There seems to be alot of hate here that blue orgin is not 'shooting high enough'. This will get 'America' back to the moon and this is a great thing! Congrats to Blue Orgin team, and I wish them all the luck.
Blue Moon
211–220 of 236 posts
Re: Blue Moon
#212Re: Blue Moon
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it has created value for its customers and investors. It has also generated enormous externalities. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and the point is one of the main points of my argument. The other being, this is just uninspired and unoriginal. It’s a presentation by an ex-hedge fund guy on a profit play, that feels more like my know-it-all uncle lecturing the family during Thanksgiving about how we…
Would world had been a better place without Amazon? You may think that it's hurting mom and pop shops. But that's not really true. Without AWS, we would still have 100 people sysadmin teams everywhere and many startups won't see light of the day. Without Amazon fulfillment centers, who get most flak for automation and worker issues, there are many things we won't have in life. Kindle gave me access to books that I wo…
But cutting the benefits so that workers end up poorer.
Also kindle workshops are considered sweat shops, and that’s by Chinese standards so imagine...
Re: Blue Moon
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've got New Armstrong pencilled in after New Glenn for taking people to the Moon. I suppose after that would be New Sagan
Would New Sagan be the Amazon-sponsored lightsail-powered generation ship to Alpha Centauri?
Amazon Centauri, its been renamed as part of a sponsorship deal
Re: Blue Moon
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't matter if you can reuse something if refurbishing costs as much as building a new one. Space just has a more sensible design with better materials and computers.
And SpaceX is doing a totally different thing. They are not putting anything like the shuttle in orbit (humand+cargo). Shuttle's other big thing was that it returned all of its engines to the ground for reuse. All shuttle threw away was the big orange tank. SpaceX had abandoned that concept, returning only the first stage and dumping the second/third stages into the sea. We will probably never see anything like shutt…
Starship is very similar to the shuttle in that it will be a reused second stage carrying humans and/or cargo (humans optional unlike Shuttle). Hopefully unlike shuttle it will be able to be reflown without extensive, expensive refurbishment.
Re: Blue Moon
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most people (myself included) do not understand how much technological improvement costs. Anecdote: I once had a conversation with a guy who worked at ITER, and he was pretty bullish (and he had no reason to bullshit me) on the prospect of fusion as a viable energy source, but frustrated with the internal politics of ITER. So I asked, "well, what would it take? If I could call up a bunch of rich people to get…
2016 estimation for the project was $20B [1]. Your number is over 50 times larger. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-15/world-s-b...
I understood the 1.2-1.5 trillion number to be the cost of "fusion as a viable energy source" not the cost of ITER. ITER itself, to be clear, won't generate electricity. It's a demonstrator project that proves the viability of some of the technologies that would be prerequisites to an eventual successful electricity generation project. Its planned successor, DEMO, will be even bigger, and will be the first one that actually generates net electricity, but even that won't be geared towards commercial use on the grid -- nobody will ever build these things for commercial use, even if we get to the point more energy comes out than goes in, if they cost tens of billions apiece. Even if both ITER and DEMO go exactly to plan, multiple additional major technological advances will be necessary before the any of it is commercially viable.
Re: Blue Moon
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
To take a real world example, Falcon 9 is completely autonomous during flight - the controllers on the ground can trigger an abort, and perhaps change the flight plan from a range of preselected options, but they're not going to attempt to take over the rocket and switch it to manual mode or something. They observe, they don't intervene during a normal flight, and if something does go wrong, they're not going to be a…
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster. Unmanned boosters have always been automated. Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree of manual control. This new generation of private manned capsules will be no different.
Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree
This is untrue for Soyuz or Dragon 2 - any capsule design is not pilotable. It will also be untrue for the upcoming starship for example. It might have crew but I struggle to think why it would have a pilot.
Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster.
Which just so happens to land itself.
The point I'm trying to make is that machines can land themselves perfectly well nowadays, and control software and its interaction with hardware is now too complex for puny humans to understand or interact with, so they're better off just letting it do its thing and land or crash - a human interaction during landing is not going to save the machine - things have moved on from the mooon landings.
Re: Blue Moon
#218Re: Blue Moon
#219Blue origin can't build a moon rocket by 2024, so maybe they can settle for the lander. Here's the vision I bet they're aiming for: a Spacex rocket, a United Launch Alliance capsule, a Blue Origin lander, and a round of pork barrel in every Congressional district.
ULA has not capsule. What are you even talking about? ULA is pure launch business. Boeing has capsule that can't go to the moon, and Lockheed Martin is a contractor on Orion.
Sorry, I was thinking of the Orion capsule, which is made by Lockheed Martin, one half of ULA.
Re: Blue Moon
#220Now everyone want to bet on future of future, but they forget the real problem like global warming (it's just one example its so many). Steve jobs have vision which is based on reality and solve the real world problem. Hope someone in tech industry solve the real problem instead problem which is never exists.
Many of us are working on it. It's a very difficult problem because so many aspects of the carbon economy are intertwined and baked into culture now. The "halo" effect around petroleum is extremely strong and disincents many incremental advances. Could be solved top-down with a carbon tax but that's a big change and beneficiaries status quo have more of an advantage the bigger the system change being attempted.
However many people are trying and failing anyway, and that creates a bed of appropriate technologies that eventually will stand on their own, and perhaps not too much slower than a top-down solution would work.