4 ms·

We could have had this all along.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Eh, maybe. There’s a lot of computing and telemetry going on that benefits from the last twenty years of miniaturization and performance. The iPhone seemed impossible when announced to BlackBerry; tech has gone crazy fast.
- collinmanderson 2y ago
  It’s a lot easier to model and simulate too.
- Teever 2y ago
  You should take a look at what Von Braun was planning for the Saturn V by the mid 1970s. IIRC they were talking about 100+ Apollo launches to get a real space station, moon base, and expedition missions to Mars by 1980 and with that would have come a real drive to innovate and improve on the Saturn V. Without the computational power that we take for granted today they would have definitely brute forced their way to elegant solutions and got somewhere close to where we are by the mid 90s. This would have lead to tremendous innovations in solar panels, batteries, and metallurgy much sooner than we ended up getting to them. Instead we chose a different path and made ourselves completely dependent on oil.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    A lot of those plans were just plain goofy. The Shuttle was supposed to generate the same sort of awesomeness, too.
    - Teever 2y ago
      Apollo was pretty goofy if you think about -- Yeeting a couple of dudes to the moon in a giant ass rocket so that they can tool around in a little electric-go cart with lawn chair seats and play some golf but it worked. I think that the Saturn V was a solid platform that was robust enough to do the kinds of things that Von Braun and others had in mind as well as versatile enough to be improved upon. They would have done it with sufficient budget but the political drive wasn't there. The politicians were more concerned with killing Vietnamese and Cambodians and then selling out American interests to oil companies.
  - fsloth 2y ago
    I guess the main problem was nobody had a budget for those plans. ”Technically speaking we can do it but we can’t afford it” unfortunately still means ”we can’t do it”. Now only if Project Orion had not been canceled due to international treaties banning nuclear testing we’d be on the moons of Jupiter by now (sigh).
neverrroot 2y ago
We just needed more people like Elon.
- reagansdi 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - neverrroot 2y ago
    Boeing does much much more of that. Why don’t they deliver, in spite of them being decades more experienced in this area? Why don’t they deliver in spite of getting much more money from the government and from your mentioned complex?
    - zenerdiodes 2y ago
      [dead]
      - neverrroot 2y ago
        Outstanding engineers care of doing engineering and making progress. And having a leader they can see burning for a mission and a goal. A leader who gets down and dirty with them.
      - throw9474 2y ago
        [dead]
  - kevinsync 2y ago
    Sure. As a human he's (at best) a deeply-flawed agent of chaos (aren't we all to some degree?)... but at the same time we DO need a lot more people like him to put blinders on and act as undeniable agents of change. For better or worse, he's single-handedly facilitated watershed progress in more areas than just about any individual we can name from recent times. All the "cringe" and human shit he does that we hate and clown on will be erased by history and forgotten when the stuff that -other people- create, as a byproduct of him starting and funding these companies, pushes us forward and eclipses the clickbait and/or questionable personal behavior of the man himself. Teamwork makes the dream work, and I believe sometimes we need gigantic egos to set the ball firmly in motion.
ridgeguy 2y ago
No. It all depends on cheap computation, reliable/free satellite location systems, and other stuff that weren't things in the (60s, 70s, 80s - pick your own starting point for "all along").
- bagels 2y ago
  It's as much the economics as it is the technology. It took a ton of private investment, and government investment to get here.
- looofooo0 2y ago
  A rocket a day keeps the cost away.
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    Found the Factorio player.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
That isn't exactly true though. For example, the neural net models that are used today in various GenAI startups were invented in the 1980s. But we couldn't have LLMs "all along" because we couldn't store the models, the training sets, or do the training compute with the computer hardware we had at the time. Similarly with rocketry there many technologies that have only been available in the last 10 - 15 years that make Starship possible. A sampling; First there are solid state inertial motion sensors[1]. Those combined gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers that way just a few grams. Those bad boys weighed a couple hundred pounds in the Apollo rockets. We put the equivalent up in a $100 quadcopter these days. Second there is 3D printing of rocket engine alloy, this allows SpaceX to 3d print a raptor engine[2] both faster, lighter, and without error than any engine we could have built before 2010. Third was the development of fracking which created so much methane availability [3] that using it for rocket fuel became cost effective. Fourth and fifth changes were three decimal orders of magnitude on the ability of computers to compute with a commensurate drop in cost, and with that an explosion the the ability to use high frequency radio to do things that used to be done by cable harnesses and wiring. (sorry no citation, general knowledge) I can appreciate that it is really really hard to internalize how much as changed and improved since Apollo and can strongly recommend a trip to one's local science museum if you have one to get a visceral sort of amazement at what Apollo engineers did with the technology available to them at the time. So it isn't accurate to say we could have had this all along, although if one of the 'big' players like Lockheed Martin or Grumman Aerospace had continued investing even after the 'Star Wars' program was cancelled I do agree we would have had it sooner than we did. How much sooner? Maybe 5 years? But it is important to realize that at that time (late 80's early 90's) they didn't know that the Internet was going to be a thing and so they didn't have a built in "market" for all of that launch capability. Even with Teledesic[4] which tried to go there, you needed someone who like Musk who was too ignorant of what "could be done" to push a bunch of really smart people beyond what they thought they were capable of. [1] Apollo PGNCS --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PGNCS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PGNCS [2] SpaceX simplifies Raptor engine: Has it used additive manufacturing? --- https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printing-news/metal-additive-manufacturing-news/spacex-simplifies-raptor-rocket-engine-was-it-3d-printed-additive-manufacturing/ https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printi... [3] The U.S. fracking revolution has caused natural gas prices to drop 47 percent compared to what the price would have been prior to the fracking revolution in 2013. --- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-fracking/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-... [4] Teledesic -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic

Eh, maybe. There’s a lot of computing and telemetry going on that benefits from the last twenty years of miniaturization and performance. The iPhone seemed impossible when announced to BlackBerry; tech has gone crazy fast.

collinmanderson 2y ago
It’s a lot easier to model and simulate too.
Teever 2y ago
You should take a look at what Von Braun was planning for the Saturn V by the mid 1970s. IIRC they were talking about 100+ Apollo launches to get a real space station, moon base, and expedition missions to Mars by 1980 and with that would have come a real drive to innovate and improve on the Saturn V. Without the computational power that we take for granted today they would have definitely brute forced their way to elegant solutions and got somewhere close to where we are by the mid 90s. This would have lead to tremendous innovations in solar panels, batteries, and metallurgy much sooner than we ended up getting to them. Instead we chose a different path and made ourselves completely dependent on oil.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  A lot of those plans were just plain goofy. The Shuttle was supposed to generate the same sort of awesomeness, too.
  - Teever 2y ago
    Apollo was pretty goofy if you think about -- Yeeting a couple of dudes to the moon in a giant ass rocket so that they can tool around in a little electric-go cart with lawn chair seats and play some golf but it worked. I think that the Saturn V was a solid platform that was robust enough to do the kinds of things that Von Braun and others had in mind as well as versatile enough to be improved upon. They would have done it with sufficient budget but the political drive wasn't there. The politicians were more concerned with killing Vietnamese and Cambodians and then selling out American interests to oil companies.
- fsloth 2y ago
  I guess the main problem was nobody had a budget for those plans. ”Technically speaking we can do it but we can’t afford it” unfortunately still means ”we can’t do it”. Now only if Project Orion had not been canceled due to international treaties banning nuclear testing we’d be on the moons of Jupiter by now (sigh).

neverrroot 2y ago

We just needed more people like Elon.

reagansdi 2y ago
[flagged]
- neverrroot 2y ago
  Boeing does much much more of that. Why don’t they deliver, in spite of them being decades more experienced in this area? Why don’t they deliver in spite of getting much more money from the government and from your mentioned complex?
  - zenerdiodes 2y ago
    [dead]
    - neverrroot 2y ago
      Outstanding engineers care of doing engineering and making progress. And having a leader they can see burning for a mission and a goal. A leader who gets down and dirty with them.
    - throw9474 2y ago
      [dead]
- kevinsync 2y ago
  Sure. As a human he's (at best) a deeply-flawed agent of chaos (aren't we all to some degree?)... but at the same time we DO need a lot more people like him to put blinders on and act as undeniable agents of change. For better or worse, he's single-handedly facilitated watershed progress in more areas than just about any individual we can name from recent times. All the "cringe" and human shit he does that we hate and clown on will be erased by history and forgotten when the stuff that -other people- create, as a byproduct of him starting and funding these companies, pushes us forward and eclipses the clickbait and/or questionable personal behavior of the man himself. Teamwork makes the dream work, and I believe sometimes we need gigantic egos to set the ball firmly in motion.

ridgeguy 2y ago

No. It all depends on cheap computation, reliable/free satellite location systems, and other stuff that weren't things in the (60s, 70s, 80s - pick your own starting point for "all along").

bagels 2y ago
It's as much the economics as it is the technology. It took a ton of private investment, and government investment to get here.
looofooo0 2y ago
A rocket a day keeps the cost away.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  Found the Factorio player.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

That isn't exactly true though. For example, the neural net models that are used today in various GenAI startups were invented in the 1980s. But we couldn't have LLMs "all along" because we couldn't store the models, the training sets, or do the training compute with the computer hardware we had at the time. Similarly with rocketry there many technologies that have only been available in the last 10 - 15 years that make Starship possible. A sampling; First there are solid state inertial motion sensors[1]. Those combined gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers that way just a few grams. Those bad boys weighed a couple hundred pounds in the Apollo rockets. We put the equivalent up in a $100 quadcopter these days. Second there is 3D printing of rocket engine alloy, this allows SpaceX to 3d print a raptor engine[2] both faster, lighter, and without error than any engine we could have built before 2010. Third was the development of fracking which created so much methane availability [3] that using it for rocket fuel became cost effective. Fourth and fifth changes were three decimal orders of magnitude on the ability of computers to compute with a commensurate drop in cost, and with that an explosion the the ability to use high frequency radio to do things that used to be done by cable harnesses and wiring. (sorry no citation, general knowledge) I can appreciate that it is really really hard to internalize how much as changed and improved since Apollo and can strongly recommend a trip to one's local science museum if you have one to get a visceral sort of amazement at what Apollo engineers did with the technology available to them at the time. So it isn't accurate to say we could have had this all along, although if one of the 'big' players like Lockheed Martin or Grumman Aerospace had continued investing even after the 'Star Wars' program was cancelled I do agree we would have had it sooner than we did. How much sooner? Maybe 5 years? But it is important to realize that at that time (late 80's early 90's) they didn't know that the Internet was going to be a thing and so they didn't have a built in "market" for all of that launch capability. Even with Teledesic[4] which tried to go there, you needed someone who like Musk who was too ignorant of what "could be done" to push a bunch of really smart people beyond what they thought they were capable of. [1] Apollo PGNCS --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PGNCS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PGNCS [2] SpaceX simplifies Raptor engine: Has it used additive manufacturing? --- https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printing-news/metal-additive-manufacturing-news/spacex-simplifies-raptor-rocket-engine-was-it-3d-printed-additive-manufacturing/ https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printi... [3] The U.S. fracking revolution has caused natural gas prices to drop 47 percent compared to what the price would have been prior to the fracking revolution in 2013. --- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-fracking/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-... [4] Teledesic -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic