581–590 of 839 posts
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I would be astounded if there were no space hotel projects shopping around for finance already. Although I think given the likely customer profile we're at least as likely to get Vegas-in-Orbit - casinos, hookers and all - as labs and exploration.
The minuscule ISS is already the most expensive structure ever built. What universe has something like described being economical?
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You can hate Elon if you want or think whatever, but anybody that can't admit that on purely intelligence level he is genius is pretty much in denial.
He's smart but not infallible. He said covid would be at zero cases by April.
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If anything the oil platform is much much more appealing. You can go diving and see a bunch of sea life. That's part of why as a human I'm more excited by sea steading than space exploration.
Would it be exciting to terraform a planet or go to another star system and observe life there?
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On the ISS you can produce higher quality optical fiber than on earth [1]. A demonstration fabrication unit is already on the ISS, and NASA has recently published prices for using the ISS for commercial tasks such as this. I suspect many other manufacturing methods can also benefit from zero gravity, and as launch costs drop more of these will be explored. 1: https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-…
It's interesting to think about that from the other side, too. Just delivering the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg (assuming rock bottom SpaceX prices). Based on some loose googling, I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. It looks like a typical 100m fiber optic patch cable retails for about $60. So, there's clearly a lot of value to…
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I understand it runs Chromium code and that the UI is written in Javascript. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer...
Wow, had I known that this whole thing would have been a lot more nerve wracking.
I'm shifting uncomfortably in my chair just reading that
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How much weight should I give the opinion of someone who calls someone who disagrees with him "the pedo guy"? 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?
Well, you can try. See if you can build something to compete. And if you can't, well, then we know who the better man is.
Perhaps of interest to HN, the cockpit displays seen in the videos are HTML pages rendered in Chromium. https://twitter.com/alteredq/status/1266853705632145409?s=19 SpaceX recently released a browser game where you use the real flight UI to dock with the ISS: https://iss-sim.spacex.com/
Aren't physical buttons that you can feel with your touch safer than touch screens?
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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…