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This was pretty impressive. It was super awesome that everything worked exactly as it should and it clears the way for SpaceX to launch people to the space stat

This was pretty impressive. It was super awesome that everything worked exactly as it should and it clears the way for SpaceX to launch people to the space station. What is more relevant for me, is that if NASA follows their own rules, it also means that SpaceX will beat Boeing to having a manned spacecraft capability. The "rules" in play here is that Boeing had a requirement of doing a successful unmanned flight. In government contracts this is known as a 'threshold requirement' meaning that it has to be done before the contract can be completed. Boeing also had a parachute deployment failure during their drop test. As NASA (and some members in Congress) have been emphasizing on how important safety is and relentlessly hammering SpaceX over their refueling techniques and their "history", if they do not want to be seen as hypocritical they should require Boeing to at least achieve a successful unmanned flight to the space station and they could piggy back the parachute deployment test on that flight (and get a twofer, both the parachute test and the end to end flight test.) Requiring that however, will cost Boeing money (they have to pay the expenses for the retest out of their pocket) and more importantly time (they need another launch vehicle from ULA and a launch window). Versus SpaceX which only needs the results of today's test audited and signed off before they can launch their test crew. So perhaps 60 days, 90 at the most before they are cleared to fly people. So I think it is highly likely that SpaceX gets people up into orbit first. And that is a pretty amazing milestone and it slaughters a couple of sacred cows in the aerospace industry. The most impressive one for me is that an aerospace company can be started from scratch and beat all established players in capability, cost, and launch cadence. It is both a huge endorsement of SpaceX's approach and a huge black eye for the existing players. Given that the existing companies actually want to survive it heralds some really exciting times ahead for space. The other thing is that a company has this capability at all. I was talking with some friends about how do you "value" that in the market? How does it affect the geopolitics of space? What happens when Bigelow aerospace or another "space industry" partner starts selling access to orbital facilities that aren't government owned and operated? As far as I'm concerned I wish this had started 40 years ago rather than a bit less than 20, but I'm glad I have had a chance to watch it unfold. Exciting times.

mr_luc 7y ago
> As far as I'm concerned I wish this had started 40 years ago rather than a bit less than 20 Absolutely agree. I bought an 8-pack of used Heinlein paperbacks the other day that I hadn't read since I was a wee lad, which included 'The Rolling Stones' -- a slim volume about a family that live in comfort on the moon, but who get the itch and buy a used spaceship and head off for more exciting parts of the Solar System. In a paragraph or two it explained gravity well maneuvers and other Kepler-ish things better than current YouTube subject matter experts. It also described, in a sentence or two, that the starships had 3-way voting computer systems, where 3 computers get the same sensor inputs and 2 of them can overrule the 3rd in the case one differs. To the author, these were basic things that would clearly exist, because of physics. Sure, it missed some marks -- underestimated the computer, for one; its heroes were still manually 'astrogating' and doing a lot of difficult math to plot their courses, when now we know they could have just played Kerbal Space program ;) -- though I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a reference to them handing their flight plans to a 'programmer' who filed them into a big computer system. Of course, it was imagining a world where we would found a moon base in the 1980's. But I appreciated the solidity of its underlying premise: that a robust human presence in space was inevitable, because the difficulties that space flight presents, especially once you climb out of Earth's gravity well, are just not that far out of reach. That spirit was alive and well when that book was published ... ... in June of 1952. It turns out that, given human nature, we needed a lot of advances in computing to overcome difficulties, some engineering but others that no one could have foreseen -- like the fact that radioactive rockets and the additional power they could bring to the table were effectively off-limits on earth for human and political reasons, or that geopolitical and business reasons would concentrate space investment in areas that could be considered inefficient if conquering Earth's gravity well is your aim. But they weren't off by that much. The physics that stared them in the face continue to stare us in the face, and declare: this is doable, folks. There's no reason humans can't live and work in space on a large scale. We need some vehicles built, but some of them are getting built right now ...
- nonesuchluck 7y ago
  > the starships had 3-way voting computer systems, where 3 computers get the same sensor inputs and 2 of them can overrule the 3rd in the case one differs. Clarke invented the communications satellite. Did Heinlein invent the consensus algorithm?

mr_luc 7y ago

> As far as I'm concerned I wish this had started 40 years ago rather than a bit less than 20 Absolutely agree. I bought an 8-pack of used Heinlein paperbacks the other day that I hadn't read since I was a wee lad, which included 'The Rolling Stones' -- a slim volume about a family that live in comfort on the moon, but who get the itch and buy a used spaceship and head off for more exciting parts of the Solar System. In a paragraph or two it explained gravity well maneuvers and other Kepler-ish things better than current YouTube subject matter experts. It also described, in a sentence or two, that the starships had 3-way voting computer systems, where 3 computers get the same sensor inputs and 2 of them can overrule the 3rd in the case one differs. To the author, these were basic things that would clearly exist, because of physics. Sure, it missed some marks -- underestimated the computer, for one; its heroes were still manually 'astrogating' and doing a lot of difficult math to plot their courses, when now we know they could have just played Kerbal Space program ;) -- though I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a reference to them handing their flight plans to a 'programmer' who filed them into a big computer system. Of course, it was imagining a world where we would found a moon base in the 1980's. But I appreciated the solidity of its underlying premise: that a robust human presence in space was inevitable, because the difficulties that space flight presents, especially once you climb out of Earth's gravity well, are just not that far out of reach. That spirit was alive and well when that book was published ... ... in June of 1952. It turns out that, given human nature, we needed a lot of advances in computing to overcome difficulties, some engineering but others that no one could have foreseen -- like the fact that radioactive rockets and the additional power they could bring to the table were effectively off-limits on earth for human and political reasons, or that geopolitical and business reasons would concentrate space investment in areas that could be considered inefficient if conquering Earth's gravity well is your aim. But they weren't off by that much. The physics that stared them in the face continue to stare us in the face, and declare: this is doable, folks. There's no reason humans can't live and work in space on a large scale. We need some vehicles built, but some of them are getting built right now ...

nonesuchluck 7y ago
> the starships had 3-way voting computer systems, where 3 computers get the same sensor inputs and 2 of them can overrule the 3rd in the case one differs. Clarke invented the communications satellite. Did Heinlein invent the consensus algorithm?