Pretty impressive. And by that I mean boring return to earth, which is impressive in that it is made to seem so "easy."
On the plus side, my friend from Lockheed-Martin who bet me dinner at one's favorite restaurant that Boeing would be the first when the contract was announced, now owes me dinner, so there's that.
I had hoped see Starship hop 150m today[1] however that seems to have been scrubbed.
There is a really good lesson here for folks which is ignore the people saying you won't be able to do something and just execute. They can't argue with results.
IMO, NASA/Congress will hang on to SLS for as long as it is remotely defensible.
The US will need 2 heavy lift, large diameter rockets before SLS gets the axe. Once Starship and New Glenn are flying it'll be significantly more difficult to justify the $2 billion / year spent just on the SLS program (not counting the actual rockets, which are another $1 billion a pop).
Exactly. Governments and large multinationals don’t like relying on a single supplier for anything because a single supplier is a single point of failure. No matter how good a new option is, they’ll keep the old option on life support until they have a third option.
I dare say it has little to do with having a third option (since SLS is still years away from being an option) and more to do with pork barrel politics.
Oh, I'm sure that's also a major factor. I just meant that we shouldn't expect the U.S. government to 'pick a winner' and cancel SLS even if they're competing head to head and it's clear SpaceX is blowing SLS out of the water.
With the ungodly amount of money spent on SLS they could support and build multible large rockets easly. The SLS is the single point of failure you should try to avoid.
I read that article all the way to the end, which was quite a slog. (You can definitely tell this guy is in the business of stretching out content to fit in more ad breaks) The conclusion at the end appears to be "NASA didn't see Starship coming at all, and built a very conservative, very expensive expendable launch system, that underperforms Starship on every metric". There is a logical next step, after you come to that conclusion...
It is, of course, very reasonable to wait for Starship to actually launch and demonstrate a couple flights. But I would be very very surprised if SLS still exists in two years.
> On the plus side, my friend from Lockheed-Martin who bet me dinner at one's favorite restaurant that Boeing would be the first when the contract was announced, now owes me dinner, so there's that.
I read somewhere that Musk have managed to hire top of the cream engineers of America's aerospace contractors, and NASA for very small money, relatively speaking, after NASA got its original "new crewed mission" project cancelled.
And the irony is, that he got money for first SpaceX launches from NASA, and got a lot of engineering made for him for free at NASA as well.
This is not exactly a fair take. the "new crewed mission" project has never been actually canceled. It's been delayed, and not due to lack of funding but poor execution. Constellation was better funded than commercial cargo and commercial crew and Orion has still been under development basically the whole time (although it changed names). Artemis continues, too.
People want to make out SpaceX as if SpaceX is ideologically opposed to NASA or government funding and thus are hypocrites, when that has never been true. People like working at SpaceX because SpaceX gets stuff done and is developing truly transformative technology beyond the expendable paradigm of Apollo. Technology that will expand the availability of space to several orders of magnitude more people instead of just a handful of heroes. And NASA loves it.
> People want to make out SpaceX as if SpaceX is ideologically opposed to NASA or government funding and thus are hypocrites, when that has never been true
It seems to me SpaceX's secret sauce is continuous iteration on vehicles that actually fly. It's hard to see how Boeing or Blue Origin can develop expertise with any confidence their designs will work, except, apparently, by going very slowly. Of course, Boeing has somewhat of a track record, but Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX and still hasn't achieved orbit.
I agree with this. It seems pretty clear to me that SpaceX's key innovation is one of management -- namely rocket engineering using software-like iterative methods. The driving force of course is Musk, who comes from software but moved into hardware where we see the exact same iterative development at Tesla.
There's no reason that other launch providers can't be doing what SpaceX is doing, but they aren't. They continue to design and build using more traditional and conservative aerospace management approaches.
Blue Origin is run by somebody with a background in finance and retail.
ULA by a former mechanical engineer.
Arianespace is run by a former policy guy turned exec.
Rocket Lab is run by an engineer.
Scaled Composites (I know a different kind of beast) is run by an aerospace engineer.
I agree with this. It seems pretty clear to me that SpaceX's key innovation is one of management -- namely rocket engineering using software-like iterative methods. The driving force of course is Musk, who comes from software but moved into hardware where we see the exact same iterative development at Tesla.
I think it's a bit unfair to look at Blue Origin like that.
While it's true that Blue Origin hasn't done anything more than a few test flights, they've definitely got a different view of the way to develop rockets.
Blue Origin effectively has no requirements to make a commercial return. Until Jeff Bezos runs out of cash (unlikely), gets bored (seemingly unlikely), or pissed off (who knows) they can keep going doing whatever they like. Certainly making money is an eventual goal, but it's not like a few delays or failures are going to result in them being unable to make rent.
For this reason, they've developed from the other end, first - perfecting their launch and landing with a smaller-scale rocket and iterating from that perspective.
SpaceX on the other hand is definitely marked by their early days where they were down to their last few $ and Elon being out of cash to keep running the business if it didn't work. So they've been working mostly on the "get something that customers will buy" side of things, with the addition of landing/re-use coming secondary.
> To me, they give a feeling that they have some very experienced, and conservative type managing their engineering who does everything by the book.
I think this is pretty clearly not true.
"The book" says that once you have an operational configuration you freeze it. I remember hearing that the shuttle program was having to scrounge for old CPUs from warehouses because someone of the processors it used were no longer manufactured, and they didn't want to make changes to the hardware.
In contrast to this, SpaceX is famous for continuously modifying their rockets - so much so that one of the NASA requirements for certification was that they freeze the design of their F9.
>"The book" says that once you have an operational configuration you freeze it.
I guess we've been reading different books then. The Shuttle you're referring to had been constantly modified and tuned (noise suppression to prevent STS-1-like body flap damage, autopilot, the anti-geyser line, LWT, SLWT etc etc etc). The other manned vehicle, Soyuz, is on its 8th major iteration already, and got many minor modifications in between.
They looked for old CPUs instead of upgrading because it wasn't worth it. Shuttle program got cancelled in 2004, and it was known well in advance that it will stop flying.
The difference is, they don't make headlines nearly as much. (Shuttle did early on, but it was too long ago)
> I remember hearing that the shuttle program was having to scrounge for old CPUs from warehouses because someone of the processors it used were no longer manufactured, and they didn't want to make changes to the hardware.
I think there's some nuance here -- my take is that SpaceX has a very good balance of knowing when going slowly and carefully is critical (launching important customer vehicles, launching crewed missions), and when it's critical to move fast and iterate (eg, every other time).
SpaceX has blown up a LOT of vehicles via mistakes, by iterating fast and learning from them. They use these as learning experiences, and if they can get a few satellites up in the interim, that's great (see: the starlink launches on re-used rockets). But when it comes to launching actual astronauts, they checked every one of NASA's million boxes.
NASA and Boeing are unfortunately incapable of operating in fast-and-loose mode, even when it would be better to iterate and break a few rockets. The two-mode operation is why SpaceX dominates, and likely will continue to crush.
I believe they are differentiated by not doing a lot of random iterations in comparison to the competition.
Blue Origin for example managed to completely redo pretty much everything about their design few times over, while SpaceX had something resembling Falcon 1, and Falcon 9 on their drawing boards pretty much since the beginning.
Too much pivots, too much iterations, and close to no straight advancements.
"And the irony is, that he got money for first SpaceX launches from NASA, and got a lot of engineering made for him for free at NASA as well."
That isn't really "ironic" though. All of the technology that NASA develops is "free" for any US company that wants to use it. Pre-pandemic NASA would host an annual NASA Technology exposition at Ames Research that was kind of like a science fair for nerds. There were posters, and often the original investigators, who would discuss what they did, what they discovered, how it could be used, etc. A number of bio-diesel companies got their start from NASA bio-diesel research.
I much prefer that model to the one where the NSF or DARPA funds a university research program that then patents the research and holds it hostage to licensing fees.
The other aspect of your comment is also somewhat out of touch with the relationship NASA has with space craft. NASA has never been the sole supplier of a space craft. They always let contracts to vendors who built components of spacecraft and then they integrated those components into a complete system. Many of the "big" components for space craft are not off the shelf, like engines, so unless you want the government in the rocket engine building business, you buy those from someone else. From the very first, NASA rockets such as Vanguard and Mercury Redstone were purchased from others.
That said, NASA recognized as early as the Mercury project days that they were not ever going to be a "supplier" of rockets to third parties. They use rockets to do science and they need someone to buy them from.
One need only look at the Space Launch System (SLS) to see the travails of NASA trying to project manage building rockets these days. The budgeting process is stuffed to overflowing with politics where congressional representatives make budget dollars contingent on them going to a company in their district or state, and science as a priority comes and goes depending on the administration.
NASA didn't "give" SpaceX money, they bought rockets from SpaceX to meet their needs. Just like a startup that "lands" a big enterprise customer that buys their product and as a result provides the resources for the startup to both grow and build and deliver the product that was purchased.
Looking at the price they paid, they got a good deal. The first "big" contract, the resupply missions, cost NASA way less than it would have if they had paid ULA to launch those missions. At the same time SpaceX made enough profit from that contract to continue improving the fundamentals. Once it was clear they could reliably get things into orbit, other people who wanted to buy "launch services" started inquiring. SpaceX has out competed every other launch provider in the world because they can launch a payload and make money on it at a price that doesn't cover the other vendors launch at all. And they can do that because they are vertically integrated (pun intended) providing the booster, the engines, and the delivery system.
If you want to look at being "subsidized" by the government then you need look no further than the "cost plus" contracts that the government used to write for launch services. Those explicitly allowed the folks as ULA to scrape a few billion dollars off the top every year to "insure a domestic launch capability." Something you need if one third of your national defense rests on being able to use a rocket to put a bunch of nuclear warheads into someone's country[1].
So I think it is important to give credit where credit is due. Elon Musk re-imagined how the space launch industry might be structured and Gwen Shotwell effectively built a company that could execute on that re-imagining. This even when the existing companies in the space called Elon's ideas "fanciful", "ludicrous", or in one case "drug induced."
I continue to watch Blue Origin as well, although I feel as if the team of Jeff Bezos and Bob Smith (the CEO) is not as strong here. It is particularly illuminating to compare choices they have made as a company (secrecy vs openness, prioritizing sub-orbital over orbital, Etc.) and how they have played out.
[1] Hence the research programs of Iran, North Korea, India, and Pakistan to name a few.
NASA tries to make a new launcher by itself, though with big inputs from your usual defence industry contractors.
Gets shut down by politicians.
SpaceX waltzes into the room, hires all fired engineers working on that from NASA, and LM for a dime, has NASA do half of their rocket for them, for NASA's money (and thus US government's.)
Essentially Musk resold the exiting RnD, and work of US government's engineers to US government.
When NASA tried to create the Ares-1 they spend many, many billions and were basically nowwhere and the architecture of their vehicle was absolutly terrible and not remotely competitive with commercial rockets. The got 'shut down by politicians' is because it was a black money pit for a suppar rocket. The reason SpaceX 'waltzed in' was that they actually executed on price, so you don't really have an argument for shutting them down.
SpaceX doesn't just sell NASA RnD back to them. First of all, non of that RnD was anywhere near production level, and specially not at the prices SpaceX wanted offered. A lot of the NASA archtecture were simply fundamentally unusable or unpractical, specially if you wanted to use it in a commercial market.
In fact, one could argue that going againt everything NASA was doing at the time is what made SpaceX successful. SpaceX made its own choices on every part of the rocket and the capsule, systematically innovated on each part of the rocket and architecture ending up far away from what NASA would have ever even considered doing.
That NASA did in no why what so ever build half their rockets for them, or design them. I don't know where you came up with this.
What SpaceX is did is fundamentally innovate and rethink the problems to achieve a better solution both from a design and a manufacturing perspective. This downplaying of SpaceX achivement by claiming its all just NASA tech that they are selling to the government is just petty and sad.
> SpaceX doesn't just sell NASA RnD back to them. First of all, non of that RnD was anywhere near production level, and specially not at the prices SpaceX wanted offered. A lot of the NASA archtecture were simply fundamentally unusable or unpractical, specially if you wanted to use it in a commercial market.
Saying that they "resold their own RnD to them" is not copy-paste Ares-1.
ULA, Nasa, defence contractors at large had decades of experience with kerolox rocketry starting with first American rockets, which they threw away, and Musk picked up at the cheap with their engineers. And it was a very safe, and sound decision.
The same for returnable capsules, and orbital vehicle expertise.
The engine that SpaceX started out-with was not very impressive, and it was also not just a simple copy of an existing engine.
And the Merlin now is a engine far beyond what any other US engine ever managed in a number of metrics.
Was it a bit easier to develop a kerlox engine for SpaceX in the US as compared to doing it in Bangladesh and starting fresh with every bit of technical knowlabe about Kerlox, of course it was but SpaceX went from a pretty simple starting point to an incredibly advanced rocket engine that they are flying now.
Putting the empasis on well somebody else has done a Kerlox engine before, rather then SpaceX designing and mass producing and incredibly advanced Kerlox engine is just downplaying what they achieved.
> Essentially Musk resold the exiting RnD, and work of US government's engineers to US government.
What Musk/SpaceX do is a tiny bit different - they're taking politics out of the equation, because unlike ULA they have a boatload of private customers willing to launch satellites for cheap and not have a major problem if one or two launches go bust. If NASA/ULA manage to fuck up a mission there will be political consequences.
Not to mention that SpaceX is staff lean which means they have the freedom to do whatever they want to keep costs low, while NASA/ULA is under Congressional pressure to dole out money across the country, even if this is completely against efficiency (and for what it's worth the ESA/Ariane/EADS/Airbus complex suffers from the same problem).
>NASA tries to make a new launcher by itself, though with big inputs from your usual defence industry contractors.
The way NASA works is as follows; First, they put together a program proposal. Like they put together the Mars Exploration Program[1] in response to their 2014 Science Plan[2]. The program is allocated budget from NASAs annual budget allocation from congress.
Then they create science missions which are specific projects within a program that support the program goals. The current Mars mission, Perseverance, is an example.
Then they go out and contract with vendors for hardware that they can use in the mission. That includes everything from rovers to launch services.
In the case of Artemis, NASA created a program to return a person to the moon. And they started creating requirements for the equipment that they would need. And they put out those contracts and request proposals, which capable vendors will send in. Then they select from the proposals they get and issue a contract. The vendor then builds the part to the requirements, NASA verifies that it meets there needs, and then they pay the vendor. Often these contracts will have several milestones that have to be met, and the vendor will be paid for meeting milestones. This lets the vendor get some money to buy raw materials and start construction, etc.
Cost overruns occur when the vendor discovers something between milestones that wasn't anticipated and they negotiate with NASA for additional funds to cover that need.
NASA has never "tried to make a new launcher", that they have done is specified requirements for a launcher that doesn't yet exist and asked people to send them proposals for how they would build it.
That’s true of any space contractor. Elon acknowledges NASA’s contributions and the fact that they are standing in the shoulders of giants all the time. What are you getting at exactly?
Here's a fun fact. A current Winnebago[1] of similar design to the one in the movie weighs 18,000 lbs, and 31' x 12' x 9' which is within the capability for Falcon 9 to both carry it in its Fairing (43' and 17' diameter) and to put it into low earth orbit. Falcon Heavy could put it into GEO Synchronous Orbit :-)
Oddly enough, putting it in terms of Winnebagos made it all the more impressive to me. I will henceforth stop making fun of articles and newscasts that use "layman's units" like coffee cups per football field or whatnot.
sorry for my question but how is that impressive really? Aren't already a fair amount of other countries sending people to the international space station and back? I think even the founder of Cirque du Soleil went right?
That's cool that spaceX is doing it, but I miss how this is such a big event?
It isn't a question of countries it is a question of being able to launch someone and bring them home. Prior to SpaceX the only two countries that had this capability were Russia and China.
It is impressive that a company, not a country now also has that capability.
Put another way, for the last 10 years if a US Person wanted to go up to the ISS they would have to buy a ticket on a Russian Soyuz, now they have a choice.
All previous splashdowns have been much further from shore and, moreover, done by squadrons of US Navy ships, so this really hasn't come up before. You don't really take your bass boat up to an aircraft carrier a few hundred miles offshore.
I expect they'll have more than one Coast Guard vessel on hand next time, and will probably look into not publicizing the landing zone.
Reminds me of the time I was helping move a boat and we were in the Gulf Stream when we saw an air craft carrier off in the distance. They launched a helicopter and buzzed us was pretty cool day
It'll be hard to not publicize the LZ. NOTAMS (aircraft exclusion zone) and maritime exclusion zones are public documents. They're essentially map coordinates for the LZ.
I think you're right about there being some CG vessels around for the next landing.
Indeed it would be difficult to stay outside the exclusion zones, unless they are published well in advance. The other problem is, that there are just a huge amount of small boats on the seas around Florida, so they could be close by just by chance on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
True, though they could publish several zones and not announce which will be used. Though the transponders from various ships would eventually give that away.
But even if it's not technically secret there's a big difference between a NOTAM and putting out press releases with specific locations, which they did this time.
SpaceX comentators were cool about everything, but they were pretty clear that some of those boats were too close and were told to back off.
I can totally understand that people want to see this. People also come to see launches, so why not this? But really, from a safe distance. Make sure you don't interfere in any way with the operation, and listen to instructions.
It seems one of the lessons is that if they continue to do splashdowns here, they need better spectator control.
Close enough that they had to be asked to back off after having already ignored Coast Guard requests.
————
As the capsule bobbed in the water, a recovery team instructed the boaters to stay away.
The Coast Guard warned boaters to stay clear of the area in a radio broadcast two hours before the splashdown, said the spokesman, Petty Officer Third Class John Michelli.
“With limited assets available and with no formal authority to establish zones that would stop boaters from entering the area,” he said, “numerous boaters ignored the Coast Guard crews’ requests and decided to encroach the area, putting themselves and those involved in the operation in potential danger.”
The occupants are NASA astronauts, and SpaceX was hired by NASA to carry them so it’s a clear case of public interest, IMHO. Also if they did bill them NASA would just get the bill and probably marked up.
> Also if they did bill them NASA would just get the bill and probably marked up.
It's a fixed cost contract, while SpaceX might push back on accepting the bill in the first place, they are unlikely to be able to redirect it to NASA if they choose to accept the bill.
Of course, I would expect to see this cost reflected in all future contracts they and anyone else signs with NASA.
That pretty well is the law of the high seas isn't it? Remember seeing a video a few years back of a private security force shooting at pirate ships from the deck of a cargo ship. Although as soon as I wrote that, I realize that's outside of territorial waters in international areas.
The US Train system sports the only US based private security that has full arrest authority. Maritime law is a bit of a special case and falls under international treaties.
Does the US Navy or Coast Guard have the legal ability to bill private companies for those kinds of services?
Government agencies can only impose fees and charges on private entities where those are authorised (directly or indirectly) by legislation. And agencies have far greater discretion to make contracts in which they are the customer than those in which they are the vendor. The later kind of contracts generally need approval at a far more senior level than the former (in some cases even requiring approval by the legislature).
The SR-71 used triethylborane to light its engines, which is also used by SpaceX to light the main engines (in combination with triethylaluminum); these are also toxic chemicals, but different from the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used onboard the Dragon.
It's listed as one of the more common[1] hypergolic propellants with LOX, pyrophoric is pretty much a superset of hypergolic(just that earth air brings the oxidizer "for free").
You can't exactly blame their curiosity. They are Floridians, so it's not like there's a lot common sense though. "Florida Man assists SpaceX recovery!" You know that during launches, people would attempt to get a closer view as well if it wasn't so secure. Look at the nimrods that encroach airport landings to feel the jet wash. Next time, there will probably be a larger escort fleet though.
>They are Floridians, so it's not like there's a lot common sense though.
I downvoted you; this kind of brash generalization about people because of their regional locality shouldn't be encouraged. It's expressing a silly and un-true meme as if it were the reality for all people living in Florida.
You aren't the only one in this thread to do so, either. I hope in the future that anyone , anywhere in the world, will double think when they say "X is from Y, they must be Z", because it's never true for the herd.
Sorry I didn't come out and say they were dumbasses, but I assumed that applied by referring to Florida Man it was inferred. Read in between the lines a little better.
> They're Floridians. They've fortified their immune systems by huffing bath salts and committing acts of cannibalism.
Replace Floridian with any other regional group of people, and maybe you'll see that the only reason you get away with saying something so hateful is because the public sentiment towards Florida has shifted in recent years.
Now here's the real question I propose : Because public opinion has made it okay to make fun of a group of people, are you personally okay with bringing the conversation down to that level?
Personally speaking, I'm not.
I humbly ask you to reassess your urge to discriminate against an entire group of people, just because they happen to have rolled the dice and landed on Florida.
There’s a disappointing lack of awareness On the part of these “Florida man” commenters that this amazing feat took place in Florida.
Yes, there are teams all over the country that worked on this mission but it launched from and returned to Florida, like hundreds of manned missions before.
Show some respect for the thousands of Floridians that have contributed to the space coast.
> They've fortified their immune systems by huffing bath salts and committing acts of cannibalism.
That was one person, 10 years ago.
> It's baffling watching commentators describing the dangerously elevated levels of nitrogen tetroxide juxtaposed with the crew members wandering around in short sleeves.
> american citizenship is required to apply for SpaceX jobs
Interestingly ITAR rules themselves only specify "US persons" (which includes LPRs, certain refugees/asylees), not necessarily exclusively citizens. It seems that restricting hiring to citizens in order to comply with ITAR may actually contradict the law:
It's possible that certain SpaceX positions have additional clearance requirements that may require citizenship. However a random search on SpaceX's hiring site only specifies ITAR requirements, and it describes the "US persons" category correctly.
"First privately owned round trip to the ISS". Its obviously still a first, but its not a technical first, but an economic first. Hacker news focused on both technical and economic things, so this still is interesting for it, but that doesn't mean it is a new tech.
The Soviet TKS capsule was designed to be both manned and reusable, but it never flew manned in the end as it never took over from Soyuz as originally planed.
Proud to have played a part in advancing access to space.
You don’t quite get the historical significance of what you are working on until you get to see it in context.
I’ll always look back at my work at SpaceX as one of the highlights of my journey through engineering. Among other things, it is because of this that we are now working on a project for NASA’s Artemis mission and will likely deliver hardware to the moon starting next year and possibly every year until 2026 or thereabouts.
Hats off to you for putting in work at SpaceX and NASA to advance humanity. The work you do is more valuable then any of us can begin to comprehend until we're much older, wiser, and a multi-planetary species.
The difference is roughly as between contemporary cars. Compare Chevy Impala of early 1960-s with today's Priuses.
Of course this is just an analogy. We can study functional differences - while both Vostok and Crew Dragon can deliver a human to orbit and back, they differ a lot regarding how well they do that and what they can also do, in addition to the main functionality.
It’s progress because the spacecraft and the vast majority of the launch vehicle are reusable and affordable. But I agree it’s still only incremental. And nothing close to the scale and ambition of Apollo. Hopefully Starship will change that.
> And nothing close to the scale and ambition of Apollo.
I'd argue Apollo, as spacecraft, is left behind. Far behind, and the scale of today's works is way bigger. You can't compare Sno-Buggy - a towering automotive achievement of its time - with modern Toyotas in numbers, development resources spent, functional richness, versatility of uses.
Apollo was different because it flew away from a low Earth orbit - a first for manned spacecrafts. And Starship maybe will fly even farther - qualitatively - than Apollo - in this sense it's a big step, yes. But making what was nearly impossible 60 years ago routine and affordable isn't unimportant or cheap.
Oh sure, but I think even Dragon won't make it quite routine. It's cheaper than Apollo per-seat by slightly better than a factor of 2 (Saturn Ib plus the Apollo command module was ~$500 million adjusted for inflation compared to ~220 million for Dragon Crew per launch), but the routineness is not much different than apollo during its prime.
That's why Starship is the most important step. It's like Apollo in scale of the launch, but will be launched much more often. And the vehicle itself can be refueled, which means you can send ~100 people to the surface of the Moon and back instead of just 2-3... And perhaps can send people all the way to Mars. And for maybe a tenth the price of a Dragon run to LEO.
THAT is transformative. Orders of magnitude more ambitious while being an order of magnitude cheaper per mission. Dragon is still just incremental, although probably a necessary step along that road.
We may argue about what is transformative - first orbital flight, first flight above LEO, first lunar landing and first hand-off of expedition on a space station all are.
From question "do we have progress?" we switched to "do we have big step up or not?". And if you look at achievement during 1960-s, all subsequent steps were incremental over previous, from technological point of view. Yet people managed to do something which wasn't done before - and to have a period in time, roughly 1960-s, when, if you compare what you had before that period and after, you have accumulated achievements which seem like a lot.
Yes it's a lot. Yes it was built on top of what was possible by then - with a lot of efforts during 1960-s. Yes we plan to have similar situations soon :) . However - even though we don't have Starship yet, and no matter if Crew Dragon is needed for that (it is), we still have progress right now.
Only instead comparing years 1960 and 1970, you have to compare 2005 and 2020. Shenzhou was a refined descendant of Soyuz, with corresponding limitations learned later, while Crew Dragon is a clean sheet implementation of what we know about capsule flight, a complex dance of engineering and economy. Discounting it as an insufficiently ambitious is a little like dismissing ITER just because it's not going to support itself economically, so can't be economically scaled.
In other words, I'm not talking about Starship here, focusing on Crew Dragon.
It's fair to point out Dragon/F9 is an advanced vehicle that is improving the state of the art after about 50 years of stagnation. The change in sign from negative (stagnation) to strongly positive is worth noting, even if it's relatively incremental vs Starship.
I don’t know was weird to see a Trump flag and I realized they were not part of recovery effort. Sounds like SpaceX announced they landing coordinates and that’s why they were able to get out there.
Devil's advocating: I did exactly this several times in my sailing career. Military vessels are regulated by the same international laws and rules as all other sea navigation subjects.
Fellow sailor crossed the course of Turkish submarine while under sail (meaning he had a right of passage). It was in Turkey's waters (!) about 10 years ago. Instead of changing course they made an emergency dive exercise.
Greenpeace used a non-lethal attack involving stink bombs from hell... glass bottles filled with some kind of oily sulfurous compound that got on everything. I wonder if anyone in commercial shipping does that. Definitely not something you would want to test.
I could be totally wrong but I didn’t think any part of the Gulf of Mexico was considered international waters? I thought the US (and maybe/hopefully Mexico) had approval over oil rigs and such in the Gulf.
Anything more than 12 miles out is "international waters", but there's a 200 mile "exclusive economic zone". Mexico and Cuba have theirs; between the three nearly all the Gulf is covered.
That said, international waters isn't actually a lawless zone. These boats are undoubtedly registered in the US, and thus subject to US law.
Even if it is US territorial waters, why can't the private boats be there? I'm not saying they should be there, but legally is it different than if Musk flipped the CyberTruck on a public road and people walked around the crash site?
> I'm not saying they should be there, but legally is it different than if Musk flipped the CyberTruck on a public road and people walked around the crash site?
It's hardly uncommon for cops to tell people to back up from an accident/crime scene if they're too close.
Presumably there are some sort of "rules of the road" that govern how and where vessels can maneuver? I can't just drop anchor at the mouth of Boston Harbor and prevent everyone else from accessing it. Or maybe I can? I have no idea.
For the same reason you can't be with in a particular distance of the take off. It is a public safety concern. And in those cases we afford law enforcement the ability to remove you from the scene.
I'm so sick of this. Yes Gwynne is great, but to deny or downplay that Elon is by far the most important person at the company is just nonsense that she wouldn't even agree with.
I hate to talk against here because she is awesome. But this social trick where everytime SpaceX does anything, the Anti-Elon crowed have to truck out the 'actually its all the enlighted levelheaded female president' not the 'nasty meme-obscessed man child asshole' is actually responsable for all the success argument, its so fucking tiered and inaccurate.
You didn't go there fully but the amount of people who argue that SpaceX achieves what it does despite Elon is just stagering. People seem to believe any bullshit if it confirms their bias.
Again, I love Gwynne she is great and so are others who work at SpaceX now or have done in the past. They achieve what they do as a team, at the same time its no question who leads the team, who makes the most important choices, who owns and controls the company.
I actually like to use Gwynne Shotwell as a great example between Tesla and SpaceX.
There's no doubt that Elon is gifted from the engineering and vision side. But Gwynne is the one that actually (paraphrasing her words) turns his seemingly crazy vision into an actual project with milestones and how to get there. I think they complement each other really well.
You can see how much of a mess Tesla is, without having someone like that to complement Elon's skills. SpaceX (also because of the domain) seems like it is run by a grownup.
Tesla on the other hand seems like it's run by a bunch of people who excel at the tough engineering challenges (contrast the cars themselves with the service experience), but have less interest in the easier stuff (running a well stocked service center). Look at the way they confusingly change pricing so often.
Tesla needs an Elon Musk but they badly need a Gwynne Shotwell.
Tesla is a public company with many betting against it, trying to make it fail for any reason. Elon Musk deliberately takes the front seat and attract any criticism to protect those who work behind the scene.
It's been 2 years since Jérôme Guillen has become Tesla's President of Automotive. You wouldn't know.
Numerous manufacturing delays, the dismal perception of their service centers (I'm a part of Tesla owner groups and nothing gets people riled up like talking about their service experiences), the constantly changing prices, the consistently missed deadlines.
Let me be clear. I own a Model 3, and I love it. I also own Tesla stock. And I cheer when their sales go up.
My criticism is from wanting them to be better. They've got all the really difficult stuff right (the car is amazing, comfortable, and we all love it). It's the easy stuff that's "boring grown up stuff of running a business" where they need a lot of help.
SpaceX has that and they have Gwynne. So do pretty much all other car manufactures, specifically with electric cars.
Having great service while scaling is insanely difficult. Just having some other influentual manager is not gone magically solve that incredibly difficult problem.
Overall the company has been anything but messy, rather they have been executing pretty well, better then most people expected.
For what it’s worth, I feel they are also doing things that are tougher than most other companies. And actually moving the industry forward in some ways.
I don’t know what people expected but I expect them to miss deadlines with the harder stuff where they’re trailblazers (like autopilot).
But building a reliable car is largely a solved problem. Even Elon has admitted they over engineered the manufacturing before they had to just use more people.
Tesla had issues with manufacturing, like everybody. That is why there are not more car companies. But they have mastered this and massively improved each generations, go look at the tear down of the 3 and the Y. They have managed to make China Model 3 cheaper and have achieved pretty good margin.
They continue to innovate and have been strategically investing in becoming a battery provider and building and expanding factories in all the important markets.
And building EV at good margin is defiantly not a solved problem.
That tweet was a very typical Muskian joke, goading the supporters of what he sees as an obviously crazy conspiracy theory. (See "Tesla bankwupt" for a more developed version.) It's probably the best indication he doesn't have anything to do with anything in Bolivia.
Besides the fact that even proponents of the theory can't come up with any better connection than "one of his products uses lithium", of course.
The idea that CEOs tend to become inhuman is a bad thing, not a good thing. If we say they should be come inhuman machines then they will, and all the corporations will be led by inhuman machine-like humans. So yes, he definitely can be both, and more CEOs need to act like him, not less.
They don't need to become inhuman machines, they just need to understand that their words have effects beyond the obvious.
You might not want to joke about blowing up the plane while you're standing in line at the X-ray machine, and you might not want to joke about conspiracy theories (or stock prices, or buyout offers, or pedophilia, or Kanye's presidential campaign, or...) when you have reason to believe that people will take you seriously. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that large numbers of motivated morons are nothing to fuck around with.
I’m not suggesting he had anything to do with it (though I wouldn’t rule out the possibility). The question was just what he thinks of it, and I thought his response wasn’t funny in the slightest. The coup in Bolivia is horrible. Not even remotely funny. It’s tone deaf and insensitive at best.
I am not in favor of the US interfering, to whatever extent it may have, but it seems that for Morales to run in the first place was unconstitutional due to term limits. His party tried to overturn the term limits in a referendum, failed, and then presto, the Supreme Court ruled it was a violation of human rights.
So if he has a case for it being a coup, it seems like the opposition has a comparably good case that he was moving towards what people call an "autogolpe" or self-coup.
This is not to say the current government is preferable.
I have not been paying attention to Bolivia recently, like most Americans, so my information is from:
I tend to avoid The Intercept since the whole Reality Winner thing sensitized me to possible Russian connections. Without knowing what the true relationship is, I have written them off as providing a manipulative propaganda line. Of course, sometimes propaganda is written by the best; I was just reading about Eric Blair's wartime efforts for the BBC, and how he tried to avoid damaging his credibility as an anti-imperialist.
I understand the election irregularities in the Bolivia election are controversial, and I don't take a side on whether that was a pretext to get rid of Morales. My point was only that the act of running in the first place was questionable.
That's shorthand for Russian government intelligence; I didn't mean to cast aspersions at the Russian people.
I hesitate to declare it worse than being a CIA front.
But in any case, I think it's better to look for other sources of information and never, ever, trust them with your freedom or life, like Ms. Winner did.
That was an obvious joke. So many people get "woosh"ed by him so much. He obviously takes pride in doing it to people who believe in things that are obviously nonsense.
Really? What makes you say that? It’s not a funny joke coming from someone in a position to fund a coup for lithium... It’s a super insensitive thing to say if nothing else. The right wing government that took over Bolivia murdered innocent civilians.
Musk doesn't have a particularly compassionate sense of humor, nor much restraint on Twitter. It's cost him a lot of money in the past.
But my guess is that he knows very few details about that coup, which allows him to joke about it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he knew as much about it as most people in the US, including myself: nothing.
Should we have a sense of humor about Latin American countries being overthrown so powerful interests can exploit their natural resources? What you call a lack of humor is IMO genuine compassion for people who have suffered a great loss.
> Should we have a sense of humor about Latin American countries being overthrown so powerful interests can exploit their natural resources?
I personally think we should have a sense of humour about everything.
The Russian reversal is one example of finding humour in darkness [1]. I found Elon’s joke to be in the category of the “be careful, or America will bring you some freedom” jokes that were popular during the Iraq war.
IMO it's a bit different when you're someone who financially benefits from the dark event. Like a random American joking about invading a company for oil, vs Dick Cheney saying that the invasion of Iraq will be great for Halliburton. There's a point where it stops being a "joke" and is just a sad fact.
> it's a bit different when you're someone who financially benefits from the dark event
Fair enough. I prefer to have more room for humour. And I bet this joke did more to educate Americans of Bolivia’s history than serious discourse has. But a reasonable point on which to disagree.
Educate Americans of Bolivia’s history? By saying he supports a coup against the leader? The New York Times already did that, only to later retract their story That suggested the election was fraudulent. The tweet has no informational content which could serve to educate anyone about Bolivia.
It was a joke, and he followed it by stating that Tesla gets most of its lithium from Australia.
I did find it a tasteless joke though, and a foolish thing to publicly say. But then again Musk is known to TUI (Tweet Under the Influence) quite often. Rocket man gets hiiiiiiiiiiiiigh...
Even if they don’t use Bolivian lithium at Tesla, more lithium in the market reduces the cost of Australian lithium. Tesla directly benefits from this if the coup government isn’t ousted.
Can anyone share why they are "inspired" by these events? Honest question.
With all of the real problems occurring on Earth today, I cannot help but feel this is just ego-driven madness. The time, resources, and energy being poured into such projects could have been spent building a better world for us today--with results that we could (and would) see in our lifetimes.
Instead, are we merely spread humanity across the galaxy in centuries to come--if at all? For what purpose?
I'll explain why I downvoted you. Basically, I feel the exact opposite. I've been a been depressed of late with the feeling that America can't really do much anymore. The pandemic made clear that what feels like simple things, like producing sufficient quantities of PPE, are simply out of reach as a nation. This is just one example in a long list of problems (climate change, mass shootings, healthcare, etc.) that I feel like the US is not equipped to address.
But SpaceX gives me hope that we can actually do "big things" again. On the contrary, with all the other problems on Earth, this launch gives me more hope that we can tackle some of those problems. I mean, it's not like the resources that go into launching space ships would just shift into, I don't know, school lunches or something.
I think this is especially relevant to the HN crowd, where a common lament that all the technical wizardry of silicon valley got us over the past 20+ years was smartphones and facebook, but not real "hard" problems. Feels inspiring to see there are companies out there that can really address things that really are rocket science.
> Can anyone share why they are "inspired" by these events? Honest question.
I love space and spaceships. I wish I could work in that industry and would jump at the chance.
> With all of the real problems occurring on Earth today, I cannot help but feel this is just ego-driven madness.
Yes indeed. But, ego-driven madness generates a lot of useful utility. I'd say the worst part is the pollution of satellites for ground-based space observation. Despite that, I fully think that mankind should expand into space and become a spacefaring race in spite of all of the risks. And I think, for compensation, publicly accessible orbital observatories should become a thing. Unfortunately, at the current price tag of orbit, that might take a while.
> Instead, are we merely spread humanity across the galaxy in centuries to come--if at all? For what purpose?
For whatever purpose we want. The only unfortunate thing is that only the rich can afford to guide us at the moment. I look forward to the day that anyone can own a spaceship as anyone can own a car.
There's a lot of spaceship science fiction movies and TV series to draw inspiration from. I get the impression that you're either too young to have seen a lot of it or, perhaps, it hasn't been a passion of yours. What drives you to to be who you are?
Chances are good that, even if you want to just be a simple farmer, you use and rely on "space age" technology. Who knows what cool and/or useful stuff could be brought by the future of space tech? In-orbit manufacturing of exotic materials for safety, for communication; in-orbit energy collection and generation. I'm excited for the prospect of orbital farming for food -- a completely controlled environment away from pests? Oh man that's going to be game changing!
They forgot to add "For our frequent flyer program members, your mileage accounts will be updated in next 24 to 48 hours"
Also: "Seats are spacious, entertainment system is top notch, big screens, good internet connection except during descent. After landing they didn't open the exit for half an hour. Good food. Overall 4/5, would recommend".
As a Russian-American this doubly pleases me. As a Russian I have found Rogozin's "trampoline" comment distasteful, and I think they should fund Roscosmos much better and come up with new stuff instead of relying on 40 year old Soviet designs. Now they might. And as an American, I'm in awe of the fact that SpaceX is possible in this day and age when companies live and die for quarterly profits and internet advertising is considered to be a respectable thing to do, and I especially love that a private company is running circles around bloated government bureaucracies and ULA that's feeding from that money pit.
It was people clapping in mission control but your brain wants to think the sound matches the images so your brain tricks you into thinking it is the sound of water splashing. This is sometimes known as the McGurk effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0
The splash probably wasn't audible from the distant camera - probably a mic mounted on the capsule.
Edit: maybe there was a sound wave transmitted through the water? That would travel much faster than a sound wave in air.
It allows them to go straight to the airfield, where a jet will be waiting to take them immediately to Houston. They have facilities as JSC specifically for evaluating and managing returning astronauts.
Because after you've been in space gravity makes you quite sick as your body fights to bring blood to your head when it's not used to having to push that blood upward. Just standing is exhausting and dangerous. So they want to get them back as soon as possible.
I hope SpaceX officials and astronauts get a fete at the White House. In the old pre-virus-gathering days they might have merited a parade. Although I dont like the current occupant of the White House, I do like their interest in space.
They weren't in their seats the whole time, but even if they were, that'd be a walk in the park compared to some other missions.
Gemini 7 might just be the least pleasant space mission. Two astronauts spent 14 days in their cramped capsule. One of them had to wait six days before being allowed to take the spacesuit off, but the capsule was uncomfortably hot anyway. There was no toilet, and the urine collector was leaky. Reading about that mission has been eye-opening to how unglamorous spaceflight gets, and left me even more amazed at how well-trained and professional the astronauts are, being able to complete such an unpleasant mission without incident.
They weren't in those seats for 19 hours. Shortly after undocking they were able to take off their suits for the night. Didn't have to put them on again until the re-entry prep started. Most of that 19 hours they were free to move around the cabin.
They responded afterwards that this shouldn't have happened, and while the area was clear for landing, tons of boats arrived after they landed. SpaceX people appeared visibly upset about it and NASA said they'll do better next time. Basically the coast guard dropped the ball here.
This is stupidly dangerous for the people on those boats, and they probably don't realize it. Crew Dragon is basically unexploded ordnance with a helping of gasses toxic at the PPM level. Everything went right today, and they broke out the oxygen tanks and masks because there was too much toxic gas in the air. It is highly irresponsible to allow them close. They're more than welcome to assemble in international waters, so long as they don't do so right beside the explosive device.
This is not a private mission, this is a mission executed by the US government, who happened to subcontract out the vehicle to a private company. Hence why the government would reasonably be expected to pay for (directly, or indirectly as part of their contract) the security.
Regardless of who pays for the security, the government (US and otherwise) frequently provides security, that's because they have a monopoly on the use of force. Consider, for example, how oversized loads on highways are frequently escorted by police (dependent on local laws).
Consider, for example, how oversized loads on highways are frequently escorted by police (dependent on local laws).
This seems less common recently. Those giant tubes that I assume are the bottom section of wind masts are all over the road recently, and I never see any police. Someone ought to write some tickets on the people who are afraid to pass with a 7.5' car in a 12'-wide lane when a load is hanging 1' over the lane, 7.5' off the ground...
Ugh, what rhetoric. Defund the police is not abolishing the police, it is removing their responsibility as only tool we have in the toolbox against many different societal problems. The police are a hammer. Sometimes you need a hammer, especially if the problem is a nail. Problem is when someone has a few screws loose, they tend to also get hammered.
I agree. You seem to think that the police function should be re-examined and adjusted and you seem to be OK using the short hand of "defund the police" to communicate that. Unfortunately there are other folks who think that "defund the police" really does mean to zero out the budget of the police and there are all sorts of positions in between those two.
So I would assert that as a means to communicate clearly, "defund the police" fails miserably. It is terrible rhetoric that just sows confusion and promotes division.
If we were to do a poll you're probably right. The majority of HN is left leaning. Personally I don't want to defund the police (especially since i'm not from the US which would make my opinion invalid.) I'm going to make an assumtion and tell me if I'm right. You have been on Twitter for at least 2 hours in the last week. Is this the case? let me know if possible.
MMH is not vented on landing. When it’s released, it’s because of a mistake. That’s why the approaching crew take the precautions they do, and don a gas mask when toying with the craft.
Nothing bad happened to these boaters. But they were downwind from a substance which, had it leaked, would have put every one of them in the hospital and taken decades off their lives.
I was listening to the feed. They clearly discussed the dropping concentrations of both MMH (although I think they called it "MMT"?) and NTO. If they weren't just staging an elaborate ruse, then those substances were going somewhere. At at least one point they asked the crew if they wanted to exit immediately or wait. The crew replied they were happy to "hang out" a bit longer.
Even though you're flip-flopping (in the same paragraph) about whether there was a dangerous condition, you do seem to concede that shooting people is not the way to rescue them. So, you're ahead of most USA national security experts.
The gas being discussed appears to have been remennants from the use of the thrusters on orbit or something. They were very explicit that there was not a leak.
Hanging out a bit longer meant staying inside the capsule longer instead of seeing a doctor sooner to avoid exposing themselves and more of the crew to those fumes. They were at 2.5ppm if I recall the radio chatter correctly.
The Crew Dragon Capsule is not expected to be involved in any mars trips. They will use the very large Starship vehicle to travel to and from Mars and it will land with rockets.
However I’m not sure what you mean by inefficient here. Parachutes work great on Earth for vehicles of a certain size.
First: That's absolutely fantastic. Congratulations to everyone, etc.
Second:
I'm a bit disturbed that they are using Chromium + some javascript framework as the UI layer in the Crew Dragon.
There was a sequence when Bob and Doug were debugging the local UI layer. I guess it was a good thing that didn't happen at a critical part of the flight.
Edit: And I write this having spent 10 years working in a browser company in an engineering/engineering management role. I believe I have a decent understanding of the risks.
Going with a browser-based UI for something as critical as this is insane, IMHO.
I made the same comment in another thread, but if you check the stream you can see they debugged an issue with an auxiliary app running on an actual iPad mini, not an issue with the apps running on the main screens mounted in front of the seats.
It's a modified Chromium + javascript, but it's only for visual presentation, all the software for actually reading and acting on that data isn't in javascript.
> There was a sequence when Bob and Doug were debugging the local UI layer. I guess it was a good thing that didn't happen at a critical part of the flight.
No that didn't happen. They had an issue with an ipad they use for displaying a schedule.
> It's a modified Chromium + javascript, but it's only for visual presentation, all the software for actually reading and acting on that data isn't in javascript.
So, chromium + js for the UI, and c++ for the web server backend, right? You're still depending on an insanely large piece of code (chromium) and javascript for actually showing the data, and collecting the input events.
The ground control explained that the problem was with Timeline app on Cmdr. Behnken's iPad. Somehow it was displaying wrong time point after disconnecting from wifi. Interim analysis suggested that the problem was related to bad cache and .. for some reason would be only addressed once landed. Apparently, this was due to mis-sync before switching wifi off. Meanwhile, the recommendation was to take the timeline snapshots from Cmdr. Hurley's iPad and AirDrop them over.
A funny moment was when ground control asked the astronauts to turn off wifi and switch to the Airplane mode. Shouldn't it be renamed to Spaceship mode? :)
On the plus side, my friend from Lockheed-Martin who bet me dinner at one's favorite restaurant that Boeing would be the first when the contract was announced, now owes me dinner, so there's that.
I had hoped see Starship hop 150m today[1] however that seems to have been scrubbed.
There is a really good lesson here for folks which is ignore the people saying you won't be able to do something and just execute. They can't argue with results.
EDIT: updated the link to point to the live camera pointed at the Starship SN5. Not sure what happened there. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QbM7Vsz3kg