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SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

nasa.gov

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Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#501

Post by dianastamm »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

It is hard to convey how "sustainable" this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. All of the NASA missions prior to this have an ambience of "uneconomical but useful". Even the shuttle, which was supposed to be this cost effective space truck, turned out to be not even close. And the last thing I'm feeling is the a…

I cringed when I saw the Tesla car though. Kinda cheapened the whole thing for me

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#502

Post by mLuby »

pknerd wrote: post #132

I am not American but as a human I feel so good about this mission. We all have a habit of looking up to sky with an awe and appreciate the beauty. My 10 years old son was so excited. Who knows he might get into this field. I wanted to study astrophysics while I was a teen. He was also watching live stream with me. Congrats and lots of love from Pakistan. Desperately waiting for Docking moments.

That's so wonderful. I liked how Astronaut Garrett Reisman put it today: https://youtu.be/GuXBdTF2jUY?t=4460

> "I hope for ten minutes just now you looked up and saw something exciting, something to give you hope of a future full of wonder. That's the magic of human spaceflight."

We cannot voyage far into space without our best human qualities: cooperation, reason, and hope. Each small step for all humankind.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#503

Post by babesh »

barbegal wrote: post #270
babesh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need to look further. You get access to rare materials that can be immensely valuable. Read https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Revolution-Spaceflight-Pos... Also with that short term outlook you wouldn’t have many things. The Internet was not initially commercial. It was designed to provide communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Yet here we are now and we have reaped immense benefits from that inves…

> It’s blindingly obvious that spaceflight makes sense to invest in. The issue is that the level of investment is large and the time horizon before a return is long. Sometimes government takes that role. Are you invested in spaceflight then? I don't see it being very obvious at all. Yes, some precious metals can be recovered in large quantities but they aren't intrinsically valuable. These materials are used in thing…

You can invest in SpaceX indirectly and directly. You have SpaceX indirectly through some mutual funds and actually through Google since Google’s VC arm invested in SpaceX. I have a tiny bit in those two via a mutual fund and Google. The problem is both have SpaceX as a very small percentage of their portfolio. There is also Virgin Galactic but I don’t have that.

One material Robert Zubrin is interested in is a rare form of hydrogen. He thinks that it would be a good candidate for fusion if we ever figure it out.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#504

Post by greeneggs »

pmorici wrote: post #200
sandworm101 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. If we are talking pure commercial travel, it is a vehicle without a destination. The ISS is definitely not a commercial project. There are lots of reasons for the ISS to exist, and they have changed over time, but it has never been a money-making venture. While the dragons certainly do come in under budget, they are a more…

They said during the launch live broadcast that SpaceX intends to fly paying tourists by next year. Apparently many tourists have also visited the space station. https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-dragon-will-fly-space-tour...

Space tourism to the ISS is just US taxpayers paying for billionaires' vacations. Yes, NASA charges a fee, but it is tiny relative to the cost of the service. If somebody develops a private space station, great. Until then, this isn't an industry that deserves any support.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#505

Post by mikepurvis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #343
TheDong wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you build it, they will come" suffers from confirmation bias. You can easily look back at things people have built and people have come to (computers, planes, cars, etc)... But there are far more things people built that no one came for, and which we don't even know of because no one wanted them. Solar roadways is an example of something that was an infrastructure project that was built out in a few places, and b…

Weren't solar roadways just bullshit and rather thoroughly debunked from the engineering POV from the very start? Concorde also AFAIR was a victim of oil prices. There is perhaps a bit of confirmation bias in this view, but I see people usually erring in the other direction. E.g. there's no such thing as "too fast Internet" today, people find new ways to suck up all available bandwidth.

Concorde was also a victim of something else getting built that people went to instead— widebody business class. It turns out that a lie-flat business bed for seven hours is more appealing to most people than a cramped, economy-style cabin for three and half hours.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#506

Post by the_rosentotter »

catalogia wrote: post #254
philwelch wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the better precedent for Elon's eccentricities might be someone like Henry Ford. Ford was an undeniable genius and innovator in a way that inspired broad admiration, but he was also troublingly paternalistic with his workers--providing above-market pay and benefits but expecting them to live up to his moral standards in their personal lives. He was also a massive sponsor of anti-Semitic publications and, prior…

I think the comparison between Elon Musk and Henry Ford starts to break down a bit towards the end of your comment. Elon Musk tweets plenty I don't like, but he's far from a Nazi.

The slow ethnic cleansing and land theft being perpetrated by a close American ally, supported by many of the biggest American corporations and capitalists, seems a comparable situation.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#507

Post by nine_k »

sandworm101 wrote: post #160
ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

It is hard to convey how "sustainable" this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. All of the NASA missions prior to this have an ambience of "uneconomical but useful". Even the shuttle, which was supposed to be this cost effective space truck, turned out to be not even close. And the last thing I'm feeling is the a…

>> into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. If we are talking pure commercial travel, it is a vehicle without a destination. The ISS is definitely not a commercial project. There are lots of reasons for the ISS to exist, and they have changed over time, but it has never been a money-making venture. While the dragons certainly do come in under budget, they are a more…

Crew Dragon is commercial in the sense that NASA wants to pay for it, and shopped around for a better vehicle than Soyuz.

But frankly, there is basically nothing that humans could do in space in a money-making way. Machines are just so much easier. They can fly for years via cheap orbits, don't mind the cold and the vacuum, etc.

The whole idea of colonizing Mars is not about commercial viability, it's about reaching a new land outside of control of Earth's governments. Very much the same as founding Massachusetts or Pennsylvania was not a commercial enterprise, but was an attempt to gain more freedom, even in utterly alien and inhospitable places.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#508

Post by mikepurvis »

bouncycastle wrote: post #366
runarberg wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

There are plenty of inhospitable places here on earth where you could set up your anthropology experiment— deep under the ocean, for example, heck there was even a series of videogames made about this exact scenario. :)

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#509

Post by Diesel555 »

dianastamm wrote: post #501
ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

It is hard to convey how "sustainable" this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. All of the NASA missions prior to this have an ambience of "uneconomical but useful". Even the shuttle, which was supposed to be this cost effective space truck, turned out to be not even close. And the last thing I'm feeling is the a…

I cringed when I saw the Tesla car though. Kinda cheapened the whole thing for me

I thought it was awesome. I'm going to create the electric car market no-one thought possible and many companies paid to lobby to create laws to stop.... and put it into space.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#510

Post by Chathamization »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #363
stickfigure wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get access to rare materials that can be immensely valuable. Why would you want to send humans to get it? Space is really inhospitable for humans, but machines seem to like it just fine. Offshore oil and gas mining is rapidly being automated, and if they could, they would eliminate humans from the process altogether. Nobody wants to go out and live on a frozen windblown metal can full of industrial machinery, i…

I don't know much about the intricacies of asteroid mining, but human beings are very capable entities. As great as machines like the Mars rovers are, there's no comparison. A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year. When I was reading the daily diaries of one of the rover drivers, it was incredible how much effort and thought went into the most trivial activities. A…

> A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year.

The estimates I've seen for a human mission to Mars are about 100-500 times the budget for Curiosity. So even if astronauts could accomplish things 52X faster (and I'm skeptical they would), it still wouldn't be as cost efficient. And that's even before you factor in the fact that the Mars Rover is going to be doing work on Mars much, much longer than a human mission would (Curiosity is going on 8 years).

Human space exploration is a solution in search of a problem. People don't seem to be rationally looking for the best way to get certain information from Mars or for the best sources of materials that could be obtained with future technology (there are many overlooked terrestrial ones) and soberly deciding that astronauts are the best answer. They seem to start out with the goal of defending human space exploration, and then searching for problems to try to justify it.

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