failure.
I guess, it depends on what you mean by "total failure".
It's very rare for the first pancake to be inedible, or basically anything except a little misshapen. As someone who's primary interested in pancakes is eating them, that's a far cry from "total failure".
But if that is your criteria, there's a very simple and effective solution: ring molds. They cost a couple of dollars on Amazon and guarantee that your pancakes will be perfect circles every time.
In contrast, there is no known way to ensure that a first rocket launch will be a success. If there was, the companies launching them would do it since failed launches are extremely expensive in time, money, and reputation.
Building a new Falcon 9 is trivial - spacex as built a lot already and knows how (or so we assume). However that is only true if you use the existing design as is. Change anything about the design (which we can assume spacex is doing from time to time) makes it non-trivial.
Only if you threw away all the tooling and knowledge of the previous design and started from scratch.
Yeah for some reason when SpaceX did it we couldn’t stop hearing about it. When OldTech does it, nobody cares.
Quick, without cheating, can you name the second human being to run a mile in less than four minutes? Can you name the current world record holder?
I guess that most people in my small town don't know who Roger Bannister is. A lot more of them can tell you the name of the first local to officially run a mile in less than four minutes. They couldn't tell you if anybody from my state has done it since.
I guess that's just a long way to say, "That's natural."
If old tech had done it 5 years ago then that would have been newsworthy.
The first jet flight across the Atlantic was newsworthy. The 837th isn’t.
Rocket science isn't easy, I would know.
Every one of the thousands of brain surgeries and heart surgery are also remarkable.
Not trivial, but also not consequential.
It's not trivial, but it's less interesting than the other news stories about Boeing.
Rocket-science is just Newtonian physics ;)
Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps.
"Ask not what flying cars can do for you; ask what 140 characters can do for your country." [0,1]
"We choose to go to LEO. We choose to go to LEO... We choose to go to LEO in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but so that MIC will learn to build without cost-plus contracting" [2, 3]
0. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/teachers/curricul...
1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/697729-we-wanted-flying-car...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
3. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-plus-contract.asp
HN is too busy in other threads pontificating about a merger from 30 years ago that they know next to nothing about.
Interesting that this did not make HN at all before the launch. There are way more cheerleaders for SpaceX than Boeing. But IMO it's still very cool, I could watch rocket launches all day.
To be fair, SpaceX is far more cheerworthy.
Does the Starliner have any feature that current SpaceX rockets don't have?
It does. It can (and will) land on land instead of water.
Like Soyuz?
Interesting, why would they want that capability?
All Russian space vehicles land on land because they don’t have easy access to warm waters and Kazakhstan steppe is big and empty.
But why boeing/nasa would want that?
Think the main reason is that sea-recoveries are expensive compared to ones on land. I imagine there's at least some extra risk to a sea recovery as well (one of the Mercury capsules sank during recovery, though happily not with its astronaut inside).
Tradeoffs on the kind of refurbishment needed compared to a splashdown, since Starliner is supposed to be reusable. Plus stuff like faster extraction of time-sensitive payloads and overall cheaper capsule processing operations since you don't need specially fitted boats chasing after the capsule.
Dragon was also initially intending to land on solid ground, but dropped the idea when NASA asked for additional tests to prove that popping landing legs out of the heat shield would be safe. SpaceX had intended such landings in large part because of the plans for Red Dragon, but since by then they had started to shift towards Starship, they deemed it easier to just splashdown and deal with the extra refurbishment than try to prove out a technology they no longer felt the need for.
Landing in water is bad for equipment--the salt water tends to corrode, so refurbishing the capsule after a water landing is a bit harder.
Is that a feature or just a difference? I assume there's trade-offs with both - is landing on land significantly better?
It's faster and more efficient, I think. You don't need a fleet of ships to go out to the sea.
Interesting to think about. I know Starliner lands in Utah. I don't know where, but I'm guessing it's somewhere very remote. I wonder if the effort to get out to the ocean to recover a ship is significantly different than getting to a remote part of the desert to recover.
Additionally, I know when the first Crew Dragon landed, it clearly wasn't hard or expensive to get to given that there were a bunch of small, private boats that (inappropriately) approached the spacecraft. It was quite close to shore, not like the old Apollo missions landing in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific.
Not really. The biggest apparent difference in the user experience is how the vehicle is commanded.
Here's a pic of the Starliner control panel: https://x.com/TrevorMahlmann/status/1207437431374565376/phot...
And Crew Dragon's control panel: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/30/21275753/nasa-spacex-astr...
I shudder thinking about what would happen if a touch action on the touchscreen would get stuck
There was a decent amount of concern within NASA on the touchscreen design, but the contract type tended to force those discussions to the sideline. In the end, NASA wanted a ride and not to drive the design.
Edit: for those wondering, this is not hearsay or speculation; it is from direct experience (albeit 5+ years ago)
The Dragon Crew has physical backup controls. The touchscreen allows for a more interactive UI that you can try out here:
But the controls themselves have physical buttons in addition to the touch screen.
Also all systems have triple redundancy.
It has physical knobs and switches as opposed to relying on touchscreens. I consider that a feature, although a minor one.
Are you an astronaut? Do astronauts prefer thousands of physical knobs? Do you think they would fly if they weren't happy?
I am not an astronaut. I prefer knobs. As my comment said, I think of them as a feature. I think the average astronaut would put up with their lack of preferred control schemes to go into space.
It is worth noting that Dragon does have physical controls, they're just backups hidden under the panel below the screens for emergencies. This is on top of the redundancy offered by the screens, where if one screen fails, the same controls are accessible on the other ones.
Plus, since it's supposed to fly autonomously, there isn't a lot of physical control to be done. This isn't like with cars where there's an argument that tactile controls are easier to adjust without looking away from the road.
Yes, it can reboost the station. Dragon can't. Cygnus, Dreamchaser, and Soyuz can reboost. This matters because the station can't boost itself.
Boost as in push it to a different orbit?
Yeah. The atmosphere is very thin but nonzero at ISS altitude so atmospheric drag causes orbital degradation over time. Whenever a resupply ship docks, if it has extra fuel, they orient the station so the ship is pointed prograde and fire the main thruster to increase the altitude. They plan to leave enough fuel for the supply ship to do its usual retro burn and land or burn up as normal.
The station can also boost itself with the Zvezda module, which has thrusters.
https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station-frequently-...
Starliner isn't even a rocket, it's a capsule. A capsule (Starliner) got launched today on top of a really old rocket design (Atlas V) which first launched in 2002...
They also have better produced livestreams in general, making it worth checking in in advance.
How many times was this launch delayed due to problems? I get excited, but can't stay excited for months.
It was delayed three times in the month leading up to launch, and there was an attempt just over a year ago that was scratched because they discovered they accidentally used a flammable material. So, four total times. But "staying excited for months" is misleading.
True, but you have to add previous attempts going back several years. Wasn't Atlas+Starliner actually rolled out to the pad last time only to be scrubbed and brought back for another 6 month delay?
Yes, this GP's comment is very misleading in that it only listed the recent scrubs. I almost felt sorry for the astronauts.
I listed all the ones I could find for the manned mission. Did my list miss some?
You are missing ones where it was scheduled, but didn't even make it to the stand because some issue was found. I can't recall when exactly, but at some point it was discovered that the tape used to wrap wires was flammable. So it was postponed, once again.
That was July 6th last year. It was one of the 4 I mentioned.
Going back to my comment which made you reply, it's nice that you can stay excited after a year. I struggle with that.
you definitely missed some...
"Although it was originally planned for a 2017 launch,[15] various delays pushed the launch back to no earlier than July 2023.[47] Then on June 1, 2023, Boeing announced the flight was indefinitely delayed, due to problems with the parachute harness and flammable tape on wiring.[105] On August 7, 2023, Boeing announced that it was resuming preparations for a launch, and that it hoped to resolve the issue with the flammable tape by September 2023, and to address the parachute harness issues by November 2023.
The Crewed Flight Test was tentatively scheduled for a launch date of May 6, 2024,[106] but due to a problem with an oxygen valve on the ULA Atlas rocket, the May 6 launch date was cancelled approximately two hours before the planned launch time.[107] The launch has been further delayed due to a helium leak in the Starliner service module, which was originally discovered during the May 6 launch attempt.[108][109]
A launch was attempted on June 1, 2024, for 16:25 UTC (12:25 PM EDT), but was aborted at 3 minutes and 50 seconds prior to liftoff. Starliner successfully completed countdown and lifted off on June 5, 2024 at 14:52 UTC (10:52 AM EDT)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner#Third_orbital...
The time more than a year before that when it was scrubbed for a stuck valve that I don’t think they ever fixed and decided it can still fly.
This rocket is not reusable so it’s kind of an antique.
The rocket is not, but the crew module is intended to fly 10 times, and is compatible with several rockets including falcon 9.
It's 'compatible' in that they can do the work to integrate it with another rocket if needed, which isn't really saying much because most payloads are like that. It isn't compatible with Falcon 9 in its current state, and IIRC because it's wider than F9, actually flying Starliner on F9 would require a lot more structural work too (devising an appropriate aerodynamic adapter and ensuring structural loads are acceptable).
Plus, NASA crew rates the full stack rather than treating the rocket and capsule separately, so integrating Starliner on another rocket would require the crew rating process to be repeated (granted, it'd be a bit easier since F9+Dragon is already crew rated).
The falcon with dragon is only partially reusable too (second stage discarded). The space shuttle reused more but is more of an antique so that's not a great determiner of antiqueness.
So all the expensive parts. Got it
There was an article when the launch was scrubbed two days ago, but it didn't make much traction, and the few comments on it were (as objectively as possible) mostly "smirking SpaceX fans".
Objectively dissing on Boeing has become it's own pastime regardless of being a fan of anything else
There is no schadenfreude for the people in my circle. The same can be said for Intel.
We all see it as a huge national security issue that these companies are fumbling, given how foundational they are for U.S. security, self-reliance and tech leadership.
There's no pleasure in Boeing's failure on my part either. It is such a learning moment on many levels that is absolutely being ignored. No meaningful changes are going to come from looking at Boeing. Instead, my cynicism would expect people to "learn" from it in seeing where Boeing went wrong with how they went for short term gains not that focusing on short term gains as the problem
It's been delayed so many times after getting very close to launch that it makes sense that everyone just lost interest.
On top of that Boeing's launch coverage is nowhere near as fancy as SpaceX (or new space in general, RocketLab and Blue Origin also tend to have pretty decent coverage, although neither of them are doing crewed orbital spaceflight yet). No views of the non-flight-control employees enjoying seeing their work fly, very little live telemetry, low resolution for when they do have live video, mostly CGI views once down to the second stage, no live views from the capsule in space either.
Finally, on top of that, Starliner is kind of just a dead end in its current state. Boeing only built the two it needs for this one contract, and it only flies on Atlas V, which are fully sold out now. So it can only do the 6 contracted ISS missions and then it's done until someone is willing to pay to have Starliner+Vulcan Centaur crew rated.
Boeing only built the two it needs for this one contract, and it only flies on Atlas V, which are fully sold out now. So it can only do the 6 contracted ISS missions and then it's done until someone is willing to pay to have Starliner+Vulcan Centaur crew rated.
This is what I like about SpaceX. Of course they have government contracts, but it's always building towards something bigger.
I was really unimpressed with Boeing's feed and its lack of telemetry. No indications of altitude, speed, distance down range, etc. Even their timeline jumped rather than progressed. It was worse than some of those old Windows progress bars of old.
Everyone was excited for the one last time and I was around for that, I didn't even realize it was happening today. I just assumed it'd be delayed for another long period again.
I didn't even realize it was happening today.
I did not, either. I tend to get most of my tech-related news via HN. Fortunately this morning I decided to swing past Ars to see if anything interesting was happening, and they had a high profile post about the launch. I made it to the livestream with less than five minutes to spare.
I had the same issue. I thought it was postponed for a longer period given the messaging from the last scrub.
I only knew it was launching 6 minutes prior because my partner alerted me about it because it was top stream on twitch.
It made it before at least one of its other launch attempts, IIRC.
Uncrewed, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Orbital_Flight_Test_2
4 days ago. 48 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547338
Also 30 days ago.
Previous launch attempts did. But there are only so many successive "launch was scrubbed" stories that are interesting.
As exciting as this is, I’ve read that this capsule faces uncertain future after 7 launches: the rocket it was launched on is retired, and while it’s compatible with Falcon it’s not clear what the advantage would be wrt SpaceX’s capsule to warrant additional testing. Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it fly just 7 times!
Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it fly just 7 times!
Huh? My understanding was that something unique about the falcon is the capability of multiple reuses, in contrast to previous missions that were one and done uses. What past experience in the history of spaceflight might someone be referring to where seven reuses registers as a disappointment?
It did not launch on Falcon. Once the current stock of rockets it did launch on runs out they will have no launch vehicle.
Once the current stock of rockets it did launch on runs out they will have no launch vehicle.
Exactly.
Just to elaborate for your parent, the Atlas V which currently flies Starliner uses an RD-180 engine that's manufactured in Russia. ULA is no longer able to procure any more such engines, and a rocket with those engines are no longer legally allowed to fly DoD payloads. Which prompted ULA to retire Atlas V in favor of Vulcan.
I think someone from ULA or Boeing (I forget which) recently said that they've begun the process of certifying Starliner on Vulcan, although I'll have to go back and make sure I remember exactly what was said.
I think the parent comment is referring to there only being 7 launches total for the entire program before being cancelled, not 7 launches per capsule.
This is about the entire lifespan of the Starliner program, not just one piece of hardware.
They won't reuse any Starliners 7 times. Twice is more likely. Three times reuse, perhaps. They can't refub in time to send the same craft up twice in a year as required by the contract so they'll need at least two. If anything goes wrong with either of those, they'll need a backup. Now they've got three for 6 flights. These vehicles will get one, two, or at best 3 launches and then retired to the scrap heap while SpaceX Dragon continues to ferry people to the ISS if it gets an extension and if not then to the first private orbital stations. Boeing should never again get a NASA contract after SLS and Starliner.
Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it fly just 7 times!
Haha, I'm guessing you don't work in the space industry. Frankly if something you work on gets to space at all you count yourself fortunate. My first job was at a defense contractor working on a big rocket. A senior engineer on our team had a picture of the Indiana Jones warehouse on the wall in his office, rows and rows of boxes. I asked him why, he said it's a reminder to not get too stressed about work - 9 out of 10 projects will never fly.
Things are changing especially in the new space corners of the industry, but for big projects requiring political will I think it's still the same.
Frankly if something you work on gets to space at all you count yourself fortunate.
That is unless you work on a ballistic missile
My first job was at a defense contractor working on a big rocket.
Out of curiosity, were you working on one of the Ares rockets?
Having more than one thing capable of doing something is an advantage in a field as uncertain as spaceflight.
Yeah, but soon we’ll have Starship and Falcon + Dragon.
It isn't compatible with Falcon, it can be made to be compatible with Falcon in the future. It wouldn't really be worth doing though, since part of the point of having two providers is dissimilar redundancy, so that any issues with one platform don't affect the other. It's more likely that if Boeing wants to keep flying Starliner after using up the stock of Atlas Vs, they'll want to integrate it on Vulcan Centaur rather than Falcon.
One might imagine that an issue could be found on Dragon, which grounded it, but not the Falcon 9. That said, it’s definitely less redundant than one might like.
The main goal of the project has been achieved as far as Boeing is concerned :)
Bear in mind they still need to return the astronauts safely to touchdown.
"The capsule" here means a decade of R&D and half a decade building production models. If turnaround is about 6-8 months, they're going to need at least two and I'll bet they build three or more because reuse and refurb won't go as well as they hope.
That means about 10 years of R&D since they got the initial contracts and then about half a decade of production for the flight articles and then a wind-down of a couple years and a skeleton crew to make the last few flights.
A 15-20 year project that sends dozens of people to space for the last years of the ISS's lifetime is not going to be a disappointment for 95% of the people who worked on this.
I don’t think you understand. It’s not 7 launches per capsule. There could be 7 launches in total for this.
I have spent years building cars that ran once, twice to great effect/happiness of all involed.
Getting to space SEVEN times off one poweplant/project is nothing short of incredible.
Getting to space SEVEN times off one poweplant/project
Sure, if you ignore the 20+ year old Atlas V that actually launched it...
This is a bit meta, but is it surprising that the BBC news website is the go-to source for a broad range of news stories that end up on HN? What and where are the competition?
It's politically neutral and generally less opinionated. Competition is reuters, AP, other public media such as canadian tv, france24 etc.
The BBC is not politically neutral. It's the legal propaganda arm of the British State.
To take a stance much more suited to this forum. It's a massive travesty that without some work Americans are now redirected to BBC.com, which curates news to be American-facing, and thus IMHO bows to advertiser pressure. We can't see BBC.co.UK, so we can't know what the other side of the news even looks like.
All news services do this. And it already fragments and destroys and hope of really talking about the news in a healthy manner IMHO.
Not only americans. I'm in Romania and also got redirected to bbc.com.
Guessing it's everyone that's not in the UK.
But they do have an American style “here’s our cookie/tracking policy, suck it up” pop-up :)
Cool it with the histrionics.
It's not histrionics. It's the State-funded broadcaster whose Director-General is a political appointee.
It might not be obvious to those within the UK or maybe further afield if reading articles on relatively neutral topics like science or climate, but the BBC is a bulwark of UK Government political influence and Oxbridge sensibilities.
There are plenty of reasonable US sources, NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, but they are all paywalled.
WaPo, "reasonable". Ha. Or cut to WSJ and NYT on Theranos, SBF, and the other huxters they've shilled for with zero journalism lately. All US news is completely biased garbage in various ways.
I caught NPR recently cutting and pasting a white house press release with zero journalism or commentary. Or their health blog which now routinely has stories like "measurements of height have historically been uses to marginalize short people, should doctors even measure it anymore?"
I literally only get my news from what I randomly hear off forums like this. And I guarantee I'll beat anyone on a quiz of actual facts about world news. (e.g. after SBF was convicted, not before.)
And I guarantee I'll beat anyone on a quiz of actual facts about world news. (e.g. after SBF was convicted, not before.)
Put your money where your mouth is - prediction markets or some other fair debate. I personally would take the other side of that bet if contrarianism is your default.
AFP as well
It’s also surprising that BBC, a government-funded media outlet, is showing ads. Either the government funding isn’t enough or they are trying to recoup some of those costs by showing ads to people who’ve already paid for the content with their taxes (even the international part is paid for - see below).
Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts or to use the BBC's streaming service, iPlayer. The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, and is used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, and online services covering the nations and regions of the UK. Since 1 April 2014, it has also funded the BBC World Service (launched in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service), which broadcasts in 28 languages and provides comprehensive TV, radio, and online services in Arabic and Persian.
BBC doesn't show ads within the UK. Imposing them on the international audience to defray the costs to the license payers seems not unreasonable.
Bloomberg and WSJ (but not the opinion pieces) are my default sources
boeing + spaceflight. they are braver than i
Despite headlines, air travel gets safer and safer every year. At least when measured by fatalities per departure. Boeing has had several high profile failures, but it's correlated with a huge increase in flights and a huge increase in expectations.
The problem is more that those failures were entirely preventable and caused by decisions that prioritised economic motives over security. And the manufacturer was squarely to blame, which is also not the case in most accidents.
Even when the industry overall is doing pretty well, we should still scrutinize every incident. There's no such thing as acceptable fatalities.
To be fair the airlines possibly share a slight proportion of the blame. They could have made sure that the pilots received proper training (or at least a fraction of it). There might be a reason why both incidents happened in third world countries...
No, not really.
Because Boeing deliberately withheld information about MCAS from the training. Especially because that would have led to breaking the shared type certificate. It could have happened in a western country just as well.
About the second incident it is a bit more debatable as some information was given after the first accident (though very sparse still) but for the first the pilots could not have been aware of the MCAS off-switch that would have solved all their problems.
In fact it was a bit nasty that Boeing even tried to play the "poor third-world airline" card for a while even though they knew exactly what had happened.
We all know air travel is safe. The concern is that the complacency involved with folks just parroting that argument is leading us to a world where that's no longer the case. Air travel isn't safe because of magic, it's safe because of decades of work, strong safety cultures, good regulations, etc. We're seeing Boeing had gutted it's safety culture, the FAA's made questionable safety decisions, overworked air traffic controllers leading to near misses, and so on. Despite the common refrain - the safety of air travel is a marvel of engineering, management, and regulation, not an innate law of the universe. If those pillars start cracking, we need to be clear eyed, take that extremely seriously, and fix it with high urgency
Don’t mistake the momentum of past success for current engineering and safety practices. If the MAX and 787 can get released with defects slipping out, there’s little certainty which other corners are being cut that can wipe out all progress of safety in the blink of an eye.
I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.
John Glenn
Oh but now it's so unimaginably worse than that. Boeing lost the contract for commercial crew to SpaceX, who was indeed the lowest bidder. But Boeing has connections, and got Congress to make NASA also give them a contract. So they did. And Boeing's contract ended up being worth about 50% more than the contract SpaceX got. It was expected Boeing was going to be the first to start launching crewed missions by a fairly wide margin. SpaceX started in 2020. Boeing started, right now.
Oh and the build up to this finale is no less... odd. Boeing did their pad abort test - demonstrating the ability for their capsule to rocket off on its on, like it might do from a failing rocket. And that test failed with only 2 out of 3 of the parachutes opening. But insert 'Boeing influence' - NASA decided it was a clear success. And not just any success, but a success so clearly successful that they simply let Boeing completely skip the launch abort test (where you'd to the same escape test, but in flight) and moved right on to complete unmanned tests to the ISS.
So they launch their first mission to the ISS, and completely miss the station leaving the craft in a potentially catastrophic scenario, though it does eventually make its way back to Earth. So NASA just pats them on the back 'Happens to us all! Just give it another go!' So they do, and on this flight 1/6th of the thrusters on the approach module failed, but by some act of God (and backup thrusters), the craft somehow managed to mate with the ISS. So of course NASA said, "Brilliant! Success! Bring on the humans!"
And that's where we are right now. And that is the company behind the rocket that's under you right now.
Though, considering the culture of normalization of deviance that developed in NASA's human spaceflight division during the Shuttle's 30-year track record of near and not-so-near misses, it's hard to imagine why we should expect NASA to demand anything different. These two organizations were made for each other.
"Astronaut whistleblower shot himself 3 times in the back of the head in a parking lot."
-- News next week probably.
No one can hear you blow a whistle in space.
Yeah this morning I was thinking about what the astronauts must be thinking.
I would ride the Atlas/Centaur stack, it's been exceedingly reliable. Starliner itself? Not quite yet, given its checkered history.
Boeing brings up nothing but sadness in me these days. I really, really, really want that company to succeed and be awesome. Hopefully going forward Starliner will bring forward the excellence that has been Boeing in the past.
What a relief for NASA and Boeing and a welcome sight for me personally as a space enthusiast - hopefully this will inspire the folks at SpaceX to get StarShip working.
Starliner vs Starship isn't really a valid comparison. Starliner is a new human carrying capsule which is fitted on top of an old rocket. Starship is a 100% brand new everything rocket and person carrying spaceship with ground breaking tech, lift capacity, full reusability, thrust, payload capacity, etc etc.
The rocket used to launch Starliner today is an Atlas V which first flew in 2002. I.e. it's a 22 year old rocket system.
But with continuous development with Vulcan Centaur engines replacing the Russian RD-180.
Vulcan-Centaur is the rocket that replaces Atlas V.
The BE-4 is the engine on Vulcan-Centaur's booster stage, which replaces the RD-180 on the Atlas V booster stage. Both Atlas V and Vulcan use RL-10 engines on their main stage (what ULA calls Centaur).
And to add more confusion, the new engine for Ariane 5/6 is the "Vulcain". :D
Atlas V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
has a first stage powered by the Russian RD-180 engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180
and a Centaur upper stage powered by RL10 engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RL10
Vulcan Centaur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Centaur
has a first stage powered by Blue Origin's BE-4 engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4
and a second stage known as Centaur V. It's an upgraded version of the Centaur, also powered by RL10 engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_(rocket_stage)#Centaur...
Vulcan has only flown once, in part because of slow delivery of BE-4 engines, which to date have not powered any other launcher (though they are meant to eventually power New Glenn).
So I don't know what you mean by "Vulcan Centaur engines replacing the Russian RD-180".
The rocket used to launch Starliner today is an Atlas V which first flew in 2002. I.e. it's a 24 year old rocket system.
Are you posting from 2026?
Starliner is the Boeing equivalent of Falcon/Crew Dragon which has been used for years.
Have they not been though?
Starship launch attempt is tomorrow, great week for space!
Starliner's competitor from SpaceX is Dragon, not Starship.
One thing which surprised me a bit was how fast it left the launch pad. It took just a second or a little bit more.
With Starship it appeared as if it was struggling to lift off, staying for a while burning fuel until it left the launch pad and even then it felt a bit slow at accelerating.
I'll see tomorrow if it was just an illusion.
The better comparison is probably Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon in terms of mass / mission etc. Starship is in a totally different class
For Falcon 9 - it will look slower on takeoff as well. One reason not mentioned yet is that after engine start, Falcon is held down until all vehicle systems are verified as functioning normally before release for liftoff. So they can do pressure / thrust etc checks on the ground before releasing.
With solid rocket motors especially - once you light those you are pretty committed.
Mass does not strictly matter, it is the ground TWR of the launch config. Heavier rockets do tend to have a lower TWR but it is not a universal rule.
Starliner is also held for confirmation of all systems being functional even with the SRBs. Better to let them burn out on the pad and clean up the mess than to risk release with, say, asymmetrical thrust. That said I'm sure there are variances between the two rockets' procedures which could make one appear faster.
I’m not a rocket scientist but I do know the two rockets use different propellants. The Atlas V uses solid propellant, and the Starship uses liquid. I know liquid engines have the ability to throttle them, and I would guess solid does not (or a more limited capacity) so that could be at play here. Starship could ignite and then throttle up, which would leave it on the pad longer. I’m sure someone more knowledgeable than I can clarify!
Only the SRBs use solid propellant (APCP). The first stage is kerolox and the upper stage is hydrolox.
Although you are a bit off the mark, you did actually hit on the likely reason for the faster liftoff, which is that the SRBs have a much higher thrust-to-weight ratio than the SpaceX Superheavy booster.
Starship (including the Super Heavy) weighs about 10x as much as the Starliner (including the Atlas V)
For one, Starship is 392 ft vs 172ft of Atlas V + Starliner. Even if they accelerate off the pad at the same rate, Starship is going to look like it's moving a lot slower.
This has to do with the launch vehicle's thrust to weight ratio (TWR) on the ground with a full tank. It's usually between 1.1 and 1.4. The Russian Proton has a famously high ground TWR and is known for "leaping" off the pad. Maybe Starliner is the same in this initial crewed LEO config.
As mentioned in other comments, the TWR at liftoff is what makes the difference. If you look at footage of Shuttle and Saturn V launches, you can really see the difference between the Saturn V's TWR of ~1.2 and Shuttle's TWR of ~1.5.
Sounds like there's a problem with the cooling system using more water than expected. If I understood the comms correctly it sounded like they switched to a backup system to try to alleviate the issue.
And there’s a leak of ullage helium, which they are unable to resolve, so I doubt they will be reentering with the capsule.
The helium leak was well understood and characterized before this launch attempt, see the last launch attempt. Helium leaks are not uncommon, and can be worked around.
Not reentering with this capsule would be a catastrophic failure. They are, unless something actually serious happens, certainly reentering on this capsule.
There are two additional leaks detected post launch, and they have been unable to stem them, and are down 6 RCS thrusters.
I anticipate catastrophic failure. Dunno where you think they’re going to get more helium from.
"Starliner’s currently maintaining plenty of helium reserves,” Boeing aerospace engineer Jim May confirmed Thursday morning.
"Currently the helium leak is not a safety issue for the crew, the vehicle or the mission.”
"Currently" is doing a lot of work in those statements.
(Unlike Boeing quality control, apparently.)
6 of 28. Looks good to me.
The Sun has a bit and it’s also in space.
Ever since I finished all 4 seasons of "For All Mankind" I've been eating up news like this.
Truly awe inspiring stuff happening these days
Everyone who likes space stuff should go watch it. They focus too much on marriage drama for my taste and they kinda jump the shark in the later seasons, but the first season is a love letter to a past that should have existed, and in a way I can't express with words.
I work in the aerospace industry and just watching a depiction of it in a universe where people still just...gave a shit...especially about something other than money, brings about a whole spectrum of emotions.
I loved the first season so much. But for the love of god, I should have stopped long before I became mad at it’s absurd drama.
I ended up fast forwarding through almost all the family-related drama. It did get absurd, as the seasons wore on they let the wrong writers get more and more pages. Just like star trek, space became a backdrop for a bland soap opera.
The pseudo-incest really wasn't necessary but the rest is really good.
First couple of episodes were awesome - the constructed drama became a deadweight though and I couldn't endure.
And there's another Starship test today as well! Space fans are getting spoiled recently, and I'm all for it.
This is a n00b question, but how do regulations apply to private human crewed missions in the US?
Are there clear guidelines already written? I’m assuming it inherits a lot of rules of general aviation? But since private firms launching into space is new, do the rules and regulations keep up? Or are they still to be written?
Rocket regulations apply including ITAR, FAA and others for any payload human or cargo launched on any vehicle . The launch doesn’t have to be even to launched from the US, rocket lab have to comply with them even when launching from New Zealand.
There are host of rules that NASA has for human spaceflight these are not regulations per se. Till now NASA has been the only buyer[1][2] of human spaceflights or the destination has been ISS which is jointly managed by them so even private operators to comply with these rules.
SpaceX and now Boeing human rate their spacecrafts to these specifications to allow them to compete for commercial crew contracts or dock to ISS[4].
In the next few years this will change, NASA is research organization not a regulatory authority sooner or later regulations have to move to either FAA or another new entity.
Currently no regulations exist for space proper. FAA does control a lot of launch related items, but don’t regulate things like spacesuits that now spaceX is developing currently.
There are no strict limits to FAA authority they do control Virgin rocket planes although it does cross the US defined line for space .
Knowing Musk’s temperament, what is likely to happen is FAA will try to extend their authority that he deems is overreach and he will sue in court saying they have no jurisdiction, either Supreme Court will say they do (not likely in Robert’s court) or congress will have pass law regulating this ( less likely in current congress it is too dysfunctional) but these things may change in the next few years when it does happen
—-
[1] Axiom buys private launches from spaceX but they still dock to ISS so I expect NASA rules apply.
[2] Jared Issacman’s last mission was the true first fully private mission to space but still used mostly stock Dragon so they mostly likely followed NASA rules
[3] all this from US perspective , Soyuz and China has capabilities and Soyuz and also in Mir space station have had some commercial flights of course
[4] only place you can go today , end of this decade there maybe private station or moon or even mars but not today
US regulation applies. On top of US regulation, basically every nation will see you as a potential security risk because the difference between an ICBM and space launch rocket is mostly payload and flight path.
On top of problems with helium leaks there's now another issue[1]:
Starliner has been given a go to hold at 260 meters from the space station. During the approach two reaction control system jets have failed off. A manual flight test has been put on hold while flight controllers look to restore those jets with a hot fire.
[1]: https://x.com/SpaceflightNow/status/1798738262368104639
some updates here as well. https://www.space.com/news/live/boeing-starliner-live-update...
keeping my fingers crossed that everything works out. must be very tense for the astronauts.
update : issues mitigated, starliner has docked with the ISS. yes!
Related. Others?
Boeing and NASA call off Starliner crew launch minutes before liftoff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547338 - June 2024 (47 comments)
Boeing's Starliner Crew Flight Test delayed again, path forward unclear - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434398 - May 2024 (28 comments)
Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40281272 - May 2024 (162 comments)
NASA and Boeing Are (Finally) Putting Astronauts on Starliner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843148 - March 2024 (9 comments)
Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879769 - July 2023 (218 comments)
NASA safety panel skeptical of Starliner readiness for crewed flight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085531 - May 2023 (27 comments)
Boeing to ground Starliner indefinitely until valve issue solved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28185195 - Aug 2021 (42 comments)
Boeing Starliner's flight's flaws show “fundamental problem,” NASA says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297564 - Feb 2020 (140 comments)
NASA Shares Initial Findings from Boeing Starliner Orbital Test Investigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22266747 - Feb 2020 (14 comments)
Starliner faced “catastrophic” failure before software bug found - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260731 - Feb 2020 (60 comments)
Boeing reports a $410M charge in case NASA decides Starliner needs another test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22194735 - Jan 2020 (55 comments)
Boeing Starliner updates: Spacecraft flies into wrong orbit, jeopardizing test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843988 - Dec 2019 (240 comments)
New Spacesuit Unveiled for Starliner Astronauts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13488096 - Jan 2017 (65 comments)
Boeing-SpaceX Team Split Space Taxi Award - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8326845 - Sept 2014 (115 comments)
NASA to Make Major Announcement Today About Astronaut Transport to the ISS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324848 - Sept 2014 (43 comments)
SpaceX Vies With Boeing as NASA’s Taxi to Station - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296567 - Sept 2014 (49 comments)
The value that you bring to this place cannot be overstated
Excellent ... we need alternatives and competition in space.
This is probably the definition of the gov rejecting competition and choosing the absolute “safest” option, and just happens to still be around when others are nipping at their heels
Unfortunately one of the doors came off mid-flight...
Funny, on Twitter I've clicked through to every "For You", "Trending", "News", etc section.
It's not mentioned once.
I always see majestic rocket photography promoted on Twitter.
Why not today?
I thought Twitter was the worlds #1 news source.
Gallows humor on the livestream chat: bet NASA will get another movie out of this.
Photographs of the launch from Reuters:
https://reuters.com/pictures/boeings-starliner-blasts-off-fi...
I hope someone double checked those doors.
I'm glad everything went ok.
> It's crazy the US could soon have up to 5 different spacecraft/launch systems that can take humans to orbit with 2 more in development
We had a launch system that could take humans to the moon in 1972.. haven't had one since. Maybe we will get another one in our lifetime, if it is even possible.
Is there much practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still? Modern robots are cheaper and can perform science more effectively than any human
Distributing human populations to ensure survival. With current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs program that will produce the technology necessary for a lunar colony will improve materials science, medical understanding, logistics.
We could also learn to live within the means of our ecology.
That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.
I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the only system that we know works.
This is the lamest of all excuses.
It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years. Detection and mapping is very good today, and they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time. Obsessing about asteroid impact is just an excuse to engage in fantasy.
But saying "We can improve our understanding of ecology by [designing] artificial biosphere", is just the chef's kiss of bullshittery. It's like saying, that we can understand the ocean by getting a fish bowl. Not exactly, and it certainly won't teach us anything about the actual biosphere. Instead, all you'd learn about is atmosphere scrubbers and water reclamation.
No. We can't detect asteroids coming from the direction of Sun. Just ask people of Chelyabinsk, Russia. [0]
[0] https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/the-sun-is-blind...
Pssst. The Earth moves. It’s not always on the same side of the sun.
I recommend taking a look at the article I shared. It might help you gain more insight on the topic, rather than continuing to post critical comments without all the information.
[I hope an LLM made it polite enough]
This was a bit more than a hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
I'd say that such an event happening over a populated region of the Earth would be pretty bad. It's worth a bit of investment.
Here's what would happen if Tunguska happened over Paris, using a mid-range estimate of its magnitude: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=30000&lat=48.8583&ln...
Worth the investment of an extraplanetary colony? Because that’s the investment we’re talking about.
He said "like astroids". Quite frankly we don't know how frequent extinction events happen. We've had nuclear weapons for less than 100 years, and have a couple of close calls[1] already.
---
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
We could just build giant bomb shelters. It’s cheaper, holds more people, and doesn’t require nearly the investment in a completely closed ecosystem. But that ain’t sexy.
If you want something that uniquely requires leaving the planet for somewhere you have truck in literally everything except rocks, you’re pretty much limited to the sun becoming a red giant. That and gamma ray bursts. That’s pretty much it.
and what is this simple method to deflect a large asteroid headed for Earth?
A gravity tractor is the simplest solution with enough lead time. It's theoretical, but doesn't involve any exotic technology or materials.
Essentially you have a spacecraft park itself beside an asteroid. It's gravity will minutely change the asteroids trajectory. With enough lead time that's all you need. Since you're not blowing up, or applying a large focused amount of energy to the asteroid it doesn't matter what the targets composition is. You won't break it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor
To be kind of blunt, even an extinction-level asteroid hit with near-total biosphere destruction is probably still more conducive to human life than any other planet or satellite in the solar system, as evidenced by the continued existence of at least a few forms of life past the extinction event. And many of the events people worry about are far less destructive than even that (nuclear winter, for example, would probably roll Earth's climate back to pre-industrial temperatures, maybe as far as Little Ice Age, which is, uh, nowhere near extinction-level threat to humanity).
It's also worth pointing out that it's possible to do closed ecological studies without the expense of running it in space (e.g., Biosphere 2). The only thing you need space for studying in that regard is "what is the effect of non-1g environments on biological forms?" (to which existing studies suggest the answer is somewhere between "bad" and "horrible").
They are in 0g environments presumably having 1-6th isn't as bad and there might be ways to prevent/mitigate those issues.
This sounds like the harder problem.
No, it's merely incredibly difficult. Sustainable living off Earth is far beyond that.
Humans definitely can't leave. Humans are even less well suited to interstellar travel than they are to living at the bottom of the ocean, something they also don't do and have no idea how they could ever do.
So, with tremendous effort humans could visit one of their neighbouring planets. All of these planets are terrible. Mars is by far more hostile to life than anywhere humans have even visited, let alone had a permanent settlement. But we could do it. To what end?
Live here, or die here, those are your options and you should get used to it.
To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth - apparently not a priority for you but it is for those that enjoy humanity existing.
Also to explore and learn more about the universe we live in. Do you truly not see value in that? Have you never left the city/state/country you were born in?
Nothing the universe has thrown at Earth in the past 3 billion years has been capable of ending all life. And nothing that could happen in the next million years seems possible of doing that either.
When we say life on earth we mean human life and civilization. Prokaryotes, while alive, are not really what people mean. Yes they would survive asteroids, nukes, possibly nanobot swarms.
It's difficult, but I don't think it is _that_ difficult. Ecologies, like any living systems, can self-heal and regenerate. There are practices that allows us to tap into that regenerative power as societies. They may not happen fast relative to our individual human lifespan, but 50 years is more than enough time to restore wastelands or reverse desertification.
I don't have a good answer to how sustain an economy based upon mining, refining, and manufacturing things out of mineral resources. Many of us have gotten used to modern conveniences (at its own cost related to mental and emotional health, and social cohesiveness). I think what most people balk on are on the perception of having to go back to barely surviving off the land, or having to alter lifestyle. Lifestyle may have to change, but the same regenerative power of ecologies also gives us significantly more resiliency.
Why do anything at all? Who are you to dictate to others what their options are?
That would be easier if we could move polluting industries off Earth.
Maybe we can find alternatives besides those industries.
As far as cleaning up pollutants themselves, there are some amazing work by Dr John Todd for cleaning up pollution. Two examples of his work — a system capable of breaking down DDT within 40 days. Another where he cleaned up a superfund site that had all ten of EPA’s top toxic pollutant list.
Self-sustaining human colonies in space or on other celestial bodies are very distant dream, probably it will take several centuries or millennia to happen. The main reason is human body: we haven’t figured out reproduction in low gravity yet. Unless some fascist state will do it, we will never experiment with it until full confidence in safety for the mother and the child.
It’s easier than you think to get 1g of gravity in space.
It's a very distant dream that will always remain distant if we don't work on it. We have a lot of things to test before we get to testing the gravitational requirements of human reproduction. As it stands, we don't even know our basic gravitational needs. All we know is that 0g is too low. It's entirely possible that it turns out we can function relatively fine at something low but non-zero, like 0.1g.
I don't think distributing within the solar system is going to do much for us. What takes out the Earth will probably take out everything else - we'll be backstopped on Earth for centuries after we have spaceborne civilization.
I think opening up a new frontier however, is valuable - in fact specifically, the transition which would be good would be to move heavy industry out of the biosphere entirely. You can imagine a nearer future where a place like Earth is treated as the paradise it is, and the idea of polluting it when we have all the rest of the uninhabitable space of the solar system to do that in is thought of as ludicrous.
And this isn't really unreasonable - beyond a certain point, the resource and energy availability of space is far greater then the places we can reach despite the advantages of the biosphere - whether we do it by robots or with manned exploration.
There's a zeitgeist change that I think would accompany having enough people working frequently in space: where its a couple of degrees of separation from someone who's looked at the pale blue dot and gone "you have no idea how valuable this is" (I do think we should have a program which sponsors any world leader who wants to on a trip around the moon: send the people making the big decisions out past the dark side, where the thing bubble of air, steel and alloy is the only thing keeping them alive - might not always work but at least then we can know they've had the opportunity for that perspective).
Instead, launch sealed, frozen embryos into orbits of various bodies in our Solar System — bury a few on the Moon.
I think a long term view is it’s the basis for building heavy industry in space as it has a lot of natural resources that can be exploited industrially and escape orbit velocities are much less from the moon than earth surface. This eventually leads to a general space infrastructure. If you believe the end of humanity is on earth then this probably isn’t convincing. Folks like myself believe we are inexorably driven to spread life as a function of what life is and we have no meaningful choice but to keep going.
But as long as some subset of humanity believes in this humanity will keep investing in it. Not everyone has to be aligned and we can have many priorities at once, not the least of which is robotic science which I only see as mutually exclusive as long as there’s not plentiful private investment, which there is at the moment. I don’t see robotic exploration as suffering in the build out of extremely low cost launch capability and a general space infrastructure including moon infrastructure. I see it benefiting enormously as the costs and risks drop significantly.
If we ever get to heavy industrialization of lunar resources, how are we going to deal with the CO2 footprint of rockets?
A spacex falcon 9 contains ~as much fuel as a 747. Note: fuel, not fuel + oxidizer
Edit: falcon 9, not starship
Source?
I get Starship 34,000,000 kg + 12,000,000 kg vs 747 ~200,000 liters ≅ 150,000 kg, or about 1/300 th of what Starship holds.
Oh shit I'm sorry I am so wrong. I had calculated falcon 9. Thank you for the correction
There are a million viable (and often quite fun) answers here, but one is really kind of funny. What do you get when you mix oxygen and hydrogen? Water? No, of course not! You get rocket fuel! Seriously. Liquid oxygen + liquid hydrogen is a common, and highly effective, fuel that's been used for various engines such as on the Space Shuttle Main Engine.
Rockets can also be carbon negative in another way. A rocket that uses less than 50% of its fuel getting to orbit would be carbon negative, because it's spending less than 'x/2' fuel to go burn at least 'x/2' fuel away from Earth. Factor in some of the fuel coming from carbon neutral sources, and it quickly becomes quite easy for a rocket to be carbon negative.
In theory it's possible to make a carbon-neutral methane rocket based on atmospheric CO2, though that depends on how completely the methane can be burned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gas
I don't remember exactly but a rocket launch has the carbon footprint of ten American citizens produce annually.
The flow of mass would be the other way around. Lunar regolith has every element embedded in it and there’s little need to bring anything but bootstrapping -to- the moon. Return to earth from the moon wouldn’t be CO2 producing anywhere but the moon.
You'd be moving other polluting industries off-Earth, thus offsetting the footprint of things that cannot be done without said footprint.
Mass drivers.
Bragging rights (ostensibly "practical" in a geopolitical, soft power projection sense)
Didn't we get to brag about it already? The value of continuing to have the capability seems to be outweighed by the costs of maintaining the facilities and equipment
You don't get much bragging rights for being first to plant a flag on the Moon once China has a continuously manned outpost there.
Establishing a permanent presence on the moon would be a stepping stone to further exploration of other planets. (Mars in particular.)
Since its only a 3-4 day trip, with transfer windows every month (and non-optimal ones essentially constantly). resupply missions and rotating astronauts/personnel are going to be much easier. Much less of a gravity well to deal with.
The plan would be for in situ resource extraction and manufacturing. With enough of a human presence, projects like local construction of spacecraft become feasible. And something like a mass driver would be much more feasible on the moon. A big enough one and you're even considering interstellar probes ...
It would require a consistent, sustained effort. But not astronomical in US budget terms. Maybe $20-$30 billion/year (about of 3-4% the defense budget)
Anything beyond Earth orbit requires either multi-stage expendable rockets, which isn't economical for supporting a moon base, or in-orbit refueling that has better economics than expendable rockets, which depends on cheap rapid reusability. If you can't land, refuel, and fly without refurbishing the launch system, rocket engines, etc. you can't ship fuel to orbit cheaply enough to justify in-orbit refueling.
Starship is a vastly better attempt at more of these goals than STS. But if it misses cost, or payload, or reliability goals it won't solve this problem. It is even possible that it will take too many attempts in which a ship and 39 engines are expended to even get close.
Or we can get the fuel from the moon. The moon has water ice, which means it has hydrogen and oxygen, which you can use as rocket propellant.
It looks like the RTT is 6 minutes (more or less depending on orbit) for packets send to mars, but despite that it does seem like the easier option yeah.
Not really accurate at all.
The lowest the RTT gets is six minutes but that is a brief period every couple of years. The longest RTT is 45 minutes.
Even 6 minutes makes any kind of tele-operation infeasible and require system to function autonomously. This restricts the kinds of science that are currently possible.
"can perform science more effectively than any human" is very disputable.
If they are so much better, why does anyone get up off their couch and do field research? Just let the robots do it.
Besides, it's human nature to explore, in person. As George Mallory said, "Because it's there."
For off planet research: because ( https://xkcd.com/695/ aside ) we don't care if the robots "die". Human space exploration has an enormous amount of overhead to keeping the humans alive at all; even the sensors humans bring with them are compromised by having to be operable in a spacesuit.
Not saying that there isn't value to sending humans into space - it's just that that value isn't in gathering data for science, other than on the astronaut-subjects themselves.
Robots aren’t performing science, they’re doing one half of one step of the scientific method: collecting data in an experiment. It’s humans doing all the rest.
I would imagine (a) keep watch over the lunar atomics and (b) fend off PLA officers stationed there permanently after Chang'e-42.
Penal colonies of course!
This is a common misconception. Modern robots are very limited in their capabilities, out of necessity. Mars is a great example. Perseverance has the most capable drill of any rover, and it can drill up to 2.4 inches deep. [1] And these drills are used extremely sparingly because they tend to break rapidly, like any sort of moving part. Perseverance's top theoretic speed is around 0.07mph, and it's a speed demon compared to prior rovers. [2] Same reasons - the more you move the more things break, and the nearest repair shop is pretty far away. The first humans on Mars will almost certainly learn vastly more in a week than we've learned in 60+ years of probes and rovers!
Beyond this though (and also the survival aspect as others have hit on), I'd simply mention the inspirational aspect. Many who lived through the Moon landings (as well as those who did not) see this as humanity's greatest achievement. And I think this sort of stuff helps to create a better future for a people. When asked what they want to be when they grow up, the most popular choice for American children today is a vlogger/YouTuber, the least popular is astronaut [3]. In China, the answers are completely reversed. Who's going to have the better generational outcome in 30 years?
But of course this isn't just for children. So many people just seem completely devoid of hope and optimism for the future. And that's completely understandable the way things have been going for many decades now. But show literally anybody this video of the Falcon Heavy landing [4] and the first question you will always get is, "Is that real?" People just can't even believe what we're achieving, and I think doing even more of this, on a much larger scale, and making it all the more visible would really improve so many lives, and likely the entire country itself. Just read the comments to that video, to see how it impacts people, and those are friggin YouTube comments!
[1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-...
[2] - https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-self-driving-on-mar...
[3] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-...
[4] - https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1704
It makes more sense to have a permanent human presence on the Moon than to aim for Mars.
The Moon is both very near and very easy to communicate with so it is the perfect first place to learn about building a "colony" before moving on to Mars.
Not much point sending robots to go look at Moon rocks if there's no pretext of sending people there. I mean, you could make some PhDs out of it I'm sure, but would that be worth the public expense? I don't think so.
Humans won't survive long-term without colonizing other planets and/or star systems. There are existential threats already in motion besides climate change; Earth won't have any surface liquid water in about a billion years. While there is several times more water underground than on the surface, that may also not be locked away well enough for when the Sun becomes a red giant 4 billion years later.
Yes, humans living on other celestial bodies is a goal in itself, expanding us beyond Earth and a few people in LEO.
Cities on the moon and Mars are a reasonable and achievable goal. There are resources which can much more easily be exploited with real people on premise, some people will want to live in different environments, there are opportunities for sport, entertainment, tourism, and plenty of industries which will be much more effective with skilled labor on site instead of meticulously planned missions which often fail and if they don't spend a whole bunch of effort overcomming the basics of operating.
All of the science returns of the robotic missions to mars in the past three decades could have been done by a geologist in a space suit with a rock hammer in 15 minutes, and probably done better. Robots really, really suck.
Also many people see the whole point to be expanding people out into the cosmos, not the science.
Why does someone always do this in a thread about space stuff?
Without fail there's always some negative Nelly who already knows the answer to their downer question.
We get it. You don't care about space shit, most people don't. But why go derail a thread about a space accomplishment with negativity?
Is there much practical reason for that?
I wouldn't go that far, but we already had humans on the moon so we can get away with robots doing the science now. I still think sending astronauts to mars would speed up research, for example.
The big one that robots can’t do is studying human biology in space.
How do we fare long term on a foreign body? What does trauma medicine look like? How do we accommodate the diseases and disabilities that frequent our non-astronaut grade population? Is gestation, birth and development possible in low gravity? Et cetera.
Then Moon provides the easiest place to do this at scale by virtu of being the closest place to Earth with in situ resources.
This comment is an invitation to an uninformative comparison. Apollo was just barely able to take a crew to the moon and back, with many expendable stages, using 5% of US GDP to do it. Almost all the value in Apollo is indirect value in the form of technologies developed for Apollo.
Why replicate that? Indeed we should ask: Is there a goal to value, other than the obvious "the Chinese would get there first if we don't?"
A lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS. We will discover that lunar regolith is a bigger nuisance than floating boogers in the ISS.
The mission goal was to land a man on the moon and return him to earth safely.
Where’s the barely? What would you have done better?
I would think barely here means, that there were quite a lot of incidents and with some bad luck, none of the astronauts would have come home.
It was still a great accomplishment, so I would not use barely, but technically it is correct I think. They spend great effort, to just make it to the moon, which was the goal, to beat the sowjets. And that succeeded. No great safety margins, not much room for error - barely.
What I meant is that the multi-stage Moon rocket, the capsule and command module, and the lander and ascent module, were just barely within the realm of the possible as dictated by the rocket equation. And, as you mention, the risks were just barely acceptable.
Source?
We can design—and are designing—automation into a lunar base in a way we couldn’t with the ISS.
That sounds really interesting, but web searching mostly brings up very old research. Do you have a link for any of the up-to-date work on automating the base?
Saturn V was ridiculously expensive [1] and very unsafe.
Apollo was built to get to the Moon fast half a dozen times. We’re building more ambitiously today.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V $1.5bn in 2024 dollars
Von Braun was asked if the Saturn V was safe to launch. He asked six of his engineering reports, each replied nein. Von Braun replied that the Saturn V had six nines of reliability.
Golf clap for that one
That's literally the SLS.
SLS is too underpowered to send Orion into lunar orbit, let alone Orion + a lander.
It would probably become a lot more possible if we could get this "SLS/Orion with frickin' Starship as a lunar lander Rube Goldberg machine" monkey off our backs.
Interesting and very readable elaboration of this snark: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
I just want to live long enough to see a ship, intended for long-term use, assembled in orbit.
I just want to live long enough to see Venus terraformed into an ocean and forest covered paradise.
Need a planet spinner if that's going to happen.
A lot of mirrors in a 24h orbit might be easier.
Still, even then it will take, what, about a century to get rid of the CO2? (Does it even count as an "atmosphere" at ground level, given that it's past the critical point and the distinction between liquid and gas phases no longer exists?)
If going that far, use the sunlight for power / in space solar ovens. Just make sure to limit how much power goes to Venus because that will increase the net energy in that envelope.
One of the options is to use the mirrors to boil off the atmosphere, the other is to keep the sunlight away for so long the atmosphere almost entirely condenses and can then be paved over; either way, it was a long wait.
You can't "boil off" the atmosphere. You need to accelerate the gas molecules past the planetary escape velocity, otherwise they'll just cool down and drop back onto the surface.
There's no realistic way to evacuate that much gas (the surface pressure on Venus is almost 100 atmospheres!).
One option is first to cover the surface of Venus with water, by first creating giant orbital mirrors to let the atmosphere to cool. Then you can sequester the carbon dioxide as elemental carbon under the water surface. Oxygen released in the process will be naturally consumed by all the underoxidized minerals present on Venus.
Venus hardly has any water, as it has already lost most of its hydrogen into space (due to its very weak magnetic field): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#:~:text=The%20solar%20wi....
Doing it to heavier gases on human time scales is a whole other scale of problem.
The idea I've heard is to dump many gigatons of hydrogen into the atmosphere to make H2O and elemental Carbon via the Sabatier reaction which will occur immediately with Venus' temperature. This gets rid of some of the CO2. The water will be part of the atmosphere, the carbon will rain down on the surface of the planet.
There will still be a lot of CO2 around though. Now you shade the planet with a giant sunshade and the atmosphere will cool down to the point where CO2 will snow out as dry ice after a couple decades of cooling. What you'll have left is a layer of carbon, followed by a layer of water ice, followed by a layer of dry ice. The atmosphere will be 2 - 3 times as dense as Earth's with almost entirely nitrogen gas. You use autonomous robots and mass drivers to collect and launch the excess dry ice into orbit.
Once you've got most of the CO2 ice out you remove the sunshade and the planet will very quickly thaw out. The planet will be covered mostly in oceans at this point with a thick nitrogen and CO2 atmosphere. At this point use genetically modified algae and microbes which, using the plentiful sunlight, can quickly convert the high CO2 atmosphere into oxygen and organics for the soil. The planet may still need some minor solar shading to keep the temps down until the CO2 approaches earth levels. Introduce Earth life to build a natural biosphere and voila! You've got a whole new Earth whose biosphere should be able to sustain life for millions of years!
Velocity in a gas is a distribution; raise temperature and increasing fraction exceeds escape velocity.
This is why Earth has ~ no hydrogen or helium in the air.
"Realistic" for values including "let's build a mirror the size of a planet, in space, and keep it together for centuries".
It's currently scifi to send more than a mere few tons total mass that way, and mirrors wouldn't even survive decades, so "realistic" is a bad criticism.
Oh, I'm sure it'll take at least several decades and more likely centuries but getting a new planet would be worth it. Seems like a harder project than terraforming Mars but in the end it would be a nicer place in my estimation. With only 7% less gravity, nearly as much surface area and without the dim sun that Mars has I think I'd rather live there.
Yeah seems like with our current physics, almost everything can be cheated out, except mass and gravity. There's no other solid Earth-sized mass now other than Venus so it may be our only real potential second home.
You can cheat gravity with a centrifuge; when the alternative is on the scale of "let's freeze or boil away Venus's atmospheric", building a city-sized rotating cylinder to live in is trivial.
But that new planet has the exact same fate as Earth in that the Sun will eventually devour it. The only way for the species to survive longer than the sun is to find other planets around other stars at different stages of their life cycles. Yeah, I agree. Expecting the species to survive that long is a bit optimistic.
We have billions of years before that happens. We're talking about things we can do in the next hundreds.
I've always loved the idea of floating habitat in Venus' atmosphere but the temperature remains the largest part of the problem.
Kurzgesagt has a good youtube video of the idea. It's wacky and unrealistic in some ways but doesn't violate any laws of physics and seems feasible to the sort of advanced civilization we humans hope to have in many decades.
In discussions I've read on planetary climate modelling one idea is that if Venus had an atmosphere like Earth's but 50%+ thicker and an ocean covering 70% of it (like Earth) you'd get an ideal situation. Because of the strong sunlight and slow spin you'd get a tendency for thick storm clouds continuously covering whatever part of the planet was experiencing mid-day, shielding the planet from the strongest and hottest rays of the (60% stronger) sunlight. The warmth would convect to the night side keeping things from getting too cold. Depending on the conditions it's possible that below-freezing temperatures wouldn't even be common in the depth of the night.
The long night seems like a problem for life but forests already thrive in the warmer parts of the near-arctic. And in times past even Antarctica had tropical rainforests despite experiencing a polar night. Another idea I had was building a ring around the planet of dark material, perhaps of left over carbon after we cleaned up the CO2 rich atmosphere. The dark ring would provide shade to certain parts of the planet during the day and would reflect light for the long night.
Sounds like a sure fire recipe for a (permanent?) super intense electrical storm in right that spot.
Might make that specific latitude uninhabitable due to the planet turning. Though it could be worth the trade off, due to there being a bunch of available land on the planet in other latitudes.
If you have some truly huge arrays of super capacitors such a permanent electrical storm might even be useful. :)
Sounds sorta fun IMO. With the slower rotation of the planet and the rotational winds being slower maybe there would be less lightning. IDK though, I'm talking out of my ass.
I've read about many terraforming ideas such as these, and I really think they're kinda pointless, because it would probably be MUCH easier to just build O'Neal cylinders. With those, you can create artificial habitats with the exact parameters you want, instead of trying to change an entire planet so be somewhat habitable by humans.
Clever. You seem to want to live on forever...
Interesting. And I'm thinking I want to see a permanent lunar base but also, "Where does it end?"
Humans walked on the Moon in my lifetime. I should be contented with that.
I'm apparently younger than you, and humans have not walked on the moon in my lifetime. I'm discontented by that.
Same, I’m terribly disappointed that I can’t simply walk on the moon. Parents generation really dropped the fuckin ball there eh
I don't recall a ball, but they dropped a feather and a hammer (the gravity experiment).
Golf ball
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_surface_operat...
The 3rd para talks about the (golf) balls.
Spherical hammer in the vacuum is a ball.
Really probably your grandparents or great grandparents depending on your age. Most Americans born after the moon landings had boomer or gen-x parents. All the men who walked on the moon and the majority of those in high office until roughly the 1990s were silent generation, the GI generation or older. They’re the ones who had the power to keep the space program going but didn’t. Once your parents had significant influence the Apollo program was long gone, the know how to build the hardware was gone, they would have had an even harder time than us rebuilding it because the commercial impetus wasn’t there and we didn’t yet have insane internet billionaires competing for launch contracts.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/03/the-destructive-generatio...
In between the Greatest Generation and Gen X - "Baby Boomer" was a name, but Destructive Generation seems to fit pretty well.
Soon there will be no living humans who have walked on the moon :/
There’s no money or geopolitical strategic importance in it, and “we” didn’t go to the moon, a saber-rattling warmongering government did using oodles of tax money and repurposed ICBMs (Mercury/Gemini).
I think perhaps Dr Strangelove is more educational about the cultural climate around the Apollo program than almost any other media.
Hopefully with vastly reduced cost to LEO it will be put within the reach of normal people who aren’t engaged in the dance of WW3 nuclear brinksmanship.
It's wild to think this is true for anyone under the half century mark.
I want to live long enough to see a viable test of larger spaceships that could send humans to Mars. I really want to live long enough to discover evidence of at least microbial life elsewhere in the solar system - Mars seems like the obvious place we can reach with a good chance for it be possible. I know there's amazingly water vapor around Europa, that's so much more remote.
I think about 30 years should lead to more exploration of Mars, and maybe multiple landers andn robots getting there from here, maybe even a return trip. (human travel to Mars feels so far out, even if Starship works out in the next 10 years).
Well, isn't it what the ISS is?
No, it has no propulsion system. That is the difference between a ship and a station.
It does have thrusters used for orbital correction about monthly, (and maybe dodging debris here and there,) but it's fair to say that system is not for taking trips or anything.
Even less than that - most of the station-keeping is supplied by visiting spacecraft; the thrusters on the (ancient, failing) Zvezda module appear to be rarely used.
My mistake!
angry Cygnus noises
I think there are thrusters on the Russian side of the station. They aren't large but they move the stations orientation for docking sometimes. (And cartwheels for fun and horror)
Personally, I want to live long enough to hit life extension escape velocity. :)
Yeah we bemoan how short-sighted people are, but that's because we only live for a handful of decades. Think of the kind of progress that we could achieve if people were free to follow their dreams for centuries, alongside the kind of respect for the life and nature that would be necessary to live as a citizen of the world for that long.
Or, immortal Joseph Stalin having breakfast with immortal Richard Nixon, while deciding who gets sent to the gulags today.
That's a rather weird person to pick, even considering that it's probably a Futurama reference...
Nixon - now more than ever.
True, today time is the greatest equalizer. Even the rich and powerful will eventually kick the bucket and leave the future for others. If life extension takes off, the rich and powerful may live forever, while the less fortunate may still be mortal.
How long do you think for them to get to the point where they can carry all the raw materials up there?
That’s probably just a handful of starship trips of cargo
I want to live long enough that I can go and see space without having to give someone a huge amount of money
I just want to live long enough to see a human walk on Mars.
That is exactly what the cislunar transporter is going to be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/nas...
I'd settle for seeing my children grow up at least a bit!
What’s stopping you from helping to build it? Jobs in space tech exist. They need smart motivated people.
IMO, this one is the least likely.
There are a lot of problems that need to be over come for Dream Chaser to be crew rated. And AFAIK, they aren't getting NASA money to do it.
Intriguing. Can you elaborate?
The big one off the top of my head:
Dream Chaser flies in a fairing for aerodynamic reasons. In order to fly crew (so that the vehicle could have a working launch abort system), they'd need to figure out how to fly without a fairing.
Naive question: Planes and helicopters do not have the ability to safely eject passengers mid-flight. We largely accept these conditions as a risk of those modes of travel. Why is LES/LAS a unique requirement for space shuttles?
That's a fair point, although my understanding is that parachute systems for small planes are becoming more common.
My view is that flight rate is the fundamental issue at hand. Airplanes and helicoptors fly many orders of magnitude more than these capsules, which means we know they are many orders of magnitude more reliable.
They've also generally been through a long process of refinement - the original airplanes were extremely dangerous compared to modern variants.
Additionally, aircraft can afford to have a lot higher margin of safety baked in to them. Because of how high gravity is on Earth and the nature of the Rocket Equation[1], it's just not possible to have a lot of margin in rockets of capsules. They need to be extremely svelt to launch at all.
And lastly, we have experience with human spacecraft without an LES/LAS - it was the Space Shuttle. And it killed 14 people - easily the most dangerous spacecraft ever created. No one has any desire to build on that particular legacy.
---
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
No, it means we have orders of magnitude more reliability data. Same result, different point.
We have enough data to know that rockets are not as reliable as airplanes.
Also worth noting that test pilots of experimental aircraft generally wear parachutes, at least for higher risk tests. This includes tests of commercial aircraft.
Planes and helicopters do not frequently fail by exploding, but rather things like engines failing. An engine failure, even if it’s the only engine in a given airplane or helicopter, does not automatically involve a deadly crash. Airplanes can glide, frequently for very long distances, and helicopters can use the air moving across the rotors to effectively “glide” down. It’s not always possible, but they do have inherent redundancies that rockets necessarily do not.
Helicopters are actually even safer than fixed-wing airplanes this way: as long as the rotor system is working properly (i.e., it's just an engine failure), the pilot can autorotate and land on any nearby spot of clear land large enough for the helicopter, and can achieve a safe landing with no or minimal damage. In fact, helicopter pilots frequently practice this maneuver while in flight training.
Airplanes need some kind of runway, by contrast, and this isn't usually available within the glide distance. So they can "land", but it frequently won't be a pretty landing.
The main dangers with helicopter engine failures are 1) it happens too close to the ground, so there's no time to react and enter a safe autorotation, and 2) the pilot is too slow to react (low-inertia rotor systems are more dangerous this way, so helicopters like Robinsons are worse).
Planes and helicopters burn, though.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/freak...
Here's an attempt to develop a jet fuel that wouldn't burn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y33N0raKZBo
Startship will not have an abort capability either.
Neither did the Shuttle, unfortunately.
Unlike the Shuttle there will be a lot more uncrewed testing of Starship, so hopefully it will be more reliable.
planes/helicopters have a fuel source that is orders of magnitude less volatile, and are also able to safely land without power
What fuels do you mean in particular? If you’re talking about hypergolic propellants, those aren’t commonly used as a main propellant on manned rockets. Most planes and helicopters use kerosene, which is also the primary fuel used by the launch stages of manned rockets.
I think rockets in this design space have frequently been closer to prototype quality rather than commercially deployment quality.
Those other systems have other redundancies and safety mechanisms.
1) Commercial planes and helicopters are orders of magnitude safer than space flight. https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/
2) Both planes and helicopters have an ability to glide (or autogyro) to a relatively safe landing in the event of most failures. A spacecraft can also do that with wings or parachutes, but only if it gets far away from its exploding booster fast enough to survive.
3) Many military planes do have the ability to safely eject passengers.
4) astronauts dying live on stream is a really bad look.
Airline passengers are in the dime-a-dozen category of expendable. Investments in astronauts are significantly higher. You really want them to be re-usable more so than the rockets
You could go without an LES if you can convince NASA that you have sufficient contingencies to not need it (and, of course, you can do almost anything you want on a private flight). SpaceX has been entertaining the idea of not using an escape system on Starship and instead proving its safety through sheer number of flights. Although there also is just a general consensus that the flip maneuver would probably make that necessary even if they had an LES.
From some quick reading it seems like the crewed Dream Chaser is intended to fly without a fairing. The cargo version's ability to fold the wings and fly within a fairing seems to be for 1) compliance with NASAs CRS-2 requirements, 2) wide compatibility with existing boosters that weren't designed for the forces that flying without a fairing would create.
Could be spin from Sierra but that's what they were saying to the press as of 2015 when they announced the cargo variant.
https://spacenews.com/sierra-nevada-hopes-dream-chaser-finds...
The problem with the wings is they generate lift during launch and that will screw up the rocket, thus the fairing. I thought there was no known solution for that.
It seems like you could mitigate that by designing the wing such that when mounted the angle of attack is 0 and thus no lift is generated. Obviously the wing would still have an effect when the booster changes orientation or in cases of high winds. I'm not remotely qualified to calculate the scale of those forces but I don't see why any of that would be a guaranteed showstopper given a booster with enough thrust vectoring capability.
Not any different than shuttle or energia. Lift can be accounted for. It’s not as easy as launching in a fairing, but it’s certainly not impossible.
Fold the wings up?
Seems like Starship fins and Falcon 9 grid fins did that trick as well.
Can't they blow the fairing as part of launch abort?
I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't really know the answer. But I have some questions:
* How reliable will the "blow the fairing" system be? If it's only used in emergencies (instead of the regular fairing separation mechanism) than it'll suffer from the same problem as emergency generators - they're rarely tested and fail very often when needed.
* How easy is it to get the fairing out of the way once it's opened? Normally, regular aerodynamic forces slough the fairing halves off, but an LES/LAS doesn't have time for that - it's escaping a potentially exploding rocket. And those fairings will act like sails - huge surface area:volume ratio means they're just not going to move fast.
* What happens if DreamChaser hits one of the fairings on the wing? Would it damage it enough that it'd have trouble landing? Is it enough to cause it to foul the escape trajectory? Or even put it in a spin?
It seems like a lot of work to get it to work with or without a fairing.
Soyuz launches with the crew capsule under fairung and even stacked under the orbital module - it still has a LES[0], that pulls off the whole fairing away & then drops the capsule once clear of the rocket.
A bit complicated but was already used in emergency and worked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_abort_modes#Jettisonable...
That's one more thing to go wrong. In a LES scenario something(s) has gone wrong in an unrecoverable way. Very few systems can be relied upon to exist let alone work correctly. A LES on a crewed capsule is supposed to be able to pull itself from the vehicle all under its own power. It can't assume explosive fasteners on the fairing are functional or actual all function correctly.
You don't want the LES to activate, seem to be working correctly, and then blast the crew into a fairing panel that did not fully separate. The crew doesn't have time to roll down the window and kick it loose.
Star Liner has all the same problems that the Space Shuttle had. In an emergency, how do you get the crew out safely?
Starliner has a launch abort system; the Shuttle did not.
From what I understand, they use a very powerful rocket (much more powerful than Crew Dragon) to get the capsule far away from the booster. I guess it can get far enough away that NASA is satisfied that falling bits of burning SRB aren't a danger to the parachutes.
Didn't the shuttle have this harebrained thing where the crew were supposed to climb all the way to the exit hatch in their pressure suits, extend a boom along the wing in full flight and then parachute out along it?
I thought I read about that. Of course that's effectively no actual escape system lol. They'd be long dead by the time they managed all that in an out of control shuttle.
It was a proposed mechanism that was never taken really seriously.
I guess it depends on what you mean by that. Astronauts were trained on the system and it was aboard the shuttle.
Did the astronauts believe that it's likely that the system would save them? Probably not.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/escape-spe...
Yeah personally I would have taken my chances ditching the craft, tbh. It would probably ditch pretty well considering it doesn't have huge engine pods under the wings.
Yep. That's supposedly for them to ditch in the event that the main engines fail but the shuttle is controllable - they don't have enough energy for a trans-atlantic abort, so they glide and bail out over the ocean.
Harebrained is right.
No idea is a bad idea, but it can be harebrained.
How far did this plan go? Just because it was discussed and documented and thought through does not mean it was something that was actually going to happen. Was this actually developed and the parts&pieces put into place with procedures written up in the flight manual?
Yes.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/escape-spe...
During the Starline abort test only 2 of the 3 parachutes opened, and that was a pad abort test - no SRBs!! NASA not only calling that a "success", but a sufficient success to move onto crewed testing was about the moment I lost all faith in Bridenstine being different. Immediately after leaving office he picked up a cushy consulting type gigs for various aerospace/defense companies (aka Boeing et al). Shocker.
For those who might not know SRB = solid rocket booster. Boeing uses them, SpaceX doesn't. An SRB is basically like a giant firecracker. You light it and it starts burning and doesn't stop until its done. It poses substantial safety concerns in the case of an accident where you need to abort the flight. But they're cheap, extremely powerful, and relatively simple contrasted against liquid fuel engines.
Failure of 1 chute was designed for, though yes, it wasn't a great look.
SRBs are in general very safe, which is why they're still used for human rated rockets.
Well we shall see I suppose. SRB's go back to the Apollo era and NASA safety qualifications often come down to 'are you doing what we've done before'? Hence them refusing to even consider SpaceX retropulsive crew landings, even though that would be a huge step forward.
I would also observe that NASA has a relatively poor safety record contrasted against the Soyuz (which has not lost crew since 1971 in spite of flying more manned missions), and one of the few completely catastrophic crashes we have had, Challenger, was directly related to the SRB. In either case, I expect variance is playing a much larger role than most might appreciate.
While I share your reservations with solid rockets as a main propulsion system on a manned rocket, it turns out they are well suited for launch escape systems themselves for some of the same exact reasons: they’re simple and powerful.
Interestingly, both Crew Dragon and Starliner have eschewed SRB based LES/LAS systems for liquid fueled hypergolic ones. You can tell this because neither capsule has a "puller" on the nose like Apollo/Orion does.
It can’t have “all the same problems” because a number of the engineering problems came from having the spacecraft on the side of the launch vehicle
Pretty sure Star liner is at the top of its stack, so there is no risk of sheets of ice falling on it and damaging it
What? No it doesn't.
Starliner is put on top of the rocket, not next to it.
IIRC one of the big ones is that of how the crew is supposed to board the vehicle. Cargo Dreamchaser is launched in a fairing so that its aerodynamics don't matter on the way up. This is fine because the cargo can be loaded prior to payload integration. But that won't work if they're carrying crew.
Thanks, this is helpful to know. What do you know about the dream chaser problems?
SLS is a jobs program. It's not economically viable at over $1 billion per launch.
As for Blue Origin and New Glenn, this is an object lesson that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't necessarily solve it. Did you know Blue Origin was founded ~18 months before SpaceX?
For the longest time (up until ~9 months ago), Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was such an odd choice. You see, this guy seems to embody everything wrong with corporate America: he was completely focused on not failing rather than succeeding. So there were constant delays with New Glenn and the BE-4 engine, which is years behind schedule. You can't fail if you don't launch.
And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of Kindles.
Whatever happened to armadillo aerospace?
Excessive hubris around solving hardware problems in software, they blew up their rocket and ran out of money as Carmack couldn’t justify it any longer: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/82qkvl/john_carmack_...
I think it's just more that Carmack didn't want to go all in with his entire life and net worth the way Elon did (and without which SpaceX would certainly have died exactly the same death). And who can blame him?
Musk went all in with Tesla, too. At one point he was down to about $200,000 and was a few hours from bankruptcy of Tesla and himself.
Musk is an enormous risk taker.
It’s easy to take risks if the failure condition is “still a multimillionaire”.
I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places. I know several people with NW of <$50M who have stashed 2-4% of their assets away in this fashion.
World wars happen, governments collapse, favor shifts, etc. Why wouldn’t you have a backup plan when it’s just pennies?
I refuse to believe that he was ever at risk of having less than 5-10M in pocket money left over after everything implodes.
Why bother when you can just have real estate instead?
I'm likely missing something here, but to me this minimises the problem to just a reduction in the number of properties you can move into (assuming some are lost and some of the others sold).
Title to real estate, as well as its ability to be liquidated, rests wholly in the cooperation of the state, as well as their recognition of your legitimate title to same. I’m reminded of the end of Godfather 2.
10-20kg of gold coins buried at gps coordinates in the deep desert has no such limitations.
I think a lot of ultrawealthy who have experience playing the geopolitical game probably must have some hedges like this. Doesn’t Thiel have NZ citizenship without any explicit intention of residing there?
It’s not like value stored like this loses its utility even if the state doesn’t collapse/confiscate your assets/persecute you.
I can’t imagine circumstances where one would end up being a billionaire then ever being a not-millionaire unless you’re thick as a brick.
I’m not a billionaire (technically neither was Elon at the time but that’s besides the point, but I suspect human psychology leads to a non-linear relationship between net work and acceptance of risk. Most billionaires don’t want to become mere millionaires. And people in poverty would likely say it’s easy for someone in the middle class to take risks.
Maybe you don't remember this, but Elon wasn't a Billionaire with his exit from Paypal. He made his bones with Tesla/SpaceX (honestly, mostly Tesla, but we'll see how SpaceX turns out, it could be bigger in the end).
Would you mind providing a source?
"The deal ended up closing on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day."
"Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance, pg 210
It was a month, not a few hours, and I have no idea where you got the $200,000 number. That is certainly not what Elon himself said. He said 1 month.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1323640901248393217
The reason you have no idea is you're talking about different instances of near bankruptcy for Tesla. Which tends to support GP's point.
It's probably no coincidence that Bill Gates was also. Bet the farm 2-3x at least.
Wiki says:
You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company, and a good CEO also needs to have industry experience.
I don't know if either of those are actually true, there are plenty of good CEOs who came from zero experience in the industry. And plenty of bad CEOs who came from plenty of experience in the industry. Both of these run successful and not successful companies.
For example the currently Boeing CEO does not have experience in airplanes, came from a business background. And is considered a bad CEO by the average person (though considered a good CEO by stockholders, or at least was before the past few months).
the only assumption i see is the counter to that - a bad CEO equals an unsuccessful company. and i don't think that's a very controversial assumption.
Seems to imply there is an issue with a CEO of a space company previously working on Kindles.
Also seems to imply the CEO is bad because their previously only worked at Honeywell on thermostats.
In my mind none of the above has anything to do with how good or bad a CEO is. Perhaps I am misreading it. In which case ignore me.
All things being equal, you'd want a CEO who understands the business, either by coming up through the ranks or a long career at another company in the same business.
Honeywell is also an aerospace company:
https://aerospace.honeywell.com/
A bad CEO can look great on paper and in the stock price. The product however will likely not keep pace, charging more for a product providing less value.
Long term value, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are all intertwined. New management is more likely than not to harm at least one of those 3 .
I reject the notion that a good manager can manage anything.
I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up prices.
It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today.
Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox [2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdplq4cj76I
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=2s
SLS cost way, way more then $1 billion per launch. More like 4 billion $ per launch. They hope to get it to $2 billion $ eventually but that will take a while. 1 billion $ is the end goal that they use in marketing, but that's not happening anytime this or next decade.
So, the full stack of SLS costs $4.1B. But that includes the cost of Orion which is ~$1.3B when you include the European Service Module, and it includes the cost of 1 year's worth of ground support equipment including upkeep for various buildings like the VAB, etc.
The marginal cost of a cargo SLS (should one ever launch, which is looking increasingly unlikely) is a bit over $2B. Which is still a horrifically high price.
For people who don't know much about SLS, one way to put its cost into context is, every time the full stack with Orion launches, that's about 1/6th of NASA's yearly budget. And that doesn't count any development cost which is several tens of Billions.
I'm not sure that's true. I would bet with Orion its even more. It depends what you consider to be work before launch 1 as launch cost. And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS.
You can of course get higher if you add development cost as well. But that depends on how many launches there are.
From the OIG report[1]:
We have an idea of an initial cost estimate from this[2].
NASA agreed to buy 2 core stages and 2 EUSes for $3.2B. Since RS-25s are around $100M each and the SRBs are around $200M each, this pushes the cost of the rocket up to $2.4B, maybe a bit more.
---
1. https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-22-003.pd...
2. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasa-commits-to-future-...
It's a total waste of taxpayer money and an extension of the pork of the military/government-aerospace/industrial complex. And they're still using Russian-made rocket engines on Atlas V prior to switching to Vulcan Centaur, another expensive platform. The American taxpayer deserves to have billions in waste cut out and capital used more efficiently at SpaceX and other vendors where there is value/$.
Yet that was historically the most successful approach in XX century for most of research-intensive industries (space, transistors, energy etc) -- when government spends crazy amounts of taxpayers money for some programs that bring little $$ back, but sprawl a lot of commercial startup follow-ups.
Investing in commercial approaches as the step 1 doesn't seem to work in multi-billion R&D endeavors.
So yes, it's not fair, but turns out to be better for the country down the road.
That works for a bit, and then all the others jostle in and start feeding on the pork. SpaceX will get this eventually too if it does well enough and settles into a routine of project bids, project management, technical project success, and more bids.
Cost-plus contracts work during wartime when everybody is motivated by the war to get the job done fast, to end the war and get their friends and family back home safely as soon as possible.
During peace time, the predominant motive is to maximize profit by dragging out the work.
True about founding before SpaceX. But wasn't it just a think tank for a while?
How does that make it better? :p
In many ways it still is just a think tank.
There's a phrase "failure to launch" that would imply the opposite sentiment
I believe that the parent commenter means "you can't fail if you don't try"
If you're too risk adverse to even try, then just sit down and get out of the way. I want to put the shut up part of that quote in there too as in quit fighting for contracts/bids that could go to people that aren't afraid.
You can't fail if you don't try, but you can't succeed either.
It's also a hedge against SpaceX imploding/compromise/whatever. In that role, cost is less important than having a provably functional product. I'm not saying anything is likely to happen to SpaceX, just saying that having SpaceX as a SPOF in the US space program would not be the best strategy.
Starliner is that hedge, SLS isn't. Using SLS for delivery to the ISS would be a crime against tax payers.
Such a sad take though, SpaceX is probably filled with America loving people not matter what a PR firms bot spew online about musk
The BE-4 was launched earlier this year. I wouldn’t assume that late means never.
the BE-4 is an engine - it was finally used in a rocket january yes - after being in development for almost 15 years. That us still kinda slow compared to spacex.
New Glenn was announced in 2016. An 8 year long development process is hardly slow in aerospace. The development costs are also somewhere between three and four billion dollars. The real problem with Blue Origin is that Jeff didn't really give a damn about Blue Origin and let himself get scammed out of his money.
Given how many people work at Blue, I would suggest its more then four billion $. The Ariane 6 cost 5 billion $ or more. BlueOrigin has been spending almost 2 billion $ a year.
Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from a jobs program.
Oooh the founding before spacex is a huge surprise. I always assumed it was bezos trying to keep up with the joneses with musk.
Only possible with the existence of "billionaires".
If by that you mean "average people pooling their billions to further advance science and technology", sure.
None of this was done in a vacuum of billionaire self funding.
Is that true? We live in a remarkably gilded age where a handful of people (whose names we all know) cashed in on the Dot-Com Boom. Their pleasure appears to be, for a few of them anyway, rockets and spacecraft.
A vacuum of billionaire self funding? Of course not, but would these ventures have progressed to where they are without the deep pockets of some of these billionaires?
IIRC, Musk wasn't listed as a billionaire until 2012, and that possibly as a result of (rather than cause of) SpaceX having successfully sent cargo to the ISS.
People mock him for being bad at estimating how long projects will take… but even if you agree with the critics, he's still the one-eyed in the land of the blind when it comes to space mission project planning.
He did self-fund SpaceX to the tune of $100M or so. He wasn’t a billionaire, but that was awful close.
That's a factor of ten, which is like calling me a millionaire when I saved just enough to buy a 35 square meter apartment in a small village just outside Cambridge (UK)… in the middle of the house price dip from the global financial crisis.
He also put money into Tesla and Solar City at the time. We don’t know the true extent of his wealth (Forbes estimates are notoriously inaccurate).
Fair, I've heard the same from chatting with someone who shall not be named who got on a different list.
I can't remember if it was them or someone else who said that people lie about their wealth all the time for lists like these; the show-offs who want on them and pretend to have more, and the quiet ones who want off them and pretend to have less. (The person previously mentioned was one of the quiet ones).
The funding was from nasa contracts, which is public funds. Someone would have done it even as a consortium of sub billionaires.
Is neutron to be man rated?
Yes and no.
It's probably more accurate to say "human ratable". They're planning on designing the rocket with human rating in mind, so that if they want to do it in the future, it'll be easier.
But NASA doesn't human rate a rocket - they human rate the entire system as a whole, so it doesn't really make sense to say "human rate Neutron".
I wonder how that's supposed to work with their unique captive fairing design. Feels like they'd have to design crew flight specific boosters which don't have the fairings.
Rocket Lab mentions “human spaceflight” on the Neutron page, that’s the only mention I’ve seen of it. I haven’t seen any plans for a spacecraft for carrying humans or how they might handle re-entry.
https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/neutron/
It's the new billionaire yacht club.
I doubt there are any billionaires in Boeing, or NASA.
For purposes of discussion, ignoring Boeing is something I think is acceptable at this point. They comment was clearly a nod to Bezos/Musk. Sadly, as far behind as Blue Origin is to SpaceX, I still the less poorly of them than Boeing even after today's launch
They comment on a thread about Boeing’s Starliner ferrying NASA astronauts to the ISS atop a ULA rocket.
Don't forget that for the foreseeable future, until other plans are made, there is a hard mission count limit for starliner, which is the number of remaining atlas V cores. The engines are Russian made and subject to sanction, so nasa could just refuse to recertify starliner on a new platform, so sad, so sorry, and have starliner just disappeae into tte night while saving face fir boeing.
NASA is keener on having Starliner flying than Boeing is. More likely scenario is Boeing decide they don't want to fly it anymore and they don't bother proceeding with the recertification, at least not without getting a lot more money from NASA.
. . . so nasa could just refuse to recertify starliner on a new platform . . .
That could happen, but I don't see it as likely. NASA is far more likely to spend ridiculous amounts of money to keep it alive in the name of "competition" or some such.
SLS + Orion is so expensive that it's not worth listing, IMO.
Also doesn’t meet the same flight certification standards as the other options listed.
While EU has none.
EU cannibalized its one (1) existing production line for making spacecraft (used to be busy making ATVs for ISS resupply) for Orion's service module production. They're not interested at all in increasing their own capabilities, they just want to not completely lose it.
For me the crazy part is that SpaceX has done 12 crewed flights before Boeing even got their first set of test pilots of the ground. I recall back when NASA was justifying giving nearly twice as much money to Boeing that "because they were much more likely to be ready sooner."
It's not surprising that people in the largest organization on earth (our federal government) think that way. They are so risk averse it creates its own risk, namely, what if you miss out on one great opportunity after another due to risk aversion.
It's a really exciting time. Also the Chinese have lots of space going on. Chang'e 5 is on its way back from the moon. Tiangong is quite large now. I'm thrilled to see humanity accelerate this.
I don't think it's crazy; it's competition, which is what should be happening. We want multiple private companies to be in this game, because that's the only way access to space will ever become practical at any kind of scale.
Went from 0 to many pretty fast really.
I wonder when we will first step foot on the moon?
SLS + Orion should be in that second category.