[HN Gopher] Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission
___________________________________________________________________
Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 405 points
Date : 2024-06-05 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Interesting that this did not make HN at all before the launch.
| There are way more cheerleaders for SpaceX than Boeing. But IMO
| it's still very cool, I could watch rocket launches all day.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It made it before at least one of its other launch attempts,
| IIRC.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Uncrewed, yes.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Orbital_Flight_Test_2
| dmix wrote:
| Everyone was excited for the one last time and I was around for
| that, I didn't even realize it was happening today. I just
| assumed it'd be delayed for another long period again.
| malfist wrote:
| I had the same issue. I thought it was postponed for a longer
| period given the messaging from the last scrub.
|
| I only knew it was launching 6 minutes prior because my
| partner alerted me about it because it was top stream on
| twitch.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I didn't even realize it was happening today.
|
| I did not, either. I tend to get most of my tech-related news
| via HN. Fortunately this morning I decided to swing past Ars
| to see if anything interesting was happening, and they had a
| high profile post about the launch. I made it to the
| livestream with less than five minutes to spare.
| xnx wrote:
| 4 days ago. 48 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547338
|
| Also 30 days ago.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Previous launch attempts did. But there are only so many
| successive "launch was scrubbed" stories that are interesting.
| api wrote:
| This rocket is not reusable so it's kind of an antique.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| The rocket is not, but the crew module is intended to fly 10
| times, and is compatible with several rockets including
| falcon 9.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's 'compatible' in that they can do the work to integrate
| it with another rocket if needed, which isn't really saying
| much because most payloads are like that. It isn't
| compatible with Falcon 9 in its current state, and IIRC
| because it's wider than F9, actually flying Starliner on F9
| would require a lot more structural work too (devising an
| appropriate aerodynamic adapter and ensuring structural
| loads are acceptable).
|
| Plus, NASA crew rates the full stack rather than treating
| the rocket and capsule separately, so integrating Starliner
| on another rocket would require the crew rating process to
| be repeated (granted, it'd be a bit easier since F9+Dragon
| is already crew rated).
| cma wrote:
| The falcon with dragon is only partially reusable too (second
| stage discarded). The space shuttle reused more but is more
| of an antique so that's not a great determiner of
| antiqueness.
| tekla wrote:
| So all the expensive parts. Got it
| BurningFrog wrote:
| To be fair, SpaceX _is_ far more cheerworthy.
|
| Does the Starliner have any feature that current SpaceX rockets
| don't have?
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Not really. The biggest apparent difference in the user
| experience is how the vehicle is commanded.
|
| Here's a pic of the Starliner control panel: https://x.com/Tr
| evorMahlmann/status/1207437431374565376/phot...
|
| And Crew Dragon's control panel:
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/30/21275753/nasa-spacex-
| astr...
| greenavocado wrote:
| I shudder thinking about what would happen if a touch
| action on the touchscreen would get stuck
| bumby wrote:
| There was a decent amount of concern within NASA on the
| touchscreen design, but the contract type tended to force
| those discussions to the sideline. In the end, NASA
| wanted a ride and not to drive the design.
|
| Edit: for those wondering, this is not hearsay or
| speculation; it is from direct experience (albeit 5+
| years ago)
| Maxatar wrote:
| The Dragon Crew has physical backup controls. The
| touchscreen allows for a more interactive UI that you can
| try out here:
|
| https://iss-sim.spacex.com/
|
| But the controls themselves have physical buttons in
| addition to the touch screen.
|
| Also all systems have triple redundancy.
| starik36 wrote:
| It does. It can (and will) land on land instead of water.
| coolspot wrote:
| Like Soyuz?
|
| Interesting, why would they want that capability?
|
| All Russian space vehicles land on land because they don't
| have easy access to warm waters and Kazakhstan steppe is
| big and empty.
|
| But why boeing/nasa would want that?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Tradeoffs on the kind of refurbishment needed compared to
| a splashdown, since Starliner is supposed to be reusable.
| Plus stuff like faster extraction of time-sensitive
| payloads and overall cheaper capsule processing
| operations since you don't need specially fitted boats
| chasing after the capsule.
|
| Dragon was also initially intending to land on solid
| ground, but dropped the idea when NASA asked for
| additional tests to prove that popping landing legs out
| of the heat shield would be safe. SpaceX had intended
| such landings in large part because of the plans for Red
| Dragon, but since by then they had started to shift
| towards Starship, they deemed it easier to just
| splashdown and deal with the extra refurbishment than try
| to prove out a technology they no longer felt the need
| for.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Landing in water is bad for equipment--the salt water
| tends to corrode, so refurbishing the capsule after a
| water landing is a bit harder.
| simplicio wrote:
| Think the main reason is that sea-recoveries are
| expensive compared to ones on land. I imagine there's at
| least some extra risk to a sea recovery as well (one of
| the Mercury capsules sank during recovery, though happily
| not with its astronaut inside).
| dave78 wrote:
| Is that a feature or just a difference? I assume there's
| trade-offs with both - is landing on land significantly
| better?
| starik36 wrote:
| It's faster and more efficient, I think. You don't need a
| fleet of ships to go out to the sea.
| dave78 wrote:
| Interesting to think about. I know Starliner lands in
| Utah. I don't know where, but I'm guessing it's somewhere
| very remote. I wonder if the effort to get out to the
| ocean to recover a ship is significantly different than
| getting to a remote part of the desert to recover.
|
| Additionally, I know when the first Crew Dragon landed,
| it clearly wasn't hard or expensive to get to given that
| there were a bunch of small, private boats that
| (inappropriately) approached the spacecraft. It was quite
| close to shore, not like the old Apollo missions landing
| in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It has physical knobs and switches as opposed to relying on
| touchscreens. I consider that a feature, although a minor
| one.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Are you an astronaut? Do astronauts prefer thousands of
| physical knobs? Do you think they would fly if they weren't
| happy?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I am not an astronaut. I prefer knobs. As my comment
| said, I think of them as a feature. I think the average
| astronaut would put up with their lack of preferred
| control schemes to go into space.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It is worth noting that Dragon does have physical controls,
| they're just backups hidden under the panel below the
| screens for emergencies. This is on top of the redundancy
| offered by the screens, where if one screen fails, the same
| controls are accessible on the other ones.
|
| Plus, since it's supposed to fly autonomously, there isn't
| a lot of physical control to be done. This isn't like with
| cars where there's an argument that tactile controls are
| easier to adjust without looking away from the road.
| saberience wrote:
| Starliner isn't even a rocket, it's a capsule. A capsule
| (Starliner) got launched today on top of a really old rocket
| design (Atlas V) which first launched in 2002...
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes, it can reboost the station. Dragon can't. Cygnus,
| Dreamchaser, and Soyuz can reboost. This matters because the
| station can't boost itself.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Boost as in push it to a different orbit?
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| They also have better produced livestreams in general, making
| it worth checking in in advance.
| luuurker wrote:
| How many times was this launch delayed due to problems? I get
| excited, but can't stay excited for months.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It was delayed three times in the month leading up to launch,
| and there was an attempt just over a year ago that was
| scratched because they discovered they accidentally used a
| flammable material. So, four total times. But "staying
| excited for months" is misleading.
| starik36 wrote:
| True, but you have to add previous attempts going back
| several years. Wasn't Atlas+Starliner actually rolled out
| to the pad last time only to be scrubbed and brought back
| for another 6 month delay?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yes, this GP's comment is very misleading in that it only
| listed the recent scrubs. I almost felt sorry for the
| astronauts.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I listed all the ones I could find for the manned
| mission. Did my list miss some?
| starik36 wrote:
| You are missing ones where it was scheduled, but didn't
| even make it to the stand because some issue was found. I
| can't recall when exactly, but at some point it was
| discovered that the tape used to wrap wires was
| flammable. So it was postponed, once again.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| That was July 6th last year. It was one of the 4 I
| mentioned.
| dylan604 wrote:
| you definitely missed some...
|
| "Although it was originally planned for a 2017
| launch,[15] various delays pushed the launch back to no
| earlier than July 2023.[47] Then on June 1, 2023, Boeing
| announced the flight was indefinitely delayed, due to
| problems with the parachute harness and flammable tape on
| wiring.[105] On August 7, 2023, Boeing announced that it
| was resuming preparations for a launch, and that it hoped
| to resolve the issue with the flammable tape by September
| 2023, and to address the parachute harness issues by
| November 2023.
|
| The Crewed Flight Test was tentatively scheduled for a
| launch date of May 6, 2024,[106] but due to a problem
| with an oxygen valve on the ULA Atlas rocket, the May 6
| launch date was cancelled approximately two hours before
| the planned launch time.[107] The launch has been further
| delayed due to a helium leak in the Starliner service
| module, which was originally discovered during the May 6
| launch attempt.[108][109]
|
| A launch was attempted on June 1, 2024, for 16:25 UTC
| (12:25 PM EDT), but was aborted at 3 minutes and 50
| seconds prior to liftoff. Starliner successfully
| completed countdown and lifted off on June 5, 2024 at
| 14:52 UTC (10:52 AM EDT)."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner#Third_orbi
| tal...
| idontwantthis wrote:
| The time more than a year before that when it was scrubbed
| for a stuck valve that I don't think they ever fixed and
| decided it can still fly.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's been delayed so many times after getting very close to
| launch that it makes sense that everyone just lost interest.
|
| On top of that Boeing's launch coverage is nowhere near as
| fancy as SpaceX (or new space in general, RocketLab and Blue
| Origin also tend to have pretty decent coverage, although
| neither of them are doing crewed orbital spaceflight yet). No
| views of the non-flight-control employees enjoying seeing their
| work fly, very little live telemetry, low resolution for when
| they do have live video, mostly CGI views once down to the
| second stage, no live views from the capsule in space either.
|
| Finally, on top of that, Starliner is kind of just a dead end
| in its current state. Boeing only built the two it needs for
| this one contract, and it only flies on Atlas V, which are
| fully sold out now. So it can only do the 6 contracted ISS
| missions and then it's done until someone is willing to pay to
| have Starliner+Vulcan Centaur crew rated.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Boeing only built the two it needs for this one contract,
| and it only flies on Atlas V, which are fully sold out now.
| So it can only do the 6 contracted ISS missions and then it's
| done until someone is willing to pay to have Starliner+Vulcan
| Centaur crew rated.
|
| This is what I like about SpaceX. Of course they have
| government contracts, but it's always building towards
| something bigger.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was really unimpressed with Boeing's feed and its lack of
| telemetry. No indications of altitude, speed, distance down
| range, etc. Even their timeline jumped rather than
| progressed. It was worse than some of those old Windows
| progress bars of old.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| There was an article when the launch was scrubbed two days ago,
| but it didn't make much traction, and the few comments on it
| were (as objectively as possible) mostly "smirking SpaceX
| fans".
| dylan604 wrote:
| Objectively dissing on Boeing has become it's own pastime
| regardless of being a fan of anything else
| protastus wrote:
| There is no schadenfreude for the people in my circle. The
| same can be said for Intel.
|
| We all see it as a huge national security issue that these
| companies are fumbling, given how foundational they are for
| U.S. security, self-reliance and tech leadership.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's no pleasure in Boeing's failure on my part
| either. It is such a learning moment on many levels that
| is absolutely being ignored. No meaningful changes are
| going to come from looking at Boeing. Instead, my
| cynicism would expect people to "learn" from it in seeing
| where Boeing went wrong with how they went for short term
| gains not that focusing on short term gains as the
| problem
| nytesky wrote:
| Gallows humor on the livestream chat: bet NASA will get another
| movie out of this.
| dave78 wrote:
| Sounds like there's a problem with the cooling system using more
| water than expected. If I understood the comms correctly it
| sounded like they switched to a backup system to try to alleviate
| the issue.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| I find it amazing that this is treated as such a trivial
| achievement, with an attitude as if any one of us could have done
| this. Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps.
| Cacti wrote:
| HN is too busy in other threads pontificating about a merger
| from 30 years ago that they know next to nothing about.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Not trivial, but also not consequential.
| saberience wrote:
| It's a nice new capsule launching on top of a 20+ year old
| launch system (Atlas V).
|
| It's a great accomplishment but it's not "super crazy"
| malfist wrote:
| It took them a decade and a half to make this thing. I think
| that alone speaks to the complexity of this achievement.
| saberience wrote:
| I'm not shitting on Starliner, it's great that we have
| another person-rated capsule for spaceflight.
|
| I'm just pointing this out because there are many people
| apparently who are confusing Starliner for Boeing's version
| of Starship, i.e. a whole rocket plus crew rated capsule.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Starliner would be more rightly compared to Crew Dragon.
| Why would anyone compare to Starship?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The names are very similar.
| ericd wrote:
| Well, "ocean liner" means a large oceangoing ship,
| "airliner" means large airplane, so people could be
| forgiven for thinking a "starliner" was a large spaceship
| and not a tiny pod.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| But Star Dingy doesn't have the same ring to it.
| ericd wrote:
| Haha zodiac would be a good fit, though.
| wubrr wrote:
| Let's not forget that this is modern Boeing we're talking
| about... the long timeline could just be incompetence.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| How long did it take Spacex to develop their human rated
| capsule? I think that was 10+ years as well
| Retric wrote:
| Depends on what you consider starting. 16 years is
| probably the most reasonable number, but you could argue
| for as little as 6.
|
| Initial work on Dragon began in 2004, it 'entered
| service' in 2009, had its first mission in 2010, but
| first connected to the ISS in 2012.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon
|
| Work on a crewed version was officially mentioned in 2006
| though they only got a contract for manned missions in
| 2014 and the first manned mission was 16 November 2020.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1
| dotnet00 wrote:
| IIRC it took SpaceX ~7 years.
|
| It's kind of useful perspective that when the contracts
| for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX
| shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having
| "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the
| better job than an inexperienced upstart. Plus the extra
| $400M they extorted out of NASA despite this being a
| fixed price, milestone based contract.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing
| argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all
| because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was
| guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced
| upstart.
|
| I think it's useful to note that this wasn't just
| Boeing's opinion - it was pretty widely believed in the
| industry. And not without reason - Boeing had _Shuttle_
| heritage.
|
| Thankfully, NASA kept both awards.
| Retric wrote:
| It wan't an inaccurate assessment. SpaceX was working on
| life support for a crewed module 14+ years before their
| first successful manned launch. IE: It took them longer
| than Boeing.
|
| However the missing context is SpaceX put in 8+ years
| into the project before getting the award which offset
| most of the issues.
|
| So it worked out well for NASA, but SpaceX was
| approaching it more as a prestige project than a
| profitable one.
| boxed wrote:
| They got the contracts at the same time, and Boeing has
| been building rockets since the 60s...
| perihelions wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17509988 ( _"
| Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in
| commercial crew"_ (2018))
| pfdietz wrote:
| In retrospect those defending Boeing there and attacking
| SpaceX (and Eric Berger's reporting) are just hilarious.
| tekla wrote:
| Its Hacker News Dropbox over and over and over again.
| tw04 wrote:
| It took them a decade and a half because Boeing learned the
| hard way that you have to actually be efficient when you
| don't get a cost plus contract. Their entire system was
| setup to extract as much money from the government as
| possible, not to deliver product on time.
|
| Late and over a budget is how you maximize profit in cost
| plus contracts.
| elteto wrote:
| Yes, one year for each unnecessary layer of middle
| management at Boeing.
| kragen wrote:
| it speaks to the lamentable state of boeing
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I think it is materially less exciting than it would have been
| if it had launched years ago when it was scheduled to. It
| provides competition with SpaceX in one very small niche of
| space travel with no applications to any other niche. Meanwhile
| SpaceX is building a Mars rocket with in flight refueling. I
| really wish they did have more competition, and I also hope
| they succeed.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I think one of the challenges (and let's be really clear,
| Boeing has MANY issues) is that there's a double standard (or
| at least different expectations).
|
| How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And
| that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard.
| Combining precision and technology with 'controlled
| explosion' is going to be a challenge).
|
| But as a NASA person said - NASA-funded contracts "can't"
| have failures. They obviously do, but he was more talking to
| the acceptability, political and otherwise. One or two
| launchpad explosions of a taxpayer funded vehicle and you're
| fighting Congressional demands to shut down the entire
| program. SpaceX provides a layer of abstraction and
| indirection to that, so they can move faster - "Who cares if
| we blow up 10 in the next couple of years to get to one that
| works".
| ragebol wrote:
| Boeing and SpaceX are both not NASA, so same level of
| indirection. If Boeing went the iterative route with some
| failed experimental launches, that could/should be just as
| acceptable.
|
| But they didn't, they went for the first time right
| approach, but that failed too. If you are going to have
| failures, maybe just accept that first time right doesn't
| exist, or just takes much much longer.
| theultdev wrote:
| Well, that's how you build rockets successfully.
|
| Either you make fast iteration acceptable, regardless of
| politics, or you fail.
|
| It's not just political process either, it's the technical
| process. You need to be able to debug, fix, and manufacture
| the iterations quickly.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| No, I totally agree. I'm talking about the mindset
| difference. I'm not saying "SpaceX is 'cheating'" or
| anything like that. Just the mindset differences are
| leading to what we see here in terms of iteration
| cadence.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I think you're conflating the way SpaceX is developing
| Starship with the way the rest of their business operates
| (and _has_ operated). Their Falcon rockets (i.e. the ones
| they actually sell launches on) have an outstanding
| reliability record, and the Dragon 2 development program
| (the direct analogue to Starliner) didn 't lose any test
| missions. IIRC the only major hardware loss was during a
| static fire test of the abort motors on the capsule, which
| is unfortunate, but not so far out of the ordinary.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| It's not about the specific program, it's about the
| overall perspective.
|
| Looking at https://www.space.com/every-spacex-starship-
| explosion-lesson...
|
| there have been many many prototype and other losses. And
| incidents, some catastrophic, some less so.
|
| SN1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15 and the orbital Starship
| launch attempt all had failures losing hardware. If
| NASA/publicly funded work had that many failures (or a
| fraction of them) there'd be Congressional enquiries and
| calls to shut down the program and stop burning tax
| dollars.
| caconym_ wrote:
| You are simply underlining my point that your perspective
| is disproportionately (and inappropriately, in this
| context) focused on the Starship program, which is
| completely irrelevant to NASA's Commercial Crew program.
|
| It's true that SpaceX enjoys more latitude to destroy
| test hardware in its private development programs that
| aren't funded with somebody else's money (public or
| private), but why is that relevant here? Commercial Crew
| was funded by NASA with public money, and SpaceX
| developed Dragon 2 in a relatively conservative and
| conventional program with NASA looking over their
| shoulder the whole time. There is no double standard.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Different design philosophy. Those launches were expected
| to fail. None of those were a finished product. It's more
| like "let's see how far we can get with what we have
| built so far".
| shkkmo wrote:
| What are you even talking about? NASA has directly
| publicly funded Starship development to the tune of ~4
| Billion with the Artemis Moonlander contract and
| extension.
|
| The overall perspective is that SpaceX developed their
| crewed capsule much much faster and cheaper than Boeing.
| The data also indicates that flying with SpaceX is safer.
|
| Congress doesn't care about buring tax dollars as long as
| it is spent in their districts. Otherwise Artemis and SLS
| wouldn't exist.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| If NASA had that many failures while working on a program
| explicitly not intended to experience failures and it
| wasn't being run by Boing, Lockmart or any other defense
| contractor that has Congress in its pockets, yeah, they'd
| be getting hell from Congress. But, NASA did used to work
| on regular old development programs akin to Starship,
| where perceived failure was completely acceptable to push
| understanding. For example, there were the Ranger series
| of lunar impactors, the first 6 of which all failed in
| various ways, and of course they blew up plenty of
| rockets and rocket engines back then too.
|
| The issue isn't "burning tax dollars". Congress is too
| busy selling out the country's future to give a shit
| about that. The issue is that they'd already rather not
| be giving any money to NASA in the first place. They'd
| just give the defense contractors tax payer funded
| 'donations' directly if they could.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there have been many many prototype and other losses_
|
| SpaceX has an assembly line in Hawthorne and test site in
| Texas. (Both send kit to the space coast for launch.)
|
| The reliability of what comes out of the former exceed's
| Boeing's. The innovativeness of what comes out of the
| latter exceeds them once again. Muddling statistics
| between the two would be like considering Boeing's
| experimental drones when measuring its commercial
| airliners' reliability. They're totally different
| departments.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The Falcon 9 is, by a wide margin, the most reliable rocket
| ever built. It's had 341 successful launches and 2
| failures. The Atlas V (what is flying on this mission) has
| had 99 successes and 1 failure. It's also slightly
| misleading, because its first stage is using a Russian made
| RD-180 engine. And similarly the SLS (another Boeing et al
| project) is literally using the exact same engines (RS-25)
| that the Space Shuttle used.
|
| So SpaceX is the only company truly innovating on all
| fields, has the highest launch success rate, highest launch
| cadence, the most capable rockets, and launches for far
| cheaper than any other company (or country).
| nordsieck wrote:
| > I think one of the challenges (and let's be really clear,
| Boeing has MANY issues) is that there's a double standard
| (or at least different expectations).
|
| > How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been?
| (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is
| hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled
| explosion' is going to be a challenge).
|
| IMO, this really misunderstands the two kinds of "tests".
|
| SpaceX is engaged in a development program. And as a part
| of that development program, they're doing test flights to
| discover how to properly build Starship. Those flights are
| expected to fail in various ways. The exact way they fail
| gives SpaceX vital information that's used to improve the
| rocket.
|
| A big part of the reason SpaceX is doing this is because
| simulation and modeling have a limited ability to give good
| answers to questions about novel behaviors when it comes to
| rockets - the speeds and just too high. And the only way to
| find the true unknown unknowns is to interact with reality.
|
| In contrast, Starliner's tests are supposed to be
| demonstrations that the system is complete, functional, and
| ready for service. They are not supposed to have anything
| wrong with them at all.
|
| It's worth pointing out that Boeing chose to do less
| testing and more paperwork as part of Starliner's
| certification. If Boeing had done an in-flight abort test
| instead of a pad abort test like SpaceX did, they probably
| would have caught the OFT-1 problems then.
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| Yeah for some reason when SpaceX did it we couldn't stop
| hearing about it. When OldTech does it, nobody cares.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Quick, without cheating, can you name the second human being
| to run a mile in less than four minutes? Can you name the
| current world record holder?
|
| I guess that most people in my small town don't know who
| Roger Bannister is. A lot more of them can tell you the name
| of the first local to officially run a mile in less than four
| minutes. They couldn't tell you if anybody from my state has
| done it since.
|
| I guess that's just a long way to say, "That's natural."
| chgs wrote:
| If old tech had done it 5 years ago then that would have been
| newsworthy.
|
| The first jet flight across the Atlantic was newsworthy. The
| 837th isn't.
| seydor wrote:
| Every one of the thousands of brain surgeries and heart surgery
| are also remarkable.
| amelius wrote:
| At some point we'll have to think of it as trivial, otherwise
| what progress are we making?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Unlike science (and particularly math) where everything is
| trivial unless novel, in most endeavors these are too
| separate axes. For example, there's no progress or novelty in
| a sports team winning a championship, but it's definitely not
| trivial to win. Same for an engineering project - there are
| many cathedrals out there, but building a new one never
| became trivial.
| amelius wrote:
| Let's say: if you can just open the manual and start
| building, then it is trivial.
|
| We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources
| about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
| bluGill wrote:
| Building a new Falcon 9 is trivial - spacex as built a
| lot already and knows how (or so we assume). However that
| is only true if you use the existing design as is. Change
| anything about the design (which we can assume spacex is
| doing from time to time) makes it non-trivial.
| amelius wrote:
| Only if you threw away all the tooling and knowledge of
| the previous design and started from scratch.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Let's say: if you can just open the manual and start
| building, then it is trivial.
|
| > We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources
| about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
|
| Except that you're wrong.
|
| Because it's very common for the first launch of a
| company's first orbital rocket to fail to make it to
| orbit. So you can't "just open the manual and start
| building".
| amelius wrote:
| > Because it's very common for the first launch of a
| company's first orbital rocket to fail to make it to
| orbit.
|
| It is also very common for the first pancake to be a
| total failure.
|
| That doesn't mean it is non-trivial to make pancakes.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > It is also very common for the first pancake to be a
| total failure.
|
| I guess, it depends on what you mean by "total failure".
|
| It's very rare for the first pancake to be inedible, or
| basically anything except a little misshapen. As someone
| who's primary interested in pancakes is eating them,
| that's a far cry from "total failure".
|
| But if that is your criteria, there's a very simple and
| effective solution: ring molds. They cost a couple of
| dollars on Amazon and guarantee that your pancakes will
| be perfect circles every time.
|
| In contrast, there is no known way to ensure that a first
| rocket launch will be a success. If there was, the
| companies launching them would do it since failed
| launches are extremely expensive in time, money, and
| reputation.
| adolph wrote:
| > Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps.
|
| "Ask not what flying cars can do for you; ask what 140
| characters can do for your country." [0,1]
|
| "We choose to go to LEO. We choose to go to LEO... We choose to
| go to LEO in this decade and do the other things, not because
| they are easy, but so that MIC will learn to build without
| cost-plus contracting" [2, 3]
|
| 0.
| https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/teachers/curricul...
|
| 1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/697729-we-wanted-flying-
| car...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
|
| 3. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-plus-contract.asp
| amelius wrote:
| Rocket-science is just Newtonian physics ;)
| urda wrote:
| Rocket science isn't easy, I would know.
| barryrandall wrote:
| It's not trivial, but it's less interesting than the other news
| stories about Boeing.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| What a relief for NASA and Boeing and a welcome sight for me
| personally as a space enthusiast - hopefully this will inspire
| the folks at SpaceX to get StarShip working.
| ozr wrote:
| Have they not been though?
| saberience wrote:
| Starliner vs Starship isn't really a valid comparison.
| Starliner is a new human carrying capsule which is fitted on
| top of an old rocket. Starship is a 100% brand new everything
| rocket and person carrying spaceship with ground breaking tech,
| lift capacity, full reusability, thrust, payload capacity, etc
| etc.
|
| The rocket used to launch Starliner today is an Atlas V which
| first flew in 2002. I.e. it's a 22 year old rocket system.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The rocket used to launch Starliner today is an Atlas V
| which first flew in 2002. I.e. it's a 24 year old rocket
| system.
|
| Are you posting from 2026?
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| But with continuous development with Vulcan Centaur engines
| replacing the Russian RD-180.
| T-A wrote:
| Atlas V
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
|
| has a first stage powered by the Russian RD-180 engine
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180
|
| and a Centaur upper stage powered by RL10 engines
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RL10
|
| Vulcan Centaur
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Centaur
|
| has a first stage powered by Blue Origin's BE-4 engines
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4
|
| and a second stage known as Centaur V. It's an upgraded
| version of the Centaur, also powered by RL10 engines
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_(rocket_stage)#Centau
| r...
|
| Vulcan has only flown once, in part because of slow
| delivery of BE-4 engines, which to date have not powered
| any other launcher (though they are meant to eventually
| power New Glenn).
|
| So I don't know what you mean by "Vulcan Centaur engines
| replacing the Russian RD-180".
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| Vulcan-Centaur is the rocket that replaces Atlas V.
|
| The BE-4 is the engine on Vulcan-Centaur's booster stage,
| which replaces the RD-180 on the Atlas V booster stage.
| Both Atlas V and Vulcan use RL-10 engines on their main
| stage (what ULA calls Centaur).
|
| And to add more confusion, the new engine for Ariane 5/6 is
| the "Vulcain". :D
| ta1243 wrote:
| Starliner is the Boeing equivalent of Falcon/Crew Dragon which
| has been used for years.
| croddin wrote:
| Starship launch attempt is tomorrow, great week for space!
| Narishma wrote:
| Starliner's competitor from SpaceX is Dragon, not Starship.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| This is a bit meta, but is it surprising that the BBC news
| website is the go-to source for a broad range of news stories
| that end up on HN? What and where are the competition?
| seydor wrote:
| It's politically neutral and generally less opinionated.
| Competition is reuters, AP, other public media such as canadian
| tv, france24 etc.
| jibe wrote:
| There are plenty of reasonable US sources, NY Times, WaPo,
| WSJ, but they are all paywalled.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| WaPo, "reasonable". Ha. Or cut to WSJ and NYT on Theranos,
| SBF, and the other huxters they've shilled for with zero
| journalism lately. All US news is completely biased garbage
| in various ways.
|
| I caught NPR recently cutting and pasting a white house
| press release with zero journalism or commentary. Or their
| health blog which now routinely has stories like
| "measurements of height have historically been uses to
| marginalize short people, should doctors even measure it
| anymore?"
|
| I literally only get my news from what I randomly hear off
| forums like this. And I guarantee I'll beat anyone on a
| quiz of actual facts about world news. (e.g. after SBF was
| convicted, not before.)
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| > And I guarantee I'll beat anyone on a quiz of actual
| facts about world news. (e.g. after SBF was convicted,
| not before.)
|
| Put your money where your mouth is - prediction markets
| or some other fair debate. I personally would take the
| other side of that bet if contrarianism is your default.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| AFP as well
| closewith wrote:
| The BBC is not politically neutral. It's the legal propaganda
| arm of the British State.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| To take a stance much more suited to this forum. It's a
| massive travesty that without some work Americans are now
| redirected to BBC.com, which curates news to be American-
| facing, and thus IMHO bows to advertiser pressure. We can't
| see BBC.co.UK, so we can't know what the other side of the
| news even looks like.
|
| All news services do this. And it already fragments and
| destroys and hope of really talking about the news in a
| healthy manner IMHO.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Cool it with the histrionics.
| closewith wrote:
| It's not histrionics. It's the State-funded broadcaster
| whose Director-General is a political appointee.
|
| It might not be obvious to those within the UK or maybe
| further afield if reading articles on relatively neutral
| topics like science or climate, but the BBC is a bulwark
| of UK Government political influence and Oxbridge
| sensibilities.
| airstrike wrote:
| Bloomberg and WSJ (but not the opinion pieces) are my default
| sources
| ein0p wrote:
| As exciting as this is, I've read that this capsule faces
| uncertain future after 7 launches: the rocket it was launched on
| is retired, and while it's compatible with Falcon it's not clear
| what the advantage would be wrt SpaceX's capsule to warrant
| additional testing. Imagine working on something for over a
| decade only to see it fly just 7 times!
| bitcharmer wrote:
| The main goal of the project has been achieved as far as Boeing
| is concerned :)
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It isn't compatible with Falcon, it can be made to be
| compatible with Falcon in the future. It wouldn't really be
| worth doing though, since part of the point of having two
| providers is dissimilar redundancy, so that any issues with one
| platform don't affect the other. It's more likely that if
| Boeing wants to keep flying Starliner after using up the stock
| of Atlas Vs, they'll want to integrate it on Vulcan Centaur
| rather than Falcon.
| nickff wrote:
| One might imagine that an issue could be found on Dragon,
| which grounded it, but not the Falcon 9. That said, it's
| definitely less redundant than one might like.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it
| fly just 7 times!
|
| Huh? My understanding was that something unique about the
| falcon is the capability of multiple reuses, in contrast to
| previous missions that were one and done uses. What past
| experience in the history of spaceflight might someone be
| referring to where seven reuses registers as a disappointment?
| jdminhbg wrote:
| This is about the entire lifespan of the Starliner program,
| not just one piece of hardware.
| ein0p wrote:
| It did not launch on Falcon. Once the current stock of
| rockets it did launch on runs out they will have no launch
| vehicle.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Once the current stock of rockets it did launch on runs
| out they will have no launch vehicle.
|
| Exactly.
|
| Just to elaborate for your parent, the Atlas V which
| currently flies Starliner uses an RD-180 engine that's
| manufactured in Russia. ULA is no longer able to procure
| any more such engines, and a rocket with those engines are
| no longer legally allowed to fly DoD payloads. Which
| prompted ULA to retire Atlas V in favor of Vulcan.
|
| I think someone from ULA or Boeing (I forget which)
| recently said that they've begun the process of certifying
| Starliner on Vulcan, although I'll have to go back and make
| sure I remember exactly what was said.
| asadotzler wrote:
| They won't reuse any Starliners 7 times. Twice is more
| likely. Three times reuse, perhaps. They can't refub in time
| to send the same craft up twice in a year as required by the
| contract so they'll need at least two. If anything goes wrong
| with either of those, they'll need a backup. Now they've got
| three for 6 flights. These vehicles will get one, two, or at
| best 3 launches and then retired to the scrap heap while
| SpaceX Dragon continues to ferry people to the ISS if it gets
| an extension and if not then to the first private orbital
| stations. Boeing should never again get a NASA contract after
| SLS and Starliner.
| asadotzler wrote:
| "The capsule" here means a decade of R&D and half a decade
| building production models. If turnaround is about 6-8 months,
| they're going to need at least two and I'll bet they build
| three or more because reuse and refurb won't go as well as they
| hope.
|
| That means about 10 years of R&D since they got the initial
| contracts and then about half a decade of production for the
| flight articles and then a wind-down of a couple years and a
| skeleton crew to make the last few flights.
|
| A 15-20 year project that sends dozens of people to space for
| the last years of the ISS's lifetime is not going to be a
| disappointment for 95% of the people who worked on this.
| ein0p wrote:
| I don't think you understand. It's not 7 launches per
| capsule. There could be 7 launches in total for this.
| spacemark wrote:
| >Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it
| fly just 7 times!
|
| Haha, I'm guessing you don't work in the space industry.
| Frankly if something you work on gets to space at all you count
| yourself fortunate. My first job was at a defense contractor
| working on a big rocket. A senior engineer on our team had a
| picture of the Indiana Jones warehouse on the wall in his
| office, rows and rows of boxes. I asked him why, he said it's a
| reminder to not get too stressed about work - 9 out of 10
| projects will never fly.
|
| Things are changing especially in the new space corners of the
| industry, but for big projects requiring political will I think
| it's still the same.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > My first job was at a defense contractor working on a big
| rocket.
|
| Out of curiosity, were you working on one of the Ares
| rockets?
| mbonnet wrote:
| Having more than one thing capable of doing something is an
| advantage in a field as uncertain as spaceflight.
| Reubachi wrote:
| I have spent years building cars that ran once, twice to great
| effect/happiness of all involed.
|
| Getting to space SEVEN times off one poweplant/project is
| nothing short of incredible.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > Getting to space SEVEN times off one poweplant/project
|
| Sure, if you ignore the 20+ year old Atlas V that actually
| launched it...
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| It's crazy the US could soon have up to 5 different
| spacecraft/launch systems that can take humans to orbit with 2
| more in development:
|
| Falcon 9 + Dragon, SLS + Orion, Atlas V (Vulcan Centaur) +
| Starliner
|
| Close to orbital payload launch, likely human rated in the
| future: Vulcan Centaur + Dream Chaser, Superheavy + Starship
|
| Under development: New Glenn + Space Vehicle (?), Neutron
| ragebol wrote:
| Is neutron to be man rated?
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| Rocket Lab mentions "human spaceflight" on the Neutron page,
| that's the only mention I've seen of it. I haven't seen any
| plans for a spacecraft for carrying humans or how they might
| handle re-entry.
|
| https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/neutron/
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Is neutron to be man rated?
|
| Yes and no.
|
| It's probably more accurate to say "human ratable". They're
| planning on designing the rocket with human rating in mind,
| so that if they want to do it in the future, it'll be easier.
|
| But NASA doesn't human rate a rocket - they human rate the
| entire system as a whole, so it doesn't really make sense to
| say "human rate Neutron".
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I wonder how that's supposed to work with their unique
| captive fairing design. Feels like they'd have to design
| crew flight specific boosters which don't have the
| fairings.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > likely human rated in the future: Vulcan Centaur + Dream
| Chaser
|
| IMO, this one is the least likely.
|
| There are _a lot_ of problems that need to be over come for
| Dream Chaser to be crew rated. And AFAIK, they aren 't getting
| NASA money to do it.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > There are a lot of problems that need to be over come for
| Dream Chaser to be crew rated.
|
| Intriguing. Can you elaborate?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| IIRC one of the big ones is that of how the crew is
| supposed to board the vehicle. Cargo Dreamchaser is
| launched in a fairing so that its aerodynamics don't matter
| on the way up. This is fine because the cargo can be loaded
| prior to payload integration. But that won't work if
| they're carrying crew.
| JanSolo wrote:
| Star Liner has all the same problems that the Space Shuttle
| had. In an emergency, how do you get the crew out safely?
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Star Liner has all the same problems that the Space
| Shuttle had. In an emergency, how do you get the crew out
| safely?
|
| Starliner has a launch abort system; the Shuttle did not.
|
| From what I understand, they use a very powerful rocket
| (much more powerful than Crew Dragon) to get the capsule
| far away from the booster. I guess it can get far enough
| away that NASA is satisfied that falling bits of burning
| SRB aren't a danger to the parachutes.
| somenameforme wrote:
| During the Starline abort test only 2 of the 3 parachutes
| opened, and that was a _pad_ abort test - no SRBs!! NASA
| not only calling that a "success", but a sufficient
| success to move onto crewed testing was about the moment
| I lost all faith in Bridenstine being different.
| _Immediately_ after leaving office he picked up a cushy
| consulting type gigs for various aerospace /defense
| companies (aka Boeing et al). Shocker.
|
| For those who might not know SRB = solid rocket booster.
| Boeing uses them, SpaceX doesn't. An SRB is basically
| like a giant firecracker. You light it and it starts
| burning and doesn't stop until its done. It poses
| substantial safety concerns in the case of an accident
| where you need to abort the flight. But they're cheap,
| extremely powerful, and relatively simple contrasted
| against liquid fuel engines.
| tekla wrote:
| Failure of 1 chute was designed for, though yes, it
| wasn't a great look.
|
| > It poses substantial safety concerns in the case of an
| accident where you need to abort the flight
|
| SRBs are in general very safe, which is why they're still
| used for human rated rockets.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Well we shall see I suppose. SRB's go back to the Apollo
| era and NASA safety qualifications often come down to
| 'are you doing what we've done before'? Hence them
| refusing to even consider SpaceX retropulsive crew
| landings, even though that would be a huge step forward.
|
| I would also observe that NASA has a relatively poor
| safety record contrasted against the Soyuz (which has not
| lost crew since 1971 in spite of flying more manned
| missions), and one of the few completely catastrophic
| crashes we have had, Challenger, was directly related to
| the SRB. In either case, I expect variance is playing a
| much larger role than most might appreciate.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Didn't the shuttle have this harebrained thing where the
| crew were supposed to climb all the way to the exit hatch
| in their pressure suits, extend a boom along the wing in
| full flight and then parachute out along it?
|
| I thought I read about that. Of course that's effectively
| no actual escape system lol. They'd be long dead by the
| time they managed all that in an out of control shuttle.
| tekla wrote:
| It was a proposed mechanism that was never taken really
| seriously.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Starliner is put on top of the rocket, not next to it.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Pretty sure Star liner is at the top of its stack, so
| there is no risk of sheets of ice falling on it and
| damaging it
| tekla wrote:
| What? No it doesn't.
| wolfendin wrote:
| It can't have "all the same problems" because a number of
| the engineering problems came from having the spacecraft
| on the side of the launch vehicle
| nordsieck wrote:
| The big one off the top of my head:
|
| Dream Chaser flies in a fairing for aerodynamic reasons. In
| order to fly crew (so that the vehicle could have a working
| launch abort system), they'd need to figure out how to fly
| without a fairing.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Can't they blow the fairing as part of launch abort?
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Can't they blow the fairing as part of launch abort?
|
| I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't really know the
| answer. But I have some questions:
|
| * How reliable will the "blow the fairing" system be? If
| it's only used in emergencies (instead of the regular
| fairing separation mechanism) than it'll suffer from the
| same problem as emergency generators - they're rarely
| tested and fail _very_ often when needed.
|
| * How easy is it to get the fairing out of the way once
| it's opened? Normally, regular aerodynamic forces slough
| the fairing halves off, but an LES/LAS doesn't have time
| for that - it's escaping a potentially exploding rocket.
| And those fairings will act like sails - huge surface
| area:volume ratio means they're just not going to move
| fast.
|
| * What happens if DreamChaser hits one of the fairings on
| the wing? Would it damage it enough that it'd have
| trouble landing? Is it enough to cause it to foul the
| escape trajectory? Or even put it in a spin?
|
| It seems like a lot of work to get it to work with or
| without a fairing.
| giantrobot wrote:
| That's one more thing to go wrong. In a LES scenario
| something(s) has gone wrong in an unrecoverable way. Very
| few systems can be relied upon to _exist_ let alone work
| correctly. A LES on a crewed capsule is supposed to be
| able to pull itself from the vehicle all under its own
| power. It can 't assume explosive fasteners on the
| fairing are functional or actual all function correctly.
|
| You don't want the LES to activate, seem to be working
| correctly, and then blast the crew into a fairing panel
| that did not fully separate. The crew doesn't have time
| to roll down the window and kick it loose.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Soyuz launches with the crew capsule under fairung and
| even _stacked under the orbital module_ - it still has a
| LES[0], that pulls off the whole fairing away & then
| drops the capsule once clear of the rocket.
|
| A bit complicated but was already used in emergency and
| worked.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_abort_modes#Jetti
| sonable...
| enragedcacti wrote:
| From some quick reading it seems like the crewed Dream
| Chaser is intended to fly without a fairing. The cargo
| version's ability to fold the wings and fly within a
| fairing seems to be for 1) compliance with NASAs CRS-2
| requirements, 2) wide compatibility with existing
| boosters that weren't designed for the forces that flying
| without a fairing would create.
|
| Could be spin from Sierra but that's what they were
| saying to the press as of 2015 when they announced the
| cargo variant.
|
| https://spacenews.com/sierra-nevada-hopes-dream-chaser-
| finds...
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| The problem with the wings is they generate lift during
| launch and that will screw up the rocket, thus the
| fairing. I thought there was no known solution for that.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Fold the wings up?
|
| Seems like Starship fins and Falcon 9 grid fins did that
| trick as well.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| It seems like you could mitigate that by designing the
| wing such that when mounted the angle of attack is 0 and
| thus no lift is generated. Obviously the wing would still
| have an effect when the booster changes orientation or in
| cases of high winds. I'm not remotely qualified to
| calculate the scale of those forces but I don't see why
| any of that would be a guaranteed showstopper given a
| booster with enough thrust vectoring capability.
| oooyay wrote:
| Naive question: Planes and helicopters do not have the
| ability to safely eject passengers mid-flight. We largely
| accept these conditions as a risk of those modes of
| travel. Why is LES/LAS a unique requirement for space
| shuttles?
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Planes and helicopters do not have the ability to
| safely eject passengers mid-flight. We largely accept
| these conditions as a risk of those modes of travel. Why
| is LES/LAS a unique requirement for space shuttles?
|
| That's a fair point, although my understanding is that
| parachute systems for small planes are becoming more
| common.
|
| My view is that flight rate is the fundamental issue at
| hand. Airplanes and helicoptors fly many orders of
| magnitude more than these capsules, which means we know
| they are many orders of magnitude more reliable.
|
| They've also generally been through a long process of
| refinement - the original airplanes were extremely
| dangerous compared to modern variants.
|
| Additionally, aircraft can afford to have a lot higher
| margin of safety baked in to them. Because of how high
| gravity is on Earth and the nature of the Rocket
| Equation[1], it's just not possible to have a lot of
| margin in rockets of capsules. They need to be extremely
| svelt to launch at all.
|
| And lastly, we have experience with human spacecraft
| without an LES/LAS - it was the Space Shuttle. And it
| killed 14 people - easily the most dangerous spacecraft
| ever created. No one has any desire to build on that
| particular legacy.
|
| ---
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
| hexane360 wrote:
| Also worth noting that test pilots of experimental
| aircraft generally wear parachutes, at least for higher
| risk tests. This includes tests of commercial aircraft.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > which means we know they are many orders of magnitude
| more reliable
|
| No, it means we have orders of magnitude more reliability
| data. Same result, different point.
| JoeCortopassi wrote:
| planes/helicopters have a fuel source that is orders of
| magnitude less volatile, and are also able to safely land
| without power
| sqeaky wrote:
| I think rockets in this design space have frequently been
| closer to prototype quality rather than commercially
| deployment quality.
|
| Those other systems have other redundancies and safety
| mechanisms.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| 1) Commercial planes and helicopters are orders of
| magnitude safer than space flight.
| https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-
| driving/
|
| 2) Both planes and helicopters have an ability to glide
| (or autogyro) to a relatively safe landing in the event
| of most failures. A spacecraft can also do that with
| wings or parachutes, but only if it gets far away from
| its exploding booster fast enough to survive.
|
| 3) Many military planes do have the ability to safely
| eject passengers.
|
| 4) astronauts dying live on stream is a really bad look.
| nativeit wrote:
| Planes and helicopters do not frequently fail by
| exploding, but rather things like engines failing. An
| engine failure, even if it's the only engine in a given
| airplane or helicopter, does not automatically involve a
| deadly crash. Airplanes can glide, frequently for very
| long distances, and helicopters can use the air moving
| across the rotors to effectively "glide" down. It's not
| always possible, but they do have inherent redundancies
| that rockets necessarily do not.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Planes and helicopters burn, though.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-
| institution/freak...
|
| Here's an attempt to develop a jet fuel that wouldn't
| burn:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y33N0raKZBo
| eagerpace wrote:
| Startship will not have an abort capability either.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You could go without an LES if you can convince NASA that
| you have sufficient contingencies to not need it (and, of
| course, you can do almost anything you want on a private
| flight). SpaceX has been entertaining the idea of not
| using an escape system on Starship and instead proving
| its safety through sheer number of flights. Although
| there also is just a general consensus that the flip
| maneuver would probably make that necessary even if they
| had an LES.
| glenstein wrote:
| >There are a lot of problems that need to be over come for
| Dream Chaser to be crew rated.
|
| Thanks, this is helpful to know. What do you know about the
| dream chaser problems?
| hammock wrote:
| _> It 's crazy the US could soon have up to 5 different
| spacecraft/launch systems that can take humans to orbit with 2
| more in development_
|
| We had a launch system that could take humans to the moon in
| 1972.. haven't had one since. Maybe we will get another one in
| our lifetime, if it is even possible.
| picture wrote:
| Is there much practical reason that requires sending people
| to the moon still? Modern robots are cheaper and can perform
| science more effectively than any human
| striking wrote:
| Bragging rights (ostensibly "practical" in a geopolitical,
| soft power projection sense)
| picture wrote:
| Didn't we get to brag about it already? The value of
| continuing to have the capability seems to be outweighed
| by the costs of maintaining the facilities and equipment
| zardo wrote:
| You don't get much bragging rights for being first to
| plant a flag on the Moon once China has a continuously
| manned outpost there.
| mrmuagi wrote:
| It looks like the RTT is 6 minutes (more or less depending
| on orbit) for packets send to mars, but despite that it
| does seem like the easier option yeah.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Not really accurate at all.
|
| The lowest the RTT gets is six minutes but that is a
| brief period every couple of years. The longest RTT is 45
| minutes.
|
| Even 6 minutes makes any kind of tele-operation
| infeasible and require system to function autonomously.
| This restricts the kinds of science that are currently
| possible.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| > can perform science more effectively than any human
|
| I wouldn't go that far, but we already had humans on the
| moon so we can get away with robots doing the science now.
| I still think sending astronauts to mars would speed up
| research, for example.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think a long term view is it's the basis for building
| heavy industry in space as it has a lot of natural
| resources that can be exploited industrially and escape
| orbit velocities are much less from the moon than earth
| surface. This eventually leads to a general space
| infrastructure. If you believe the end of humanity is on
| earth then this probably isn't convincing. Folks like
| myself believe we are inexorably driven to spread life as a
| function of what life is and we have no meaningful choice
| but to keep going.
|
| But as long as some subset of humanity believes in this
| humanity will keep investing in it. Not everyone has to be
| aligned and we can have many priorities at once, not the
| least of which is robotic science which I only see as
| mutually exclusive as long as there's not plentiful private
| investment, which there is at the moment. I don't see
| robotic exploration as suffering in the build out of
| extremely low cost launch capability and a general space
| infrastructure including moon infrastructure. I see it
| benefiting enormously as the costs and risks drop
| significantly.
| sho_hn wrote:
| If we ever get to heavy industrialization of lunar
| resources, how are we going to deal with the CO2
| footprint of rockets?
| p1mrx wrote:
| In theory it's possible to make a carbon-neutral methane
| rocket based on atmospheric CO2, though that depends on
| how completely the methane can be burned.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gas
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| A spacex falcon 9 contains ~as much fuel as a 747. Note:
| fuel, not fuel + oxidizer
|
| Edit: falcon 9, not starship
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Source?
|
| I get Starship 34,000,000 kg + 12,000,000 kg vs 747
| ~200,000 liters [?] 150,000 kg, or about 1/300 th of what
| Starship holds.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Oh shit I'm sorry I am so wrong. I had calculated falcon
| 9. Thank you for the correction
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Mass drivers.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You'd be moving other polluting industries off-Earth,
| thus offsetting the footprint of things that cannot be
| done without said footprint.
| somenameforme wrote:
| There are a million viable (and often quite fun) answers
| here, but one is really kind of funny. What do you get
| when you mix oxygen and hydrogen? Water? No, of course
| not! You get _rocket fuel_! Seriously. Liquid oxygen +
| liquid hydrogen is a common, and highly effective, fuel
| that 's been used for various engines such as on the
| Space Shuttle Main Engine.
|
| Rockets can also be carbon negative in another way. A
| rocket that uses less than 50% of its fuel getting to
| orbit would be carbon negative, because it's spending
| less than 'x/2' fuel to go burn at least 'x/2' fuel away
| from Earth. Factor in some of the fuel coming from carbon
| neutral sources, and it quickly becomes quite easy for a
| rocket to be carbon negative.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| Distributing human populations to ensure survival. With
| current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining
| but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and
| sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event
| couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs
| program that will produce the technology necessary for a
| lunar colony will improve materials science, medical
| understanding, logistics.
| hosh wrote:
| We could also learn to live within the means of our
| ecology.
| sho_hn wrote:
| This sounds like the harder problem.
| tialaramex wrote:
| No, it's merely incredibly difficult. Sustainable living
| off Earth is far beyond that.
|
| Humans definitely can't leave. Humans are even less well
| suited to interstellar travel than they are to living at
| the bottom of the ocean, something they also don't do and
| have no idea how they could ever do.
|
| So, with tremendous effort humans could visit one of
| their neighbouring planets. All of these planets are
| _terrible_. Mars is by far more hostile to life than
| anywhere humans have even visited, let alone had a
| permanent settlement. But we could do it. To what end?
|
| Live here, or die here, those are your options and you
| should get used to it.
| tonynator wrote:
| >To what end?
|
| To have the species survive if anything ends all life on
| Earth - apparently not a priority for you but it is for
| those that enjoy humanity existing.
|
| Also to explore and learn more about the universe we live
| in. Do you truly not see value in that? Have you never
| left the city/state/country you were born in?
| jcranmer wrote:
| > To have the species survive if anything ends all life
| on Earth
|
| Nothing the universe has thrown at Earth in the past 3
| billion years has been capable of ending all life. And
| nothing that could happen in the next million years seems
| possible of doing that either.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| When we say life on earth we mean human life and
| civilization. Prokaryotes, while alive, are not really
| what people mean. Yes they would survive asteroids,
| nukes, possibly nanobot swarms.
| hosh wrote:
| > No, it's merely incredibly difficult.
|
| It's difficult, but I don't think it is _that_ difficult.
| Ecologies, like any living systems, can self-heal and
| regenerate. There are practices that allows us to tap
| into that regenerative power as societies. They may not
| happen fast relative to our individual human lifespan,
| but 50 years is more than enough time to restore
| wastelands or reverse desertification.
|
| I don't have a good answer to how sustain an economy
| based upon mining, refining, and manufacturing things out
| of mineral resources. Many of us have gotten used to
| modern conveniences (at its own cost related to mental
| and emotional health, and social cohesiveness). I think
| what most people balk on are on the perception of having
| to go back to barely surviving off the land, or having to
| alter lifestyle. Lifestyle may have to change, but the
| same regenerative power of ecologies also gives us
| significantly more resiliency.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >But we could do it. To what end?
|
| Why do anything at all? Who are you to dictate to others
| what their options are?
| pretendscholar wrote:
| That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like
| asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by
| trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial
| biospheres.
|
| I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the
| only system that we know works.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| This is the lamest of all excuses.
|
| It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an
| extinction asteroid in 65 million years. Detection and
| mapping is very good today, and they're relatively simple
| to deflect given even with current technology, and a long
| enough lead time. Obsessing about asteroid impact is just
| an excuse to engage in fantasy.
|
| But saying "We can improve our understanding of ecology
| by [designing] artificial biosphere", is just the chef's
| kiss of bullshittery. It's like saying, that we can
| understand the ocean by getting a fish bowl. Not exactly,
| and it certainly won't teach us anything about the actual
| biosphere. Instead, all you'd learn about is atmosphere
| scrubbers and water reclamation.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > they're relatively simple to deflect given even with
| current technology, and a long enough lead time.
|
| and what is this simple method to deflect a large
| asteroid headed for Earth?
| papercrane wrote:
| A gravity tractor is the simplest solution with enough
| lead time. It's theoretical, but doesn't involve any
| exotic technology or materials.
|
| Essentially you have a spacecraft park itself beside an
| asteroid. It's gravity will minutely change the asteroids
| trajectory. With enough lead time that's all you need.
| Since you're not blowing up, or applying a large focused
| amount of energy to the asteroid it doesn't matter what
| the targets composition is. You won't break it up.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor
| nordsieck wrote:
| >> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events
| like asteroids.
|
| > This is the lamest of all excuses.
|
| > It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an
| extinction asteroid in 65 million years.
|
| He said "like astroids". Quite frankly _we don 't know_
| how frequent extinction events happen. We've had nuclear
| weapons for less than 100 years, and have a couple of
| close calls[1] already.
|
| ---
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_fals
| e_alar...
| tonynator wrote:
| We miss asteroids all the time. And we could get hit by a
| GRB at any time with no warning. We could get Carrington
| evented at any time. Global thermonuclear war could occur
| at any time.
|
| Don't understand this lefty obstinance against preparing
| for the unexpected when the negative outcome is the death
| of humanity. Is it because you don't like Elon?
| riley_dog wrote:
| > Don't understand this lefty obstinance against
| preparing for the unexpected when the negative outcome is
| the death of humanity. Is it because you don't like Elon?
|
| I agreed with you right up until this garbage.
| protomolecule wrote:
| >Detection and mapping is very good today
|
| No. We can't detect asteroids coming from the direction
| of Sun. Just ask people of Chelyabinsk, Russia. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/the-sun-
| is-blind...
| samatman wrote:
| This was a bit more than a hundred years ago.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
|
| I'd say that such an event happening over a populated
| region of the Earth would be pretty bad. It's worth a bit
| of investment.
|
| Here's what would happen if Tunguska happened over Paris,
| using a mid-range estimate of its magnitude: https://nucl
| earsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=30000&lat=48.8583&ln...
| jcranmer wrote:
| > That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events
| like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of
| ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony
| artificial biospheres.
|
| To be kind of blunt, even an extinction-level asteroid
| hit with near-total biosphere destruction is probably
| _still_ more conducive to human life than any other
| planet or satellite in the solar system, as evidenced by
| the continued existence of at least a few forms of life
| past the extinction event. And many of the events people
| worry about are far less destructive than even that
| (nuclear winter, for example, would probably roll Earth
| 's climate back to pre-industrial temperatures, maybe as
| far as Little Ice Age, which is, uh, nowhere near
| extinction-level threat to humanity).
|
| It's also worth pointing out that it's possible to do
| closed ecological studies without the expense of running
| it in space (e.g., Biosphere 2). The only thing you need
| space for studying in that regard is "what is the effect
| of non-1g environments on biological forms?" (to which
| existing studies suggest the answer is somewhere between
| "bad" and "horrible").
| pretendscholar wrote:
| They are in 0g environments presumably having 1-6th isn't
| as bad and there might be ways to prevent/mitigate those
| issues.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Self-sustaining human colonies in space or on other
| celestial bodies are very distant dream, probably it will
| take several centuries or millennia to happen. The main
| reason is human body: we haven't figured out reproduction
| in low gravity yet. Unless some fascist state will do it,
| we will never experiment with it until full confidence in
| safety for the mother and the child.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's a very distant dream that will always remain distant
| if we don't work on it. We have a lot of things to test
| before we get to testing the gravitational requirements
| of human reproduction. As it stands, we don't even know
| our basic gravitational needs. All we know is that 0g is
| too low. It's entirely possible that it turns out we can
| function relatively fine at something low but non-zero,
| like 0.1g.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Instead, launch sealed, frozen embryos into orbits of
| various bodies in our Solar System -- bury a few on the
| Moon.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes, humans living on other celestial bodies is a goal in
| itself, expanding us beyond Earth and a few people in LEO.
|
| Cities on the moon and Mars are a reasonable and achievable
| goal. There are resources which can much more easily be
| exploited with real people on premise, some people will
| want to live in different environments, there are
| opportunities for sport, entertainment, tourism, and plenty
| of industries which will be much more effective with
| skilled labor on site instead of meticulously planned
| missions which often fail and if they don't spend a whole
| bunch of effort overcomming the basics of operating.
| twothreeone wrote:
| I would imagine (a) keep watch over the lunar atomics and
| (b) fend off PLA officers stationed there permanently after
| Chang'e-42.
| Teever wrote:
| Why does someone always do this in a thread about space
| stuff?
|
| Without fail there's always some negative Nelly who already
| knows the answer to their downer question.
|
| We get it. You don't care about space shit, most people
| don't. But why go derail a thread about a space
| accomplishment with negativity?
|
| Is there much practical reason for that?
| tonynator wrote:
| I genuinely think it's because they dislike Elon and have
| expanded that dislike to all space exploration to
| rationalize a way in which he isn't basically the most
| important and valuable human being on Earth.
| Teever wrote:
| This stuff has predated Elon Musk.
|
| I think it's part contrarianness and part cognitive
| deficiency where some people can't properly reason about
| things on these scales.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "can perform science more effectively than any human" is
| very disputable.
|
| If they are so much better, why does anyone get up off
| their couch and do field research? Just let the robots do
| it.
|
| Besides, it's human nature to explore, in person. As George
| Mallory said, "Because it's there."
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It makes more sense to have a permanent human presence on
| the Moon than to aim for Mars.
|
| The Moon is both very near and very easy to communicate
| with so it is the perfect first place to learn about
| building a "colony" before moving on to Mars.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Establishing a permanent presence on the moon would be a
| stepping stone to further exploration of other planets.
| (Mars in particular.)
|
| Since its only a 3-4 day trip, with transfer windows every
| month (and non-optimal ones essentially constantly).
| resupply missions and rotating astronauts/personnel are
| going to be much easier. Much less of a gravity well to
| deal with.
|
| The plan would be for in situ resource extraction and
| manufacturing. With enough of a human presence, projects
| like local construction of spacecraft become feasible. And
| something like a mass driver would be much more feasible on
| the moon. A big enough one and you're even considering
| interstellar probes ...
|
| It would require a consistent, sustained effort. But not
| astronomical in US budget terms. Maybe $20-$30 billion/year
| (about of 3-4% the defense budget)
| Zigurd wrote:
| Anything beyond Earth orbit requires either multi-stage
| expendable rockets, which isn't economical for supporting
| a moon base, or in-orbit refueling that has better
| economics than expendable rockets, which depends on cheap
| rapid reusability. If you can't land, refuel, and fly
| without refurbishing the launch system, rocket engines,
| etc. you can't ship fuel to orbit cheaply enough to
| justify in-orbit refueling.
|
| Starship is a vastly better attempt at more of these
| goals than STS. But if it misses cost, or payload, or
| reliability goals it won't solve this problem. It is even
| possible that it will take too many attempts in which a
| ship and 39 engines are expended to even get close.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _practical reason that requires sending people to the
| moon still?_
|
| The big one that robots can't do is studying human biology
| in space.
|
| How do we fare long term on a foreign body? What does
| trauma medicine look like? How do we accommodate the
| diseases and disabilities that frequent our non-astronaut
| grade population? Is gestation, birth and development
| possible in low gravity? _Et cetera_.
|
| Then Moon provides the easiest place to do this at scale by
| virtu of being the closest place to Earth with _in situ_
| resources.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Not much point sending robots to go look at Moon rocks if
| there's no pretext of sending people there. I mean, you
| could make some PhDs out of it I'm sure, but would that be
| worth the public expense? I don't think so.
| somenameforme wrote:
| This is a common misconception. Modern robots are very
| limited in their capabilities, out of necessity. Mars is a
| great example. Perseverance has the most capable drill of
| any rover, and it can drill up to 2.4 inches deep. [1] And
| these drills are used extremely sparingly because they tend
| to break rapidly, like any sort of moving part.
| Perseverance's top theoretic speed is around 0.07mph, and
| it's a speed demon compared to prior rovers. [2] Same
| reasons - the more you move the more things break, and the
| nearest repair shop is pretty far away. The first humans on
| Mars will almost certainly learn _vastly_ more in a week
| than we 've learned in 60+ years of probes and rovers!
|
| Beyond this though (and also the survival aspect as others
| have hit on), I'd simply mention the inspirational aspect.
| Many who lived through the Moon landings (as well as those
| who did not) see this as humanity's greatest achievement.
| And I think this sort of stuff helps to create a better
| future for a people. When asked what they want to be when
| they grow up, the most popular choice for American children
| today is a vlogger/YouTuber, the least popular is astronaut
| [3]. In China, the answers are completely reversed. Who's
| going to have the better generational outcome in 30 years?
|
| But of course this isn't just for children. So many people
| just seem completely devoid of hope and optimism for the
| future. And that's completely understandable the way things
| have been going for many decades now. But show literally
| anybody this video of the Falcon Heavy landing [4] and the
| first question you will always get is, "Is that real?"
| People just can't even believe what we're achieving, and I
| think doing even more of this, on a much larger scale, and
| making it all the more visible would really improve so many
| lives, and likely the entire country itself. Just read the
| comments to that video, to see how it impacts people, and
| those are friggin YouTube comments!
|
| [1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-
| rovers-...
|
| [2] - https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-self-
| driving-on-mar...
|
| [3] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-
| kids-would-...
|
| [4] - https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1704
| wolfendin wrote:
| Robots aren't performing science, they're doing one half of
| one step of the scientific method: collecting data in an
| experiment. It's humans doing all the rest.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| It would probably become a lot more possible if we could get
| this "SLS/Orion with frickin' _Starship_ as a lunar lander
| Rube Goldberg machine " monkey off our backs.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Interesting and very readable elaboration of this snark:
| https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
| jonathankoren wrote:
| That's literally the SLS.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we had a launch system that could take humans to the moon
| in 1972_
|
| Saturn V was ridiculously expensive [1] and very unsafe.
|
| Apollo was built to get to the Moon fast half a dozen times.
| We're building more ambitiously today.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V _$1.5bn in 2024
| dollars_
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Saturn V was ridiculously expensive [1] and incomparably
| unsafe.
|
| Von Braun was asked if the Saturn V was safe to launch. He
| asked six of his engineering reports, each replied _nein_.
| Von Braun replied that the Saturn V had six nines of
| reliability.
| Zigurd wrote:
| This comment is an invitation to an uninformative comparison.
| Apollo was just barely able to take a crew to the moon and
| back, with many expendable stages, using 5% of US GDP to do
| it. Almost all the value in Apollo is indirect value in the
| form of technologies developed for Apollo.
|
| Why replicate that? Indeed we should ask: Is there a goal to
| value, other than the obvious "the Chinese would get there
| first if we don't?"
|
| A lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS. We
| will discover that lunar regolith is a bigger nuisance than
| floating boogers in the ISS.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS_
|
| Source?
|
| We can design--and are designing--automation into a lunar
| base in a way we couldn't with the ISS.
| lambdaone wrote:
| That sounds really interesting, but web searching mostly
| brings up very old research. Do you have a link for any
| of the up-to-date work on automating the base?
| wolfendin wrote:
| The mission goal was to land a man on the moon and return
| him to earth safely.
|
| Where's the barely? What would you have done better?
| pdonis wrote:
| I don't think it's crazy; it's competition, which is what
| _should_ be happening. We _want_ multiple private companies to
| be in this game, because that 's the only way access to space
| will ever become practical at any kind of scale.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I just want to live long enough to see a ship, intended for
| long-term use, assembled in orbit.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Interesting. And I'm thinking I want to see a permanent lunar
| base but also, "Where does it end?"
|
| Humans walked on the Moon in my lifetime. I should be
| contented with that.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| > Humans walked on the Moon in my lifetime. I should be
| contented with that.
|
| I'm apparently younger than you, and humans have not walked
| on the moon in my lifetime. I'm discontented by that.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Same, I'm terribly disappointed that I can't simply walk
| on the moon. Parents generation really dropped the fuckin
| ball there eh
| nyokodo wrote:
| > Parents generation really dropped the ... ball there
|
| Really probably your grandparents or great grandparents
| depending on your age. Most Americans born after the moon
| landings had boomer or gen-x parents. All the men who
| walked on the moon and the majority of those in high
| office until roughly the 1990s were silent generation,
| the GI generation or older. They're the ones who had the
| power to keep the space program going but didn't. Once
| your parents had significant influence the Apollo program
| was long gone, the know how to build the hardware was
| gone, they would have had an even harder time than us
| rebuilding it because the commercial impetus wasn't there
| and we didn't yet have insane internet billionaires
| competing for launch contracts.
| jakswa wrote:
| I don't recall a ball, but they dropped a feather and a
| hammer (the gravity experiment).
| bell-cot wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_surface_ope
| rat...
|
| The 3rd para talks about the (golf) balls.
| tekla wrote:
| Golf ball
| avmich wrote:
| Spherical hammer in the vacuum is a ball.
| brandall10 wrote:
| It's wild to think this is true for anyone under the half
| century mark.
| jononor wrote:
| Soon there will be no living humans who have walked on
| the moon :/
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| I want to live long enough to see a viable test of larger
| spaceships that could send humans to Mars. I really want to
| live long enough to discover evidence of at least microbial
| life elsewhere in the solar system - Mars seems like the
| obvious place we can reach with a good chance for it be
| possible. I know there's amazingly water vapor around
| Europa, that's so much more remote.
|
| I think about 30 years should lead to more exploration of
| Mars, and maybe multiple landers andn robots getting there
| from here, maybe even a return trip. (human travel to Mars
| feels so far out, even if Starship works out in the next 10
| years).
| grondilu wrote:
| Well, isn't it what the ISS is?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _isn 't it what the ISS is?_
|
| No, it has no propulsion system. That is the difference
| between a ship and a station.
| moffkalast wrote:
| _angry Cygnus noises_
| smolder wrote:
| It does have thrusters used for orbital correction about
| monthly, (and maybe dodging debris here and there,) but
| it's fair to say that system is not for taking trips or
| anything.
| TechPlasma wrote:
| I think there are thrusters on the Russian side of the
| station. They aren't large but they move the stations
| orientation for docking sometimes. (And cartwheels for
| fun and horror)
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I just want to live long enough to see Venus terraformed into
| an ocean and forest covered paradise.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Clever. You seem to want to live on forever...
| projektfu wrote:
| Need a planet spinner if that's going to happen.
| ben_w wrote:
| A lot of mirrors in a 24h orbit might be easier.
|
| Still, even then it will take, what, about a century to
| get rid of the CO2? (Does it even count as an
| "atmosphere" at ground level, given that it's past the
| critical point and the distinction between liquid and gas
| phases no longer exists?)
| mjevans wrote:
| If going that far, use the sunlight for power / in space
| solar ovens. Just make sure to limit how much power goes
| to Venus because that will increase the net energy in
| that envelope.
| ben_w wrote:
| One of the options is to use the mirrors to boil off the
| atmosphere, the other is to keep the sunlight away for so
| long the atmosphere almost entirely condenses and can
| then be paved over; either way, it was a long wait.
| cyberax wrote:
| You can't "boil off" the atmosphere. You need to
| accelerate the gas molecules past the planetary escape
| velocity, otherwise they'll just cool down and drop back
| onto the surface.
|
| There's no realistic way to evacuate that much gas (the
| surface pressure on Venus is almost 100 atmospheres!).
|
| One option is first to cover the surface of Venus with
| water, by first creating giant orbital mirrors to let the
| atmosphere to cool. Then you can sequester the carbon
| dioxide as elemental carbon under the water surface.
| Oxygen released in the process will be naturally consumed
| by all the underoxidized minerals present on Venus.
| projektfu wrote:
| I've always loved the idea of floating habitat in Venus'
| atmosphere but the temperature remains the largest part
| of the problem.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| In discussions I've read on planetary climate modelling
| one idea is that if Venus had an atmosphere like Earth's
| but 50%+ thicker and an ocean covering 70% of it (like
| Earth) you'd get an ideal situation. Because of the
| strong sunlight and slow spin you'd get a tendency for
| thick storm clouds continuously covering whatever part of
| the planet was experiencing mid-day, shielding the planet
| from the strongest and hottest rays of the (60% stronger)
| sunlight. The warmth would convect to the night side
| keeping things from getting too cold. Depending on the
| conditions it's possible that below-freezing temperatures
| wouldn't even be common in the depth of the night.
|
| The long night seems like a problem for life but forests
| already thrive in the warmer parts of the near-arctic.
| And in times past even Antarctica had tropical
| rainforests despite experiencing a polar night. Another
| idea I had was building a ring around the planet of dark
| material, perhaps of left over carbon after we cleaned up
| the CO2 rich atmosphere. The dark ring would provide
| shade to certain parts of the planet during the day and
| would reflect light for the long night.
| justinclift wrote:
| > thick storm clouds
|
| Sounds like a sure fire recipe for a (permanent?) super
| intense electrical storm in right that spot.
|
| Might make that specific latitude uninhabitable due to
| the planet turning. Though it could be worth the trade
| off, due to there being a bunch of available land on the
| planet in other latitudes.
|
| If you have some truly huge arrays of super capacitors
| such a permanent electrical storm might even be useful.
| :)
| javiramos wrote:
| I just want to live long enough to see a human walk on Mars.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| What's stopping you from helping to build it? Jobs in space
| tech exist. They need smart motivated people.
| tomcam wrote:
| How long do you think for them to get to the point where they
| can carry all the raw materials up there?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That's probably just a handful of starship trips of cargo
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Personally, I want to live long enough to hit life extension
| escape velocity. :)
| aftbit wrote:
| Yeah we bemoan how short-sighted people are, but that's
| because we only live for a handful of decades. Think of the
| kind of progress that we could achieve if people were free
| to follow their dreams for centuries, alongside the kind of
| respect for the life and nature that would be necessary to
| live as a citizen of the world for that long.
| pasabagi wrote:
| Or, immortal Joseph Stalin having breakfast with immortal
| Richard Nixon, while deciding who gets sent to the gulags
| today.
| aftbit wrote:
| True, today time is the greatest equalizer. Even the rich
| and powerful will eventually kick the bucket and leave
| the future for others. If life extension takes off, the
| rich and powerful may live forever, while the less
| fortunate may still be mortal.
| emeril wrote:
| I'd settle for seeing my children grow up at least a bit!
| pbreit wrote:
| Only possible with the existence of "billionaires".
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| If by that you mean "average people pooling their billions to
| further advance science and technology", sure.
|
| None of this was done in a vacuum of billionaire self
| funding.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Is that true? We live in a remarkably gilded age where a
| handful of people (whose names we all know) cashed in on
| the Dot-Com Boom. Their pleasure appears to be, for a few
| of them anyway, rockets and spacecraft.
|
| A vacuum of billionaire self funding? Of course not, but
| would these ventures have progressed to where they are
| without the deep pockets of some of these billionaires?
| BlarfMcFlarf wrote:
| The funding was from nasa contracts, which is public
| funds. Someone would have done it even as a consortium of
| sub billionaires.
| ben_w wrote:
| IIRC, Musk wasn't listed as a billionaire until 2012, and
| that possibly as a result of (rather than cause of)
| SpaceX having successfully sent cargo to the ISS.
|
| People mock him for being bad at estimating how long
| projects will take... but even if you agree with the
| critics, he's still the one-eyed in the land of the blind
| when it comes to space mission project planning.
| CHSbeachbum420 wrote:
| It's the new billionaire yacht club.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _billionaire yacht club_
|
| They comment on a thread about Boeing's Starliner ferrying
| NASA astronauts to the ISS atop a ULA rocket.
| cryptonector wrote:
| SLS + Orion is so expensive that it's not worth listing, IMO.
| cletus wrote:
| SLS is a jobs program. It's not economically viable at over $1
| billion per launch.
|
| As for Blue Origin and New Glenn, this is an object lesson that
| simply throwing money at the problem doesn't necessarily solve
| it. Did you know Blue Origin was founded ~18 months before
| SpaceX?
|
| For the longest time (up until ~9 months ago), Bezos had the
| former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was
| such an odd choice. You see, this guy seems to embody
| everything wrong with corporate America: he was completely
| focused on not failing rather than succeeding. So there were
| constant delays with New Glenn and the BE-4 engine, which is
| _years_ behind schedule. You can 't fail if you don't launch.
|
| And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of Kindles.
| dubcanada wrote:
| You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company,
| and a good CEO also needs to have industry experience.
|
| I don't know if either of those are actually true, there are
| plenty of good CEOs who came from zero experience in the
| industry. And plenty of bad CEOs who came from plenty of
| experience in the industry. Both of these run successful and
| not successful companies.
|
| For example the currently Boeing CEO does not have experience
| in airplanes, came from a business background. And is
| considered a bad CEO by the average person (though considered
| a good CEO by stockholders, or at least was before the past
| few months).
| notatoad wrote:
| >You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company
|
| the only assumption i see is the counter to that - a bad
| CEO equals an unsuccessful company. and i don't think
| that's a very controversial assumption.
| dubcanada wrote:
| > And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of
| Kindles.
|
| Seems to imply there is an issue with a CEO of a space
| company previously working on Kindles.
|
| > Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue
| Origin, which to me was such an odd choice
|
| Also seems to imply the CEO is bad because their
| previously only worked at Honeywell on thermostats.
|
| In my mind none of the above has anything to do with how
| good or bad a CEO is. Perhaps I am misreading it. In
| which case ignore me.
| resolutebat wrote:
| All things being equal, you'd want a CEO who understands
| the business, either by coming up through the ranks or a
| long career at another company in the same business.
| bigjimmyk3 wrote:
| Honeywell is also an aerospace company:
|
| https://aerospace.honeywell.com/
| gibolt wrote:
| A bad CEO can look great on paper and in the stock price.
| The product however will likely not keep pace, charging
| more for a product providing less value.
|
| Long term value, employee satisfaction, and customer
| satisfaction are all intertwined. New management is more
| likely than not to harm at least one of those 3 .
| cletus wrote:
| I reject the notion that a good manager can manage
| anything.
|
| I also reject the financialization of modern companies
| where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-
| matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack
| up prices.
|
| It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today.
|
| Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox
| [2].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdplq4cj76I
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=2s
| deciplex wrote:
| I would say that the one redeeming quality of Elon Musk (in a
| sea of otherwise awful personality traits) is that for at
| least Tesla and SpaceX, that he was interested in running
| those companies primarily _to produce a product._ Like that
| was the primary focus and raison d 'etre of both of those
| companies, especially SpaceX I think. This is in opposition
| to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money"
| ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly
| even notice it anymore. The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman,
| and ultimately bad for business.
|
| I don't know if he still takes that approach. In fact, I kind
| of doubt he ever really did, but he certainly projected that
| image publicly, and most importantly to workers of those
| companies - whether he "really believed" it I guess is a moot
| point.
|
| When you take the "businesses exist to return a profit to
| shareholders" approach you're always going to focus on
| leadership that has a track record of doing that, even if
| that excludes building a good product or for that matter even
| the long-term viability of the business. Thus, you see these
| CEO hires that don't seem to make sense - most of us
| unconsciously still think of businesses as things created to
| make a thing or do a specific thing, because that's a natural
| thing to believe.
|
| Anyway I think you can attribute some of the success of both
| to this, as well as Musk's public image at least ca 2008-2018
| or so.
| gibolt wrote:
| Most people who have worked close to him generally note
| that he has intimate knowledge up and down the entire
| product side (at minimum) of the company. This can lead to
| micro-management, but leads to far better results than most
| companies could ever hope to achieve.
|
| Communication and agreement are what add cost and
| misdirection to development. When a tiny set of people with
| one clear goal pull the strings, it is much more efficient
| to reach the north star product.
| dsco wrote:
| Why do people always have to preface Elon praise with some
| initial criticism. The man has objectively created some
| incredible businesses.
| Wherecombinator wrote:
| Because he's the worlds oldest 14 year old boy
| eitally wrote:
| World's oldest [asshole] 14 year old boy. Just comparing
| him to all the good kids out there is disrespectful to
| the teens.
| azinman2 wrote:
| With exceptionally more impact, both good (I'd say net
| good) and bad.
| skybrian wrote:
| Because they want to be seen as a moderate rather than an
| uncritical fan.
|
| This happens for many online debates where extreme
| positions are common.
| yokoprime wrote:
| Because he is a complex human being with a very visible
| dark side and any praise of his achievements will make
| his terrible personality traits stain you like a soggy
| barf bag on an overnight flight
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| But you know... they're all complex. Even you are a
| complex human being... maybe not so visible as Elon
| Musk... but... so what?
|
| You know why people really do it? It has nothing to do
| with Elon Musk, but rather is a response to our own fears
| for our own social standing. We fear that if we say
| something good about a person that our social group has,
| in defiance of your complex human point, decided is "a
| bad guy" that we'll just as cavalierly be excluded or
| derided from that group.
|
| So when you acknowledge that complexity or something good
| that this "good for nothing" person has done, you have to
| start off with with virtual signaling: "oh this guy is
| terrible, but... ", (meaning "please see that I'm still
| one of you").
|
| I find the whole act kinda craven, perhaps even moreso
| than a social group that demands it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| The hive mind has decided he's bad, so you have to make
| sure everyone knows you hate him too otherwise you risk
| being ostracized as well
| causality0 wrote:
| It's very much a "religion of society". There is dogma,
| sins, shunning, confession, penance, blasphemy, heretics,
| etc. Just because it doesn't have a creation myth doesn't
| make it not religious.
| evilduck wrote:
| A more gratuitous interpretation is that someone who does
| this is making an attempt to stave off the expected vapid
| replies that occur whenever you mention polarizing topics
| or people.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| This is so silly. Reading comments like these, you'd
| think everyone on HN is a perfect human, without flaws
| and liked by everyone. I'm glad someone like Elon doesn't
| spend his time reading stuff like this and instead spends
| most of his time kicking ass. In the long run, his
| results will continue to speak for him.
| causality0 wrote:
| I mean, yes and no. In principle I agree with you but
| Musk very much does also spend his time reading stuff
| like this and getting into internet slap fights. Last
| time I checked he was tweeting 29.2 times a day, or
| roughly once every thirty minutes of wake time.
| strken wrote:
| Half the problem with Elon is that he _does_ spend some
| of his time reading stuff like this and shitposting on
| the website formerly known as Twitter about it, instead
| of going to work or sitting on a beach reading something
| more useful.
|
| Upon reflection this is also a problem with me, but I
| don't own SpaceX or Tesla, so fewer people are going to
| call me out on it.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Elon's name is mud among progressives. He's a vocal
| opponent of "the woke mind virus", and he single-handedly
| broke the leftists' editorial monopoly on social media,
| so it makes sense that they dislike him. In certain
| hysterical echochambers, they've convinced themselves
| that Elon is a literal nazi. I am not exaggerating.
|
| You've also got to remember that most places aren't as
| cordial as HN. In most echochambers around the internet,
| wrongthink is swiftly punished by downvotes, bans, and/or
| hateful comments. As a result, any comment which might
| upset the hivemind must be prefaced with a brief
| profession of faith, so as to inform the hive that you
| are one of the hive, and not a dreaded _other_.
|
| Thus, for a denizen of those echochambers, any comment
| about Elon _which could be interpreted as positive_ must
| be prefaced accordingly.
| EricDeb wrote:
| Yes Musk broke the monopoly of leftists owning social
| media. Mark Zuckerburg of course being one of the most
| famous leftists /s
| jay-barronville wrote:
| > The man has objectively created some incredible
| businesses.
|
| What an understatement. He's one of the most impactful
| humans in the world and one of the greatest entrepreneurs
| America can claim as our own (despite him not being born
| here). I find it beyond unfortunate that so many in this
| community constantly feel the need to belittle Elon or
| downplay his accomplishments simply because they don't
| like the guy, his politics, etc.
| kiba wrote:
| He has an extremely dark side that impedes him and
| everyone around him, regardless of the extraordinary
| success he experienced.
|
| That man need a therapist.
|
| The public hatred he has gotten is his making,
| ultimately.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| He bought an extremely dangerous product in Twitter,
| remove most content moderation and now is contributing to
| huge risks to democratic systems all over the world.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| As a non Twitter/X user, I keep hearing this take and I
| gotta say... I just don't see it.
|
| To me, there has been no significant change, aside from
| hearing more people on the left bemoan that Elon is
| giving "dangerous" people on the right a platform.
|
| But I honestly don't see an actual difference aside from
| people saying there is one.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| P U S S Y I N B I O
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Seriously, your response to this is "I don't use the
| product. The product doesn't seem any different to me
| under new ownership." Do you not see the inherent
| contradiction?
| nelox wrote:
| I agree and further to your point, I'd suggest he would
| never have achieved anything like what he has achieved in
| any other country other than the USA. Imagine SpaceX was
| based in the UK, EU, or Asia. It would be shackled beyond
| recognition.
| digging wrote:
| > feel the need to belittle Elon or downplay his
| accomplishments simply because they don't like the guy
|
| It's not simply that people think he's annoying. There is
| a perspective that he's a _legitimate threat to
| democracy_ since buying Twitter. I also find it hard to
| stomach someone wanting to move 'humanity' forward when
| "his politics" involves denying the humanity of people he
| doesn't like.
|
| Say what you will about his accomplishments, but none of
| them were made in a vacuum. He isn't a god, he's a bad
| person (for more reasons than listed above) with
| ambition. I promise you, we don't _need_ bad people to
| lead technological progress. We could have good people,
| but assholes have the advantage as long as we don 't
| force them to care about the consequences of their
| "success."
| bluescrn wrote:
| There is also a perspective that the worryingly popular
| 'silence all dissent' mentality is vastly more of a
| threat to democracy than anything Elon has done.
| cletus wrote:
| I don't want to go deep down this rabbit hole but IMHO
| there has been a whole lot of historical revisionism and
| propaganda regarding the history of both Tesla and SpaceX.
|
| Tesla lists Elon Musk as a founder but he didn't found it.
| He was an early investor who essentially took over the
| company. Tesla only exists through government largesse,
| specifically carbon tax credits. Also, it arguably only
| survived thanks to a 2009 Department of Energy loan (for
| $465 million). If you look at the history here, this loan
| is under a cloud.
|
| This is particularly funny given Elon's self-made
| propaganda.
|
| SpaceX succeeded (IMHO) in spite of Elon not because of
| him. I've read (admittedly unverified) accounts where
| someone in SpaceX's leadership essentially built a wall
| around Elon to insulate the rest of the company from him.
| SpaceX engineers themselves are a byproduct of NASA to a
| large degree. Also, SpaceX could not have succeeded without
| government loans, grants and contracts. Even today, it's
| completely reliant on the government purse.
|
| Both Tesla and SpaceX have made huge promises and under-
| delivered on them or delivered late. People forget how
| delayed the Falcon timeline was. It just didn't matter
| because there was no competition: the ULA, for example, is
| a jobs program with no interest in competing on price or
| features.
|
| And self-driving Telsas, anyone? Anyone?
| geocrasher wrote:
| You have good points, but I really feel like most of
| those things could be said about any successful company
| in the aerospace business.
| vl wrote:
| I own a Tesla, for practical purposes it is self-driving.
| justinclift wrote:
| Including into the back of emergency vehicles?
| toss1 wrote:
| Seriously? Your definition of "self-driving" must be
| different from normal.
|
| Any proper understanding of the term "self driving",
| including the way Musk advertises it, is 'tell car
| through the UI where you want it to go, sit back and it
| _reliably_ gets you there with zero further input, better
| than the average human driver '.
|
| Please post a video of it doing this for any route on
| real roads, with no driver input. Seriously. I'd love to
| see it, because I never have.
|
| I've seen Tesla videos with _few_ required driver
| interventions. But not none. And from the accidents I 've
| read about, I sure as shirt would not give it a
| destination and recline reading a book. Especially on
| left-turns and near emergency vehicles, turning trucks,
| or construction barriers.
|
| So, what is your definition of self-driving, and what
| performance can you show? And in what road conditions?
| postmeta wrote:
| I don't want to go deep down this rabbit hole, but when
| Elon "took over the company" it had no IP, or products,
| or employees and had produced nothing of value.
|
| Attributing the success of Tesla to a government loan
| they paid back early is also joke and insulting to all
| the hard work of the employees and other investors.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| "Tesla only exists through government largesse,
| specifically carbon tax credits."
|
| This assumes no subsidies for oil and gas (plenty,
| including depreciation below cost basis!)
|
| In terms of credits - those are in the 2%-3% range of
| revenue.
|
| In terms of SpaceX being the most dependent on the govt -
| totally false. Things like SLS are cost plus, have cost
| $20 billion with almost nothing to show for it. SpaceX is
| so available, cheap and reliable they are literally
| launching ESA payloads (ESA won't even mention them its
| so embarrassing), most commercial payloads that can
| actually go to bid and competitors payloads (looking at
| you Amazon).
| treme wrote:
| Surprised someone on HN would parrot popular reddit trope
| of Elon's accomplishments.
|
| Taking a car which was essentially at concept car stage
| to mass production levels and becoming the most valued
| car company in the world, more so than all other car
| companies in the world combined is a ridiculous
| accomplishment in itself.
|
| "IMHO based on unverified anecdotes I've read on
| internets" please keep those to yourself. Many verified
| people that worked at SpaceX vouch for his
| knowledge/leadership being crucial to SpaceX's success.
| pknomad wrote:
| I think you really put this well:
|
| This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a
| business is to make money" ethos that so permeates
| neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it
| anymore. The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and
| ultimately bad for business.
|
| Call it cynicism, but decision calculus from upstairs
| always work in that direction (i.e. gotta hit arbitrary
| financial goals for this quarter because that's how bonuses
| and comp gets dictated) so I think in that mindset so I
| don't setup myself for disappointment or surprise if a
| decision that doesn't appeal to that shorted-sighted
| thinking doesn't gain traction.
| starik36 wrote:
| True about founding before SpaceX. But wasn't it just a think
| tank for a while?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from
| a jobs program.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's a really exciting time. Also the Chinese have lots of
| space going on. Chang'e 5 is on its way back from the moon.
| Tiangong is quite large now. I'm thrilled to see humanity
| accelerate this.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Boeing and NASA call off Starliner crew launch minutes before
| liftoff_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547338 - June
| 2024 (47 comments)
|
| _Boeing 's Starliner Crew Flight Test delayed again, path
| forward unclear_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434398
| - May 2024 (28 comments)
|
| _Boeing Starliner 's first crewed mission scrubbed_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40281272 - May 2024 (162
| comments)
|
| _NASA and Boeing Are (Finally) Putting Astronauts on Starliner_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843148 - March 2024 (9
| comments)
|
| _Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in
| sight_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879769 - July
| 2023 (218 comments)
|
| _NASA safety panel skeptical of Starliner readiness for crewed
| flight_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085531 - May
| 2023 (27 comments)
|
| _Boeing to ground Starliner indefinitely until valve issue
| solved_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28185195 - Aug
| 2021 (42 comments)
|
| _Boeing Starliner 's flight's flaws show "fundamental problem,"
| NASA says_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297564 - Feb
| 2020 (140 comments)
|
| _NASA Shares Initial Findings from Boeing Starliner Orbital Test
| Investigation_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22266747 -
| Feb 2020 (14 comments)
|
| _Starliner faced "catastrophic" failure before software bug
| found_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260731 - Feb 2020
| (60 comments)
|
| _Boeing reports a $410M charge in case NASA decides Starliner
| needs another test_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22194735 - Jan 2020 (55
| comments)
|
| _Boeing Starliner updates: Spacecraft flies into wrong orbit,
| jeopardizing test_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843988 - Dec 2019 (240
| comments)
|
| _New Spacesuit Unveiled for Starliner Astronauts_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13488096 - Jan 2017 (65
| comments)
|
| _Boeing-SpaceX Team Split Space Taxi Award_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8326845 - Sept 2014 (115
| comments)
|
| _NASA to Make Major Announcement Today About Astronaut Transport
| to the ISS_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324848 - Sept
| 2014 (43 comments)
|
| _SpaceX Vies With Boeing as NASA's Taxi to Station_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296567 - Sept 2014 (49
| comments)
| wigster wrote:
| boeing + spaceflight. they are braver than i
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| No one can hear you blow a whistle in space.
| Diederich wrote:
| Yeah this morning I was thinking about what the astronauts must
| be thinking.
|
| I would ride the Atlas/Centaur stack, it's been exceedingly
| reliable. Starliner itself? Not quite yet, given its checkered
| history.
|
| Boeing brings up nothing but sadness in me these days. I
| really, really, really want that company to succeed and be
| awesome. Hopefully going forward Starliner will bring forward
| the excellence that has been Boeing in the past.
| tootie wrote:
| Despite headlines, air travel gets safer and safer every year.
| At least when measured by fatalities per departure. Boeing has
| had several high profile failures, but it's correlated with a
| huge increase in flights and a huge increase in expectations.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The problem is more that those failures were entirely
| preventable and caused by decisions that prioritised economic
| motives over security. And the manufacturer was squarely to
| blame, which is also not the case in most accidents.
|
| Even when the industry overall is doing pretty well, we
| should still scrutinize every incident. There's no such thing
| as acceptable fatalities.
| btmiller wrote:
| Don't mistake the momentum of past success for current
| engineering and safety practices. If the MAX and 787 can get
| released with defects slipping out, there's little certainty
| which other corners are being cut that can wipe out all
| progress of safety in the blink of an eye.
| MarcScott wrote:
| > I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready
| to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts
| -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.
|
| John Glenn
| somenameforme wrote:
| Oh but now it's so unimaginably worse than that. Boeing lost
| the contract for commercial crew to SpaceX, who was indeed
| the lowest bidder. But Boeing has connections, and got
| Congress to make NASA also give them a contract. So they did.
| And Boeing's contract ended up being worth about 50% more
| than the contract SpaceX got. It was expected Boeing was
| going to be the first to start launching crewed missions by a
| fairly wide margin. SpaceX started in 2020. Boeing started,
| right now.
|
| Oh and the build up to this finale is no less... odd. Boeing
| did their pad abort test - demonstrating the ability for
| their capsule to rocket off on its on, like it might do from
| a failing rocket. And that test failed with only 2 out of 3
| of the parachutes opening. But insert 'Boeing influence' -
| NASA decided it was a clear success. And not just any
| success, but a success so clearly successful that they simply
| let Boeing completely skip the launch abort test (where you'd
| to the same escape test, but in flight) and moved right on to
| complete unmanned tests to the ISS.
|
| So they launch their first mission to the ISS, and completely
| miss the station leaving the craft in a potentially
| catastrophic scenario, though it does eventually make its way
| back to Earth. So NASA just pats them on the back 'Happens to
| us all! Just give it another go!' So they do, and on this
| flight 1/6th of the thrusters on the approach module failed,
| but by some act of God (and backup thrusters), the craft
| somehow managed to mate with the ISS. So of course NASA said,
| "Brilliant! Success! Bring on the humans!"
|
| And that's where we are right now. And _that_ is the company
| behind the rocket that 's under you right now.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Though, considering the culture of normalization of
| deviance that developed in NASA's human spaceflight
| division during the Shuttle's 30-year track record of near
| and not-so-near misses, it's hard to imagine why we should
| expect NASA to demand anything different. These two
| organizations were made for each other.
| skc wrote:
| Ever since I finished all 4 seasons of "For All Mankind" I've
| been eating up news like this.
|
| Truly awe inspiring stuff happening these days
| KenArrari wrote:
| I hope someone double checked those doors.
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| I'm glad everything went ok.
| divbzero wrote:
| Photographs of the launch from Reuters:
|
| https://reuters.com/pictures/boeings-starliner-blasts-off-fi...
| surume wrote:
| Unfortunately one of the doors came off mid-flight...
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Excellent ... we need alternatives and competition in space.
| dm03514 wrote:
| This is a n00b question, but how do regulations apply to private
| human crewed missions in the US?
|
| Are there clear guidelines already written? I'm assuming it
| inherits a lot of rules of general aviation? But since private
| firms launching into space is new, do the rules and regulations
| keep up? Or are they still to be written?
| gamepsys wrote:
| US regulation applies. On top of US regulation, basically every
| nation will see you as a potential security risk because the
| difference between an ICBM and space launch rocket is mostly
| payload and flight path.
| manquer wrote:
| Rocket regulations apply including ITAR, FAA and others for any
| payload human or cargo launched on any vehicle . The launch
| doesn't have to be even to launched from the US, rocket lab
| have to comply with them even when launching from New Zealand.
|
| There are host of rules that NASA has for human spaceflight
| these are not regulations per se. Till now NASA has been the
| only buyer[1][2] of human spaceflights or the destination has
| been ISS which is jointly managed by them so even private
| operators to comply with these rules.
|
| SpaceX and now Boeing human rate their spacecrafts to these
| specifications to allow them to compete for commercial crew
| contracts or dock to ISS[4].
|
| In the next few years this will change, NASA is research
| organization not a regulatory authority sooner or later
| regulations have to move to either FAA or another new entity.
|
| Currently no regulations exist for space proper. FAA does
| control a lot of launch related items, but don't regulate
| things like spacesuits that now spaceX is developing currently.
|
| There are no strict limits to FAA authority they do control
| Virgin rocket planes although it does cross the US defined line
| for space .
|
| Knowing Musk's temperament, what is likely to happen is FAA
| will try to extend their authority that he deems is overreach
| and he will sue in court saying they have no jurisdiction,
| either Supreme Court will say they do (not likely in Robert's
| court) or congress will have pass law regulating this ( less
| likely in current congress it is too dysfunctional) but these
| things may change in the next few years when it does happen
|
| ---
|
| [1] Axiom buys private launches from spaceX but they still dock
| to ISS so I expect NASA rules apply.
|
| [2] Jared Issacman's last mission was the true first fully
| private mission to space but still used mostly stock Dragon so
| they mostly likely followed NASA rules
|
| [3] all this from US perspective , Soyuz and China has
| capabilities and Soyuz and also in Mir space station have had
| some commercial flights of course
|
| [4] only place you can go today , end of this decade there
| maybe private station or moon or even mars but not today
| qwertox wrote:
| One thing which surprised me a bit was how fast it left the
| launch pad. It took just a second or a little bit more.
|
| With Starship it appeared as if it was struggling to lift off,
| staying for a while burning fuel until it left the launch pad and
| even then it felt a bit slow at accelerating.
|
| I'll see tomorrow if it was just an illusion.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| This has to do with the launch vehicle's thrust to weight ratio
| (TWR) on the ground with a full tank. It's usually between 1.1
| and 1.4. The Russian Proton has a famously high ground TWR and
| is known for "leaping" off the pad. Maybe Starliner is the same
| in this initial crewed LEO config.
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| I'm not a rocket scientist but I do know the two rockets use
| different propellants. The Atlas V uses solid propellant, and
| the Starship uses liquid. I know liquid engines have the
| ability to throttle them, and I would guess solid does not (or
| a more limited capacity) so that could be at play here.
| Starship could ignite and then throttle up, which would leave
| it on the pad longer. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than
| I can clarify!
| rdruxn wrote:
| Starship (including the Super Heavy) weighs about 10x as much
| as the Starliner (including the Atlas V)
| gorkish wrote:
| For one, Starship is 392 ft vs 172ft of Atlas V + Starliner.
| Even if they accelerate off the pad at the same rate, Starship
| is going to look like it's moving a lot slower.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| The better comparison is probably Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon in
| terms of mass / mission etc. Starship is in a totally different
| class
|
| For Falcon 9 - it will look slower on takeoff as well. One
| reason not mentioned yet is that after engine start, Falcon is
| held down until all vehicle systems are verified as functioning
| normally before release for liftoff. So they can do pressure /
| thrust etc checks on the ground before releasing.
|
| With solid rocket motors especially - once you light those you
| are pretty committed.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Mass does not strictly matter, it is the ground TWR of the
| launch config. Heavier rockets do tend to have a lower TWR
| but it is not a universal rule.
|
| Starliner is also held for confirmation of all systems being
| functional even with the SRBs. Better to let them burn out on
| the pad and clean up the mess than to risk release with, say,
| asymmetrical thrust. That said I'm sure there are variances
| between the two rockets' procedures which could make one
| appear faster.
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