Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you notice how they slightly jazzed it up after a couple of seasons?
The last 2 seasons are pretty great. It's too bad the show got sacked. Enterprise is my second favorite behind TNG.
Did u try the expanse?
SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
221–230 of 273 posts
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine the energy and money spent on bickering and wars and ultimately useless junk were not.
I'm not a fan of war, but many technologies and sciences were developed for military use, everything from mathematics for ballistics, food preservation, thermodynamics, antibiotics, nuclear energy, the lunar program, and GPS. So yes, war is a horrendous waste and terrible detriment to humanity, but even war has had some beneficial side effects.
The same effort can be put into inventing these in the absence of conflict. You do need funding and you do need urgency, but that's a question of national will.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Antartica is not a stepping stone to further and greater endeavors out into the cosmos It's more of a "dead end", cosmically speaking. This is why it doesn't have same interest or appeal. There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Anta…
> There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose so…
The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are things that you can do in Antartica that wouldn't benefit from being done in space.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making rockets re-usable is a massive step forward and not about 'not regressing'.
I doesn't seem clear at this point whether re-usable will be significant for activities beyond earth orbit. Partly the excitement comes from being a workaround for humanities reluctance to spend money on space exploration. Believe what you want, but from what I can find this doesn't seem to be a significant part of what would e.g. make humanity interplanetary. At least not yet.
My great grandmother was reading a pulp magazine about man going to the moon when she was young, her father made a point to check that she understood that such things were impossible if not extremely far off in the future. The only reason I know this story is that she survived to watch the moon landings and told my father, who told me. The moral of the story was always that it's very hard to predict technological growth, in particular, we tend to undershoot with our long term predictions. Personally I tend to be more weary of people that claim something won't happen in my lifetime than people that tell me something will happen.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#225Do you ever wonder how people felt when they say Magellan or Captain Cook set off? Or, when they watched the Apollo missions happen? I'm guessing that this is what it felt like. We're at the dawn of a new space age.
Soyuz takes people to the space station every few months, has done for years. Why is this specific mission new?
Soyuz is a remarkable vehicle and the people who make and fly it should be very proud. The DM-1 mission is significant for several reasons. A return of manned space launch capability for the USA which will bring a lot of national pride. The commercialisation aspect with SpaceX and Boeing not just building a NASA vehicle like SLS/Orion but providing a launch service which could help open up space exploration to more sustainable development. And the story of SpaceX themselves from improbable tech founder vision 17 years ago to industry disruption and market leadership today. This is clearly a very important milestone for them as they ultimately want to send people to the Moon and Mars.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google thinks a shuttle launch cost at least $450 million, for comparison.
It's really not something you can compare. Space Shuttle was not a can for humans to reach LEO. It was a much more capable spacecraft with a significantly bigger (both in volume and weight) payload.
With an appropriate payload there were proposals for upto 80 people in the shuttle. At $450m to launch that would be $6m a seat.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose so…
The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are things that you can do in Antartica that wouldn't benefit from being done in space.
For example, Antarctica is a great place to research Antarctica. And Mars is a great place to research Mars. For that reason alone, there will be people on Mars, even if there's nothing to commercially exploit there and no reason to colonize it.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.
A lot of human knowledge cannot be written down and has to be passed on person to person. There isn't enough bandwidth in a book to actually convey a lot of it. Machining is one instance of this. You basically have to have somebody show you how to do some of it. Same thing with forging. (At least in my experience)
The examples you cited can be written down and they don't have to be taught in person. You could instruct somebody to do these without being present in person. I'm sure there are reasons that's not the way it's taught primarily, but you've not convinced me it's fundamentally impossible.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
#229Congratulation to SpaceX. That being said, we should take a step back and stop drinking the Elon Musk Koolaid. This has been done flawlessly by Russian Soyouz hundreds of times over the last decades (with almost no failures). This has also been done with the Shuttle.
Docking to the ISS? Sure. But a reusable first stage? That has tremendous implications and had never been done.
SpaceX has been Lansing and reusing first stages for years. Last year they landed 3 at the same time (well ok one had a minor glitch)