201–210 of 246 posts
I have the feeling this should be bigger. This was 03:00 localtime for me and I expected to wake up to headlines about the moon everywhere. But even here it vanished from the front page. No trends (Germany) on Twitter or YouTube. No top news on news sites. My "friends" on Facebook aren't talking about it. My twitter timeline only has tweets from the obvious accounts (SpaceX, Elon Musk, …) about it. What happened?
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How much of your capital do you plan to allocate? And do you plan to allocate any of mine (i.e., the taxpayer)?
How about not buying some of those problematic F-35's? Or, maybe, skip the next invasion of a foreign country. Do you have any idea how much a bomb costs?
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>excluding extremely elite painters and musicians I think that's what they're going for with this mission. Nearly every world-famous artist would be interested in something like this, so they won't be short of options. If you can, why not pick the absolute best?
Best? Who is better, Yo Yo Ma or Wayne Shorter? Bob Dylan or Paul Mcartney or Stevie Wonder? Or Bjork? Ai Wewei or Banksy or Stan Lee? Stephen King or Salman Rushdie? Sorry for getting snippy, but my Point is, art, especially of all things, while it certainly has its quantifiable aspects, is a domain where talking about “absolute best” and “world famous” is not very constructive or useful, imho.
1. Yo Yo Ma
2. Stevie Wonder
3. Salman Rushdie.
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Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. Ironically, or fittingly, I've been reading a comprehensive collection of his short stories, because it was impressed on me early in my life that he was a great author, and I have recently been horrified at how terrible many of his more obscure ones are. The interesting thing is that the quality does not simply improve with time and experience. There are extreme outliers.
Weird question: I've been trying to find a short story I read years ago, which I think is by Sturgeon. Is there any chance you have run across it? In it, an engineer is brought into a war zone, where giant tank-like creatures are on the edge of overrunning the front lines. The lines must be maintained in a cave system to keep extracting a valuable mineral. The generals keep pressuring the engineer for weapons, but he…
I have the feeling this should be bigger. This was 03:00 localtime for me and I expected to wake up to headlines about the moon everywhere. But even here it vanished from the front page. No trends (Germany) on Twitter or YouTube. No top news on news sites. My "friends" on Facebook aren't talking about it. My twitter timeline only has tweets from the obvious accounts (SpaceX, Elon Musk, …) about it. What happened?
We've already seen several announcements of civilian space voyages planned for just far enough into the future that nobody's reputation will be harmed too much when the timeline quietly expands indefinitely. The "boy who cried wolf" effect is very much at work here, and quite rightly IMO.
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How about not buying some of those problematic F-35's? Or, maybe, skip the next invasion of a foreign country. Do you have any idea how much a bomb costs?
How about not give the uber rich a huge tax break?
We need to teach our kids that, when the world is exceedingly generous to them, it's nice to care for the ones it wasn't so nice to.
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> on a once in a lifetime trip AFAIR, Burt Rutan said he wasn't that keen to watch Apollo-11 landing because he assumed it's soon going to be routine. So far it wasn't. But why do you think it will not become more routine - perhaps a lot more routine - this time? Surely one can't count on that - but we do can dream and we do can bring some of our dreams to reality, even though we aren't always good with predicting wh…
There's literally (yes, literally literally) nothing there on the Moon, and going there costs more than going to the Mariana Trench. No, it will not become more routine.
You're simply not being accurate in saying that there's nothing there.
It's worth keeping in mind "Elon Time". 2023 is a "no earlier than" date. It's if everything goes to plan, no new problems arise. I'd love to see it happen on schedule but I have doubts.
Setting an arbitrary deadline is not a negative. It gives people goals to achieve vs infinite discussion/research. Even if the date does get pushed, it's not the end of the world. NASA is famous for its schedules getting pushed. When's the JWT launching? When did the Hubble launch? How far behind was the LHC? Yes, people complain, but I would rather have them late and working than rushed and not. Look at what Hubble has given us. Well worth the wait.
Not sure why Elon Musk gets so much hyper focused attention like this. He's not the only person to have projects run late. Look at the Red camera system. Look at Black Magic Design. Apple, Microsoft and pretty much any software dev has had to push back release dates. Any HN reader should be sympathetic as I'm sure everyone has had to push back release dates, or at the least not release every feature as scheduled.
Are they actually going to the moon if they are only going to orbit it? Sorry my English isn’t the best
They aren't going to actually orbit the moon, they're going around the moon. It's called a "free return trajectory". This is actually less than Apollo 8 did (edit: only talking about the orbit): Apollo 8 actually went into lunar orbit with a burn, and then left lunar orbit with another burn. However, this is using "orbit" in its formal sense. Most people would look at the diagram of the spaceship flying around the mo…
But isn't it exactly what Apollo 13 did?