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Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

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Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

#41

Post by mulmen »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #3

I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?

We're iterating on a new idea. The commercialization of space travel. The technology exists to go to the moon or live in orbit but the question now is can we reduce cost and scale capacity.

Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

#42

Post by dotancohen »

cbanek wrote: post #18
dghlsakjg wrote: post #3

I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?

(I worked at SpaceX) Two words: flight heritage. Successful concepts are very often reused. For example, heat shields, parachute landings, sea landings, air bags for landings on hard land, etc. Now, let me try to explain this in something similar: cars. Cars are all pretty much the same. They have a steering wheel, 4 tires, transmission, engine, etc. The parts all do the same thing in different cars, but we don't alw…

Though we have lost some documentation, that is not the reason that we would not build Saturn Vs or Apollo capsules anymore. Those vehicles just do not support the modem missions that we would like to do, even if we had the full specs still.

We need more mass to orbit, more time on orbit, larger spacecraft volumes, less expensive mass-to-orbit, and less toxic materials in order to do the new missions that we'd like to do.

Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

#46

Post by imtringued »

gopkarthik wrote: post #43

Noob question: Hypothetically if the crew were in the Starliner for the trip, they would have planned safely? I get that prior to the trip, the risk of failure was high enough to not make that call.

The problem wasn't landing Starliner. The problem is that the crew might be stuck in orbit, because the thrusters won't fire.

Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

#48

Post by anonzzzies »

cbanek wrote: post #18
dghlsakjg wrote: post #3

I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?

(I worked at SpaceX) Two words: flight heritage. Successful concepts are very often reused. For example, heat shields, parachute landings, sea landings, air bags for landings on hard land, etc. Now, let me try to explain this in something similar: cars. Cars are all pretty much the same. They have a steering wheel, 4 tires, transmission, engine, etc. The parts all do the same thing in different cars, but we don't alw…

> But if you're starting from scratch, you've lost all the "little fixes" that go into making a car good.

This is also the reason massive software rewrites often fail; you rebuild the general gist quite fast, nice code, lovely interfaces etc but it will have a trillion bugs which come from decades of adding an exception here, adding one there etc. So now you have a beautiful albeit worthless product. And often these get scrapped: I know of some tax system rewrites from mainframe to modern code that costed 10s of millions and were scrapped, multiple times for this reason.

Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

#49

Post by orwin »

Mistletoe wrote: post #27
dghlsakjg wrote: post #3

I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?

Our IQ is literally dropping, I don’t think you need more than that. Going to outer space is hard. It requires intelligent people at every level and they need to be focused on what they are doing. Our era is an era of massive distraction and less intelligent people. >Flynn attributed this increase to better nutrition. Flynn continued his work and other scientists followed suit until they all noticed that children bor…

I really don't believe your source, so I looked into the original material : Flynn 1984, Flynn 1987, Flynn 2012,and I was right: the first study reporting a reverse-Flynn effect is pretty recent, and is from my country France, it's the Dutton&Lynn from 2015. Also, it's way more complicated than this.

Basically an IQ test, if you're lucky to never have been subjected to one, is in fact multiple different tests (for me it was either 4 or five, I don't remember, I know I scored under the mean in the temporal-spatial test, barely above in the verbal, and way above in at least 2 others). It's a 'proxy' for intelligence but, but an incomplete one, and different tests exists. According to Flynn (2012), the gains were mostly with performance-based mesures, and the gains in verbal tests (which highlight education, and imho, culture) were low or negative. The reverse-Flynn could very well be caused by a decline in crystallized intelligence (general knowledge subtest, vocabulary/verbal subtests), while performance-based tests (logic, adaptibility, spatial vision) plateau or stopped increasing. In any case, we should avoid making broad claims about IQ: tests aren't _really_ standardized, vary between countries (and psychologists tbh) and are a very complex subject.

Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

#50

Post by pmontra »

hindsightbias wrote: post #25
dghlsakjg wrote: post #3

I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?

It’s not like the HW folks had been building capsules for four decades. Look at the last 5 decades of SW. Why aren’t we in an iterative utopia already?

It's an analogy that's only partially good.

Software from 50 or 30 years ago couldn't solve some of the problems current software is solving because the hardware wasn't powerful enough. Example: we had neural networks theory and a little practice but without the current hardware we could not work on them and advance the theory. Could we be confident that LLM could be as good as they are? We could not.

However let's go back 20 years or maybe 30 and more mundane tasks like word processing and spreadsheet were already a solved. We needed only to port them to newer versions of the OS. A Word from around 2000 would be OK for most tasks today.

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