Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

nasa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 839 posts

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#801

Post by travisporter »

stickfigure wrote: post #776
TeMPOraL wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is building the relevant aspects of the economy. Sitting on our butts, playing zero-sum games to squeeze more money out of each other with ads and products increasingly optimized to be as fragile as possible... that isn't getting us anywhere. (Note that RTS economy is based around acquiring new resources. You can't make minerals by advertising, speculating, or even having your soldiers trade with each other. The…

The leading self-driving vehicle company was bankrolled by ad money, so I think your cynicism is misplaced. Also, in terms of bettering our lives... I'd bet advertising beats the ISS. What has the ISS given us? I know hundreds of small businesspeople that would never have gotten off the ground without modern advertising. There are people out there that click on ads and buy things, and that makes them happy.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/benefits...

It certainly is way overpriced in my opinion, but for me, it has served as a reason to wake up excited on many of my days off.

That being said, ads are a great way to bootstrap so many awesome things. I think the cynicism comes from the feeling of privacy invasion.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#802

Post by pharke »

jacobolus wrote: post #785
pharke wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg This is also assuming the price per kg to orbit stays stable but Musk has stated he intends to drive the price down much further. He's even given figures for what he thinks they might be able to achieve with Starship[0] and SpaceX's rapid progress seems to indicate that they will, eventually, get there. The best comparison from history is probably…

People used railroads to profitably carry freight (originally with carts pulled by horses) right from the get-go. They became a lot cheaper to make once steel could be economically mass produced. Steam engines were originally used for pumping water, but there was an obvious huge demand for locomotives to move freight by land once they could be made cheaper or better than draft animals. I’m sure there exist some comme…

The points you bring up don't seem to support your argument. It took a decade from when people first attempted to haul freight with a steam locomotive until the first commercially successful railway was built. If you start counting from when the steam engine was first invented then it would be more than a century. You're correct that a lot of that success depended on improvements in manufacturing capability but I don't think it's so obvious that there was a huge market for steam locomotives right from the start, early steam engines were notoriously fickle, required constant attention and a trained engineer, needed specialized tooling and materials to repair when they inevitably broke, and they were incredibly inefficient and fuel hungry at first. That's why they started out so linked to coal mines, the mine produced enough cheap fuel for the engine and already had a lot of the metalworking tools and capable engineers needed to maintain it.

I'm not sure why you don't think space is commercially viable right now, companies and governments are paying a lot of money to have things delivered to orbit. SpaceX is making money with every launch otherwise they would have gone bust years ago. If you mean there's no market for human spaceflight, well there wasn't a market for passenger railroad travel for a long time either. You need to build the railways before people can make practical use of them. Back when most railways only extended for 1 or 2 km it was pretty hard to imagine getting paying passengers. You have to build something that connects to places people want to go before they'll pay to ride it.

With spaceflight we're currently in the shorthaul stage, all the profit is in delivering cargo to LEO. The cost is coming down and people are finding more uses for cheap satellites. The rockets already have their use case, they move people and cargo the same as a railroad, it's what we do with that capability that we need to get creative with and as we continue to build out capability and lower cost there will be more and more uses for space. The main reason I compare it to railroads is that it is a type of infrastructure that makes new things possible and there's always a profit to be made in a frontier as long as you're daring enough to take it.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#803

Post by Gatsky »

protomolecule wrote: post #794
dang wrote: post #231

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'…

"Second freshness - that's what is nonsense! There is only one freshness - the first - and it is also the last. And if sturgeon is of the second freshness, that means it is simply rotten."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#804

Post by dgritsko »

zidel wrote: post #464
dgritsko wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to said "daily diaries?" They sound fascinating, but this is the first I've heard of them.

https://marsandme.blogspot.com/ is Scott Maxwells blog about driving Spirit + Opportunity

Awesome, thanks!

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#805

Post by esmi »

andrepd wrote: post #699
dannyw wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High frequency traders will want the best connectivity humanely possible. It’s a zero sum game. If they can beat a competitor firm’s signals by the smallest fraction of a second, even a nanosecond, they reaps in the profits. So $100m for some better fibre? Go nuts!

Eh, that's a really sad thing to optimise for, don't you think? Revealing of a broken incentive system. I'd prefer if HFT practices were banned.

Personally I waffle on this myself. My instinct tells me it’s bad but then I try to decide what trading cadence I would limit it to. Assume there is a CEO who wants to do something nefarious to manipulate the stock price. If they make a decision how fast can a company actually act on it? Would or could they make the company act on 1 hour boundaries? Even if we limited trades to once per week is that the long term we want a CEO to consider? At what time frame does a stock stop being a stock and convert to something else? Then I decide even by minute trading is not really something that management can even consider, even if they want to, so there is really no point to artificial limits imposed by law and take a more laissez faire attitude.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#806

Post by bluGill »

1bc29b36f623ba8 wrote: post #721
adrianN wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good thing about space is that you don't have to worry about the native people.

Let's hope someone with a similar view-point doesn't discover Earth, then! :D Jokes aside, you are right, of course. We don't have to worry about environmental effects or native populations in the same way when dealing with off-World colonies on sterile worlds. That alone should provide some incentive for commercial exploitation of things like asteroids; at some point Earth will either run out of certain elements, or…

It doesn't matter. The speed of light is too slow for anyone out there to get here in a reasonable amount of time. Even if the universe is densely populated with aliens more knowledgeable than us odds are none are close enough to establish useful communication. That is by the time they realize they know more than us and that knowledge arrives we probably will have discovered it in on our own. (that leaves room to have alien art on the wall but nothing else useful)

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#807

Post by jhgb »

philwelch wrote: post #621
jhgb wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you saying that people didn't notice that Nazis were mass-killing people until 1945? What had they been doing since 1939?

The Nazis were in power for six years before 1939 and existed as a political movement since 1920.

And they started mass-murdering people in 1939. The news were full of it.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#808

Post by 51Cards »

boardwaalk wrote: post #379
frakkingcylons wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sheer cost of launches is much lower on a Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon versus the Shuttle. Amortized per-launch cost for the Shuttle was about $1.5B [0]. The cost of the Demo-2 mission today with 2 astronauts costs $110M [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget [1]: This article states the per-astronaut cost paid by NASA on a Crew Dragon mission is $55M, compared to $86M on Soyuz: https://…

They're also only using two of the four seats. And that's on top of taking out seats they originally had planned (maybe they could put them back in at some point?)

From what I have read NASA has opted for the 4 seat version only, and then placed cargo under them where the other 3 seats would be. SpaceX has designed the capsule to carry 7 if you want an all passenger config but it will need to be heading to a destination fairly quickly as it doesn't leave much space left over. That said, even at 7 it looks like it would still be roomier than a Soyuz at 3 people.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#809

Post by jhgb »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #679
jhgb wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you saying that people didn't notice that Nazis were mass-killing people until 1945? What had they been doing since 1939?

Yup. In fact, there are various stories of people in late 1930s who tried to get the word out to the wider world about what's starting to happen in Germany, and they were generally ignored. The world truly didn't learn about the camps until Nazi Germany was conquered.

Possibly, but the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder has been readily available once they declared war on the rest of the Europe and went through with it. You didn't have to wait until discovering some camps to change your notions of them.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#810

Post by meritganset »

hanniabu wrote: post #489
tdy721 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they weigh so much you don’t make 11.2km/s

Also there's the adaptability aspect. For manual controls you'd need a ton of physical controls and you need the astronauts to know them by heart. With a screen that has an adaptable interface it's much easier UX on the astronaut as the controls increase. Also I'm sure ground control can push an emergency update if need be where you wouldn't quite have that luxury with manual controls.

Do you even understand the statement you're making?

By your account, the astronauts to knowing the controls of the spacecraft by heart is a negative. You honestly believe that a CHANGING INTERFACE is less of a cognitive load on an astronaut than a fixed, tactile one?

You also then must believe that we're sending human being s into space without them knowing the controls of the vehicle by heart. Does your mental model of spaceflight coincide with what it's like to learn how the HVAC works a new car when you buy it from the dealership?

Astonishing.

Post reply on HN