391–400 of 839 posts
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A new normal has just been defined. Amazing to see. "Thank you for flying with Falcon 9 today", as though it's an airplane.
Wouldn't it be "Thank you for flying with Spacex today"?
Noticed those big kneeboards atop astronauts suited knee, with some kind of pen tethered to it, like good-old sign-in clipboards. The surface is white, but does not seem to glow. Is it real paper and pencil? Or some sort of e-ink tablet. iPad? Kinda bukly, though... Who needs a space-pen? Got a space-watch? :)
That's as much as I was able to gather from today and Wednesday's livestream.
How wonderful! Congratulations to the entire Space X team, this is a real accomplishment and I'm sure not one that came easily. It's exciting to see relatively small companies fulfilling roles that people thought might require massive military contractors. Elon is an interesting figure. He is, I think, a paradigmatic example of the imperfect creator. His undeniable success in difficult endeavors can create an aura of…
> I hope we can move away from the "elon sucks" v.s. "elon is a genius" dichotomy and into a culture of acknowledging accomplishment while insisting claims in other areas be fully justified. Until then, I'll happily consider Elon's or even John Carmack's opinion over those of Elon's numerous, noisy but otherwise uninteresting critics on the Internet and elsewhere.
It's a serious question. Elon may run some successful companies, but beyond that his credibility has taken a beating on any number of fronts.
How much credit should Elon get for heading companies full of other people who do the actual work? Could another leader do a better job, given Elons unsteady behaviour?
How wonderful! Congratulations to the entire Space X team, this is a real accomplishment and I'm sure not one that came easily. It's exciting to see relatively small companies fulfilling roles that people thought might require massive military contractors. Elon is an interesting figure. He is, I think, a paradigmatic example of the imperfect creator. His undeniable success in difficult endeavors can create an aura of…
The Elon of SpaceX introduces himself as "I'm proud to be here representing the SpaceX team." The Elon of Tesla is smoking up on camera, throwing humongous ball bearings at the Cybertruck windows, sleeping in his sleeping bag while trying to bring Model 3 production through the Shadow of the Valley of Death.
You almost never hear about any of Elon's direct contributions to SpaceX whereas he's mister Tesla front and center at Tesla pulling stunt after tweet. SpaceX servers a very conservative industrial market and Tesla makes consumer products. These companies require to very different types of leadership. Who is the real Elon behind this public Jekyll and Hyde dynamic? Most likely it's the driven "man of first principles" just doing what needs to be done.
> "our national lab orbiting Earth,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Is it though?
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I’m not super well informed on this, but is there any reason for sending humans to space at this moment in time (or for the next 20 years for that matter). The only reason my layperson understanding can think of is mining minerals in space, but I fail to see why robots wouldn’t be able to adequately do the job. In fact wouldn’t sending humans make future space ventures even more costly and put people into unessisary…
Building a moon-base or mars-base would be an interesting experiment for humans. 1. Have a backup of our species in case something happens to Earth. 2. A great experiment in anthropology! It could help us rethink how we organize life on earth. As far as I see, a moonbase would be a "greenfield project" on land that doesn't belong to any nation, where they have to build everything from scratch. How will they organize?…
I'm glad that the space age has been rekindled. I wish Europe would do something similar.
Being European also, I honestly am not in favour of it. The amount of public money that flows into these ventures without well defined purpose in a time where we're hitting 20% unemployment due to a pandemic seems grotesque to me. There's a lot more things to fix on this planet.
Wouldn’t starting a space mission create thousands of direct and indirect jobs?
These advancements are not taking money away from them. The research we did towards all of the space travel in the past 6 decades have given us dividends on several fronts.
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- International travel (anywhere in the world in less than two hours) could be one of those things. - Asteroid mining
>in less than two hours plus or minus 48, depending on the clouds today.
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I think your parent poster's point was that previously the IP was owned by NASA. The companies contracted to build Apollo or the Space Shuttle was unable to reuse the IP to sell rides to another company or fly private citizens, nor could they bundle and sell the IP. SpaceX owns the Crew Dragon IP and tooling, and they can sell flights to private citizens - in fact I believe they said today that they are contracted wi…
I can't imagine the thought process that feels that the IP being owned by a private company who answers to no one and has no accountability to anyone is 'more sustainable' than it being owned by the public through a non-military organization (NASA)...
You need manufacturing base and a business model to sustain commercial operation. NASA is a government agency that gets its priority sets by a congress that is not very interested in space flight, and putting the budget wherever they want at any given time. So NASA could have lots of IP about 4 different vehicles that gets into LEO but no amount of money could actually get you there.
They can give the IP to a 3rd company of course, but because they way it was designed it would not really have any commercial use, and likely it only works connected together with other government IP/hardware that you also easily get.
Now you have a private company, who has a very clear business intensive, to get the greatest possible use out of that IP, it only uses other commercially available tools and has synergy with other parts of their business that also has other commercial uses. The industrial base and teams are sustained, and not removed when congress lowers budget for a year.
So the Dragon 2 works with Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX always operates Falcon 9 launch pads and they have plenty of rockets to fly and a manufacturing base that makes more of them. So now you have a much easier time to get the whole system together for an actual 3rd party flight, as the rocket, launch pad, infrastructure is already there and commercially operated.