51–60 of 136 posts
Edit: finding out the picture in question had a name, Earthrise, made it easier to find. Here's the video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-vOscpiNc
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Still planning to do it again within the next decade just to reassure ourselves about it.
Actually doing it is important. “I can go to the moon anytime I want” stops being true after a solid generation of not doing it. There is institutional knowledge in doing something in the present world. Further, specs and documents are nice, but rarely sufficient. A famous example is the F-1 engine. Every one of them was made off spec and if you took the factory drawings alone you would never make a working engine. Y…
Obviously, the F-1B booster wasn't picked for the SLS and they went with the improved 5-segment SRBs[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...
It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back. Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans…
It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back. Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans…
> Humans are no longer capable of mach 3 flight, or making Roman concrete We have plenty of aircraft capable of mach 3 or faster just not for commercial purposes, and most modern concrete is superior to Roman concrete in most dimensions specifically cost (not to mention its modern mythos is completely based on a single study published in American Mineralogist).
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> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did? We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
That way lies a slippery slope ;) It's pretty close to the "Ruinenwerttheorie" of the German Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value
It's hard to believe that it's been over 50 years since humans have been outside of low earth orbit. It's like we sprinted forward so fast, going from horse drawn carriage to space flight in a generation, only to get frightened and recede back from the highest point, never to go back. Granted there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the last 50 years, but by some accounts we've been going backwards. Humans…
such a nihilistic view has little ground in reality > been outside of low earth orbit we stopped pushing that frontier because we've been there and found it dull and empty, as a matter of fact, we decided zero g experiment were more important than playing with regolith, and build a freaking human habitat in the void to support that endeavor. beside, we've got regolith here on earth now, we can experiment on it in the…
If anything you can argue that the latest Bugatti with a slightly larger engine is moving us backwards by the waste of resources (in design, production and use).
Peak technology right now is not the big sexy machine, it's whatever makes the good stuff boring for the masses.
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> What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)? Rather than nukes, I always thought the main advantage of the Shuttle was the ability to bring things back to Ear…
AFAIK the Russians were mainly concerned about the ability of the Space Shuttle to quickly change its orbital plane, combined with the planned high frequency of flights (which never happened though) and high cargo capacity. Put a few nukes on the Shuttle, and you can drop them anywhere in the world with much less warning time than intercontinental ballistic missiles. At least that's what I read about the reasoning of…
Cargo capacity... Not that much really, since you're carrying yourself a whole lot of orbiter already. It had a large volume in the cargo bay, and the mentioned ability to retrieve things in that cargo bay.
But yes, DoD/military influenced the design of the Shuttle. It just turns out they never used the capabilities they requested. And so you end up with a craft that makes little sense for civilian use, except for the building of a massive space station in orbit and eventual servicing of satellites.
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It's called the "overview effect": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
I wonder how we could get more people to experience this effect... Something like what Stewart Brand did by pushing for and publicising the first whole earth picture (in part via the Whole Earth Catalog) but more for the internet age. I was toying with an idea of a site called "Get Some Perspective" where you'd start off with a FPS view and as you scroll you gradually zoom out, eventually to the whole observable univ…
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> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did? We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
I think you are suffering a bit from survivorship bias here. Way less than 0.001% of Roman buildings are still standing and the ones that remain have been continuously maintained over the centuries. If humanity will keep maintaining the White House for centuries it will look just as good in 4021 as it does today.
Survivorship bias is always brought up in these discussions, but I believe it to just be a cop-out. Take a look at any well-preserved medieval / renaissance / early industrial era city in Europe (Bruges, Edinburgh, Venice). They are all absolutely gorgeous, even the buildings used historically by the lower classes (ones that were not even built with longevity in mind).
No, something flipped around the 1920s, and architecture, along with our whole societal philosophy around it, has clearly changed. I'd argue that it's for the worse.
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> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did? We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.
That way lies a slippery slope ;) It's pretty close to the "Ruinenwerttheorie" of the German Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value
The 3rd Reich had a lot of problems, but they had some good aesthetics (Huge Boss, etc). To ignore that, and shun a whole realm of aesthetics because it was appreciated by The Devil, is a waste and a poor strategic move; you're abandoning the beautiful elements because they had the misfortune to be mixed into a dark brew. It's an artistic tragedy, and a poor political move, putting you in a similar spot to the 3rd Reich themselves with regards to their ideas about 'degenerate art'.
The height of technology, and we cloak ourselves in ugliness and mediocrity, not daring to build anything beautiful. What a fucking waste. The sorts of small-souled people who build modern western identikit cities don't deserve to go to the moon.