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The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they w

• inglor_cz 6y ago
  SpaceX is an interesting exception. They innovate really fast, their pace resembles that of the positive examples you mention.
  • injidup 6y ago
    But SpaceX can can develop a tin can fast because it is not expected to have martians shooting at it. Imagine planning to go to Mars but your tin can had to be stealthy, manoeuvrable and armed to the teeth. You'd get Ripley's drop ship!
  • grecy 6y ago
    Agree 100% Literally all the "experts" said it was impossible to land the booster, and now it's almost routine. Nobody else in the industry can achieve what SpaceX have done successfully 40 times.
    • hef19898 6y ago
      Experts from EASA didn't say it was impossible, but rather not economicaly feasible. And with SpaceX not publishing any financials we have no way to tell which side is right.
      • grecy 6y ago
        Are you really suggesting that throwing away a booster worth many tens of millions of dollars is more economically feasible than reusing it? Elon makes it pretty clear in this tweet it's very financially sound to bring back a booster "Payload reduction due to reusability of booster & fairing is <40% for F9 & recovery & refurb is <10%, so you’re roughly even with 2 flights, definitely ahead with 3" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?lang...
        • hef19898 6y ago
          There were mutiple reason, citing from top of my head as I don't find he old paper anymore. Reasons were: - Reliability and insurance costs - limited number of launches - refurbishment costs of boosters ompared to new ones - heavier and more expensive boosters to make them reusable This paper was way before SpaceX tried that. And whther or not reusable boosters are really a financial success is impossible to tell without published financials from SpaceX. The paper alsosaid, that reusable boosters become interessting with a high number of commercial launches, something they didn't see to happen. And that part alone makes Starlink so interessting, because it is basically SpaceX increasing its own number of launches.
          • greedo 6y ago
            If you're seriously arguing that F9 reuse is not a financial success, then you're not paying attention. Flight insurers "like" the F9 since it has proven itself reliable. Otherwise you're arguing that SpaceX is either a welfare queen, or a ponzi scheme.
            • hef19898 6y ago
              I am citing an old paper from EASA. Again, how the true financials are is impossible to tell without SpaceX finances. Which we don't have. Except for really old leaks. And even with these numbers, we would have to account for Starlink launches.
  • Schweigi 6y ago
    Their advantage is that they are very mission driven and don’t really have to answer to anyone. I think its one of the key ingredients why Elon’s companies & adventures are so successful. A company or organization which is pulled in different directions because of politics or financial influence is always at a disadvantage.
• medium_burrito 6y ago
  You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them. We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
  • zdragnar 6y ago
    More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built. That means fewer hands on thr steering wheel, and fewer compromises to achieve multiple missions. The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks. No real surprise that it didn't work out.
    • VectorLock 6y ago
      Exactly this. Hyper specialized boundary pushing things are easy compared to general purpose good for everything projects.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        The basic concept isn't even a terrible one. It was a reaction to the many functionally-overlapping aircraft that the various service branches were having designed and built. But it seems clear at this point that the F-35 tried to be too general purpose.
      • dbreunig 6y ago
        Our vaccine effort is a perfect example of this. We got heroic, efficient results in developing vaccines because the requirements were so clear. Distribution is much, much harder!
    • sandworm101 6y ago
      >> More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built. Not really. The SR-71 was the final plane of an extended program called OXCART which created the A-12. The program was nominally to replace the U2, but even oxcart was within a large aircraft design plan. There was even a interceptor (YF-12) that was meant for shooting down Valkyrie-class mach3+ bombers. These aircraft were very similar to the 71, so similar that most people seeing them might not spot any difference. Any assessment of the 71's development costs is therefore very difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12 "YF-12C: Fictitious designation for an SR-71 provided to NASA for flight testing. The YF-12 designation was used to keep SR-71 information out of the public domain."
• phaemon 6y ago
  > we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today. Indeed. If you killed hundreds of thousands of civilians today you'd probably get cancelled by leftists or something! Toxic.
• spoonjim 6y ago
  Not dropping radioactive bombs = toxic.
  • jazzyjackson 6y ago
    The point was how quickly it went from theory to implementation.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • spoonjim 6y ago
      I know what your point was. But the expedience of those times came at an incredible human cost.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • CameronNemo 6y ago
      Is this a race to Godwin's law?
      • paulmd 6y ago
        seeing as how nobody mentioned nazis, no.
        • CameronNemo 6y ago
          The Holocaust also quickly went from theory to implementation. Those were the days, right? /s
• ldbooth 6y ago
  How much can we attribute to the financialization of capitalism? I think it's the driving force. Some historical societies have recognized paying interest on capital at every level of the value stack creates an anti-competitive costs of production. Maybe they just didn't like creditors.
  • gher-shyu3i 6y ago
    Islam prohibits dealing with interest, yet that didn't stop the incredible progress and flourishing during the Islamic Golden Age. Interest is immoral and parasitic, there are other ways which aren't to achieve progress.
• markus_zhang 6y ago
  The point is that if every project is just for the votes and friends then essentially you are going to ignore the engineering and other parts. I'd argue further that it's the same for business projects as well, just that you do it for the stocks and friends.
• antattack 6y ago
  Speaking of military expenses. One would think spending fraction of military budget towards vaccine research would protect our country better. Alas, building machines of destruction seems to the prerogative.
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  • nxm 6y ago
    Abys? lowest unemployment in 50 years (including for minorities) before corona (out of his control) and first president in 40 years to NOT start a war. Not to mention the peace deals in the middle east. Give credit where it's due
• supernova87a 6y ago
  Maybe someone with more industry knowledge or interesting sources can corroborate -- But I believe that one of the things that happened to the military aviation industrial complex was that in the WW2, early Cold War era, planes and military development programs were very much driven by individuals or very small teams responsible for designing the requirements, overseeing the planning, and the outcome of new aircraft. That was how you got such distinctive (and long lasting designs) that served well the needs of the military, even in use up to today. Let's call it (using today's fashionable term, "passion" about the aircraft, and unwillingness to put out a piece of crap.) You could name who was responsible for an aircraft design. But in the 1970s, 1980s, something happened where the size of projects or the professionalization of military projects caused them to have distributed (read, lack of) ownership by very critical people, and instead by an anonymous/dispersed "committee style" management. Also, the experts within the military often left for better pastures at the contractors (NG, LM, etc). Add to that the requirement (by Congress, regulation) that you couldn't just use your expert / private connections to other experts to "get things done" and bring in contractors who had expertise, and instead had to farm out RFPs to every company, get their bland input, and fill out a heat map of who did what best, and cobble together a solution "mutually acceptable to all stakeholders". So no longer was an aircraft project owned by someone who had very certain opinions about what was needed, and not needed, and who something should be designed for. But instead, projects follow a certain recipe, hoping that form produces function, yet not actually produce useful output because of what happens when you lack ownership. You cannot today name who is responsible for an aircraft design (I would say). It is the metaphorical side project among many, of a large dispersed group of people. It seems to me something was missed in the migration to this new method of working. But as I said, I would love to hear corroborating observations about whether this was a major factor.
  • TylerE 6y ago
    The F-35 broke the most important of Kelly Johnson's rules. 15. Never do business with the (damned) Navy!
  • cgearhart 6y ago
    At least three things happened: - congressional oversight increased, with the result that the purchasing authority is no longer generally the end user. We aren’t just buying a ship (plane, gun, etc.), we’re maintaining a logistics and manufacturing industrial base to produce that type of item (and maintain jobs in congressional districts). So maybe we should buy a few more tanks/ships/bombs than we need so that we don’t forget how. (A bit dubious, but it’s one of the reasons we make the funding decisions we do.) - risk tolerance shrank. Especially in war time there was a high tolerance for risk if the payoff was big enough. These days our risk tolerance is basically zero. I once had to get an admiral to sign off on a risk hazard assessment with an estimated likelihood of ~1e-18 (you’re more likely to win the powerball jackpot twice). There was a cap that might pop off an item at high speed during flight, and if it hit someone they would probably miss a day of work. By the likelihood/consequence framework for risk management, that meant it required an admiral’s signature. You can’t move fast in an environment like that. - complexity increased. Old schools systems like a WW2 jeep were designed and prototyped in 40 days because they were incredibly simple and made liberal use of COTS parts. There’s an argument to be made that maybe we don’t need such complex systems to meet requirements, but I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should be replacing all the F-35 fleet with a WW2-style aircraft. (Although there have been proposals to build super-simple aircraft for CAS missions, etc.)
• TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  That is a very strange sentiment about the bombs.
• chickenpotpie 6y ago
  Covid-19 has a vaccine less than a year into the first death in The US, that’s pretty nuts
  • woeirua 6y ago
    Not just a vaccine. A 95% effective vaccine. That's never happened before in such a short time frame. The high efficacy vaccines that most of us have been injected with took decades to develop.
• heymijo 6y ago
  Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) [0]. You might have missed this news. It’s a modern remix to the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich days of developing legendary aircraft at Lockheed’s Skunkworks that you lamented the loss of. People in the know confirm it’s legit and shocking, in a good way. Especially compared to the failures of the F-35 and even the F-22’s development. [0] https://www.airforcemag.com/article/ropers-ngad-bombshell/ https://www.airforcemag.com/article/ropers-ngad-bombshell/
  • silexia 6y ago
    Until we break new military developments away from the political process of congress people funneling projects to big companies in their districts regardless of competence we will continue to see failure after failure in every area. We saw many advances during world War I and world War II because instead of rewarding companies with contracts that voted for politicians, all everyone cared about was defeating the enemy. My suggestion is that the military should put out specs for what it wants and then put out big cash prizes for getting it done similar to what was done with the Covid vaccine. Say a $1 billion prize for a modern tank design. And then a fixed price for each one delivered thereafter.
  • tiahura 6y ago
    Roper is awesome. There’s a video of him describing the role of K8s in the next-gen process.
    • tomjakubowski 6y ago
      We are doomed.
      • p_l 6y ago
        Avionics software resembled k8s before k8s was designed. Sure, some of the most problematic bits don't exist due to static assignment, but the difference is not that big. Including presence of virtual overlay networks. Anyway, k8s is mostly for lower-criticality software to be quickly added/removed, iirc, partly because unlike the normal avionics setup it allows dynamic addition/removal.
• federona 6y ago
  Thiel and his ilk are the reason we can't build cool shit anymore. Look at PayPal, horrible outdated interface that is still a kluge with old functionality glued to new functionality because it's just too big to be too concerned, and horrible customer service too. There is so much corruption and profiteering due to monopolization of various industries that this sort of behavior happens, Thiel is the guy who walks away with all his money before shit from his philosophy hits the fan; society being the bag man. Look at Trump who Thiel supported or his general idea of a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, competition and distribution is good. Thiel does not know what he's talking about. The rich can capture all the value, but what happens after that, they continue to capture all the value and don't have to improve or innovate to continue to exist, you can't hold them up to anything because what are you going to do you are locked in. Do things 10x better he says, and then you will have so much network effect that you can do things 10x worse and people still have a hard time getting rid of you.
• solarhoma 6y ago
  What’s going on with all the Reddit level comments below your post? I think you bring up great points. This could be a case of low hanging fruit being picked. We are at the point where everything being added is just bells and whistles since the foundation has already been built.
  • choxi 6y ago
    That's what I was thinking, I wonder to what extent this is a symptom of stagnation in physics.
    • solarhoma 6y ago
      Maybe it’s just the calm before the storm.
  • misiti3780 6y ago
    Not sure, I accidentally started a flamewar! I wouldnt consider the atomic bomb low hanging fruit either, it took many different breakthroughs in nuclear physics and structural engineering to procure the isotopes.
• matthewmacleod 6y ago
  Nah, we build cool shit all the time. We just rolled out a whole new vaccine technology across the world in under a year. You never really wanted a flying car, and AI-driven tech is everywhere but you just don't call it AI any more.
• jetrink 6y ago
  > Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. Not to mention the F-16 itself, which the F-35 was meant to replace: 1972: RFP for prototypes 1974: Maiden flight of the first prototype 1975: Production begins 1980: The aircraft officially enters service
  • hef19898 6y ago
    The F-117 as well. A marvelous plane, and development program.
  • whalesalad 6y ago
    Lockheed is synonymous with Skunk Works ... the F-35 was a Lockheed project. I can guarantee a lot of the engineers who worked on those legendary aircraft also participated in the JSF.
    • labcomputer 6y ago
      F-16 was a joint Northrop and General Dynamics project. Manufacturing rights were only sold to Lockheed in the 90's.
    • jeffreyrogers 6y ago
      Organizations change. I heard recently at Skunk Works the engineers were told by some bureaucrats that they couldn't change the skunk logo (they had a modified version for some project). It's like how Boeing used to be a great engineering organization and now isn't. The sad thing is when a downturn happens those bureaucrats saying you can't change the logo will probably keep their jobs while the engineers who could probably be making pretty cool stuff if they had better leadership will be out of work.
    • p_l 6y ago
      A critical part of F-35 problems was developed so far away from Skunkworks it is technically a separate company (still part of the wider Lockheed-Marting Concern) - the Lockheed-Marting Global Training & Logistics. Having encountered the quality (hahahah ... sob) they produce personally, I'm totally unsurprised US Navy and USMC could find funding a new fleet of space satellites cheaper than re-bribing enough senators to get ALIS (and now ODIN) contract reassigned to someone competent.
• jc01480 6y ago
  Given a compelling need for innovation we could potentially do that. But today’s innovation is about social equities. Billions will be pumped into that for the next decade until - heaven forbid- there’s a new need for tools to perform catastrophic things.
• rubicon33 6y ago
  I wonder if anyone has any theories as to why? Assuming it's true that technological innovation peaked in the mid 40s/50s, it begs the question why it has ground to such a halt now. Recognizing that is a big assumption of truth, would anyone here be willing to posit an explanation?
  • JustSomeNobody 6y ago
    My pet theory is we rely too much on computers.
  • adwww 6y ago
    1940s-1950s two big factors - necessity to win a war. But also opportunity. Even widespread mains electricity is fairly new back then, there were a lot of fairly obvious opportunities to quickly exploit.
  • sanderjd 6y ago
    Maybe check out Ross Douthat's recent book about "decadence" as a place to start. Not sure I buy the argument, but this is part of what he's talking about. For me personally, I think it's just the point we're at in the current technological revolution (in the Carlota Perez sense). We're due for a new one (maybe biotech, eg. driven by crispr, mrna, etc.) so things feel stale.
  • mikewarot 6y ago
    We don't have a government anymore... it started breaking down with the death of FDR. The only thing that kept it going was the cold war. We don't invest in research like we should.
  • Negitivefrags 6y ago
    It’s a combination of factors but all with the same theme. Basically nobody is willing to take any risk for anything. This is on every level, from being wrong about a simple decision all the way up to not taking any personal risk with your life. And it’s impossible to argue against it because at any point you can always make an argument for reduction of risk, and anyone arguing against it is demonized. How can you argue against more health and safety standards after all? More rigourous engineering standards? More environmental protection standards? More consultation with the public? But it’s not just a government thing, it’s on a societal level. In large companies it’s the same exact phenomenon of buck passing and responsibility dodging. Each thing only has a tiny multiplicative cost, but the sum total of all of it is the inability to make any progress.
• jonny_eh 6y ago
  I thought the Singularity is near because innovation is accelerating. I'm perpetually confused.
  • dane-pgp 6y ago
    It is digital technology specifically where we are seeing accelerating progress, largely because the progress compounds, using one generation's machines to design and produce the next generation's. Also, most digital technology is developed outside of the government procurement / military industrial complex, so all the problems inherent to those systems do not apply. If the Singularity is reachable, it doesn't depend on the ability to create aircraft or weapons of any sort, whereas it would be impossible to reach the Singularity without digital technology.
  • ars 6y ago
    It's not accelerating, IMO innovation has stalled quite a bit. If you compare the speed of innovation between now and 30 years ago, the change is quite dramatic. There will not ever be a Singularity.
    • pas 6y ago
      Why? Even if we upload a mind, even via whole brain emulation, that then becomes modifiable, optimizable. If uploaded minds start enhancing the process it can become a lot faster. Sure, probably for them that will just look like how it looks now to us.
• clownpenis_fart 6y ago
  Yeah, it's really sad how we can't have nice things anymore like nuking hundreds of thousands of civilians.
  • misiti3780 6y ago
    You are obviously taking my comment in bad faith, but even if you ignore the the two bombs, I believe nuclear energy is the cleanest renewable.
• beowulfey 6y ago
  You need a purpose behind progress. Look at any of the major developments of the 20th century and there is something huge providing the motivation. Science continues on and incredible discoveries are made all the time. But when it comes to building incredible things... there just isn’t any push for it right now.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  I think your points are certainly common ones, but unfortunately they rely on three major misunderstandings. The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials. It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc. The second misunderstanding is that we're not still building amazing things. Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition, or talk to anyone in the world from a cheap videophone in your pocket, is astonishing. And the third is that flying cars somehow respresent the future. But flying car enthusiasts only focus on the "cool" aspect of it, rather than nuts-and-bolts issues like how they could be fuel efficient, how an average driver will avoid fatal crashes, if we really want urban skies filled with visual, noise and emissions pollution, etc. Flying cars exist. But they don't make any economic or practical sense to use. If you think we're still not accomplishing astonishing things today, you're not paying attention. Did you notice, for example, how multiple companies put together COVID vaccines in record time? How is that not amazing?
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    Flying cars marry terrible airplanes with terrible cars. I’m not sure what would cause that general rule to be broken, but the demands of crash safety for cars add a lot of weight and weight is the killer negative metric for aircraft.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      If you're going to fly do you really need the car to be highway worthy? A flying car that goes up to 30 mph could be acceptable.
      • sokoloff 6y ago
        If you're going to license it as a low-speed vehicle (limited to 25 mph federally by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 500), you will be barred from many surface streets with speed limits of greater than 30 mph, depending on state law. In trying to map out whether I could get from my house to my local airport exclusively on roads with 30 mph or lower speed limits, I had a hard time proving it. All of the obvious routes that I actually use had at least one segment with a speed limit of 35 mph or higher, which is barred by my state law (Massachusetts).
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  > Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today. The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
  • mlyle 6y ago
    > The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend. Piggy-backing off the efforts of mRNA vaccines for the past decade or two, and existing efforts for personalized cancer immuno-oncology vaccines. There ain't no chance you figure out the lipid nanoparticle magic in a weekend. (Indeed, it's not really figured out: what we have is inadequate for mRNA drugs, which are the holy grail... but the shortcomings were realized to be useful for vaccines ~a decade ago).
• g9yuayon 6y ago
  I wonder if this has to do with the overall decline of manufacturing in the US. Supply chains have been moving out of the US so iteration will be slower and more costly. Fewer talents would like to go to manufacturing. Fewer university professors are researching traditional mechanics now, for example, but more on "cutting-edge" stuff like nanometer materials. We also get fewer and fewer highly trained workers on lathing, welding, milling and etc over the years. As a result, it gets more expensive and more risky to build something as complex as F35.
  • colechristensen 6y ago
    No, its the acquisition process and administrative overhead. If you give smart people with a good idea a lot of resources to chase it while insulating them from people who want to measure/validate/manage/mandate, you often get good results and sometimes get complete failures. It is a problem of middle management interfering with the development process, red tape, trying to do everything at once, and requirements that constantly change. I read a headline and article like that and my immediate reaction is the military leader probably wants to make a name for himself spearheading a new plane – ambition on the part of customers in military acquisition is a real problem. (why are navy ships so big? because navy captains wouldn't feel as important with more, smaller ships) The problems have little to do with the end-stage production manufacturing, and a lot to do with the engineering R&D.
• throwaway6734 6y ago
  We found multiple vaccines for Covid in less than 1 year.
• jksmith 6y ago
  Well your single customer is your paycheck and your deal with the devil. If you triple the price of what you really think it will take because the gov will be inflating dollar supply by double digits every year and you're working a 10 year project, then the gov may go for a different/multiple contractors. So you have to just milk the project for as long as you can beyond 10 years and hope you can dollar/cost over time for the best profit. Lockheed should offer a store of value price and a dollar price. Otherwise, this is the new standard for long-term gov contracts. Lockheed can't lay their legendary game down when dealing with this kind of client. Is what it is.
  • konjin 6y ago
    Since your customer also will bail you out when you fail what's the point in even trying? It's a lot more profitable to bill like your planes work, but to provide planes made out of cardboard. Until you start executing companies (or CEOs) for incompetence you will keep getting the same results.
    • jksmith 6y ago
      Yeah, but that's a pots and kettles issue. We are commenting from our mountain about a business that has dropped into the gutter. None of the parties will change.
  • cool_dude85 6y ago
    They have to rip the government off to stave off inflation? How's inflation been looking, oh, these past 40 years or so?
    • jksmith 6y ago
      Hah, and throw in this dimension: Don't need F35's patrolling the Persian Gulf, because the need for oil is disappearing. Can't fuel those planes with petrodollars, just burning paper. This is not good.
    • konjin 6y ago
      I'm sure that the 50th time in the last 20 years I've heard we will have hyper inflation will be the time it happens. Any day now the house of cards build will fall and gold will be the only currency worth anything.
• Thorentis 6y ago
  > we just cant build cool shit anymore I sadly agree. Unis spend so much time teaching CAD software, processes, etc, you wonder how much understanding engineering grads actually have. I just think we've stagnated as a technological society. We rely so much on computers to do everything, that we can't innovate in the same way anymore. Unless our new x has an onboard super-computer, we just can't get it to do anything.
  • captain_price7 6y ago
    > Unis spend so much time teaching CAD software, processes, etc, you wonder how much understanding engineering grads actually have That's interesting. The popular sentiment in programming world seem to be Unis don't tech practical stuff enough, or interviews for (junior) developers don't test their practical knowledge enough- a point I always found a bit strange.
    • unishark 6y ago
      I'm in a university dealing with this stuff and we get both ends at the same time, they (companies) want more immediate technical skills (e.g. programming) while also complaining that grads don't know their math fundamentals enough. In an engineering department (as in not CS) I'd say the bias is overwhelmingly towards the math end of the spectrum, partly because faculty largely don't even keep up with the technology. You'd have to heavily revise your course constantly (imagine teaching how to use google products...). Plus it just feels less worthwhile teaching things that will become obsolete in a few years. Oh and by the way we need to teach them to write better too. Kids can't communicate these days. And economics. And ethics. It ends up being a very tight squeeze we can cram in maybe two courses on programming if it's a top priority.
    • eitland 6y ago
      > That's interesting. The popular sentiment in programming world seem to be Unis don't tech practical stuff enough, I think the point might be that there might be a sweet spot somewhere between - demanding Java code to be created by students using only Notepad and javac and - just teaching the latest js trends I think it is fully possible - and a lot more motivating - to teach theoretical problems hand in hand with practical problems.
• jnwatson 6y ago
  They've been at this for more than 14 years. I was accidentally part of both the Boeing and Lockheed F-35 teams, and that was 23 years ago. For a humorous take on the U.S. military platform problem, look for a movie called The Pentagon Wars [1] starring Kelsey Grammar and Cary Elwes. It came out in 1998, and very little has changed since then. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144550/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144550/
  • hef19898 6y ago
    Back the day an engineer cold be there at the start of program, see the maiden flight and even go on to see a second program. Today, the same engineer probalby enters years after the concept phase and retires before the first prototype takes of.
    • Rebelgecko 6y ago
      A friend of mine working on a space telescope had to fix a mistake that someone had made on a diagram. When she tried to figure out who made the oopsie, turns out he had worked on the project more than a decade ago and retired while she was in middle school
  • misiti3780 6y ago
    Wikipedia said it was started in 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
    • jhpankow 6y ago
      Lockheed and Boeing were building protoypes in the 1990s and the contract was awarded to Lockheed in October 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program
      • misiti3780 6y ago
        thanks!
• drewvolpe 6y ago
  NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.
  • paganel 6y ago
    We as a species were sending stuff to Mars and to Venus (which imho is a lot more interesting than Mars) back in the '70s and '80s, not that much novelty in recent events (even though I must admit the helicopter gimmick was interesting, until the novelty very quickly worn off, that is). > had it through FDA trials in under a year. That was by political decision, at least that is my understanding.
  • jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    Life sciences is about the only area of science that has promising new technology coming out of it. Almost every other area is incremental. Nuclear reactor design: mostly already considered by the Navy in the 50s and 60s. Space Exploration: Space shuttle was reusable too. Rockets that could land were demonstrated in the 90s IIRC (admittedly SpaceX improved on this quite a bit). Electric/Renewable Powered Aircraft: Soviet Union had a hydrogen powered airliner. I'm not saying the new stuff isn't impressive. It is and those small improvements add up to a lot, but it's not revolutionary in the way a jet engine or a nuclear reactor was.
  • atleta 6y ago
    Fun fact: the mRNA vaccines were developed in about 2 weeks after the publication of the SARS2 DNA sequence. (At least the Pfizer/BioNTech one was.)
    • chmod775 6y ago
      Was it though? The science that made this possible was in the works for decades, and it took Moderna and BioNTech many many years to get the technology right. So that's many years of effort with the stated goal of getting a vaccine out the door fast when it's needed. But there was relatively little "science" left to be done when COVID struck. The only interesting aspect here are the logistics to make vaccines in the required quantities, and honestly it's not looking too great, considering where we are with vaccinations. Though maybe it just wouldn't have been possible to make doses any quicker, regardless of effort.
• RapidFire 6y ago
  We already have flying cars; they are called helicopters. I'm not sure you want to live in a neighborhood that has people commuting by helicopters; it would be very noisy. Want an example of crazy cool shit we just accomplished? Covid vaccine. Creating a vaccine/testing in less than a year and now distributing it at such a massive scale will likely go down in history as an event akin to the Manhattan Project.
• dustingetz 6y ago
  What's the source for the Thiel quote about "we just can't build cool shit anymore"?
• titzer 6y ago
  Clear requirements, small teams, small budgets, custom-built, no over-thinking, absolutely must work, chop a path through the jungle with a machete. We do everything opposite these days: no thinking about requirements, huge teams, no budget, off-the-shelf everything, over-think everything, OK with failure (because golden parachutes, team churn, and "blameless" culture), and wait 5 months for the bulldozers to get shipped here.
  • Traster 6y ago
    The problem isn't that we don't think about requirements. The problem is that there are no requirements. The Bomb and the SR71 had two very clear things in common - they were built to address existential threats. The bomb was designed for one reason - to fight Nazis we knew they were building the bomb and we needed our own. We knew exactly what to build and we went and figured out how. The SR71 exactly the same issue - we knew exactly what we wanted, we wanted a super fast undetectable spy plane to spy on the Communists. The problem today is that we've got no damn clue who we're meant to be fighting against and it's been 30 years since the US has engaged in a war where air superiority was even an issue. The level of development in the US right now isn't "We need to build a system that's better than North Korea's" it's more like "Hey guys, I totally think we could build a system that plucks NK's ICBMs out of the air before they even jettison their first shroud". There's no reason clear and direct motivation for these systems. So the purpose gets lost and we build something with a thousand bells and whistles because we're desperately trying to find some reason for it to exist.
  • sheepybloke 6y ago
    I think the bigger thing is that we think about requirements, but they change so frequently they require rework. I was working on an FMS for a customer and they changed their high level requirements every 3 months or so, driving huge costs and timeline overruns. It's easy when the Air Force gives you a solid set of requirements to work with, but what happens when the Army 5 months later gives you something contradicting those?
• elorant 6y ago
  Well we built two mRNA vaccines in less than a year. I'd call that pretty fucking awesome.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    Technically the vaccine (at least the moderna one) was built in 48 hours. They had it prepared before they even had a sample of the virus. Chinese researchers uploaded the genetic sequence to the net and that was all moderna needed to build the vaccine. It was trials/testing/approval that took the rest of the time. Truly some mind-blowing stuff.
• trident5000 6y ago
  Socialists want to delegate vast managerial and allocation task to a handful of bureaucrats in the govt. This is a great example of why that doesnt work aside from the corruption and oppression. At least we get a reminder out of this mess.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Except you haven't had a socialist government so you can't really blame socialists for the problems you have.
    • trident5000 6y ago
      Do you understand what a microcosm/example is? Or do you just like to be a pain in the ass?
• Karawebnetwork 6y ago
  > Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today. I think that I am misunderstanding this paragraph. You mean the speed at which a new inventions was put into production, right? It could be my English failing me but putting it through a translator did not help.
  • misiti3780 6y ago
    Of course, I don't mean killing hundreds of thousands of people was good, but it did end WWII, and presumably saved lives that would have been lost via a land invasion (US + USSR)
    • Karawebnetwork 6y ago
      This is far from how I learned it. I am not saying either of us is right, just noticing how interesting it is that historical facts taught differently completely change a person's perception. We will probably never learn the truth as none of us were there. I have always been told that Japan was already ready to surrender and that dropping the bombs was simply the first step into the cold war -- a bombing to show strength to the USSR. "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." - Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet "The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons" - Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, President Truman's Chief of Staff "The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it." - Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946 Etc.
      • Supermancho 6y ago
        > The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. That is a shockingly flippant quote that shows a lack of critical analysis. Disappointing. There was a political message in bombing Japan that communicated to Russia (and supported China). There was utility for the US. The Japanese were both divided and weighing on who to surrender to. The Japanese Imperial Army were notoriously staunch in their bushido teachings and with a lack of cohesion at the highest ranks, some would undoubtedly continue to follow orders. eg There were tens of thousands ready to repel an American land invasion in Kyushu* It had the desired effect in practical Japanese military planning. * https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/world-war-ii-the-final-chapter/wwii-victory-in-japan/would-japan-have-surrendered-without-the-atomic-bombings-1.360300 https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/world-war-ii-th...
• robotresearcher 6y ago
  The phone in my hand is a miracle of cool shit technology. And a large fraction of the population of the world owns one. We take the miraculous for granted when it’s frequent, sigh about the things we don’t have, and declare its all terrible.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    A lot of it enabled by Defense projects too! (Internet, GPS) I don’t have a fully formed opinion around how I feel about defense spending, but it’s definitely complicated.
• nickik 6y ago
  Thiel is wrong. What is happening in batteries is insane. SpaceX is doing amazing things in space and many smaller companies are doing great things too. Starlink itself is revolutionary, Starship is arguably even more so. And btw the advancements in batteries and EV is exactly what is needed actually do flying cars, if that is even a good idea in the first place. Government programs are often massively badly managed, politically captured, this is not new. But it doesn't mean nobody is inventing anything new anymore.
• balls187 6y ago
  I test drove a Tesla. Imo, it is cool shit.
• dalbasal 6y ago
  Broad statements like Thiel's shouldn't be taken too literally. I don't think the main point is the broad statement about the trends themselves. The main point is the classification: Flying Cars vs 140 Characters or Bits vs Atoms. FB is worth almost $1trn. No real technical achievements or advancement. If fb didn't exist, something else would be the friendster. Tesla, Apple, MSFT, Google, etc. are closer to the flying cars end of that spectral dichotomy. We could debate where. Thiel attracts antagonists in the same way like leftists do. Paypal, Palantir, his capital allocation theories & such are not very performant on his own flying cars VS 140 characters test. It's a hazard of being an idealist. The traditional question a leftist authors get (chomsky, etc) is about selling his books on amazon. But yes. There certainly is a lot of failure in western economies, especially in the "public-private" realm. These aren't constructive failures, and this sort of stuff is deeply limiting. You know, cutting edge aerospace engineering is risky. Let's take easier examples. Why can't we procure buildings or do basic infrastructure without scandals and runaway costs? Ancient civilizations managed to build incredible aqueduct systems, public buildings, etc. We've regressed.
  • 015a 6y ago
    > Ancient civilizations managed to build incredible aqueduct systems, public buildings, etc. We've regressed. This feels like an extreme take. (Most) Every city in America has a functional clean water delivery network. Every city has electricity. Most cities have sewage. Most cities have very nice paved roads. This is billions of miles of pipes, wires, roads, bridges, dams... Billions. And you're comparing what the US, and actually most economies, have accomplished in this domain to a handful of ancient roman aqueducts made of stone, transporting barely potable water, and saying that modern society has regressed? That's wild. The public library in my city of ~800,000 people is twice the size of the Parthenon. Hell, there's a LITERAL 1:1 Parthenon replica in Nashville TN, which they basically built for the hell of it as a showcase for a fair. Across the street from me, they just finished up construction on a (I dare say, beautiful and modern) 32 story apartment building; a building like that would be the singular crown jewel of an ancient civilization, more advanced and useful than anything Rome ever built, and its not even remotely the only one in my 3rd tier US city, let alone worldwide. Sure, the Pyramids of Giza are impressive. 455 feet tall, probably took a lifetime to build. You know who has a bigger pyramid? Fucking North Korea; the Ryugyong Hotel, 1082 feet tall, constructed in 1992. The Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas is 350 feet tall, and its part of a fucking casino. The Memphis Pyramid in Tennessee, 321 feet tall, and its a BASS PRO SHOP. The pride-and-joy of Ancient Egypt, the effort of an entire civilization for decades, is nearly replicated in the US, and we use it to sell bait and tackle for fishing. Is that regression? No. Its progression. We've gotten so good at putting buildings up and laying infrastructure that people are no longer impressed by any of it. Its easy to look at a Roman aqueduct as a massive feat of engineering; no one sees the miles upon miles of pipes below an average city that enable you to turn on a faucet and always have water (anomalous events aside like bad storms or the Flint crisis). And now, squarely in the 21st century: No one sees the thousands of servers it takes to power google.com. No one sees the billions of miles of tiered fiber criss-crossing the country. No one sees the ten million dollar cooling systems, and the billions of person-hours that went into making it possible for you to search for "boobs" and receive back 1.4 billion fully indexed and browseable results. People ignore the 3.8 million pixels used to display those results on your screen. They disregard the 13.2 billion transistors in their graphics card, capable of 12 trillion floating point operations per second, and that any human in the country can order a laptop that has all of this and have it delivered to their doorstep in 48 hours. Even more impressively; most people can afford it. The problem isn't that we've regressed. The problem is that we've lost appreciation for where we have progressed. Sure, a lot of it is by private corporations; but a lot of it isn't. And if that's what it takes to actually drive humanity forward, maybe that's the path we need to take.
• thinkharderdev 6y ago
  On the other hand, we just managed to create an effective vaccine against a novel virus in something like 48 hours (and another 8 months to get it FDA approved but still!) In general I don't think that we've forgotten how to build cool shit. It's just that in a lot ways we don't have the incentive to do so anymore. When we DO have the incentive (like with COVID) we are capable of feats of engineering an innovation that are amazing. More to the point, the incentives now seem to work against rapid innovation. We tend to think of infrastructure projects and defense projects as jobs programs so nobody wants it to be done quickly.
• Aunche 6y ago
  I love the SR-71 as much as anyone else, but I don't think that's entirely fair. 12/32 were lost in an accident, so it looks like we lost a lot of reliability in exchange for a much faster development.
  • jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    It also pushed the boundaries of what aircraft were capable of. Required all sorts of new materials technology, probably required new controls as well. I think it is fairer to compare the development of the SR-71 to something like the early development of rockets/missiles, than to the F35, which is much more incremental.
    • mywittyname 6y ago
      > It was also pushes the boundaries of what aircraft were capable of Are capable of. The SR-71 remains a marvel and it's unlikely that we could build something better today with the same design constraints. Which is part of why the successors to the SR-71 removed the on-board pilot (UAV) or the ability to lift-off without aid (satellites).
• benjamoon 6y ago
  I’m in the UK, over here we developed a vaccine to an unknown virus in about 10 months and then gave it to nearly 20 million people in 2 months. I’ll take that over the next generation of pointless aircrafts any day!
• RobLach 6y ago
  The F-35 program is spread across hundreds of vendors with representatives grabbing a piece for their constituents. I wouldn't be suprised if different diameter o-rings are coming from different suppliers. This is a strategic approach that both jacks up the price and gives you plenty of powerful allies who will fight to keep the program afloat. They could very put such an aircraft together at half the cost and time if cost and time were targets for the people deciding to fund this.
• tlogan 6y ago
  I want just to add that Peter Thiel is one of the reason why we cannot have / invent ‘cool stuff’. But he is also not wrong about what he saying: I’m just saying that it is not so simple.
  • centimeter 6y ago
    How do you blame Thiel for bureaucratic bloat in the US government? NASA, the canonical example of a formerly productive organization becoming hopelessly turgid, was dysfunctional by the time he was a teenager.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      Thiel believes that rent seeking monopolies are desirable and necessary to enable innovation. He's plainly wrong about that as a mater of economic science. Lockhead's use of regulatory capture to extract as much money as possible is directly in line with how Thiel thinks business should be done.
      • jeffreyrogers 6y ago
        I don't think Thiel thinks this. I think Thiel's argument about monopolies is that good businesses act like monopolies because they have no competition, i.e. it's better to be Tesla[0] than to be starting a fast food franchise. I don't agree with Thiel on this, I think you're more likely to get rich in an area where there is already demand, but Thiel is more focused on people that pioneer new industries. [0]: Yeah, I know there are other EV manufacturers, Tesla is really not competing with them at this stage and never really was.
        • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
          He's been quite explicit about it in his talks for years. He sees monopolies as necessary to concentrate enough capital under one person's control to enable them to be an innovator. To be rather blunt about it, much of his rhetoric is ultimately just about saying indirect forms of "let John Galt do whatever he wants and be grateful peasant." This is why he's financially supported Yarvin, who quite literally wants to turn the world into a technocratic monarchy, with some very nasty "scientific racism" style stuff mixed in. It's a drop in the bucket compared to Thiel's wealth, but he clearly has no problem providing millions of dollars in support of this kind of thinking. Also pay attention to how Palantir does business. They behave very similarly to Lockhead Martin when it comes to over promising their technology and under delivering in order to pull as much money off the table as possible, including from governments.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  I work in defense and the approach to software development is hell. Imagine package managers and Git being newfangled scary technologies and not unit testing anything. Now slap tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on there and you've got a defense program. I'm actually quite tired of it and I'm looking elsewhere.
  • wtf_is_up 6y ago
    Yes, and the user community and PMs on the gov't side are terrible at defining requirements. Even moreso as the number of stakeholders increases.
    • sheepybloke 6y ago
      Exactly. How can I build and test a system when you change the system requirements and scope every 6 months?
• hutzlibu 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/864/ https://xkcd.com/864/ Also, well "Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today" I believe some people consider WW2 and the nuclear wipeout of 2 cities of common people to be "toxic environment", too.
• ausbah 6y ago
  I think it's a combination of science is simply harder because the low picking fruits have mostly been picked, and environments that lead to breakthroughs like fission appear only under exceptional circumstances
• greedo 6y ago
  I would put up designing an mRNA vaccine in less than a year to show that we can make technological progress when the desire is present.
• asah 6y ago
  COVID vaccine had entered the chat. 6 months vs 4-10+ years previously, and 4+ vaccines at once.
• mmaunder 6y ago
  For more detail on how effective Skunkworks was, read Kelly Johnson's book. It was recommended to me by a buddy at JPL and it's a wonderful view into how they did things on time and below budget on projects like the SR71. Not an affiliate link: https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-More-Than-Share-All/dp/0874744911 https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-More-Than-Share-All/dp/08747449...
  • dharmab 6y ago
    I love the problem solving stories. My favorite is the one about transporting the prototype from Washington to Nevada on a very wide trailer- which involved sawing signposts apart and bribing a bus driver...
• jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  While the US does have a problem with building civil engineering projects today, that dynamic isn't really what happened with the F-35. The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun on cost and time table. Ash Carter fixed that by telling Lockheed if they didn't agree to his new contract he'd kill the entire thing. And oh hey what a surprise suddenly the marginal cost of a new F-35 started hitting the target numbers. The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does, but that doesn't erase just how much grift was involved in this program for decades. The other big thing driving the Air Force to heavily restructure it's approach is they know they just can't have these decades long development programs. They want to be able to iterate much faster. It's all still classified, but apparently the first few attempts at this more agile approach are in fact actually working, like with the NGAD program.
  • sayhar 6y ago
    Thank you for bringing a structural, informed approach to this. I'm getting a little tired of the tendency to handwave blame "cultural decline" rather than actual looking into the policies and details.
    • yrgulation 6y ago
      Aren't policy and details a product of culture? If a group of people, be it a team or nation, dont have have a solid culture then surely they cant achieve solid results. And indeed it would appear that gradually there is a decline in achieving great results from countries that have historically achieved such results. Dont get me wrong, the US is still doing great, but maybe when the rest of the world keeps raising red flags then criticism should be taken on board as not all is ill intentioned.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • _carbyau_ 6y ago
        This is where I failed to understand the idea of a "Developing Nation". Aren't they all?
• bborud 6y ago
  I might be mistaken, but I thought I'd seen the Skunkworks logo being used when talking about the F-35. Which is kind of pissing on the legacy of Skunkworks as Skunkworks effectively stopped existing in the 1970s.
• aphextron 6y ago
  We're just fat, lazy, entitled, and lacking all motivation at this point. In the 20th century we went from dropping grenades out of cloth covered biplanes to shooting radar guided nuclear missiles from supersonic jet fighters in 20 years because our survival was at stake. Global hegemony has a predictable way of softening societies that is empirically observable throughout human history. Compare the pace of change and development in the US to what is happening in China now, and you can see where the global locus of innovation has shifted.
  • nathancahill 6y ago
    Yep, is it Fahrenheit 451 or another Ray Bradbury story where the planes zip around the globe to start and end a war within a couple minutes, without anyone really realizing or caring?
• marshmallow_12 6y ago
  We want nuclear propulsion, not more boring jet engines. we can't have jets, so why should we care if the Army has better ones then 15 years ago.
  • jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    Nuclear propulsion in an aircraft? Isn't that going to spray radioactive matter everywhere?
    • marshmallow_12 6y ago
      That's why it doesn't yet exist! Find a way to either contain or limit the radiation. Use hydrogen fission. I'm not fussy about the details. Tony Stark managed to fit a reactor in his chest! why can't we?
• wwww4all 6y ago
  Look at current society. Who wants to spend decades studying STEM and working for average salary these days? Tik Tok stars and Twitch bros and ethots are making multi million dollars playing games. This country can’t build a functioning high speed rail system, that other countries built 30 years ago. How can we build an airplane now? Public school teachers and teachers unions are opposed to opening schools. They never cared about kids and education. US is at bread and circuses stage of decline. Time to accept reality and deal with it appropriately.
• thewarrior 6y ago
  The requirement specs for this plane seem crazy. It has to be as agile and fast as an F-22. It needs to do ground support like an A-10. It has to be able to do carrier missions and on top of that it has to take off and land vertically. And yeah do all this while being cheap and maintainable. It’s basically a unicorn.
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Because Boeing is now ran by MBAs who want to maximize profit. A low cost F-35 means less money for Boeing in the short term. What about the long term? Fuck the long term. It is all about quarters, and short term bonuses.
• hansthehorse 6y ago
  The time from project start to first flight of the SR 71 was 47 months - with slide rules and manual drafting.
  • p_l 6y ago
    With heavy use of computers, including one special that was built just for the project effectively - and it was critical for the project getting off the ground at all. And even then a lot of the calculation was done on specialised scientific calculators operated by low-status (human) "computers".
• jacquesm 6y ago
  > Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. > No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today. Excellent!
• jacquesm 6y ago
  > I know Peter Thiel is not popular here, but his conversations about technological progress seem to be spot on: we just cant build cool shit anymore. As opposed to the other PayPal dude that is building spacecraft. It's more about what Peter Thiel can't do.
• totetsu 6y ago
  If it stops us producing Civilization Ending technologies like the A-bomb then I'm all for the toxicity... Not all progress is linear, efficiency is no as vitrue unto itself!
  • arp242 6y ago
    Well, someone would have invented it sooner or later, because after the discovery of nuclear physics it doesn't take that much brainpower to figure out the basic concept of "if we smash a bunch of neutrons in these unstable isotopes, then we're going to get a big kaboom!" The actual technological legwork is a bit more effort (and the Germans famously failed at it, although they probably would have gotten there eventually), but not insurmountably hard either. This is the curse with a lot of these technologies.
• Krasnol 6y ago
  But isn't the main reason for that "decline" that things get complicated while all those easy and fast things have already been invented?
• madeofpalk 6y ago
  > all I have is 140 characters Well actually we've had 280 characters since 2017. Talk about progress!
• Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > we just cant build cool shit anymore JPL just landed Perseverance, and we have had weekly SpaceX launches with successful stage recoveries (thought to be impossible), Falcon Heavy sent a 1st Gen Tesla Roadster which is orbiting Mars as we speak... Thiel's windmill powered Bitcoin operation in Texas, which likely froze last week, is another example of how absurd his statement is. I think Thiel is not liked because he uses hyperbole to make blanket statements that are clearly not true. And his business acumen much like his actual tech skills, are dubious at best despite being immensely wealthy. The US will always be a leader in innovation in the World, I'd argue this is the larges concentration of talent the World has ever seen, including Florence during the enlightenment. What we have a problem with is an absurd amount of useless bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, Industries that get in the way and all want their slice of the pie for nothing more than being a middleman and ultimately pay no taxes to re-invest in the education of said future talent, all while the entrepreneurs and talented labour take all the risk and get little to no reward for their efforts due to a depreciating fiat currency and ever increasing taxes and more and more diminishing social mobility due the aforementioned concentration of wealth. CRISPR is not going to solve much if any of your problems, maybe your kid's but not yours. If you think the US cannot build amazing things, and is somehow not a leader in this the problem is with you and, I guess Thiel.
• kart23 6y ago
  Fraction of the cost? Might I ask how much each A-12 and SR-71 cost, and the total cost of development?
• greens 6y ago
  I can't believe that you're talking about the mass-murder of civilians like it's some sort of triumph, especially since you could have made the exact same point citing the trinity test. And it's so weird that you use the term "toxic environment" right after that. IMO AI progress in the last 10 years has drastically exceeded reasonable expectations. You can buy a helicopter any time you want.
  • misiti3780 6y ago
    I dont think the "mass-murder of civilians like it's some sort of triumph", although I can see the way I wrote it sounds like that is what I mean (and I cannot edit it because of HN). Quit assuming bad faith in my comment. Why on earth would I think that ? I meant that we discovered fission and then we built a bomb in under 6 years. Even if you disagree with the outcome of what happen in Japan, the Manhattan Project was an amazing scientific accomplishment, and there is no way the US could do something of that scale, scientifically in 2021.
    • greens 6y ago
      Ok, sorry for assuming bad faith and ranting. Still, I think it's pretty hard to compare engineering achievements like this. Is it harder to make a fission bomb in 6 years with 1940s technology, or a COVID vaccine in 1 year with 2020s technology? Also, I seems like we could be having this conversation in 1940 about an american battleship program.
      • misiti3780 6y ago
        No problem! The COVID vaccine was an achievement, without a doubt, but i still think we need time to see how effective it will be as the virus mutates and make sure there are no long term side affects. If the vaccines achieve herd immunity ends the pandemic then history will be very kind to it and the scientists that created it. One thought is the actual creating of the vaccine must have been considerable less complicated than the atom bombs if it was really created in one day.
• redis_mlc 6y ago
  > I really did want a flying car They exist and aren't even hard to build but ... In the US you would need an FAA rating to fly it (about $10k), so most people actually don't want one.
• every 6y ago
  The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? If you're a defense contractor, none of it. If you're a tax-payer, all of it...
• devwastaken 6y ago
  We did send multiple car sized rovors to mars on a pretty decent budget. And have reusable rockets. So, not sure if we "can't build cool things" anymore. More so that were not at risk of global war is a driving factor for not having to innovate military much.
• jet_32951 6y ago
  The core problem is the failure of the contracting agency to set requirements and stick with them. Once a contractor gets galloping requirements you get instant proof that better is the enemy of good.
• paulmd 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that the F-35 was pitched as saving money by doing everything for everyone. It was going to be a lightweight fighter with carrier-landing durability (contradictory) that had options for both single-engine, multi-engine, and VTOL engine (all contradictory), with a big-wing and small-wing version, that could be a quasi-air-superiority, quasi-guided-missile, quasi-bomb-truck, or even wild-weasel/SEAD (all contradictory roles), and replace about 75% of the aircraft in the arsenal. The SR-71 was designed to do one thing. Go fast and take pictures. It didn't carry bombs. They eventually tried to put a drone on it and it didn't work and was abandoned. You don't even have to look back as far as the SR-71 though, the F-22 was a reasonably successful program - bumpy, expensive, but it produced what is the world's preeminent air-superiority fighter. It is not a bomb truck, it does not land on carriers. It does one thing well. Others are not wrong about the fact that the F-35's merit to Congress was as a jobs program, either. This is in fact what a lot of military spending really is. We build tanks only to drive them into the desert and store them, all to keep those production lines running and keep people employed. They could be building trains or something else equally well. The underlying problem there is that the US political system has become byzantine and cumbersome. When "played" adversarially with all "players" using the maximum extent of their political powers, it takes supermajority control of all three branches of government to govern. This has promoted a byzantine system on top of that to try and come up with mechanisms to fix a broken, unfair, and non-representative process. Massive over-spending on military as opposed to other types of government-sponsored research, production, etc are only one side effect of that.
  • rbanffy 6y ago
    > It does one thing well The importance of this engineering principle cannot be overstated. It applies to everything - from home appliances to spacecraft to software.
    • pas 6y ago
      Interestingly it does a bunch of things well, fast and takes amazing pictures, goes very high, etc. But most importantly those are synergistic, they form a coherent whole, we even say one thing, because it does so well at these things simultaneously that we now consider it almost inseparable.
• 23iofj 6y ago
  WE DEVELOPED AND DEPLOYED SEVERAL VACCINES TO A NOVEL VIRUS IN LESS THAN A YEAR. The year over year progress on computing power/efficiency/size is beyond impressive. Modern computer hardware is an amazing feat of engineering. The first complete sequences of the Human Genome was completed in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project which started in 1990. Total cost of $100,000,000. That's actually not so expensive given the payoff is literally a complete copy of our own genetic code. Today, less than 20 years later, the cost of sequencing that same genome is about $1,000. The LHC? Super fucking cool. We do build cool shit. Incredibly cool shit. WAY cooler than dumb ass killing machines like fission bombs and space-age fighter jets. And BTW, going from fission in theory to something actually useful for doing something other than killing people did take a couple decades (first nuke power plant turned on in 1954). We can build all that cool shit you want, too. Flying cars? We've been able to do that for decades. You don't have a flying car because you'd almost certainly end up killing yourself or someone else and probably couldn't afford the fuel to operate it on the daily. There's a reason you can't just rent a Cessna and go out for a joy ride without any training. The "no cool shit" thesis always uses killing machines and rich person toys as examples. I don't want stupid rich person toys that even rich people don't actually use when they get them (flying cars). I want to be able to Zoom with my parents during a pandemic.
• mtnygard 6y ago
  They had a huge advantage then. No email.
• trynumber9 6y ago
  SR-71 was based on the existing A-12 design. Plus it didn't have a bunch of missions. Much less opportunity for feature creep when it has one purpose.
• amznthrwaway 6y ago
  The saddest thing about all of this, IMO, is that dishonest hacks like you use the failure of one big-ass program to pretend that nothing good or interesting is happening anywhere. You are wrong. Peter Thiel is wrong. And both of you should be forced to live in the world that you pretend exists, instead of being allowed to benefit from good, value-adding, hard-working, innovative people. It fucking sucks that dishonest, ignorant, lazy, good-for-nothing sacks of shit like you are allowed to benefit from innovations that are likely to save your life someday, even as you pretend they don’t exist. Just because you suck doesn’t mean everyone sucks, you ignorant fuckin’ loser.
• dghughes 6y ago
  >The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? You think that's bad? In Canada my government funded the F-35 program but we're not buying any F-35 jets. Spending a bit less than $1 billion for nothing.
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• lacker 6y ago
  Crispr, while awesome, has not yet turned into real concrete technology that is making our lives better. I think the best example of serious technological advances recently is the mRNA vaccines.
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Well, IMO what you're really advocating for is massive government-initiated research and development that ISN'T outsourced as pork to contractors. The lobbyists destroyed those types of programs. We used to have a pipeline for PhD candidates to these government programs, but that doesn't seem to exist anymore. Speaking of unpopular guys, Musk's Tesla and SpaceX are very much "skunkworks" companies. Maybe the US could, say, incubate more companies like that? The irrational hate of Musk reflects America's deep and strong anti-intellectual anti-nerd anti-engineering popular culture bias. Sure Musk isn't a boy scout, but the list of evil noxious business executive that are objectively worse than Musk in the last 50 years is probably about 10,000 to 20,000 longer than anything Musk has done. Possibly 100,000. Huge numbers of healthcare insurance, petroleum, defense, mining, and manufacturing executives. Microsoft and Intel's run of market manipulation and monopoly. Cable/Telephone companies sitting on their monopolies. The 50s and 60s still had the overarching group achievement and patriotism from WWII. But our modern era has steadily fallen more and more to greed, apathy, laziness, and especially narcissism.
• tored 6y ago
  There are of course many different reasons to "we just cant build cool shit anymore", but one is not understanding tradeoffs. I think it is more likely for everyone involved, team, management, project, product, client, end user etc, to understand & accept that you have to make tradeoffs when you are on a tight time frame and/or budget. You solve one thing, not a hundred different things, even though they can be equally as important in the grand scheme of things. F-35 tried to replace fighters in three different branches (Air force, Navy and Marine) and be multirole and also do close ground support, all with a long time frame and huge budget. Some tradeoffs can be solved with a bigger budget, but many tradeoffs can't. If you want your bombs to be stored inside the fuselage to be more stealthy like the F-35, then of course the fuselage will become bigger, thus creating more drag. No amount of money will change that. F-35 seems from the outside like a project that didn't understand & accept tradeoffs.
• SkyMarshal 6y ago
  You may be overreacting to one news story. The US Air Force designed the F-35 successor and built a prototype much faster and less expensively - in just one year - using advanced digital engineering and manufacturing simulations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25797112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25797112
• jmnicolas 6y ago
  IMHO innovation isn't linear: when you discover something new (say the combustion engine for example) you make great progresses at first but then you spend decades or even centuries refining these progresses. Add to this the office politics, corruption and big players crushing any hint of competition and you have general stagnation. I have read about the eventual failure of the F35 for years now. The naysayers had solid arguments but were ostracized by people with conflict of interest.
• cm2187 6y ago
  When it matters, I think we have shown to be perfectly capable of moving fast. Just look at how quickly we came up with a vaccine for covid. In a state of war (or cold war, or pandemic) you cut the red tape. Approval processes that typically take weeks magically take only hours. But it is true that when there is no particular urgency, the multiplication of bureaucracy and regulations compounded with the complexity of modern technologies makes it difficult to deliver cheap and fast.
• neycoda 6y ago
  You think dropping nukes on people is cool shit? I think doing that is literally toxic.
• runarberg 6y ago
  I might be digging my self in some mud here but when you say: > Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today. Are you for real? It is hard to find any more toxic place in resent history then during the horrors of World War 2. This time saw a holocaust with forced labor and mass killings of religious and ethnic minorities in multiple countries accross at least 3 continents. It saw indiscriminate bombing of heavy civilian population centers in densely populated centers in Asia and Europe. It saw mass famine and starvation in several regions of the world. About 3% of the entire world population died in these horrors, and many more lost their homes and livelihoods. And you mention the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as some kind of an achievement. Between 129,000–226,000 people died in that terror, and two whole cities were leveled to the ground, with the mass homelessness and medical and social emergencies that follows. Perhaps it is not your intention to devalue these horrors and you are simply trying emphasize what was possible when the political climate was more unified. But please be careful with your words. Don’t describe our time as toxic while glorifying the most toxic times ever witnessed in our recent history.