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SpaceX cleared for US military launches

bbc.co.uk

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Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#41

Post by mikeash »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #22
datamingle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"their business very much implies the termination of human life" .. you are assuming a perfect world where no other entity wants to harm human life. Also, GPS satellites were created for the military. They are fundamental for our daily lives around the world now.

Don't forget how much better the GPS could have been without the military putting the breaks on civilian uses and competitors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_%28satellite_navigation...

Selective Availability stopped in 2000. What alternative system would have been ready to go by then that was prevented from being ready by the actions of the US military? What entity would have paid for creating GPS if not the US military?

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#42

Post by drzaiusapelord »

varjag wrote: post #35
yc1010 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I was born and lived during the dying days of the USSR in 80s (left in mid 90s) Under communism everyone knew the system was a failure and everything was a sham, hell the jokes being made were hilarious. Now on the other hand in last few years everything in Russia under Tsar Putin went full retard mode with people actually believing the unashamed propaganda that the state controlled media puts out. Many R…

Indeed, in late USSR, the power rested on subtle balance between Party, KGB and Army elites. Now the Party has been eliminated, and KGB subjugated the Army. If you follow the developments of Russian WW2 themed motion pictures you'll notice the corresponding shift. Nearly every movie now features an NKVD or covert ops protagonist. Action TV series are also largely about cloak and dagger types.

This is a little much. Putin has great PR, but the reality is that he's in an ugly position considering the level of corruption he's encouraged and the dismal economy he now leads (2% shrink this quarter alone with many large firms unable for find financing due to sanctions). His foreign policy has only emboldened a previously declining NATO and set strict sanctions on Russia that no one wants to lift. Russians aren't stupid, they know this guy can't deliver the gravy train any longer and just like 1991 caught us by surprise we'll probably see a surprise change of leadership when enough parties are fed up. Putin's move towards a North Korean style government isn't from a position of strength, but a position of weakness. Its a desperate move from a desperate regime.

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#43

Post by mikeash »

wahsd wrote: post #36

This seriously compromises the integrity of SpaceX. Even if they were to only support "national security" there is absolutely zero chance they can know whether they are actually supporting national security or global surveillance and oppression of human rights. What people don't realize is that we, SpaceX and Musk, are really no different whatsoever than any of the companies that have been chided for "working with th…

There's no comparison. The US is not trying to conquer the world and the US is not committing genocide.

Yes, the US government does lots of bad things. It also does lots of good things. It's a vast collection of sometimes loosely affiliated organizations with lots of competing interests and there's no reason to expect consistency. But there's no sensible comparison to the Nazis.

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#44

Post by mikeash »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #39
gexla wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn't go into much detail. In this case, Russia is "bad" because of the uncertainty of the relationship relying on something so important to be considered national interests. The decision to develop rockets at home was made around the time when someone in Russia made a comment to the effect of "maybe they should use trampolines to get into space."

This. If this article was about China or Russia doing something to get off a US product or service, HN would be cheering. When the US protects its own interests, especially its world class space programs, suddenly the tone turns towards, "EVIL US NOT PLAYING NICE!" Sadly, that narrative is upvote heaven here on HN.

As far as I can tell, what's upvote heaven is complaining about how nonexistent bad comments get lots of upvotes. I don't see any comments in this thread that meet your description, while the top is mostly comments explaining why this move makes sense. There are quite a few kneejerk "the US is evil" comments, but it's not about playing nice, it's about thinking the US government is the devil and SpaceX is sullied by the association. I don't see any comments saying the US should just keep buying Russian engines.

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#45

Post by nraynaud »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #33
nraynaud wrote: post #3

I like the old school dogma underlying the whole thing. Russia is bad, private enterprise is good, the US wants to put weapons in space, and Michael Jackson is rocking the world with Thriller.

>Russia is bad, private enterprise is good Considering Putin is playing politics with space, namely limiting critical RD-180 sales after the west criticized his illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, as well as funding and arming rebels who are purposely targeting civilians, well, what exactly do you want us to say here? Engage in more mindless political correctness? Sing kumbaya around the campfire as to not offend…

the US invaded Iraq, and kill people everywhere in the world on a regular basis too, overthrow governments, helps dictators and lie to people all the time. Nobody gets ahead when you only look for scapegoats and with Manichaeism as a policy.

We are bringing back the world into the 20st century, this will be a big problem.

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#46

Post by ColinWright »

kaolinite wrote: post #40
ColinWright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily statistically significant, but of the past 1000 articles submitted: 8 (bbc.co.uk) 9 (techcrunch.com) 10 (arstechnica.com) 14 (nytimes.com) 14 (theguardian.com) 16 (washingtonpost.com) 16 (youtube.com) 18 (wsj.com) 32 (medium.com) 46 (github.com) Of the past 10,000: 40 (kickstarter.com) 40 (reddit.com) 40 (theatlantic.com) 44 (forbes.com) 46 (bloomberg.com) 46 (securityaffairs.co) 47 (theverge.com) 56…

Wow, thanks Colin - really cool information. Where do you get the contents of 'records' from? Do you have a script that crawls occasionally? If we merge bbc.com and bbc.co.uk, we end up with 125 / 10,000. I suppose that isn't that many compared to others, but it's still higher than I think it should be. ArsTechnica (which often runs the same articles, such as this SpaceX one) only has 68 / 10,000 and the articles are…

  > Where do you get the contents of 'records' from?
I download the "newest" and "news" pages every 15 minutes or so, then collate the data.

  > If we merge bbc.com and bbc.co.uk, we
  > end up with 125 / 10,000.  I suppose
  > that isn't that many compared to others,
It's less than some, but not as many as, say, nytimes.com or techcrunch.com. But it's a major news site, so I'm not surprised people read it and go "Oh, that's interesting, I'll click the HN bookmarklet and submit it."

  > ... still higher than I think it should be.
What do you think it "should be?"

  > A nice solution might be to remind people,
  > ... that it's better to go to the source ...
I personally find it useful to read a non-technical overview, and then if interested, go and find the technical version. Often the article with technical details borders on unreadable.

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#47

Post by nraynaud »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #39
gexla wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn't go into much detail. In this case, Russia is "bad" because of the uncertainty of the relationship relying on something so important to be considered national interests. The decision to develop rockets at home was made around the time when someone in Russia made a comment to the effect of "maybe they should use trampolines to get into space."

This. If this article was about China or Russia doing something to get off a US product or service, HN would be cheering. When the US protects its own interests, especially its world class space programs, suddenly the tone turns towards, "EVIL US NOT PLAYING NICE!" Sadly, that narrative is upvote heaven here on HN.

It's not like they couldn't buy lifts onboard other NATO countries rockets, but I guess the US people don't know there are more than Russia and the US who can send rockets.

Also, this paranoid stance is mildly worrying, because the US is the most weaponized country in the world, and one of the least shy country to use its arsenal, so if it also get a paranoid stance "all the world hate us", then we're all doomed.

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#48

Post by drzaiusapelord »

nraynaud wrote: post #45
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Russia is bad, private enterprise is good Considering Putin is playing politics with space, namely limiting critical RD-180 sales after the west criticized his illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, as well as funding and arming rebels who are purposely targeting civilians, well, what exactly do you want us to say here? Engage in more mindless political correctness? Sing kumbaya around the campfire as to not offend…

the US invaded Iraq, and kill people everywhere in the world on a regular basis too, overthrow governments, helps dictators and lie to people all the time. Nobody gets ahead when you only look for scapegoats and with Manichaeism as a policy. We are bringing back the world into the 20st century, this will be a big problem.

That's fine, you are very welcome not to buy our rockets, iphones, software, and processors if you want to protest our foreign policy. We're not buying Putin's stuff, so don't buy ours.

I don't see a problem with this.

>overthrow governments

The middle east is migrating to democracy and has the least amount of dictators in charge in my lifetime, thanks to US foreign policy. While I think foriegn policy is hard to judge, annexing land Russia-style for "fuck you" reasons is very different than overthrowing dictators murdering their people and those people begging for US/NATO/UN intervention, which we sometimes provide. The world tried non-interventionism and it got us WWII. Better the US/NATO making these calls than autocratic powers with annexation agendas like China or Russia.

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#49

Post by skinofstars »

wahsd wrote: post #36

This seriously compromises the integrity of SpaceX. Even if they were to only support "national security" there is absolutely zero chance they can know whether they are actually supporting national security or global surveillance and oppression of human rights. What people don't realize is that we, SpaceX and Musk, are really no different whatsoever than any of the companies that have been chided for "working with th…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Re: SpaceX cleared for US military launches

#50

Post by stefantalpalaru »

datamingle wrote: post #31
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can complain because it prevented (or significantly delayed) much better services through some arm twisting and corruption paid for by American tax payers out of the military budget.

Where is the corruption? Galileo (Euro planned system) was going to use the same frequency as GPS. So, during conflict areas the US could not jam Galileo without also affecting GPS. So the US military probably made plans on destroying satellites if it was determined that the enemy was using Galileo. The Euro group decided instead to use another frequency than the GPS frequency. Now.... "Galileo will start offering fi…

A different frequency means that all the existing GPS hardware won't work with the new network.

> I fail to see any corruption.

http://www.aftenposten.no/spesial/wikileaksdokumenter/221020...

http://www.itworld.com/article/2792924/data-center/secret-u-...

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internationa...

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1145904

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