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

The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 269 posts

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#41

Post by laurent92 »

paganel wrote: post #24
bambax wrote: post #8

In short, we are now using billionaires instead of dogs to test spaceships. I would argue that's progress.

Hope those billionaires won't dare to force for their faces to be put on future postal stamps, I grew up as a kid having Laika [1] on them, I wouldn't want for future postal-stamp collector kids to have to look at the faces of Branson or, God forbid, Bezos. [1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/postage-stamp-mongolia-circa...

Isn’t that the principle of football and space conquest: Giving plebs something to dream about, so we can shove them with ads and admiration for absurd ideas (like nationalism or love for any idea, maybe sovietism, patriotism, Richardbrandsonism, or for the belief that we’re in together pushing for a better world).

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#42

Post by the-pigeon »

mongol wrote: post #28
jedberg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit to Musk here for being smart enough not to get in one of his own rockets (yet).

Is that really to his credit though? Should he not be prepared to risk his own life, just like those of his employees?

SpaceX employees haven't gone to space. Just NASA astronauts on SpaceX rockets. And this privately paid for mission coming up.

I don't think it's the CEO's job to be a test pilot. I think that's pretty crazy actually.

I know someone who is a test pilot. He's trained a long time to do it. You want someone in the craft that is an expert at both piloting spacecraft and the engineering of the craft. Musk is certainly no pilot and the job of CEO does not require you to have those skills.

It could be argued that since these systems are fully automated that you don't need anyone with special skills there. But being a programmer I don't trust software for every situation. So I sure think if you are going to put a person on it, they should be able to intervene if needed. There should be a purpose to their risk.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#43

Post by walrus01 »

amatecha wrote: post #39
walrus01 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until people hear about the person I know who was a contestant on "The Bachelor", who is in fact already happily married. Reality TV is fake? The ocean is wet! Sewage is smelly! and other shocking news, film at 11.

Who was already married, the "bachelor" or the contestant trying to win his marriage? or both? lol

I think it was the reverse-gender version of the show? With many male contenders and one woman. The person who is a friend-of-a-friend is a happily married man with two kids, but was "single" for the purpose of the show.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#44

Post by rpmisms »

timmytokyo wrote: post #26
bigtones wrote: post #2

Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.

Violating airspace regulations isn't gutsy. It's irresponsible and selfish. It puts others at risk.

Life is risk, sometimes with other people's lives in the balance. Violating their airspace, in this context, was absolutely gutsy, and dangerous, and stupid, but all of them have massive balls and my respect.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#45

Post by amatecha »

walrus01 wrote: post #43
amatecha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was already married, the "bachelor" or the contestant trying to win his marriage? or both? lol

I think it was the reverse-gender version of the show? With many male contenders and one woman. The person who is a friend-of-a-friend is a happily married man with two kids, but was "single" for the purpose of the show.

Oohhh, "The Bachelorette" I guess. Yeah, doesn't surprise me...

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#46

Post by beerandt »

vermontdevil wrote: post #3

Telling they fired Sturckow when he was pretty outspoken such as this: In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their…

They didn't fire him for the emails, they fired him for publicly bad mouthing the company. There were ~2 years in between.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#47

Post by dylan604 »

amatecha wrote: post #27
dboreham wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!

Oh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!

It still amazes me that anyone still believes that the pictures they see on TV are in any way real.

100% of content on TV is fake. I used to say except the news, but now I'm not even able to trust that. If it's a commercial, definitely fake. If it's a TV show, 100% fake. Games shows shoot 5 episodes in a day, so when they say "last week's winner" it was last hour's.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#49

Post by TeMPOraL »

krapp wrote: post #30
HPsquared wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bigger category: the egos of the powerful. The rich are a subset.

I can't think of anyone powerful enough who isn't also rich. Although "rich" is a vaguely defined term. There still to me seems to be a direct relationship between money and power - billionaires can push the world further than millionaires, than the upper class, etc.

Money and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you.

The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways of doing this are perfectly legal). Conversely, political power - the kind mediated by legal systems or explicit threats of violence - is directly convertible to money.

(There's also a special variant of the latter - power wielded by organized religions. The power to browbeat others into doing almost any arbitrary work. Of course, that one too is trivially convertible to both money and political power, and vice versa. That's why fully separating business, church and state is fundamentally impossible. They're different facets of the same thing. An Unholy Trinity.)

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#50

Post by dchest »

mc32 wrote: post #31
dchest wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biking to the spaceport was in the promotional video released a few days before the flight (where they announced "astronauts"), obviously it couldn't be filmed on the flight day.

But on the day of the flight on the stage he went along pretending he’d biked there.

Hm, you're right: they even had a big "Earlier Today" label when they showed this piece live.
Post reply on HN