Large existing discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639965
For some reason the discussion in this thread is far better than the earlier one you linked.
SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
121–128 of 128 posts
Re: SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you want to talk inspiring, consider Gwynne Shotwell. She's tasked with turning Musk's crazy ideas and timelines into reality. I can't imagine a tougher job and she's killing it.
I always read about Musk like he does the whole thing on his own. Never read about all the engineers that work their asses off to achieve these results
The way I see ot, ot goes both ways. He has taken a lot of shit for Tesla,SpaceX so obviously when something good happens then too he gets a lot. The dynamic is a bit similar to actors/actresses in movies. If it flops, nobody is blaming the makeup artist,dialogue writer. Btw, i do find some things related to Elon's life overglorified(those parts do not involve SpaceX,Tesla)
BTW, read this thread about Tom Mueller.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1081619342377...
Really inspiring. This thread got picked up by many news sites. I just googled "spaceX engineer lumberjack" to find this.
Re: SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
That could bring satellite costs down a lot though - if launches are cheap and not weight limited a cheap steel frame satellite with heavy solar panels becomes feasible - all the old rules about building to optimise weight and not price go out the window. I wouldn’t be surprised if spacex also enter the satellite building business after mass producing starlink.
Light weight satellite construction will still be a very high priority because making the structure of the satellite lighter extends its operational lifespan. The reason is attitude control. Reaction wheels can be used to orient the satellite, but eventually reaction wheels get saturated. At that point you need to use thrusters to cancel out the reaction wheel saturation. Those thrusters require propellant, e.g. some…
That's a good point, though can add more propellant too if you're not mass constrained.
It will be interesting to see if Falcon Heavy, and more likely starship, have a significant impact on what sort of satellites are built, and the way they are built. If they do it will probably take years before we see any changes, however spacex is ideally positioned to cash in on a transition to more mass-produced satellites if that does happen.
Re: SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
#124I find this, and SpaceX, so inspiring. It's easy to feel that technology just moves itself forward. After all there are billions of people on Earth with people working on a countless array of different problems. And each day things seem to move forward, almost inexorably so. And so it's easy to feel that the value of the individual is really relatively low. Yet imagine a world where Elon did not exist and thus SpaceX…
if you want to talk inspiring, consider Gwynne Shotwell. She's tasked with turning Musk's crazy ideas and timelines into reality. I can't imagine a tougher job and she's killing it.
Gwynne Shotwell is pretty amazing. But don't forget that Musk was smart enough to hire her, and she had enough confidence in him to take the job. A very large part of being a successful tech revolutionary is hiring the right people to work for you.
Re: SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
#125Not only that, but apparently they recovered both fairings: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... So 5 out of 5...
So now they have recovered the fairings? SpaceX just keeps getting farther and farther ahead of everyone else.
Re: SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you want to talk inspiring, consider Gwynne Shotwell. She's tasked with turning Musk's crazy ideas and timelines into reality. I can't imagine a tougher job and she's killing it.
I always read about Musk like he does the whole thing on his own. Never read about all the engineers that work their asses off to achieve these results
He constantly emphasizes that it's the entire team bringing SpaceX to what it is. However, there is an important difference between working for a company and leading one. Boeing/Lockheed, Arianespace, NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc, etc not also only have brilliant scientists and engineers working for them, but also have billions of dollars and have been around for many decades.
The big difference in outcomes comes from the leadership. These other companies are headed by people of different abilities, different ideologies, different technical abilities, and so on. This is why they've all been, more or less, surpassed by a company started on a shoestring budget in 2002.
In other words, I imagine if you had let Musk have complete control over ULA (united launch alliance - an arguably anticompetitive merger between Boeing and Lockheed) he'd not only achieved as much as he has already, but likely far more given their vast resources - both economic and human. Similarly, if you put Marilyn Hewson [1] (president, chair, CEO of Lockheed) in charge of SpaceX's people in 2002, SpaceX almost certainly would have catastrophically failed.
Re: SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
#127Can we finally stop having sci-fi films in which the whole outcome of the movie is solely determined on some heroic manual flying of a spaceship while simultaneously using manually aimed weapons like it's World War II?
> Can we finally stop having sci-fi films in which the whole outcome of the movie is solely determined on some heroic manual flying of a spaceship while simultaneously using manually aimed weapons like it's World War II? Probably no, we can't stop having some of that. We can have her alternative, and, in fact, a lot of space combat in movies and TV is not resolved that way (both because it involves highly automated m…
I like that about the Expanse novels, automatic systems control a lot of the lower level work in battles. Of course humans still come up with the crazy ideas and sort of execute them on a higher level.
Re: SpaceX nails triple booster landing after satellite delivery
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see multiple requests to ampproject on the official page, so Google is getting data regardless.
So, now without amp, too: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-fairing-recove...
Not that I'm avoiding google, but this link connects to
google.com googlesyndication.com googletagmanager.com gstatic.com
When rendering the page, so this just proves that avoiding sending data to google is very tricky indeed!