Don't ever let anyone tell you that something is impossible.
Yep! Never tell me the odds! Great moment in human history.
SES-10 Mission
201–210 of 368 posts
Re: SES-10 Mission
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there is probably a reason why nobody thought it was worth doing it again ever since. More seriously though, just because many projects were wrongly considered foolish in the past, does not mean one can not point at a new one and call it foolish. History tends to remember those who turned out to be brilliant, and forget all those who genuinely were foolish. The example I like is Franz Reichelt [1]. People aroun…
Franz Reichelt clearly failed in his approach, but his idea was not crazy -- today we have wingsuits that can fly.
Yet as of today nobody has ever landed with just a wingsuit. You need a parachute.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#203Without SpaceX and Tesla the world would have been really depressing.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Illiterate people can too using Skype and such. Instant planetwide communication between any party of humans sharing a common language is now pretty much a given.
While you are correct for the most part, I would point out that text services have wider distribution even if only for bandwidth reasons. But there are other reasons, there are good (enough) and widely distributed text standards (SMS), but not yet for video. But maybe we are both over thinking it, does the old voice network reach even further?
You can use Skype and similar services without video.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm ok with aiming high and en-passant solving cheap access to orbit. Anything else is gravy, imagine if that dream did not exist this whole saga would not have happened. Dreams are good, they allow people to expend energy chasing that dream and the spin-offs from that may be worth as much or more to humanity than the original dream, even if we may not be able to figure out what path that might take today. I'm certai…
It's a bit disappointing to me that poverty, human trafficking, addiction, habitat destruxtion, cultural erasure, genocide, torture, extinction, etc aren't very powerful motivators for such people. I feel such pressure to use our new skills to solve these problems, but I know 10 years ago they were a combination of invisible/impossible to me. If I hadn't been aggressively pushed by smart feminists to examine my life…
Human nature does not lend itself very well to engineered solutions. If you can so much as put a minor dent in that problem that does not involve cures worse than the disease that would be an engineering feat much more impressive than anything that SpaceX has done to date.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Franz Reichelt clearly failed in his approach, but his idea was not crazy -- today we have wingsuits that can fly.
Yet as of today nobody has ever landed with just a wingsuit. You need a parachute.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm ok with aiming high and en-passant solving cheap access to orbit. Anything else is gravy, imagine if that dream did not exist this whole saga would not have happened. Dreams are good, they allow people to expend energy chasing that dream and the spin-offs from that may be worth as much or more to humanity than the original dream, even if we may not be able to figure out what path that might take today. I'm certai…
It's a bit disappointing to me that poverty, human trafficking, addiction, habitat destruxtion, cultural erasure, genocide, torture, extinction, etc aren't very powerful motivators for such people. I feel such pressure to use our new skills to solve these problems, but I know 10 years ago they were a combination of invisible/impossible to me. If I hadn't been aggressively pushed by smart feminists to examine my life…
Things like space-flight can be solved by relatively small teams without having to convince billions of people from different cultures to change what they are doing.
In terms of global development, things have improved greatly over the last 50 years, say.
So it depends what kind of person you are. Do you like sitting in committees? Do you like, or can you tolerate a great deal of convincing other people to do things? How many cycles of that have you been through? How many otherwise good projects have you seen fail due to (human) factors entirely outside of the participants' control.
Although it may seem that way sometimes, hard engineering problems aren't really an adversarial game. Hard human problems typically are.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Illiterate people can too using Skype and such. Instant planetwide communication between any party of humans sharing a common language is now pretty much a given.
While you are correct for the most part, I would point out that text services have wider distribution even if only for bandwidth reasons. But there are other reasons, there are good (enough) and widely distributed text standards (SMS), but not yet for video. But maybe we are both over thinking it, does the old voice network reach even further?
Audio-only is a little better that way.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
And they caught it again. Truly amazing.
Amazing. But the video seemed to cut out right before landing.
It always happen right after you can barely see the fire reflecting on the barge. The vibrations from the rocket screws with the satellite connection.
We don't have the technology yet to have internet in the middle of the ocean without satellites.
Re: SES-10 Mission
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are several reasons: adventure, incentivize cheaper space travel, drastically improve humanity's chance at survival. Waitbutwhy has an amazing explanation of the how's and why's. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-coloni...
I'm familiar with this article. First, "adventure" is a reason to go there, not to settle. Second, I'm not buying the "drastically improve humanity's chance at survival" argument. There have been several mass extinction events in the past, so in order to survive one that might be coming, we should move to a place where there is likely no life at all? That does not make any sense to me. If we can survive on mars, we c…
You don't need to send a live person to ensure the survival of the species. I agree, it's not about that.