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SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

nasa.gov

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Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#691

Post by lazyjones »

nearbuy wrote: post #688
lazyjones wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a serious question. Elon may run some successful companies, but beyond that his credibility has taken a beating on any number of fronts. People are seriously confused these days. It's like doubting Einstein's famous statement about the importance of bees and his credibility in general because there's a photo of him sticking out his tongue. > How much credit should Elon get for heading companies full of other p…

> It's like doubting Einstein's famous statement about the importance of bees and his credibility in general because there's a photo of him sticking out his tongue. That's an unfortunate example to choose considering that famous statement ("If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.") wasn't actually said by Einstein and also isn't true.

> wasn't actually said by Einstein and also isn't true.

There's no conclusive evidence either way, for both things.

The actual alleged quote is 'Remove the bee from the earth and at the same stroke you remove at least one hundred thousand plants that will not survive.' by the way.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#692

Post by globular-toast »

NortySpock wrote: post #259
tsimionescu wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Crew Dragon is only making money from the government, how would it still be there tomorrow if the government weren't paying? Do you really imagine that there will be a market for this as it stands today? How much training and medical evaluation have the astronauts gone through to ensure they could survive the trip and know how to operate?

I think your parent poster's point was that previously the IP was owned by NASA. The companies contracted to build Apollo or the Space Shuttle was unable to reuse the IP to sell rides to another company or fly private citizens, nor could they bundle and sell the IP. SpaceX owns the Crew Dragon IP and tooling, and they can sell flights to private citizens - in fact I believe they said today that they are contracted wi…

> IP was owned by NASA

Isn't the output of the US government in the public domain? I think the issue was more about the manufacturing and launching of rockets being highly regulated for obvious reasons.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#693

Post by [deleted] »

thu2111 wrote: post #651
trentdk wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your thoughts, but they are sad thoughts to me. Isn’t there something about “exploration” that seems important to a non-neglible amount of humans? I don’t want everything we do to serve the rat race we’re in. Let’s loose our money on something amazing.

Our notion of exploration is very much tied to ancient history and in particular exploring places that we could not otherwise learn anything about other than by going there. The problem with space exploration is that we already have explored it to a huge degree just by using telescopes and remote probes. It's not entirely clear what humans could learn by going to somewhere like Mars, that couldn't otherwise be learne…

[deleted]

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#694

Post by giantrobot »

luma wrote: post #441
sandworm101 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. If we are talking pure commercial travel, it is a vehicle without a destination. The ISS is definitely not a commercial project. There are lots of reasons for the ISS to exist, and they have changed over time, but it has never been a money-making venture. While the dragons certainly do come in under budget, they are a more…

I can think of one commercial case for people in space: servicing existing systems in orbit. There have been a handful of STS missions that involved EVAs to service everything from the Hubble's famous mirror to correcting launch issues with commercial communication satellites like STS-49: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49 I doubt there's enough of a need for this sort of thing to keep a venture afloat, but manned…

The Space Shuttle was unique in terms of orbital servicing in that it had an airlock, a giant cargo bay, and CanadaArm.

The airlock allowed astronauts to go outside the vehicle to work on stuff without de pressuring and repressurizing the whole vehicle. No capsules have that capability and none are really large enough to add the capability. Remember it's not just the airlock but storage of the EMUs and any tools or equipment the task might need.

This leads into the cargo bay and manipulator arm. The Space Shuttle could get close to a satellite, grab it with the arm and then pull it into the cargo bay. The arm could also be used to maneuver astronauts out to a satellite to large to pull into the cargo bay. No capsules have these capabilities either.

A Dragon capsule has no ability to depressurize and repressurize safely and has no airlock. It's CBM compatible hatch is not large enough to fit either a NASA EMU or the Russian Orlan so there's no way for the crew to even perform EVAs. The launch suits worn on the Dragon and ACES suits worn on the Space Shuttle can handle emergency depressurization of the vehicle but are not EVA capable.

So it certainly won't be the Dragon, Starliner, or Soyuz doing any sort of manned in-orbit servicing of satellites.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#695

Post by yellowapple »

giantrobot wrote: post #687
yellowapple wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't see any commercial reason to launch people into space Asteroid mining comes to mind. And sure, we can do that with robots, but it's incredibly convenient to have actual sapient personnel in close proximity to coordinate things, perform repairs, etc. And Ceres is a reasonable choice for such a colony (more so than Mars, IMO, though I know plenty of people might disagree), given the low escape velocity a…

Asteroid mining is pointless for Earth-based industry. There's more of everything on Earth and it's orders of magnitude closer to processing and manufacturing infrastructure. The ISS in Earth orbit cost billions of dollars and was only possible because the Space Shuttle was an awesome utility vehicle that could act as an orbital work platform. Putting even trivial ore processing and refining infrastructure in a place…

> There's more of everything on Earth

No there ain't. A single asteroid could have billions if not trillions of dollars' worth of precious metals (gold, silver, platinum) and would flood the respective markets of those precious metals (making them less "precious" and more commodities, which would be a massive boon for all sorts of industries). Even more common metals like iron and nickel are abundant enough to represent multiple years of Earth's production per asteroid.

Thus:

> that infrastructure [for space-based manufacturing] is more hundreds of billions of dollars to bootstrap.

That will readily pay for itself.

> Then there's the pesky problem of life support, water, and food for everyone working in space to build all that shit.

Asteroids happen to be rich in water ice and hydrocarbons. Ceres, on that note (like I mentioned previously), is a giant ball of the former and has rich surface deposits of the latter (particularly tholins), making it pretty great as a refueling stop and colony site in support of asteroid belt mining operations (better, IMO, than Mars or the Jovian moons). Melt some water and setup some hydroponic farming and you're set.

> That's all besides the fact the technology to actually mine an asteroid doesn't exist and would need to be developed at great cost.

We've been mining for hundreds of years at this point; the key differences with asteroids v. Earth are the (relative) lack of gravity and the lack of atmosphere, both of which should be relatively straightforward to overcome (if anything they should make things easier). Having humans at the mining sites would allow for faster iteration and development of the specific methods.

> You wouldn't cross the Sahara desert to go to some oasis to fill up a gallon bucket of water and take it home.

No, but you might cross the Sahara to find gold, which is exactly what motivated explorers of centuries past. No different here.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#696

Post by nearbuy »

lazyjones wrote: post #691
nearbuy wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like doubting Einstein's famous statement about the importance of bees and his credibility in general because there's a photo of him sticking out his tongue. That's an unfortunate example to choose considering that famous statement ("If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.") wasn't actually said by Einstein and also isn't true.

> wasn't actually said by Einstein and also isn't true. There's no conclusive evidence either way, for both things. The actual alleged quote is 'Remove the bee from the earth and at the same stroke you remove at least one hundred thousand plants that will not survive.' by the way.

Edit: You added the quote in an edit, which is different from the one I thought you meant by "Einstein's famous statement about the importance of bees". In my defense, I would still consider the quote I listed to be Einstein's famous statement about bees (it's the only quote you'll find in the Google search results for "Einstein bees").

----------------------------

I forgot to link Quote Investigator before: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/27/einstein-bees/

It's as close to conclusive as you can get for any quote misattributed to Einstein (and there are hundreds of quotes misattributed to him). You can't prove someone never said something. At best, you can prove someone else said the same thing earlier.

As for whether it's true,

1) You won't find any scientific study or any evidence supporting it. It was just made up.

2) The evidence against it is that the vast majority of our food doesn't require bees. Grains and staples like corn, wheat, rice, and soybean aren't pollinated by insects. Meat doesn't require bees either, as animals tend to be fed grains or grass. Vegetables generally don't require bees. Many fruits can self-pollinate or aren't pollinated by bees (bananas, citrus fruit, etc.). Finally, even the fruits for which bees are currently essential (kiwis, watermelon) could be manually pollinated if necessary. But even if we lost those few fruits and nuts entirely, humans wouldn't go extinct in 4 years (or at all).

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#698

Post by hk__2 »

Benjammer wrote: post #451
hk__2 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you are underestimating the challenges they have to overcome to get machines to work in space. Even if it’s hard, it’s still a lot easier than getting humans to work in space.

Is it really that much easier to build space robots to cover as much breadth of function as one astronaut-engineer in a space suit?

> Is it really that much easier to build space robots to cover as much breadth of function as one astronaut-engineer in a space suit?

No, but it’s tremendously easier to fly these robots there than doing the same with humans. We can afford to let robots “die” on Mars; humans not really.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#699

Post by andrepd »

dannyw wrote: post #633
mumblemumble wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to think about that from the other side, too. Just delivering the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg (assuming rock bottom SpaceX prices). Based on some loose googling, I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. It looks like a typical 100m fiber optic patch cable retails for about $60. So, there's clearly a lot of value to…

High frequency traders will want the best connectivity humanely possible. It’s a zero sum game. If they can beat a competitor firm’s signals by the smallest fraction of a second, even a nanosecond, they reaps in the profits. So $100m for some better fibre? Go nuts!

Eh, that's a really sad thing to optimise for, don't you think? Revealing of a broken incentive system. I'd prefer if HFT practices were banned.
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