11 ms·

Welcome to the New Space Age

107 points by uptown 8y ago

rory096 8y ago
Shout out to the stunning issue cover photo by John Kraus (/u/johnkphotos), who got his start posting photos of launches on Reddit's /r/spacex. https://twitter.com/BW/status/1022430733829324800?s=19 https://twitter.com/BW/status/1022430733829324800?s=19
- navaati 8y ago
  Wow ! This must be one of the greatest rocket photo I've ever seen, it looks surreal, too clean to be true, the perfect shape of these 9 fire jets ! Thanks for sharing it. I'd love to get a high res, standalone (without the Bloomberg cover) version.
  - rory096 8y ago
    I'm not sure if Kraus invented those underexposed exhaust shots, but he's certainly popularized them over the last couple years. He sells prints on his website: https://johnkrausphotos.com/buy-prints https://johnkrausphotos.com/buy-prints
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      these are splendid https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b72f92d7d4c976fb6d/2714df82-58c1-4711-90ac-4a02e9a9a78a_rw_1920.jpg?h=75ac0cf56ac71bcf14a008ef44c64f6a https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b7... from his gallery https://johnkrausphotos.com/portfolio https://johnkrausphotos.com/portfolio
      - Analemma_ 8y ago
        I was going to post a link to that first one, and you beat me to it. It's my favorite of his photos, because it's not just pretty, but actually gave me that eureka moment when I genuinely understood, on a deep level, the relationship between the first and second stages.
        agumonkey 8y ago
        Yeah it's as pretty as geometrical and even though we've seen the launch 32 times already it was first rocket perspective. Different perspective. ps: Also the launch arc was known but this one has all steps
    - adwi 8y ago
      Not to quibble, but they appear perfectly exposed to me... that’s the true technical achievement in his work.
      - rory096 8y ago
        Oh yeah, definitely. That's just the term I've seen other launch photogs use for it — I assume they mean underexposed relative to a normal photo trying to capture the rocket itself. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about photography outside of ~5 hours in a dark room in high school.) e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/899jq5/jumped_on_the_superunderexposed_engine_view_train/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/899jq5/jumped_on_th...
  - thesehands 8y ago
    from his portfolio: https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b72f92d7d4c976fb6d/27ef944c-df0b-4b4a-8e68-65df36617444_rw_1920.jpg https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b7...
    - rory096 8y ago
      Think it's actually this one (with postprocessing tweaks), but yeah. https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b72f92d7d4c976fb6d/281ec66f-fed6-4157-8113-9915a89239a0_rw_1920.jpg https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b7...
- Klathmon 8y ago
  That guy is my favorite story. I don't know the exact quote, but when someone asked him how he started doing it and how he got the credentials, he said "I just asked and they said yes..." IIRC he was also something like 16/17 when he started. It made me rethink some things in my life that I thought I couldn't do, but when I actually thought about it I realized "why not?"
jessriedel 8y ago
An interesting aspect of collecting all these space stories in one place is that it allows you quickly confirm how many conform to the same science-journalism template: an extended human-interest story that doesn't start dribbling bits of science until many paragraphs in. Even when the focus of the article is a human's role, the writer follows the formula of telling a compelling anecdote rather than actually delivering important facts. "In early February, Gwynne Shotwell arrived in Saudi Arabia for a bit of last-minute cleanup...." "Kathleen Howell never aspired to walk on the moon. When she watched the first lunar landing as a teenager in 1969, she was more intrigued by the looping route that brought the Apollo 11 astronauts from Earth to the Sea of Tranquility and back..." "On July 18, outside the West Texas town of Van Horn, hundreds of Blue Origin employees and their families and friends gathered to watch the New Shepard rocket blast off toward the edge of space...." "The chicken sandwich has to get to space. This is what everyone at World View Enterprises Inc. was thinking as they set to work in the predawn hours of June 29, 2017, at the Page Municipal Airport in Arizona.... "Shou-Ching Jaminet, a molecular biologist and former researcher at Harvard Medical School, spent almost a year preparing an experiment for her small biotech startup, Angiex, to study the effects of weightlessness on a potential cancer drug. By June she was nervous with anticipation,..." Does no one else get sick of this? I would love more inverted-pyramid coverage of science.
- Eequei3i 8y ago
  > Does no one else get sick of this? I roll my eyes every time I see such stories and look for a more technical coverage of the topic somewhere else. I suspect that's a difference between thing- vs. people-oriented readers. I assume the former are in the minority.
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    It's not so much that I'm oriented toward things as that I just hate people...
    - thraway180306 8y ago
      I just hate people Wow, that's rich. After some decades I discovered that physics too is about people. Social aspect is inescapable. That didn't turn me off, but taught to appreciate the narrative aspect as integral and thus maybe a part of the beauty. Not necessarily in the watered down journalism (which is fine, as a scientist I'm not the target audience) but the fact that the big narratives that harnessed collective resources previously were just that: big narratives. That was one of the functions and enablers of the Space Program itself, not sustained nor repeated since, to the determent of our capability. And that's what bystanders look for in science. (Not just them, if your social status and self-esteem hinges on you being a scientist, that's also taking part in narrative that enables you to thrive despite hating people). If you really just hate people, then take example in Teller - he also knew the power of storytelling but just used it mercilessly.
jharohit 8y ago
Meanwhile in Asia...http://inc-asean.com/editor-picks/is-southeast-asia-the-new-bastion-for-space-technology/ http://inc-asean.com/editor-picks/is-southeast-asia-the-new-...
caio1982 8y ago
It's hard to assess the quality of all these articles listed in this special page but — oh my — the topics are very well choosen and quite interesting. I easily calculated I will spend the next few days to read them all, not just skim them. Great job, Bloombergians!
okket 8y ago
Can the link please get changed to the actual article and not the issue landing page? Thanks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/welcome-to-the-new-space-age https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/welcome-t...
rb808 8y ago
Didn't mention Rocket Lab that wants multiple launches a day to near orbits. https://www.rocketlabusa.com https://www.rocketlabusa.com

107 points by uptown 8y ago

Shout out to the stunning issue cover photo by John Kraus (/u/johnkphotos), who got his start posting photos of launches on Reddit's /r/spacex. https://twitter.com/BW/status/1022430733829324800?s=19 https://twitter.com/BW/status/1022430733829324800?s=19

navaati 8y ago
Wow ! This must be one of the greatest rocket photo I've ever seen, it looks surreal, too clean to be true, the perfect shape of these 9 fire jets ! Thanks for sharing it. I'd love to get a high res, standalone (without the Bloomberg cover) version.
- rory096 8y ago
  I'm not sure if Kraus invented those underexposed exhaust shots, but he's certainly popularized them over the last couple years. He sells prints on his website: https://johnkrausphotos.com/buy-prints https://johnkrausphotos.com/buy-prints
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    these are splendid https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b72f92d7d4c976fb6d/2714df82-58c1-4711-90ac-4a02e9a9a78a_rw_1920.jpg?h=75ac0cf56ac71bcf14a008ef44c64f6a https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b7... from his gallery https://johnkrausphotos.com/portfolio https://johnkrausphotos.com/portfolio
    - Analemma_ 8y ago
      I was going to post a link to that first one, and you beat me to it. It's my favorite of his photos, because it's not just pretty, but actually gave me that eureka moment when I genuinely understood, on a deep level, the relationship between the first and second stages.
      - agumonkey 8y ago
        Yeah it's as pretty as geometrical and even though we've seen the launch 32 times already it was first rocket perspective. Different perspective. ps: Also the launch arc was known but this one has all steps
  - adwi 8y ago
    Not to quibble, but they appear perfectly exposed to me... that’s the true technical achievement in his work.
    - rory096 8y ago
      Oh yeah, definitely. That's just the term I've seen other launch photogs use for it — I assume they mean underexposed relative to a normal photo trying to capture the rocket itself. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about photography outside of ~5 hours in a dark room in high school.) e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/899jq5/jumped_on_the_superunderexposed_engine_view_train/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/899jq5/jumped_on_th...
- thesehands 8y ago
  from his portfolio: https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b72f92d7d4c976fb6d/27ef944c-df0b-4b4a-8e68-65df36617444_rw_1920.jpg https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b7...
  - rory096 8y ago
    Think it's actually this one (with postprocessing tweaks), but yeah. https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b72f92d7d4c976fb6d/281ec66f-fed6-4157-8113-9915a89239a0_rw_1920.jpg https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf1.myportfolio.com/483775244caf67b7...
Klathmon 8y ago
That guy is my favorite story. I don't know the exact quote, but when someone asked him how he started doing it and how he got the credentials, he said "I just asked and they said yes..." IIRC he was also something like 16/17 when he started. It made me rethink some things in my life that I thought I couldn't do, but when I actually thought about it I realized "why not?"

jessriedel 8y ago

An interesting aspect of collecting all these space stories in one place is that it allows you quickly confirm how many conform to the same science-journalism template: an extended human-interest story that doesn't start dribbling bits of science until many paragraphs in. Even when the focus of the article is a human's role, the writer follows the formula of telling a compelling anecdote rather than actually delivering important facts. "In early February, Gwynne Shotwell arrived in Saudi Arabia for a bit of last-minute cleanup...." "Kathleen Howell never aspired to walk on the moon. When she watched the first lunar landing as a teenager in 1969, she was more intrigued by the looping route that brought the Apollo 11 astronauts from Earth to the Sea of Tranquility and back..." "On July 18, outside the West Texas town of Van Horn, hundreds of Blue Origin employees and their families and friends gathered to watch the New Shepard rocket blast off toward the edge of space...." "The chicken sandwich has to get to space. This is what everyone at World View Enterprises Inc. was thinking as they set to work in the predawn hours of June 29, 2017, at the Page Municipal Airport in Arizona.... "Shou-Ching Jaminet, a molecular biologist and former researcher at Harvard Medical School, spent almost a year preparing an experiment for her small biotech startup, Angiex, to study the effects of weightlessness on a potential cancer drug. By June she was nervous with anticipation,..." Does no one else get sick of this? I would love more inverted-pyramid coverage of science.

Eequei3i 8y ago
> Does no one else get sick of this? I roll my eyes every time I see such stories and look for a more technical coverage of the topic somewhere else. I suspect that's a difference between thing- vs. people-oriented readers. I assume the former are in the minority.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  It's not so much that I'm oriented toward things as that I just hate people...
  - thraway180306 8y ago
    I just hate people Wow, that's rich. After some decades I discovered that physics too is about people. Social aspect is inescapable. That didn't turn me off, but taught to appreciate the narrative aspect as integral and thus maybe a part of the beauty. Not necessarily in the watered down journalism (which is fine, as a scientist I'm not the target audience) but the fact that the big narratives that harnessed collective resources previously were just that: big narratives. That was one of the functions and enablers of the Space Program itself, not sustained nor repeated since, to the determent of our capability. And that's what bystanders look for in science. (Not just them, if your social status and self-esteem hinges on you being a scientist, that's also taking part in narrative that enables you to thrive despite hating people). If you really just hate people, then take example in Teller - he also knew the power of storytelling but just used it mercilessly.

jharohit 8y ago

Meanwhile in Asia...http://inc-asean.com/editor-picks/is-southeast-asia-the-new-bastion-for-space-technology/ http://inc-asean.com/editor-picks/is-southeast-asia-the-new-...

caio1982 8y ago

It's hard to assess the quality of all these articles listed in this special page but — oh my — the topics are very well choosen and quite interesting. I easily calculated I will spend the next few days to read them all, not just skim them. Great job, Bloombergians!

okket 8y ago

Can the link please get changed to the actual article and not the issue landing page? Thanks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/welcome-to-the-new-space-age https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/welcome-t...

rb808 8y ago

Didn't mention Rocket Lab that wants multiple launches a day to near orbits. https://www.rocketlabusa.com https://www.rocketlabusa.com