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Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must
by bigtones 5y ago
Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.
- ragnot 5y agoAs much as I hate to admit it, "ego" has driven so much innovation in space that it was probably inevitable that something like this would happen.
- krapp 5y agoThe egos of the rich fuel the engine of civilization, and the blood of the poor grease its wheels.
- HPsquared 5y agoI think it's a bigger category: the egos of the powerful. The rich are a subset.
- krapp 5y agoI can't think of anyone powerful enough who isn't also rich. Although "rich" is a vaguely defined term. There still to me seems to be a direct relationship between money and power - billionaires can push the world further than millionaires, than the upper class, etc.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoMoney and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you. The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways of doing this are perfectly legal). Conversely, political power - the kind mediated by legal systems or explicit threats of violence - is directly convertible to money. (There's also a special variant of the latter - power wielded by organized religions. The power to browbeat others into doing almost any arbitrary work. Of course, that one too is trivially convertible to both money and political power, and vice versa. That's why fully separating business, church and state is fundamentally impossible. They're different facets of the same thing. An Unholy Trinity.)
- zhoujianfu 5y agoRich is how much money you own. Power is how much money you control. They’re not as closely linked as you think. A managing partner of a $1B fund is more powerful than a person worth $10B on paper whose wealth is all tied up in a minority position in a company they are unable to sell the shares of. Or consider the power of Biden vs his personal net worth.
- robertlagrant 5y agoThat's why being worth something on paper is not the same thing as money.
- aaaxyz 5y agoThat's a bit of a tautology isn't it?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hellbannedguy 5y agoWe used to have smart guys in competition. Edison vs. Tesla. Not we have rich business savy guys with not much of a science background holding the cards. I have met very few wealthy men, young or old, who had great ideas. It's almost like the money dulls their brains? And their vanity projects are usually way out of their wheelhouse. It's the same with Writers. I have read very few wealthy guys shop could write. They certainly have the time to write, but it's dribble. They are only read because they have money.
- allovertheworld 5y agoThat's because Edison vs. Tesla was really mostly theoretical with some funds for engineering (and marketing). The space race is really mostly engineering which requires lots of money.
- slugiscool99 5y agoApparently Edison was much more of a businessman than his legacy suggests - which was intentional on his part. Similar to Bill Gates, they both started as engineers but made their money organizing people. See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-nature-of-thomas-edisons-genius https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-natur...
- majkinetor 5y agoNot really a competition. Comparing Tesla to Edison is like comparing Virgin Galactic to SpaceX.
- pessimizer 5y agoEdison wasn't a smart guy. He hired smart guys and didn't give them credit for their inventions, while trying to talk to the dead.
- kergonath 5y agoSounds exactly like at least a pair of these attention-seeking billionaires who rant about technology and engineering.
- aaroninsf 5y agoI would unpack "gutsy" with its overtones of grudging admiration, into a lot harsher terms related to toxic narcissism and what amounts to a pissing contest between competitive men. I suspect there is a natural evolutionary curb on the somewhat sociopathic qualities at work, whereby bravado is kept in some check by self-culling being commonplace.
- bee_rider 5y agoThe whole exercise was dumb. Flying up and then down on a rocket is a difference in degree, rather than type, from taking a ride on the Vomit Comet. Orbit -- half way to anywhere -- that's the accomplishment.
- bnralt 5y agoI also don't think people realize how close to the earth these people still were. Take a globe, hold your finger as close as you can to it without touching, and that's about as high as Bezos and Branson went. As you said, orbital is what matters, and a suborbital flight around the Karman line doesn't mean much.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Noumenon72 5y agoFor comparison, how high off the globe would orbit be?
- bee_rider 5y agoOrbit can occur at any distance from Earth if you are the right speed I guess -- although below a handful of fingers you'll get significant drag from the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere doesn't just suddenly cut off at some point, it is a matter of degrees. But for example, the ISS orbits around 400km and needs to be boosted a 'few times a year.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#Examples (The Karman line is around 100km, so if we want to use 500ish km as the threshold for reasonable orbits, we really are in the ballpark of a hand's worth of fingers). The altitude isn't really the point, so much as the trajectory -- if they miss the ground at least once I say we give them a round of applause.
- SonicScrub 5y agoBit of a bad comparison of accomplishment. Low Earth Orbit isn't that much higher. But it is much much faster (which is what's hard). Getting into orbit is about going fast enough that the centripetal force from your velocity keeps you aloft. To get into a stable orbit at a precise target altitude requires accurate timings and controls, and lots more energy. The engineering challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoHardly the first time Branson has put his life at risk, with others in tow, for an aeronautical accomplishment.
- jlawson 5y agoIt seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day. If I have to choose between this and nuclear-armed superpowers intimidating each other with super-accurate rockets - I'll take the billionaires. To be honest I think it's awesome. We need people who are able and willing to push for something beyond the everyday, and it doesn't really matter why they're doing it.
- krisoft 5y ago> it doesn't really matter why they're doing it. I disagree with that. Why they are doing what they are doing is very important. Elon is a set of flaws walking on two legs but his plans make sense: Humanity has all their eggs in one basket by being a single planet species. To change that we need to make space travel much, much cheaper than it was. To do that we need reusable and economical spacecrafts. He works alongside this plan. Branson made people build him the adult version of a coin operated mall kiddie ride. You give it money and it shakes you around and later you can tell people that you are now an astronaut. Two people, both have a ton of money and both used some of their wealth to assemble a team to build a spacecraft. The difference between them is the “why” they did this. One if suceeds has changed the history of humankind. If he fails at the grand goal misserably he still made a vastly succesfull space company. The other if he succeeds has a funfair ride with bragging rights. Meh. The why is all that matters, because it affects the how and the what fundamentally.
- achenet 5y ago> It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day. No, you're overgeneralizing. As counter-examples: - fitness goals - financial freedom goals (eg the FIRE communities) - altruistic goals - romantic goals (impress a potential partner) are all proof that humans can be motivated by health/desire for physical well-being, kindness, compassion and personal comfort to progress to goals beyond the day-to-day. Competition motivates some progress, but there are other sources of motivation as well :)
- jlawson 5y agoFitness goals are generally related to romatic goals. Romantic goals are inherently competitive - if you succeed, you're taking the partner from whoever else would have gotten her had you never existed. Financial freedom isn't competitive really, you're right. Altruism is borderline, given how much of "altruistic" activity is really about social signaling and competitive status games through conspicuous giving. Even if subconsciously. All the above are day-to-day goals though, except perhaps altruism. By not day-to-day I mean something beyond satisfying the desires of your physical body to feel good, fuck, eat well, be safe, be admired, etc. Goals about species, deep time, eternal questions, the fate of the environment or the planet.
- mc32 5y agoThere are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry! It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed getting out, shuts the door and it goes back up the ramp. It's all fakery.
- dboreham 5y agoAlso those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!
- amatecha 5y agoOh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!
- dylan604 5y agoIt still amazes me that anyone still believes that the pictures they see on TV are in any way real. 100% of content on TV is fake. I used to say except the news, but now I'm not even able to trust that. If it's a commercial, definitely fake. If it's a TV show, 100% fake. Games shows shoot 5 episodes in a day, so when they say "last week's winner" it was last hour's.
- bonestamp2 5y agoTalk Shows are the worst for this. Many of them have a rehearsal with the guests. It's no surprise that all of the guests have amazingly funny or interesting stories about every topic the host brings up. Once you know this is how they work, it's impossible to unsee it when you're watching them. I'm sorry I ruined talk shows for anyone here who may like them.
- timmytokyo 5y agoViolating airspace regulations isn't gutsy. It's irresponsible and selfish. It puts others at risk.
- rpmisms 5y agoLife is risk, sometimes with other people's lives in the balance. Violating their airspace, in this context, was absolutely gutsy, and dangerous, and stupid, but all of them have massive balls and my respect.
- JohnFen 5y agoWhat about that is deserving of respect? Edit: This was an honest question, and I was hoping for an answer that would help me to understand. It's a shame that this is getting downvoted rather than someone enlightening me.
- doctor_eval 5y agoAnyone can win if they are allowed to break the rules. You get my respect by completing the mission within the rules.
- Sebb767 5y agoTo be fair, the rules they are really up against are those of physics and they naturally can't break those. FAA rules are rather pale in comparison.
- doctor_eval 5y agoThe rules I'm referring to are the ones that say "if this light goes red, abort the mission instead of potentially crashing into other people or killing everyone aboard".
- bumby 5y agoThis is unfortunately common. Even NASA regularly ignores their own standards and procedures due to schedule and budget pressures.
- decebalus1 5y ago> the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. So much energy invested in a dick measuring contest. I hope humanity reaches a point in which the incentive structure would stimulate a more meaningful investment of human labor. Not to say I'm not part of the problem...
- bamboozled 5y agoFunny too because no one cares,few months after the event and it’s all water under the bridge. People remember Yuri Gagarin, not these people.
- baud147258 5y agoI'd wager that if Branson had died on the flight, people would remember it
- bamboozled 5y agoYuri didn't die, everyone remembers it, I don't get your point.
- Aeolun 5y ago> Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move. I’m more concerned that he also puts other people’s lives on the line.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> all for the inflated ego of one man. Well, no. All for the best marketing position for the near-space tourism business that Virgin (and, in competition, Blue Origin) is launching and each promoting with the media frenzy around their respective founder-on-board demo launch.
- justinclift 5y ago> Brilliant well written article. Personally, I found it the exact opposite. It's like the author was trying to pad something simple into "War and Peace" type volume. Gave up after just a few paragraphs, as it's clear the author had no intention of getting to the point any time soon.