6 ms·

Elon Musk Shows off the Dragon Capsule, Back From Space (video)

96 points by thenextcorner 14y ago

dhughes 14y ago
When did Slashdot get TV?
- kristopolous 14y ago
  yeah, that's totally the biggest news here for me. Is there actually a decent half hour video program of technology news that's not just a beauty pageant for new consumer electronics?
  - someperson 14y ago
    > beauty pageant for new consumer electronics That's a good way to describe it. There's been a lot of crappy 30 minute tech shows, with CNET TV (has local versions produced in suprisingly many countries) being the latest one I've been exposed to (and one of the worst.) The same was once true of game-review shows. But in Australia at least, the show "Good Game" (and the for-kids spinoff "Good Game Spawn Point") have completely amazed me with it's quality and the hosts being the kind of people who would watch the show. Sorry for the long-winded post, but I find it hard to articulate the huge shift that happens going from a technology show that's basically shows paid-for advertising to ones that are GOOD. I hope somebody can make the weekly 20-30 minute show that I crave, but can't articulate :)
- sp332 14y ago
  Just at the end of March. https://tv.slashdot.org/ https://tv.slashdot.org/
wissler 14y ago
Don't miss seeing the animation toward the end of the video.
- minikomi 14y ago
  The first instance of that landing would be quite something to witness!
  - frankydp 14y ago
    I would drive any distance to see a vstol landing of an suborbital or orbital vehicle. Talk about game changing.
    - mkramlich 14y ago
      Agreed. If you'd like to cheat and get a sneak preview of what it could be like, at least the last leg, go dig up the Armadillo Aerospace videos of their capsule VTOL launch/land successes. As a thumbnail argument, if we've seen Armadillo do just the VTOL launch/land part, and we've seen SpaceX do the rocket launch & parachute splashdown part, it's not hard to imagine the engineering equivalent of smooshing those two solution spaces together into a single entity which can accomplish both. I will be as giddy as a lunch table of teen girls at recess when I see SpaceX pull this off.
      - InclinedPlane 14y ago
        Armadillo, Blue Origin, and Masten (and the DC-XA before them) have all been working on rocket powered VTVL flights and have done sub-scale test flights. It's a technology that just plain makes sense, especially now that computers are so cheap and so fast. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be so common and routine that a lot of people will think it's a natural part of spaceflight and wonder how it could possibly be done any other way.
- dantheman 14y ago
  Agreed - the 6 minute mark is great. You can see the engine return to earth.
- jordanthoms 14y ago
  Yeah, it'll be incredible to see that kind of precision with just retro rockets, imagine travelling down in that with no wings and no parachute!
confluence 14y ago
Cue comments about how Elon Musk is doing so much more with his money than everyone else, and how SpaceX/Tesla Motors/SolarCity are so much more valuable than anything else. Cue complaints about how no one works on hard problems any more, and that everyone is just chasing instagram/facebook/twitter/groupon/zynga/social/local/mobile. Forget that Elon Musk started an advertising/publishing company in 1995-1997, intelligently riding the bubble, and then created X.com (a more complex Mint.com), which he then merged with Confinity to create PayPal (from where he was essentially fired - unfortunately). Forget that battery tech wasn't useful enough until just over 5 years ago (not nearly dense/cheap enough), and how we needed the massive production increases in laptop battery production for Tesla to make sense. Also forget that NASA had 0 use for SpaceX until the Space Shuttle program was shutdown - which is curiously lined up with the COTS program. Also forget that Solar panels required massive production gains thanks to China which only occurred within the past 5 years. Finally, ignore the fact that he would never have been able to do anything without the money from a stupid email payments thing. Big problems are awesome. Little problems are better. Everyone starts small. Even Elon (a personal hero of mine and a man I deeply respect). Start on new small things, work hard, and TIME your entry/exit with extreme precision. Malcolm Gladwell says a lot of things which are "truthy", but his Outliers book was right on the money. "Big things have small beginnings" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk).
- carbocation 14y ago
  Your core message was pretty fantastic, and with a different tone it could be even better, and better received.
  - confluence 14y ago
    Felt like I had to get it off my chest. My sincere apologies for the ranty tone everybody.
- kiba 14y ago
  Unimportant things just happen to have lower barrier for entry and higher tolerance for risk. If important things happen to have lower barrier than unimportant things, we'll see important things progress faster, especially combined with higher tolerance for failure. Failure in rocketry is often very costly, hence low tolerance of risk. This is also the same situation for healthcare. A drug that didn't pan out is a very costly failure. Both of them also requires lot of expertise and red tape on top of normal startup stress.
rwhitman 14y ago
Weirdly enough the thing I'm fixated on in this video is the fact that he's meeting with NASA at a press event dressed in a t-shirt.
mkramlich 14y ago
This video reminds me of another of Elon's strengths, beyond just a technical mind and an entrepreneurial mind: he's very well-spoken, and he's very charismatic -- and it comes off as very natural, so it helps to close the gap with his audience whenever he speaks. He doesn't come off as some egghead academic or engineer -- though clearly he can think like one. Instead he talks like he's a friend speaking casually and calmly, off-the-cuff, with a mixture of what you might call British-style humility. But backed by confidence and a sense of persistance. One of his repeated phrases across many interviews is that he's determined to make X thing happen, and he's confident he can, that they can. If they can't make something happen the first time perfectly out of the gate, then they'll learn, adjust and try again until they do. He probably has a one-in-a-million combination of both a strong technical mind, a strong business sense, and strong personal charisma. There are a ton of folks out there that have maybe one of those things, and rarely two, but it's extremely hard to find all three. Plus he scored big early with Zip2 and PayPal. Arguably this fourth thing -- a huge war chest to draw from, beginning in the late 90's or so -- has made him even more rare. Indeed, a Tony Stark of his age.
erikpukinskis 14y ago
As a decade-long reader of Slashdot, who transitioned almost completely to HN several years ago, it's remarkable how good the visible comments on /. seem after a long absence. On discussions of sufficient size, because of the depth-first nature of HN I almost inevitably bail out around the 2000 pixel mark. I just don't want to wade through that much garbage, and that's about as much space as it takes for HN threads to devolve into a pointless tête-à-tête these days. I think when I switched to HN, there basically weren't worthless comments, but those days appear to be over. The transition here wasn't noticeable, but going back feels like a breath of fresh air.
- vidarh 14y ago
  I'd suspect the current state of Slashdot is helped by Slashdot not being the "in" thing anymore too. A lot of the noise-makers have moved on, or aren't finding the site in the first place any more.
Nevaeh 14y ago
Thank you. It's such a refreshing sight as just 3 months ago, Elon was visibly quite disappointed in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=related#t=11m40s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=relat... 2 months later, the Dragon successfully docked with the space station. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s Just look at Elon's excitement at the 9:36 mark of this video as well as all of SpaceX employee's enthusiasm. This was truly a huge success despite the challenging odds. Looking forward to the future Grasshopper mission. Perhaps it will fail at its first few attempts just like the Falcon1, but with Elon's determination and his excellent team of engineers, I believe they can do it. They have already proven themselves during the darkest times in SpaceX history. Skip to [38:30] to hear it from Elon himself. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-bloomberg-risk-takers.html http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-b... And his reaction after Falcon9 successfully launched on the very first try. [39:12] All that hardship and pain, totally worth it. We will be victorious, indeed.

96 points by thenextcorner 14y ago

dhughes 14y ago

When did Slashdot get TV?

kristopolous 14y ago
yeah, that's totally the biggest news here for me. Is there actually a decent half hour video program of technology news that's not just a beauty pageant for new consumer electronics?
- someperson 14y ago
  > beauty pageant for new consumer electronics That's a good way to describe it. There's been a lot of crappy 30 minute tech shows, with CNET TV (has local versions produced in suprisingly many countries) being the latest one I've been exposed to (and one of the worst.) The same was once true of game-review shows. But in Australia at least, the show "Good Game" (and the for-kids spinoff "Good Game Spawn Point") have completely amazed me with it's quality and the hosts being the kind of people who would watch the show. Sorry for the long-winded post, but I find it hard to articulate the huge shift that happens going from a technology show that's basically shows paid-for advertising to ones that are GOOD. I hope somebody can make the weekly 20-30 minute show that I crave, but can't articulate :)
sp332 14y ago
Just at the end of March. https://tv.slashdot.org/ https://tv.slashdot.org/

wissler 14y ago

Don't miss seeing the animation toward the end of the video.

minikomi 14y ago
The first instance of that landing would be quite something to witness!
- frankydp 14y ago
  I would drive any distance to see a vstol landing of an suborbital or orbital vehicle. Talk about game changing.
  - mkramlich 14y ago
    Agreed. If you'd like to cheat and get a sneak preview of what it could be like, at least the last leg, go dig up the Armadillo Aerospace videos of their capsule VTOL launch/land successes. As a thumbnail argument, if we've seen Armadillo do just the VTOL launch/land part, and we've seen SpaceX do the rocket launch & parachute splashdown part, it's not hard to imagine the engineering equivalent of smooshing those two solution spaces together into a single entity which can accomplish both. I will be as giddy as a lunch table of teen girls at recess when I see SpaceX pull this off.
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      Armadillo, Blue Origin, and Masten (and the DC-XA before them) have all been working on rocket powered VTVL flights and have done sub-scale test flights. It's a technology that just plain makes sense, especially now that computers are so cheap and so fast. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be so common and routine that a lot of people will think it's a natural part of spaceflight and wonder how it could possibly be done any other way.
dantheman 14y ago
Agreed - the 6 minute mark is great. You can see the engine return to earth.
jordanthoms 14y ago
Yeah, it'll be incredible to see that kind of precision with just retro rockets, imagine travelling down in that with no wings and no parachute!

confluence 14y ago

Cue comments about how Elon Musk is doing so much more with his money than everyone else, and how SpaceX/Tesla Motors/SolarCity are so much more valuable than anything else. Cue complaints about how no one works on hard problems any more, and that everyone is just chasing instagram/facebook/twitter/groupon/zynga/social/local/mobile. Forget that Elon Musk started an advertising/publishing company in 1995-1997, intelligently riding the bubble, and then created X.com (a more complex Mint.com), which he then merged with Confinity to create PayPal (from where he was essentially fired - unfortunately). Forget that battery tech wasn't useful enough until just over 5 years ago (not nearly dense/cheap enough), and how we needed the massive production increases in laptop battery production for Tesla to make sense. Also forget that NASA had 0 use for SpaceX until the Space Shuttle program was shutdown - which is curiously lined up with the COTS program. Also forget that Solar panels required massive production gains thanks to China which only occurred within the past 5 years. Finally, ignore the fact that he would never have been able to do anything without the money from a stupid email payments thing. Big problems are awesome. Little problems are better. Everyone starts small. Even Elon (a personal hero of mine and a man I deeply respect). Start on new small things, work hard, and TIME your entry/exit with extreme precision. Malcolm Gladwell says a lot of things which are "truthy", but his Outliers book was right on the money. "Big things have small beginnings" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk).

carbocation 14y ago
Your core message was pretty fantastic, and with a different tone it could be even better, and better received.
- confluence 14y ago
  Felt like I had to get it off my chest. My sincere apologies for the ranty tone everybody.
kiba 14y ago
Unimportant things just happen to have lower barrier for entry and higher tolerance for risk. If important things happen to have lower barrier than unimportant things, we'll see important things progress faster, especially combined with higher tolerance for failure. Failure in rocketry is often very costly, hence low tolerance of risk. This is also the same situation for healthcare. A drug that didn't pan out is a very costly failure. Both of them also requires lot of expertise and red tape on top of normal startup stress.

rwhitman 14y ago

Weirdly enough the thing I'm fixated on in this video is the fact that he's meeting with NASA at a press event dressed in a t-shirt.

mkramlich 14y ago

This video reminds me of another of Elon's strengths, beyond just a technical mind and an entrepreneurial mind: he's very well-spoken, and he's very charismatic -- and it comes off as very natural, so it helps to close the gap with his audience whenever he speaks. He doesn't come off as some egghead academic or engineer -- though clearly he can think like one. Instead he talks like he's a friend speaking casually and calmly, off-the-cuff, with a mixture of what you might call British-style humility. But backed by confidence and a sense of persistance. One of his repeated phrases across many interviews is that he's determined to make X thing happen, and he's confident he can, that they can. If they can't make something happen the first time perfectly out of the gate, then they'll learn, adjust and try again until they do. He probably has a one-in-a-million combination of both a strong technical mind, a strong business sense, and strong personal charisma. There are a ton of folks out there that have maybe one of those things, and rarely two, but it's extremely hard to find all three. Plus he scored big early with Zip2 and PayPal. Arguably this fourth thing -- a huge war chest to draw from, beginning in the late 90's or so -- has made him even more rare. Indeed, a Tony Stark of his age.

erikpukinskis 14y ago

As a decade-long reader of Slashdot, who transitioned almost completely to HN several years ago, it's remarkable how good the visible comments on /. seem after a long absence. On discussions of sufficient size, because of the depth-first nature of HN I almost inevitably bail out around the 2000 pixel mark. I just don't want to wade through that much garbage, and that's about as much space as it takes for HN threads to devolve into a pointless tête-à-tête these days. I think when I switched to HN, there basically weren't worthless comments, but those days appear to be over. The transition here wasn't noticeable, but going back feels like a breath of fresh air.

vidarh 14y ago
I'd suspect the current state of Slashdot is helped by Slashdot not being the "in" thing anymore too. A lot of the noise-makers have moved on, or aren't finding the site in the first place any more.

Nevaeh 14y ago

Thank you. It's such a refreshing sight as just 3 months ago, Elon was visibly quite disappointed in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=related#t=11m40s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=relat... 2 months later, the Dragon successfully docked with the space station. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s Just look at Elon's excitement at the 9:36 mark of this video as well as all of SpaceX employee's enthusiasm. This was truly a huge success despite the challenging odds. Looking forward to the future Grasshopper mission. Perhaps it will fail at its first few attempts just like the Falcon1, but with Elon's determination and his excellent team of engineers, I believe they can do it. They have already proven themselves during the darkest times in SpaceX history. Skip to [38:30] to hear it from Elon himself. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-bloomberg-risk-takers.html http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-b... And his reaction after Falcon9 successfully launched on the very first try. [39:12] All that hardship and pain, totally worth it. We will be victorious, indeed.