531–540 of 839 posts
Does anyone have a link to a video of the booster landing? I could only find a still shot.
For me, the best thing about today (among so many wonderful things) is the pure and utter inspirational value of every moment. I remember being glued to my tv when I watched the first shuttle launch in 81. For me, that inspired a lifelong passion for astronomy, which led to a PhD, and eventually a successful tech career. Today, I sat with my daughters and watched the launch live and then went outside an hour or so la…
I thought this[1] was nicely done, and potentially inspiring for students. [1] Planet Hunter https://vimeo.com/419873718
The defenses are public, and do get taped. But I've never seen an accessible video of one. Perhaps with covid come fall. Anyway, I thought I'd mention it, in case it nudges someone.
Hmm... Kunle Demuren has a thesis defense Monday Jun 1 at 10 on zoom...
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 don't understand how SpaceX is "commercial." As I understand it, they exist because the US Government wants to have a space program. Yes, they can launch satellites, but how many for-profit non-state entities can use these things? It seems like SpaceX is possible because there are governments out there with money to burn.
GPS/map plus ads&directory is already printing money...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Isn’t there something about “exploration” that seems important to a non-neglible amount of humans? I don’t want everything we do to serve the rat race we’re in. Let’s loose our money on something amazing.
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> 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. I understand your sentiment, but I’m also profoundly unsettled by the idea that commerce and capitalism are reaching beyond the clutches of our planet. Today is definitely a threshold, but what that threshold means, in a broader sen…
I fear the profit motive is going too far. And I hope it goes further. We've seen what happens when decisions are made on the basis of political expedience rather than cost-effectiveness: you get SLS. Or more accurately, you don't get SLS.
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> I think you are underestimating the challenges they have to overcome to get machines to work in space. Even if it’s hard, it’s still a lot easier than getting humans to work in space.
You don't understand the challenges. Sending humans up with semi-automated machines would actually be a lot easier than fully automated machines. The human race's entire experience so far has been with machines in 1g. We have almost zero experience making self repairing factories in any gravity. We have zero experience mining in low or zero gravity. It might take several generations of engineers and miners in space t…
We never explored the surface of Mars, or landed on an asteroid before we had our machines do it, but we managed it anyway with the human operators still on Earth.
Other things people have posted, whose threads we've merged hither: https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1266812530833240064 https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/30/spacex-makes-history-with-... https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/todays-the-day-weath... If there's a particularly good article, we can swap out the URL above. Edit: beefman suggested the nasa.gov page ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23364975 ), so we'…