361–370 of 588 posts
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Or on a larger scale, their publicly disclosed COVID deaths.
You mean like this https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aef5697 , or this https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8354557/ .
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> Blue's option was being seen as the faster option due to having a less risky critical path Source? (Not doubting, and it sounds vaguely familiar.) > the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since eve…
> I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction. The plans for Artemis are public, and they don't include any robotic construction before a manned landing. Neveemind that the idea of a moon base is fanciful, I think it's very unlikely to happen in anything resembling current world climate.
They also change every time a Congressional staffer sneezes. If the space suits don’t work, a pivot would be easier than having the space suits with no rocket to put them on.
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Software quality sucks because the consequences for getting it wrong are low for the people and organizations making it. Which is often fine, but sometimes isn't.
I have come to think that the reason why people are prepared to accept AI slop is because the software industry was so blase about quality. They already had slop, now they get it cheaper. AI is the fentanyl to JavaScript bootcamp heroin.
There isn't an actual diverse ecosystem of most consumer software, just a monoculture of largely undifferentiated clones.
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> and reliable vertical landings We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago [1] > reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason) Static fire tests are routine since the 60s, nothing new here either [2]. > We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs This is about manufacturing optimization and it has very little to do with rocke…
If I had a few hundred billion lying around, I'd be spending a couple of billion a year on grants for new physics research. Hire all those smart people who waste their lives being quants and steer them in the direction of something useful.
Unfortunately, this is not the way the world is going right now.
Physics research, and generally speaking fundamental research, is publicly funded.
Meaning, most of the time, under funded.
This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin. I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the New Glenn booster, it finally seemed like they had some bragging rights. Now they're looking at a year minimum before they get back to a regular launch rhythm. The question now is: What went wrong? If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake. Maybe an incorrec…
I'm not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog". Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting. If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has around 660 orbital launches with a fully reusable system. They build rocket factories.
BO is absolutely the underdog, in every way, unless you want to count 38 suborbital joyrides, then they're ahead at 38 to 0.
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Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.
Well, they just had a failure, so that spells great success, right? I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.
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No, this would be crushing regardless. Even if Blue Origin had dozens of rockets ready to go, they can't fly without without the pad, which will take around a year to repair (based on previous examples).
If one pad is the bottleneck, and the goal is to ramp up to be a spacex competitor, then build more than one... Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.
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> They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket. > It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon
You're assuming "before" when it's probably "investigate 100 possible causes in parallel".