9 ms·
> For the imperially challenged You mean everyone in the world expect for the Americans, Liberians and Burmese? :)
by merek 2y ago
> For the imperially challenged
You mean everyone in the world expect for the Americans, Liberians and Burmese? :)
- foooorsyth 2y agoMaking this joke falls flat in the comments section of a rocket science article about Americans continuing to dominate space.
- lionkor 2y agoNot sure if I would necessarily say that the reason the US is pretty good at space stuff is imperial measurements. Its probably imperialism, instead.
- etiennebausson 2y agoIt's mostly because the US was the only nation to survive WW2 with its infrastructure intact. Same story as computing, really.
- kortilla 2y agoNope, that’s a lazy excuse. The US space industry was dead in the early 2000s. Astronauts went to the ISS on Soyuz.
- conductr 2y agoIt was more of an exploration lull and not much industry had came out of it quite yet as privatization was being implemented and so it’s the case the industry was actually just being born.
- mrguyorama 2y agoYou are simply wrong for anything other than human rated flight. They didn't have the kind of PR that NASA and Space X have, and they were never human rated, but private satellites never stopped flying on Atlas, Delta, and Titan programs that variously went from the 1960s all the way up until the 2020s. All three of those rocket programs are direct descendants of ICBM programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launcher_families#List_of_retired_launcher_families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launcher... I disagree with the premise that it was lack of bombing of US infrastructure related though. Space programs are very simply the public output of ICBM programs. Most of the modern day is simply a direct descendant of ICBM programs. You like distributed and reliable communication networks like the internet? Built so ICBM silos could command each other even if certain hubs were nuked. You like the miniaturization of solid state electronics? That capability was paid for entirely by the US Air Force who wanted powerful computers under 100 pounds for advanced planes and precision ICBMs. Satellite navigation was also explicitly invented for nuclear missiles fired out of submarines to have an accurate fix for guidance purposes. Basically the entirety of the modern world exists because the US of the cold war pumped trillions of dollars into producing ICBMs and planes that were genuinely "next gen" while every single private business takes the credit for stuff they never paid for. Computer and telecommunications companies would never have built this stuff on their own: They were fine with computers taking up an entire facility that they could rent out (cf modern clouds) and fully switched networks that were reliant on a big company to manage. None of them needed to sell you a "personal computer". None of them wanted a distributed, uncontrolled network like the Internet.
- kortilla 2y ago> You are simply wrong for anything other than human rated flight. They didn't have the kind of PR that NASA and Space X have, and they were never human rated, but private satellites never stopped flying on Atlas, Delta, and Titan programs that variously went from the 1960s all the way up until the 2020s. Those are moribund programs that were being kept alive solely by the government because it wanted to ensure the US had launch capabilities for NRO and other classified missions. There was absolutely no innovation coming out of them to drive down costs or increase payloads. The sector was dead from an innovation perspective and a failure from a competitive perspective. Your screed about businesses taking credit for stuff is mostly unfounded. The internet’s foundation in DARPA is very well understood and acknowledged. However, all of the advancements to scale up to the scale of the internet today were pushed by Silicon Valley and academia. DARPA and the military never cared about scale and still doesn’t because it’s not a goal.
- lionkor 2y agoWhich is easy to do when you enter at the end and capture the highest skill scientists.
- trompetenaccoun 2y agoWhat does that have to do with rockets? The main resources you need for spaceflight are intellectual capacity and engineering skills. Plus a government that allows it to happen. Besides the US, China and Russia, the 4th place for number of launches in 2023 is shared by India and New Zealand. The latter can hardly be described as imperialist by any measure. All you need is a single company like Rocket Lab. It could easily happen in other places too, under the right circumstances. Prior to losing WW2 for example Germany dominated the space and they were latecomers in imperialism with very little control over anything outside their own territory. In fact getting pushed around by more powerful colonial nations, and the economic sanctions that were put on them, were the main reason leading to the fascist takeover and ultimately the war.
- lupusreal 2y agoRocket Lab is mostly an American company these days. Headquartered in America, most of their employees in America, traded on an American stock exchange, doing contracts for the American military.
- lionkor 2y agoOne could argue the US entering into WW2 is imperialism. Von Braun and a large number of other highly skilled and important people came from that, which directly migrated German rocket and Spacecraft innovation to the US. How is that not arguably imperialism related?
- trompetenaccoun 2y agoNot to start a big discussion about WW2 but the US was passive until they were attacked. Over 2000 Americans were killed in Pearl Harbor. For a nation of its size and power, the US was decidedly un-imperialist up until then. Even after they'd beat the Nazis and Imperial Japan, they actually helped rebuild their economies instead of exploiting them. Granted, that might have been the smarter thing to do anyway and turned out a win-win. But it wasn't how most leaders thought at the time. Look at the Soviet Union and how they ended up oppressing the territories they "liberated". The Western allies also wanted to keep Germany down, as did some in the US government (see the Morgenthau Plan for example). Had they prevailed there might soon have been another war.
- eps 2y agoNot to beat the dead horse but NASA predominantly uses metric units.
- Aaargh20318 2y agoAlso, they got their lead in space tech mainly because of a German scientist (Werner von Braun). On the Apollo program, all the calculations were done in metric (obviously). The computers all worked in metric internally and then converted to imperial for display. They actually had to waste some of their very limited cpu cycles on converting to imperial because the US astronauts couldn’t handle the metric system.
- firesteelrain 2y agoYour comment contains a series of partial truths, falsehoods and misconceptions. So Werner built the rockets and all the subsystems too or was just the technical fellow/consultant? Sure, the US was in a better position post WW2. But Werner has been dead for years and the US still dominates space 10x or even 100x times. Engineering in the US is top notch. As far as your other assertion- what’s your source? NASA primarily used the imperial system (feet, pounds, and seconds) for the Apollo program. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and other systems were designed using imperial units because the entire spacecraft and mission control infrastructure were built around the U.S. customary system. There was no wasting of CPU cycles. We even have the source code on GitHub to go look at: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 Look in this assembly code. It is imperial. https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminary099/LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.agc https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar... Then, there are design documents and other engineering standards that tell us everything was in imperial units. I am not buying what you are saying.
- _0ffh 2y agoI took a look at the code, and I found references to both metric (meters, kgs) and imperial units (lbs) in there.
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- vasco 2y ago"Americans dominate space" is the most American sentence I've read in a while. Imagine that, a few humans from a little corner of the universe dominating space!
- fragmede 2y agoThanks to Starlink, something like 70% of the 7500 satellites orbit Earth are American. Or course by mass, nature still wins by a landslide, but as always, it's all in how in count things.
- willvarfar 2y agoSpace is pretty big. Is it fair to say that the USA dominates up to, say, Earth's Ionosphere?
- arijun 2y ago"Americans dominate the space industry" is presumably what they meant, and not inaccurate. On the other hand, even the American space industry uses metric.
- mp05 2y agoDominated by a company that is led by an African-American man no less!!
- brudgers 2y agoHow many HP is your Eurorack case?
- snakeyjake 2y agoWhat's the highest posted speed limit on the M1/M6 from London to Birmingham?
- delta_p_delta_x 2y agoThere are only three things the UK uses Imperial units for: road signage (speed limits, distances, and vehicle dimension restrictions; and since 2016 all new dimension restriction signage has to be in dual-SI and Imperial units[1]), beer, and milk, the latter two of which are also sold in half-litre and litre measurements. [1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/362/pdfs/uksi_20160362_en.pdf https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/362/pdfs/uksi_20160...
- nordsieck 2y ago> There are only three things the UK uses Imperial units for: road signage (speed limits, distances, and vehicle dimension restrictions; and since 2016 all new dimension restriction signage has to be in dual-SI and Imperial units[1]), beer, and milk Do people not weigh themselves in stones and pounds?
- rors 2y agoThe UK government doesn't mandate units for reporting your own weight. The examples listed are required by law.
- adolph 2y ago> The UK government doesn't mandate units for reporting your own weight. Wait, you can just use a unit-less value? UK Govt Official Weight Form Weight: well-nourished
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- dspillett 2y ago
- BoxOfRain 2y agoAlso the British, we're metric on paper for most things but in practice we use both systems interchangeably for a lot of things. In a few cases like the roads and draught beer imperial units are mandated.
- thechao 2y agoSince this comes as a surprise to many of my first-time British colleagues: US customary and Imperial use the same names, but are different units. The US customary volume units (cups, gallons, etc.) are on two scales: the "tablespoon scale" which is all powers-of-two, and the "teaspoon scale" which is a third of some nearby tablespoon scale. I used to have a handy chart of the mapping of "prefix" to power-of-two, for 2^-7 to 2^7. Also, the US foot was supposed to be exactly 30cm, but the French couldn't get their shit together, in time.
- BoxOfRain 2y agoAnother fun fact is that UK gallons are based on the volume occupied by ten pounds of water. Combined with the fact there's 20 ounces in UK pint this means a fluid ounce of water weighs an ounce, and a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter. Not that you're very likely to encounter British fluid ounces any more, the smallest imperial unit of volume I generally run into is the half-pint.
- thechao 2y agoYeah. It'd've been neat if the US gallon was defined to be 256in^3 (with the US in being exactly 2.5cm). Then, it'd be exactly 4000 cm^3 (4L) to a US gallon, and the table of "prefixes" would be: gallon 2^0 half-gallon 2^-1 quart 2^-2 pint 2^-3 cup 2^-4 gill 2^-5 jill 2^-6 -- invented half-gill ounce 2^-7 tbsp 2^-8 half-tbsp 2^-9 dram 2^-10 The "positive" values are harder; you'd have to steal/reappropriate the dry prefixes: peck 2^1 half-bushel 2^2 bushel 2^3 half-barrel 2^4 barrel 2^5 hogshead 2^6 ??? 2^7 ??? 2^8
- jszymborski 2y agoCanadians mostly use imperial when describing one's height and weight. Folks also tend to bake using imperial measures in my experience, and idk if it's different for large projects, but home demos are very much the domain of imperial standard objects (like a 4' x 8' panel of drywall or a 2" x 4" x 8' beam)
- radlad 2y agoYet a 2 x 4 isn't 2" x 4". :P
- lostlogin 2y agoAhh, rough sawn versus dressed. Deeply frustrating when you assume sizing matches description.
- bombela 2y agoEven rough sawn is not 2" by 4". Americans love inventing field specific nomenclature. Like piping sizes, wire sizes, metal sheet thickness, plywood router bit size, construction wood size, furniture/raw wood size, etc I have always thought it was just a side effect of capitalism. The more messy the units, the harder it is to enter a field without requiring the help of an expert sales.
- sandermvanvliet 2y agoAfter 10 months of house renovation it’s my experience that plumbers are the worst offenders when it comes to sizing weirdness. You think you got the right size fitting, lol nope, it’s actually conical not straight…
- physhster 2y agoProbably because you're stuck with sub-par 110v appliances made for the US market...
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- marssaxman 2y agoNote that the Americans never adopted the imperial system, which was established after US independence; US customary units are their own thing, based on the older English customary units which preceded the Imperial standardization.
- lostlogin 2y agoI use a German MRI scanner and they have clearly thought about this too. I can enter patient height and weight in ‘metric’ centimetres and kilograms or in ‘US’ feet, inches and pounds.
- dang 2y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html