701–710 of 774 posts
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If you were acting on behalf of the other players in the sequel, these would be great moves.
I no longer think he's deliberately acting on their behalf. He's just so stupid that's equivalent to that.
One way to understand the election is a rejection of complexity - political complexity, social complexity, scientific complexity, economic complexity, moral complexity - these are all out of style. People seem very happy to ditch all of these in favor of kayfabe [0].
Of course, an empty narratives doesn't last; but once people get used to an empty narrative, they sometimes just move on to the next one. Just give them a face and a heel - things are much easier to understand that way.
Anyway, I feel like things might stay this way for a while.
It's definitely a real human experience to say "I know MY job is complicated, but that thing over there ought to be simple"
Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1]. Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, S…
These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed. The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putt…
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In my eyes, institutional knowledge is figuring out what things do NOT work, not what did back then. When you lose that, you're wasting years or even decades hitting the exact same pitfalls the old guard hit once upon a time. Many truly bright minds aren't those asserting how this was the best method and then burying their heads in the sand when other ideas come out. My time working with some of the brightest minds i…
> is figuring out what things do NOT work, not what did back then Yes, this is my point. It's pruning the solution space before traversing it. The diligent approach is to temporarily disregard that knowledge, and do a quick re-exploration to test if it's still true. > to some extent This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
As of now, this same mentality is used to push AI into everywhere. Not only is the intent bad, but the tech doesn't even work. That's not "resisting change". That's experimenting and realizing the hype was just that.
>This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
The comment itself definitely reveals more than a light suggestion.
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What does this even mean? I literally cannot figure it out. Like, they’ll just put warm bodies anywhere, as if that’s a feature of naziism? That Nazis love rockets? Something else?
It's a reference to Wernher von Braun. I think it's a really pointless thing to say, since it adds nothing to the conversation and just sort of makes an unrelated, uninformative reference. But here we are nonetheless.
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SLS doesn't serve any actual NASA needs. It's fake make-work. Case in point: Congress expressly ordered NASA to launch Europa Clipper on SLS, to make it appear that SLS was indispensable to core NASA science missions. But, due to design flaws, SLS turned out to be technically incapable of launching Clipper at all. So they backtracked and allowed free-market competition to compete for the Clipper launch. Which it did:…
How many orbital refuels would Starship need for a lunar landing and return mission? Something like 20? I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.
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The satellite industry in the US is larger than ever, FWIW. Between Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, plus a gazillion startups like Astranis, K2 Space, etc, not to mention defense satellites, there has never been a time when more satellites have been launched by the U.S. I think your friend will be fine. The real issue is the capability loss for NASA.
Doesn't a lot of that require you to live in Texas?
But haven't people wanted NASA to be more streamlined, and efficient? Not sure if that is reducing staffing, or changing its mission. SpaceX making such leaps and bounds over NASA had to be a shot across the bow.
>leaps and bounds repeated explosions?
The thing that's exploding is Starship, which is still under development. Their production vehicles are among the most reliable in history. Falcon has a 99% mission success rate a 95% landing success rate and Falcon Heavy has a 100% mission success rate.
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So many ways. The current paradigm is that it gets one chance and it has to be perfect. Starship (which I'm only referencing as the bleeding-edge launch vehicle) compared to Ariane 5 could be a fraction of half the cost, with double the volume and 4x the mass. With those constraints removed the science missions had a lot more flexibility in their design.
JWST cost $10B. The launch was expensive at $1.5B; but getting that down to $750M won’t really change the availability.