7 ms·

Clear skies and tailwinds. Can't get back to the Moon fast enough, while we still have living continuity to Apollo. Can't believe how low the low in our space p

Clear skies and tailwinds. Can't get back to the Moon fast enough, while we still have living continuity to Apollo. Can't believe how low the low in our space program has been.

minikites 5y ago
SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA instead.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  NASA seems confident enough in SpaceX's ability to award them a contract for Starship to take them back to the moon. "This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA's decision a week ago to award SpaceX—and only SpaceX—a contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to the Moon, could launch as early as 2024." https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/five-reasons-why-nasas-starship-award-is-a-watershed-moment-in-spaceflight/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/five-reasons-why-nas...
- thelean12 5y ago
  SpaceX also blew up a huge amount of their Falcon rockets at the beginning too, and now they're consistently bringing astronauts to the ISS and payloads into orbit. So I'm not sure what your point is.
- derekp7 5y ago
  I love how whenever SpaceX fails to land a booster that I see headlines of "SpaceX blows up another rocket", even if it still delivered its payload to orbit. I do wonder, however, where NASA would be if they would have continued with the DC-X prototype instead of abandoning it when it had a landing leg failure causing it to topple over in an early test.
  - minikites 5y ago
    It's because of Elon's hubris and the ways that hubris is baked into the entire institutional culture. I think far fewer people would delight in their failures if they showed an ounce of humility from any of their mistakes. Instead, they continue to make wild eyed proclamations and promises of impossible goals, but it's Elon so people continue to believe him for some reason.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Great progress comes from Elon's hubris. > people continue to believe him for some reason. I believe in him, and the reason is obvious. He gets things done nobody else seems able to.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  NASA/JPL have an ample history of blowing up experimental rockets. Same as the Russians. The Germans had it hard with the V2s as well I'd recommend people to look up into those previous failures (and SpaceX is finding "new ways" to fail)
  - dennis_jeeves 5y ago
    lol. I rarely test my code, but when I do, I test it on prod.
    - raverbashing 5y ago
      Unit tests can't catch all bugs ;)
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    See the book "V2" by Dornberger on all the failures of the V2 rockets. Quite a good read.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  Occurrence of failures directly correlates to occurrence of growth and innovation. SpaceX is (a) innovating very fast, and therefore we see lots of failures, (b) embracing those failures as opportunities to grow, and (c) installing many sensors and collecting a lot of data to maximize the chance that they can learn a lot from whatever failures occur. Make no mistake, if a company or institution isn't trying a lot and failing a lot to achieve a new type of goal, it's also not making much progress toward any new type of goal.
  - minikites 5y ago
    Then why shouldn't we apply this same standard to government projects? Any time a government project doesn't go perfectly it's used an excuse to scrap the very concept of government since "they can't do anything right".
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      As far as I'm concerned, the government is free to innovate, as long as my daily life (and that of my fellow Americans) is not part of what's being experimented with. We have the entire corpus of world history to refer to for experimental data on government policy -- let's use it as much as possible. Social crises aren't worth creating for the data they yield. Regarding technical innovation, NASA did a lot of that in the 1960s. There were a lot of failures then (Mercury and Gemini programs), followed by incredible success (Apollo program). NASA's work with SpaceX is another great form of innovation -- pick the most innovative commercial partners and move forward.
    - lmm 5y ago
      The US culture around government is really weird. And yes, if people gave the government permission to fail sometimes they could probably do things 10x cheaper. But that requires a level of trust that just isn't there. I don't know why, and I'm glad I live somewhere more functional.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        No only does lack of trust prevent innovation, on the other end of the spectrum you have people who won't tolerate failure because it might give the distrustful of government people data point or talking point.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  I'd rather have them fail their first 9 attempts that each take a month before succeeding, than succeeding on the first attempt that takes a decade. Failure during research & development isn't necessarily a bad thing.
aplummer 5y ago
Pictures of Pluto, a helicopter on Mars, I’m more inspired than ever by nasa
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  And I love them for it. But I want humans on the Moon again.
  - HDMI_Cable 5y ago
    To be fair, the pure scientific impact of the robotic missions is probably much higher than human ones (besides advances in medical/bioscience). But, placing people on the moon probably brings more funding for NASA than robots. Edit: Both are still extremely cool though
    - mandevil 5y ago
      To compare the scientific return of robots and people, we can compare the results of the only space rock both have visited: the Moon. The six manned Apollo missions brought back much much much more scientific return than all of the contemporary robotic missions. Apollo brought back 382 kg of moon rocks. Three Soviet probes (first one, Luna 16, between Apollo 12 and 14) brought back a total of 326g. While it's a bit facile to claim that's the whole difference, I would say that the difference in scientific return was at least one order of magnitude, if not quite as large as the moon rock numbers. Now, the Apollo program also cost much more than the robotic missions. If you are willing to invest enough (e.g. Apollo was >1% of US GDP/year for most of the 60's) you can get an enormous amount of scientific return from a manned mission, but robots are useful for budgets that can't cover a manned mission.
      - vkou 5y ago
        Bear in mind that the Luna missions were done with 1960s Soviet robotics technology... And were only a side-show to their goal of a manned landing, which was hamstrung by repeated launcher problems. (And as soon as they lost the moon race, interest in this immediately dried up on the Soviet side - the sample return in the 70s was an afterthought.) If your goal is to plant a flag and ship back ~400 Kg of moon rocks, you could do it today, using robots, for a tiny fraction of a manned mission's budget. The thing is, bringing back 400 Kg of moon rocks is not 400 times more valuable than bringing back 1 Kg of moon rocks.
vkou 5y ago
The reason the space program wound down was because the moon race was a vanity project. Once the vanity goal was achieved, nobody had any reason to go back there. Meanwhile, people and groups with non-vanity goals are making extensive use of space in 2021, compared to 1969... But that's not very sexy, because things like weather satellites and imaging satellites, and communications satellites and the occasional telescope actually accomplish concrete, useful things, at a fraction of the Apollo budget.
- anonAndOn 5y ago
  > nobody had any reason to go back there Don't tell that to the Radio Astronomers. Something, something, dark side.[0] [0]https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_I_Phase_II/lunar_crater_radio_telescope/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...
publicola1990 5y ago
Last years Chang'e 5 mission was essentially a robotic Apollo mission. This decade does look to be promising for Lunar exploration.
- mandevil 5y ago
  Chang'e 5 was more like a modern day Luna 16 than an Apollo mission.
  - publicola1990 5y ago
    Luna 16 had no rendezvous in lunar orbit, while Change'e 5 had the sample return capsule rendezvous with the Orbiter, like the Appolo missions.

Clear skies and tailwinds. Can't get back to the Moon fast enough, while we still have living continuity to Apollo. Can't believe how low the low in our space program has been.

minikites 5y ago

SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA instead.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
NASA seems confident enough in SpaceX's ability to award them a contract for Starship to take them back to the moon. "This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA's decision a week ago to award SpaceX—and only SpaceX—a contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to the Moon, could launch as early as 2024." https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/five-reasons-why-nasas-starship-award-is-a-watershed-moment-in-spaceflight/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/five-reasons-why-nas...
thelean12 5y ago
SpaceX also blew up a huge amount of their Falcon rockets at the beginning too, and now they're consistently bringing astronauts to the ISS and payloads into orbit. So I'm not sure what your point is.
derekp7 5y ago
I love how whenever SpaceX fails to land a booster that I see headlines of "SpaceX blows up another rocket", even if it still delivered its payload to orbit. I do wonder, however, where NASA would be if they would have continued with the DC-X prototype instead of abandoning it when it had a landing leg failure causing it to topple over in an early test.
- minikites 5y ago
  It's because of Elon's hubris and the ways that hubris is baked into the entire institutional culture. I think far fewer people would delight in their failures if they showed an ounce of humility from any of their mistakes. Instead, they continue to make wild eyed proclamations and promises of impossible goals, but it's Elon so people continue to believe him for some reason.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Great progress comes from Elon's hubris. > people continue to believe him for some reason. I believe in him, and the reason is obvious. He gets things done nobody else seems able to.
raverbashing 5y ago
NASA/JPL have an ample history of blowing up experimental rockets. Same as the Russians. The Germans had it hard with the V2s as well I'd recommend people to look up into those previous failures (and SpaceX is finding "new ways" to fail)
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  lol. I rarely test my code, but when I do, I test it on prod.
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    Unit tests can't catch all bugs ;)
- WalterBright 5y ago
  See the book "V2" by Dornberger on all the failures of the V2 rockets. Quite a good read.
TimTheTinker 5y ago
Occurrence of failures directly correlates to occurrence of growth and innovation. SpaceX is (a) innovating very fast, and therefore we see lots of failures, (b) embracing those failures as opportunities to grow, and (c) installing many sensors and collecting a lot of data to maximize the chance that they can learn a lot from whatever failures occur. Make no mistake, if a company or institution isn't trying a lot and failing a lot to achieve a new type of goal, it's also not making much progress toward any new type of goal.
- minikites 5y ago
  Then why shouldn't we apply this same standard to government projects? Any time a government project doesn't go perfectly it's used an excuse to scrap the very concept of government since "they can't do anything right".
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    As far as I'm concerned, the government is free to innovate, as long as my daily life (and that of my fellow Americans) is not part of what's being experimented with. We have the entire corpus of world history to refer to for experimental data on government policy -- let's use it as much as possible. Social crises aren't worth creating for the data they yield. Regarding technical innovation, NASA did a lot of that in the 1960s. There were a lot of failures then (Mercury and Gemini programs), followed by incredible success (Apollo program). NASA's work with SpaceX is another great form of innovation -- pick the most innovative commercial partners and move forward.
  - lmm 5y ago
    The US culture around government is really weird. And yes, if people gave the government permission to fail sometimes they could probably do things 10x cheaper. But that requires a level of trust that just isn't there. I don't know why, and I'm glad I live somewhere more functional.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      No only does lack of trust prevent innovation, on the other end of the spectrum you have people who won't tolerate failure because it might give the distrustful of government people data point or talking point.
Denvercoder9 5y ago
I'd rather have them fail their first 9 attempts that each take a month before succeeding, than succeeding on the first attempt that takes a decade. Failure during research & development isn't necessarily a bad thing.

aplummer 5y ago

Pictures of Pluto, a helicopter on Mars, I’m more inspired than ever by nasa

BitwiseFool 5y ago
And I love them for it. But I want humans on the Moon again.
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  To be fair, the pure scientific impact of the robotic missions is probably much higher than human ones (besides advances in medical/bioscience). But, placing people on the moon probably brings more funding for NASA than robots. Edit: Both are still extremely cool though
  - mandevil 5y ago
    To compare the scientific return of robots and people, we can compare the results of the only space rock both have visited: the Moon. The six manned Apollo missions brought back much much much more scientific return than all of the contemporary robotic missions. Apollo brought back 382 kg of moon rocks. Three Soviet probes (first one, Luna 16, between Apollo 12 and 14) brought back a total of 326g. While it's a bit facile to claim that's the whole difference, I would say that the difference in scientific return was at least one order of magnitude, if not quite as large as the moon rock numbers. Now, the Apollo program also cost much more than the robotic missions. If you are willing to invest enough (e.g. Apollo was >1% of US GDP/year for most of the 60's) you can get an enormous amount of scientific return from a manned mission, but robots are useful for budgets that can't cover a manned mission.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Bear in mind that the Luna missions were done with 1960s Soviet robotics technology... And were only a side-show to their goal of a manned landing, which was hamstrung by repeated launcher problems. (And as soon as they lost the moon race, interest in this immediately dried up on the Soviet side - the sample return in the 70s was an afterthought.) If your goal is to plant a flag and ship back ~400 Kg of moon rocks, you could do it today, using robots, for a tiny fraction of a manned mission's budget. The thing is, bringing back 400 Kg of moon rocks is not 400 times more valuable than bringing back 1 Kg of moon rocks.

vkou 5y ago

The reason the space program wound down was because the moon race was a vanity project. Once the vanity goal was achieved, nobody had any reason to go back there. Meanwhile, people and groups with non-vanity goals are making extensive use of space in 2021, compared to 1969... But that's not very sexy, because things like weather satellites and imaging satellites, and communications satellites and the occasional telescope actually accomplish concrete, useful things, at a fraction of the Apollo budget.

anonAndOn 5y ago
> nobody had any reason to go back there Don't tell that to the Radio Astronomers. Something, something, dark side.[0] [0]https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_I_Phase_II/lunar_crater_radio_telescope/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...

publicola1990 5y ago

Last years Chang'e 5 mission was essentially a robotic Apollo mission. This decade does look to be promising for Lunar exploration.

mandevil 5y ago
Chang'e 5 was more like a modern day Luna 16 than an Apollo mission.
- publicola1990 5y ago
  Luna 16 had no rendezvous in lunar orbit, while Change'e 5 had the sample return capsule rendezvous with the Orbiter, like the Appolo missions.