Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX • Hacker News Board

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#241

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #234

tsimionescu wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, living in 0g is even less plausible than living in 0.3g long term. In particular, there is a good chance that animals can't reproduce in 0g - those that have been tried have definitely been unable (including insects and chicken - there is still a chance mammals could).

You can spin for artificial gravity out in space though, which would be relatively simple to do provided you had any sort of space manufacturing capabilities.

It's not actually simple at all. You need a massive station to actually spin in such a way that humans don't get dizzy just by crouching (you need the acceleration to be almost constant for the ~1.5m difference between a person lying down and a person standing up). You also require lots of fuel to actually maintain this constant acceleration. The larger everything is, the more problems you have with shielding and energy expenditure. Any malfunction of the spinning mechanism is likely to be catastrophic, as suddenly losing 'gravity' is can easily cause massive damage if people are living without care for this constant possibility.

Not to mention, this would not feel like living on Earth - there are many effects of spinning that do not approximate gravity well, such as the fact that forces acting on you depend on the direction of your movement relative to the direction of spin.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#242

Post by cryptonector » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #19

babesh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US won’t allow that for now because of external competition from China and Russia. That would result in the US losing the current Space Race. EDIT: Probably India as well If SpaceX were Russian, Indian, or Chinese, the US would shit its pants.

There is no "current space race" as far as the US is concerned. Americans put a man on the moon fifty years ago, and no one is worried that China or Russia are going to "gain the high ground" and nuke Washington from orbit. No one cares.

You think the ability to put up hundreds of sats in one launch is not game changing in commerce and war??

You think Starlink won't give the U.S. a military edge??

Of course there is a space race. And the name of the race is to copy everything SpaceX does.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#243

Post by marcinzm » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 11:48 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #118

marcinzm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Collisions in LEO launch debris in all orbits, they are not limited to LEO. How often? You'd need a pretty lucky collision to knock something into a higher stable circular orbit.

Any collision has a chance to knock things at orbital speeds in any direction. Anything launched away from the earth will be flung towards other orbits at something close to the 28,000km/h speeds of LEO. Here is an article in Nature [0] discussing other risks, and mentioning that LEO is already in the early stages of Kessler Syndrome, while SpaceX alone is seeking to launch as many extra satellites as there are track…

The links says that 3 pieces of debris attained higher stable orbits (ie: were still around 1-2 years later). There were 400 pieces of debris altogether. So not a large percentage.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#244

Post by marsokod » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 11:58 AM UTC

elif wrote: post #129

usehackernews wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BO didn’t want to replace SpaceX. That’s not what this is about. BO said historically NASA gives contracts to multiple companies, and BO wanted funding too (in addition to SpaceX. BO “argued that the agency was required to make multiple awards" because it had previously stated a preference for multiple awards”

BO wanted 10B compared to SpaceX's 2.7B. They also got court injunctions preventing SpaceX from starting it's program, kinda deflating your whole 'just wanted to play along' narrative

It was closer to $6B, still more than twice than SpaceX though.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#245

Post by relativ575 » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #173

relativ575 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Earth has plenty of space, we're limited by resources, and there are no interesting resources on Mars There are new discoveries on Earth even today, after hundreds of thousands year of mankind history. What make you think we have known all we need to know about Mars? > I wouldn't be surprised to find out that we'll have a colony outside the solar system before a colony on Mars. Mars is a 8 month journey. Alpha…

> Mars is a 8 month journey. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is a 296,000 year journey using the current propulsion technology. We'll have colonized every single colonizable planets in the Solar System before then. Sure, but there is nothing on Mars. We have no reason to colonize places that lack even the basic resources necessary for life, or some precious resources that are scarce on Earth. At least with a differ…

> Sure, but there is nothing on Mars. We have no reason to colonize places that lack even the basic resources necessary for life, or some precious resources that are scarce on Earth

You don't know what Mars can offer. Not without extensive exploration that can only be done effectively with human presence. We still don't fully understand Earth.

Human once couldn't survive on the desert. We might still not if we never explored it in the first place. Technologies or knowledge we take for granted today may never exist either. The same will happen with Mars. I don't know what the future hold thousands years from now. We may have terraformed it, human body may have adapted to Mars environment, or we may have found it indeed not suitable. We'll however have permanent presence on Mars, and we'll make major leap in science and technologies thanks to Mars exploration.

> I'm not sure what the article was supposed to show, is spectroscopy a technology invented as part of the space program?

You wondered the role of space exploration in the future of humanity. I reckon that our future lies in the advance of science. Spectroscopy would be much less developed without its application in astronomy.

> Teh most valuable results of the space programs have been communications satellites and things like the hubble space telescope - which has done far more for scientific space exploration than the entire Apollo program, as have the Voyager probes, Mars rover etc.

I'm not sure what points you're trying to make it here? some programs have more short term return than others? We are doing both, right? not only that, investment for something like communication satellite dwarf that for outer space programs.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#246

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #243

tsimionescu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any collision has a chance to knock things at orbital speeds in any direction. Anything launched away from the earth will be flung towards other orbits at something close to the 28,000km/h speeds of LEO. Here is an article in Nature [0] discussing other risks, and mentioning that LEO is already in the early stages of Kessler Syndrome, while SpaceX alone is seeking to launch as many extra satellites as there are track…

The links says that 3 pieces of debris attained higher stable orbits (ie: were still around 1-2 years later). There were 400 pieces of debris altogether. So not a large percentage.

Sure, but there also haven't yet been any major collisions in orbit. The risk will increase greatly if the huge number of satellites they proposed ever happens.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#247

Post by cratermoon » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #47

cratermoon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have certainly pushed the world. Whether the direction we're going is 'forward' is extremely debatable. It certainly might look that way from certain positions, but not all points of view agree, and there's no clear way to determine which should be privileged.

It's one thing to disagree, another to call them sociopaths. If what they're doing is debatable - let's debate then. With respect for each other and with civility.

The word you're looking for is not sociopath, it's 'psychopath'. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3...

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#248

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #238

WalterBright wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> exploiting Employing > credit Credit always goes to the leader. Without Bezos, none of Blue Origin would have happened. Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them.

>Without Bezos, none of Blue Origin would have happened. Anyone with the means could have founded Blue Origin, hired the same people, and gotten the same result. Jeff Bezos' money was necessary to the company's success, he was not. >Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them. Olympic athletes credit their trainers and family all the time. And, again, they d…

> Anyone with the means could have

Except they didn't. Bezos did.

> Olympic athletes credit their trainers and family all the time.

Society does not. It's always "Bob won Olympic gold!" Nobody else is mentioned.

> And, again, they do the actual work.

Um, sacrificing and earning money so your child can pursue Olympic dreams is actual work. The full time coach for them does actual work. (There's a reason families will hire the best coaches available for $$$.) The sports doctors who optimize their health and manage their inevitable injuries do actual work. Their nutritionists do actual work.

There's no such thing as an Olympic athlete who did all the work, not even close.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#249

Post by s1artibartfast » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

avmich wrote: post #221

s1artibartfast wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point. Specifically, the point is to pay for aerospace jobs if we want to compete in the aerospace market. Nasa launch contracts are the carrot for companies like spacex and others to get in the market. Various contracts keep a larger pool of engineers in the market

The idea of paying for aerospace jobs lead to steady losses in the aerospace market, until deeply capitalistic (in a sense) SpaceX came and lowered costs. Once again: the idea that USA would keep competing on international aerospace market of launch services wasn't working before SpaceX started launching Falcon-9. Maybe the market losses are because of paying for aerospace jobs, or maybe it's just a coincidence, but…

I'm not sure that we understand each other.

I'm not talking about NASA headcount, I am talking about NASA contracts which support private sector companies and aerospace engineers.

The USA wants to maintain the domestic capability to for launches, and this means funding technology and expertise. If you don't award contracts domestically, in 10-20 years the capability is gone. No domestic contracts => no jobs => no grads => no rocket engineers.

NASA's model has always been to award contracts to the private sector companies. This is why you have SpaceX, Boeing, Northrup, Lockheed launch capabilities.

>I think the idea of paying for aerospace jobs in this way doesn't work.

I'm not sure what you mean by paying for aerospace jobs. NASA funded private sector manufacturers before and continues to fund it now.

I agree the the US manufacturers were ripe for disruption, and SpaceX did a great job of doing just that. However, the entire market and jobs exist to chase these government contracts. Do you think that SpaceX would exist if it wasn't for NASA and DOD launch contracts? I don't.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#250

Post by avmich » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #249

avmich wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of paying for aerospace jobs lead to steady losses in the aerospace market, until deeply capitalistic (in a sense) SpaceX came and lowered costs. Once again: the idea that USA would keep competing on international aerospace market of launch services wasn't working before SpaceX started launching Falcon-9. Maybe the market losses are because of paying for aerospace jobs, or maybe it's just a coincidence, but…

I'm not sure that we understand each other. I'm not talking about NASA headcount, I am talking about NASA contracts which support private sector companies and aerospace engineers. The USA wants to maintain the domestic capability to for launches, and this means funding technology and expertise. If you don't award contracts domestically, in 10-20 years the capability is gone. No domestic contracts => no jobs => no gra…

Yes, I think we talk about different things. Main focus of criticism of alt-space, a.k.a new private space community is cost-plus schemas of payments, which encourage increases in costs. The big difference of SpaceX was offering a "function" for sale - there is a launch capability, which has price N dollars per launch or M dollars per kilogram on LEO, and NASA can take it or not.

This way the idea that all or many congressional districts should participate in NASA contracts - because then those congressmen support increasing NASA's budgets - goes out the window. Now congressmen - and congresswomen, of course - can judge NASA in terms of space progress vs. money spent, not in terms of distribution of money to jobs in their districts. From this point of view, your question is irrelevant - no, it wouldn't, as after forth launch Falcon-1 SpaceX didn't have funds to continue, and NASA helped, but that doesn't mean NASA doesn't have an ineffective policy.