SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#381

Post by specialist » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #177

asadlionpk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tough times make tough people. But their next generation is usually soft sadly.

Meanwhile here in Oakland, this is what Mathematics teaching looks like in schools [PDF]: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... These people are actively undermining the American spirit - I am saying this as an immigrant to USA and a person of color. I am fine with understanding racism in USA, it is completely unacceptable to inject this into STEM education. The next generation is going to g…

Public education is the front lines of the culture wars. I've observed many waves of reform (fads).

Overcorrection is the norm.

Probably because incrementalism simply isn't possible. So when reform does happen, it releases decades of bottled up pressure. Like a dam bursting.

I don't have a dog in this fight. I've seen too many of these spasms to care too much.

That said, my hot take on bias training is two fold.

1) Bias training for teachers (and every other profession) is long overdue. This is indisputable.

2) I'm unaware of any validation which shows bias training for students is worthwhile. Maybe it is. But hippocratic oath dictates that we figure this out before committing.

Teachers et al should dog food their own training for a while. Lead by example. See how well it works.

My hunch is that students will pick up most of the important lessons thru osmosis.

Simply removing teacher-born biases, those negative role models, certainly couldn't hurt.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#382

Post by foxyv » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #196

foxyv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think it has a lot to do with American sub-culture, the US dollar, our crazy university system, and immigration. This is speculation on my part so take it with a BIG grain of salt. The USA brings in 50 million or so people from other countries. Often they are bloody minded, stone cold, hard workers that will sacrifice everything to give their children the opportunity to be Americans. These people are so…

Those are all good points, but the rest of the world turns out, pound for pound, Engineers that are just as good and crazy. But have access to fewer resources, networks, capital, markets etc.. Also, the % of US immigrants that are on the 'high end' is relatively smaller. Migration to the US, when you include off the books migration, is a little bit towards the low skilled end. But definitely the smaller relative port…

This is why I didn't just mention the engineers. It's the conflation of all those factors. Not just a single one. Crazy engineers can get a lot done with no capital, but mostly they will end up doing soul crushing Dilbert style jobs.

For instance, look at Russia! Their engineers are probably twice as crazy as Americans, but they have very little room to do crazy things with that talent. They don't have trillions of US dollars being sheltered in their tech startups by VC funds.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#383

Post by mikewarot » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #362

pharmakom wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a Malthusian, but I’m very worried about the amount of resources we are using. We already lack the carbon budget and farming capacity for the world’s population to live to the standard of an average US citizen. There might be enough space and enough atoms, but we don’t yet have the capability to direct it into sustainable quality of life for all.

Did you know that total land under agriculture has been trending down for several decades? Would that put you at ease?

Why is the land no longer farmed? Could it be there isn't enough topsoil left to be fertile? Could it be that there are new crops of McMansions and ever further commutes as the core of our cities is abandoned?

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#384

Post by foxyv » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #134

foxyv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think it has a lot to do with American sub-culture, the US dollar, our crazy university system, and immigration. This is speculation on my part so take it with a BIG grain of salt. The USA brings in 50 million or so people from other countries. Often they are bloody minded, stone cold, hard workers that will sacrifice everything to give their children the opportunity to be Americans. These people are so…

>We hate boring maintenance and love to launches cars into space. “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

Big time! The USA could use a lot more maintainers. People who want to see beautiful, well built, and carefully taken care of cities and streets. People who make sure the power is humming and pipes are clean. Unfortunately the political situation is more of a "Keep building shitty car dependent walled garden suburbs that no one can afford, except investors. Keep that up until the house of cards collapses under the weight of our poorly maintained and expensive infrastructure."

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#385

Post by thinkcontext » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

h0l0cube wrote: post #371

practice9 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing to rebut. Financially and ecologically this is not worse than manufacturing products in China and shipping them all over the world, or usual stuff like tourism, cloud computing etc. I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets, as it requires a cleaner fuel than Falcon (methane vs kerosene) and should be fully reusable (i.e. no tossing the rocket in the ocean and hoping…

> There is nothing to rebut. And yet nothing in any response so far counters my claim that capital expenditure on space projects will likely increase exponentially. The only claim I made, and the one I was downvoted for. > I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets Methalox combusts to CO2. As the burgeoning space industry scales up exponentially, so will the emissions. https://everyda…

> Methalox combusts to CO2. As the burgeoning space industry scales up exponentially, so will the emissions.

Methane can be manufactured to be carbon neutral. The cost is prohibitive for everyday on the ground energy use but not so for rocket launches, since fuel is such a tiny portion of the cost of a flight.

Musk has mentioned the possibility of doing this.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#386

Post by cryptonector » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #383

cryptonector wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that total land under agriculture has been trending down for several decades? Would that put you at ease?

Why is the land no longer farmed? Could it be there isn't enough topsoil left to be fertile? Could it be that there are new crops of McMansions and ever further commutes as the core of our cities is abandoned?

You're looking at it the wrong way.

If population has gone up, so food needs have gone up, and total land under agriculture has gone down, and the planet has greened... that means that farming efficiency has increased by so more than enough to feed the planet's people that it's not profitable to keep so much land under agriculture, and most of the land that is no longer under agriculture didn't get paved over -- it's forest now.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#387

Post by lucideer » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

merpnderp wrote: post #375

lucideer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you're really looking for alternative shapes, one of the Mars fantasists I was alluding to actually went to space recently in a rather flat triangular vehicle. Which is of course completely irrelevant when one is evoking a male ego megaphor and not opening an engineering discussion on aerodynamics. I would have hoped critical thinking could also help with that distinction in topics. Fwiw, I'm at least glad th…

Lol, the last time NASA built a space plane to do real work in space, it was grossly inefficient than the previous giant dick it replaced, wildly more dangerous, and NASA had to attach it to three other dicks just to get it to space. Face it man, people making fun of dick shaped rockets are seeing dicks where no one else is seeing them and calling themselves clever.

"Lol", "Face it man", you're laser-focused in on a tiny, fairly irrelevant detail of my comment while very ardently ignoring the substantive points. No-one cares what shape the rockets are.

Fwiw the space plane I was referring to above was SS2, not a NASA vehicle. But yes, I agree, it is unlikely to be good for doing "real work in space". Which is the actual substantive point here, irrespective of vehicle shape.

Just to repeat since you seem to have missed it in my comment above: the phallic comment was not, I repeat NOT a literal commentary on rocket design. Yes, good rockets are long and cylindrical. Not what I was referring to.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#388

Post by cryptonector » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

pharmakom wrote: post #377

cryptonector wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that total land under agriculture has been trending down for several decades? Would that put you at ease?

But environmental destruction is way up. A good example is river health. We can provide more meat with high density grazing. But the waste products have to go somewhere, so the farmers spread them across their fields. Now when it rains, these run into the rivers and we get algae bloom. Majority of rivers in UK are now dying, for example. Have we discovered a sustainable way of producing more meat in less space? I hop…

> Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years?

I keep pointing to the fact that negative population growth is already baked in to the world's population pyramid, and responders conveniently continue to ignore that fact.

We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates.

> But environmental destruction is way up.

> A good example is river health.

Demonstrably false in the U.S. In the U.S. in the 30s river fires were so common that they weren't notable. By 1947 they were so rare that a river fire graced the cover of Time magazine to get people outraged (and succeeded, and good thing too because that was part of a process that led Americans to care about their environment). U.S. rivers are much cleaner than they used to be. Sure, there are some terrible stories still (e.g., the Hudson river has some terrible pollutants now-thankfully-mostly-buried under sediment).

I don't know what's the case in the UK, but I would be surprised if the state of the UK's rivers today was worse than 50 years ago, and shocked to my core if it was worse than 100 years ago.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#389

Post by cryptonector » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

pharmakom wrote: post #377

cryptonector wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that total land under agriculture has been trending down for several decades? Would that put you at ease?

But environmental destruction is way up. A good example is river health. We can provide more meat with high density grazing. But the waste products have to go somewhere, so the farmers spread them across their fields. Now when it rains, these run into the rivers and we get algae bloom. Majority of rivers in UK are now dying, for example. Have we discovered a sustainable way of producing more meat in less space? I hop…

For "Not a Malthusian", you have a very negative view of the future.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#390

Post by amelius » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #365

amelius wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we had 16x less people, some rich bastard would claim ownership of the now excess resources.

Whatever for? If there's no one to sell products to...

I don't know. People use resources for the craziest purposes. Personally, building an immense compute wall comes to mind.