|
How come it seems like SpaceX has been able to crank out all these rocket projects and other places haven't? They just have a head start or some kind of graft, other than the unnamed gentleman? I have not been following the field for a while; the most I've heard is that this Dragon capsule is apparently a credible equivalent to the Soyuz and probably significantly cheaper, or at least, "engineered this century."
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2023 00:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 21:52 |
|
|
Nessus posted:How come it seems like SpaceX has been able to crank out all these rocket projects and other places haven't? They just have a head start or some kind of graft, other than the unnamed gentleman? NASA relies on a lot of contractors spread across the entire US because that's how NASA stays funded politically. So everything from design, testing and manufacturing involves a lot of companies needing to co-ordinate together properly. It adds a lot more points of failure and much longer supply and communication lines, so it goes much slower and more expensive. As for why the other private companies can't get their space systems working, answer seems to be either corporate meddling and/or resistance to innovation. It feels like everyone but SpaceX hire all the people who had to sit on their hands the last 50 years of space development, so that's all they know how to do even when given billions more dollars to make new stuff. I'm sure it's more complicated than that but something like that seems to be plaguing Boeing and Blue Origin.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2023 00:46
|
|
|
HookedOnChthonics posted:Artemis already launched successfully dogg It also took NASA 20 years to build Artemis out of spare shuttle parts, and a single engine for SLS costs about the same as the entirety of a Superheavy stack. It drat well better have launched on the first try.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2023 05:25
|
|
|
They are building to different goals. SpaceX rockets are aimed at making the cost per kg into orbit as cheap as possible, and the company as a whole has a much higher tolerance for failure as a result. ESA and NASA have a much greater "failure is not an option" philosophy, and that results in much more expensive rockets (although ones that explode less often).
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2023 07:28
|
|
|
Uh, well this wasn’t on my 2023 bingo card.  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft quote:US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2023 23:18
|
|
|
If I were a whistleblower trying to get the US to acknowledge partial remains of alien spacecraft, I’d use my time remaining with the alien spacecraft to get some incontrovertible evidence and share that with the press before I made a statement, or possibly while I made my statement.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2023 23:29
|
|
|
I'll just repeat what I posted in the other D&D UFO thread a few minutes ago: So this is apparently a "worldwide phenomenon" but no one, not a single country, has said anything about it, even in order to embarrass the US. Putin claims he has hypersonic missiles but won't bluff with "I'm going to use our once-secret alien tech to attack Ukraine!" How convenient that in a world in constant turmoil, everyone's agreed to keep quiet about things, except this guy. Who hasn't seen poo poo. But he's talked to people who said they have seen stuff! What a joke. This is Qanon level nonsense.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2023 23:37
|
|
|
I AM GRANDO posted:If I were a whistleblower trying to get the US to acknowledge partial remains of alien spacecraft, I’d use my time remaining with the alien spacecraft to get some incontrovertible evidence and share that with the press before I made a statement, or possibly while I made my statement. Apparently the guy in question didn't actually see anything, but he knows people who TOTALLY SWARE they saw something.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2023 23:44
|
|
|
Watch some office get subpoenaed and they wheel out a bunch of evidence in front of a committee and it just turns out to be like junk from a nuclear missile or something.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2023 23:50
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:Watch some office get subpoenaed and they wheel out a bunch of evidence in front of a committee and it just turns out to be like junk from a nuclear missile or something. https://twitter.com/TPSGunsSeized/status/1561735577757704196
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 00:00
|
|
|
ashpanash posted:I'll just repeat what I posted in the other D&D UFO thread a few minutes ago: Yeah, the US ain’t such hot poo poo any more. In a cold war context I could kind of see the nato countries and the Soviet Union coming to some kind of informal agreement to not spill the beans about some kind of weird thing that could totally upend the status quo. But there’s certainly no status quo now, and there are a ton of state and private actors with a ton to gain by upending everything that currently exists. Putin has all that old secret kgb poo poo in the archives. Maybe he’d keep the amber room a secret, but he’d grav-ray the poo poo out of the US or make his old lovely tanks run on zero point if he could.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 00:04
|
|
|
Wait, what the gently caress is News Nation? They couldn’t even sell CNN on this poo poo? The whole network looks like an fmv cutscene.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 00:56
|
|
|
I AM GRANDO posted:Wait, what the gently caress is News Nation? They couldn’t even sell CNN on this poo poo? The whole network looks like an fmv cutscene. Chris Cuomo went to News Nation after leaving CNN.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 05:21
|
|
|
ashpanash posted:I'll just repeat what I posted in the other D&D UFO thread a few minutes ago: please bring back the D&D space thread subtitle: 'discuss aliens itt'
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 06:09
|
|
|
Military secrets got leaked by a cyber security kid on discord for clout. Just lol at anyone who thinks this much bigger secret could be kept secret by the US for any length of time. Like, imagine Trump learning about it in the white house and not immediately tweeting about it. Imagine the thousands of engineering dorks they would have investigating it and not nerding out every 5 minutes. You would need to have a child's understanding of how government works to believe this.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 10:27
|
|
|
ashpanash posted:I'll just repeat what I posted in the other D&D UFO thread a few minutes ago: The jig's been up for a while, given that UFO abductions and etc. stopped completely as soon as smartphones happened.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 11:53
|
|
|
Bug Squash posted:They are building to different goals. SpaceX rockets are aimed at making the cost per kg into orbit as cheap as possible, and the company as a whole has a much higher tolerance for failure as a result. SpaceX has a stated goal of doing exactly this. Boeing and the other legacy space providers have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. Any deliverable spacecraft or space hardware is simply incidental to that. This is not a cheer for SpaceX at all, simply a comment on what publicly traded corporations in the US are aimed at doing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 15:21
|
|
|
Do they have an explicit legal requirement to do so, or is it more a case of “if you go much off that beam, they install a new executive”? The outcome is not meaningfully different. I just wonder if it’s actually law, since Boeing predates the recent corpo hellscape.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 15:54
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Do they have an explicit legal requirement to do so, or is it more a case of “if you go much off that beam, they install a new executive”? According to this NYTimes Opinion Piece the answer is no, they are not legally mandated to do so: quote:There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” It goes on to say that the directors of the corporation are instead to act in the best interest of the company, which may or may not include maximizing profits in the short term: quote:And corporate case law describes directors as fiduciaries who owe duties not only to shareholders but also to the corporate entity itself, and instructs directors to use their powers in “the best interests of the company.” This is probably how companies like Apple can "get away" with sitting on a metric fuckton of straight up cash ($56,000,000,000 as of March 2023) instead of using it to generate more money. In practice, I suspect that Boeing's CEO could just say "hey guys we are planning on spending a poo poo ton of money for the next x years which will lose us money in the short term, but in x+y years it will pay off tenfold" but he would probably just get sacked because the leeches don't want 10x more money in x+y years–they want 1x money today and 10x money in x+y years. Tim Apple on the other hand probably doesn't have to worry about any of this poo poo for various reasons. The next guy after Tim? Yeah he'd probably be more traditionally beholden to shareholders as he wouldn't be Jobs's protégé. Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Jun 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:11
|
|
|
Interesting. I figured it was kind of a distillation because the broad idea isn’t wrong, but these companies do occasionally do long term poo poo while the idea taken literally would lead to much worse results than seen. And yes, give it time, etc. But this poo poo has been going on for forty years now.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:27
|
|
|
I believe the board, which represents shareholders, has authority over the executive, who have authority over the company, so even if the law doesn't say the company needs to maximize shareholder value, that's the job. In other situations, like fund management, there is a fiduciary duty, where the fund manager has a legal responsibility to increase value for the investor. Tons of wiggle room in these things.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:34
|
|
|
StumblyWumbly posted:I believe the board, which represents shareholders, has authority over the executive, who have authority over the company, so even if the law doesn't say the company needs to maximize shareholder value, that's the job. The second quote in my post kinda talks about this a little bit. tldr "maximizing shareholder value" is vague because one could argue that losing money today to generate way more money tomorrow is indeed maximizing shareholder value, as much as you could argue that the only time shareholder value matters is what the number says right now so any less is bad. In practice, the board would/could find an executive who shares the same vision/goals.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:40
|
|
|
The absolute cursedness of the aerospace industry is just one of the most glaring examples of how capitalism has been Extremely Bad for space, among other things. You delegate the construction of giant tools and machines to do extremely difficult and expensive things to a private enterprise whose mandate is to maximize rents for its private owners -- what else would you expect this to result in besides a massive system of graft and rent-seeking? The fact that SpaceX has been able to compete in this space by greatly lowering the cost of launch through reusable spacecraft is just an example of early efforts to outcompete through offering a better product (the usual capitalist pattern); we can expect that as they mature and become more enmeshed in the aerospace-government industrial complex, for the pace of their innovations to stagnate as they grow fat on big contracts. Nevermind the fact that, in the end, it's still government leading the way with the big lucrative money carrot. Space travel has always been a government-led enterprise - the 'profit' in it for private industry has just been leeching government money. This, by the way, is why I'm deeply skeptical of Raenir Salazar's claim that a Marxist analysis of historical development necessarily leads to capitalism expanding into space: to wit, the reason capitalism was able to expand abroad from Western Europe into new markets in the world is not analogous to space exploration because the "new markets" in the world were already filled with abundant people with resources to claim, exploit and colonize. When it comes to space, there are no resources to be freely claimed as there is no labor value to extract from objects in outer space. Yes, there's physical materials like asteroids full of metal and water, but assuming a Marxist framework, those resources are "dead", so to speak, as there's no human labor (the source of value per the Labor Theory of Value) to transform them. If you use automation to extract them and bring them to earth, you immediately run into the problem of the tendency of the profit rate to fall as capital - machines - do not produce labor value. If we want to pursue space, socialism is the only way forward. Even if we view space only as a huge store of resources to be used to improve human life on earth, decoupling the profit motive from space activities, and accounting for things purely in terms of inputs and outputs of raw resources, we can only do so under a socialist-like prioritization scheme.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:48
|
|
|
The Soviet sci fi authors agreed. I suppose we shall see.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:55
|
|
|
Nessus posted:The Soviet sci fi authors agreed. I suppose we shall see. I gotta find like an anthology of stories of those guys, I think I'd like them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:59
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:I gotta find like an anthology of stories of those guys, I think I'd like them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 17:32
|
|
|
The study of history, like everything else, is a poor predictor of the future. The only field that has had even a bit of luck with future predictions is physics, and even then only with approximations from numerical analysis for anything that exists in the real world. Social dynamics and societies are absurdly complex systems and all generalizations are basically cartoons.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 18:56
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:This, by the way, is why I'm deeply skeptical of Raenir Salazar's claim that a Marxist analysis of historical development necessarily leads to capitalism expanding into space: to wit, the reason capitalism was able to expand abroad from Western Europe into new markets in the world is not analogous to space exploration because the "new markets" in the world were already filled with abundant people with resources to claim, exploit and colonize. When it comes to space, there are no resources to be freely claimed as there is no labor value to extract from objects in outer space. Yes, there's physical materials like asteroids full of metal and water, but assuming a Marxist framework, those resources are "dead", so to speak, as there's no human labor (the source of value per the Labor Theory of Value) to transform them. If you use automation to extract them and bring them to earth, you immediately run into the problem of the tendency of the profit rate to fall as capital - machines - do not produce labor value. There was resources but no labor in the North Sea but today companies extract those resources with workers living there temporarily on oil platforms and ships. There was no labor or resources to legally exploit in Antarctica but there are now permanent settlements there such as McMurdo although workers are only there on a temporary basis. There was no real economic reason to settle the Paracels but Woody Island now has a permanent Chinese town although it's mainly military and workers are mostly there in shifts. So there's plenty of historical and present examples of inhospitable places being exploited by capital or government for a number of reasons. If your definition of "expanding into space" is permanent settlements with permanent populations that raise children and eventually retire there then that may not occur but there's no particular reason why there won't be private resource exploitation. Automation doesn't mean there's no labor involved. Many people are employed to operate and plan for the Mars rovers. They are just on Earth operating their tools at a distance.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:59
|
|
|
History is a pretty good indicator of the future, to suggest otherwise flies in the face of entire mainstream philosophical schools of thought and to a lesser extent the basis of mathematics. DrSunshine posted:The absolute cursedness of the aerospace industry is just one of the most glaring examples of how capitalism has been Extremely Bad for space, among other things. You delegate the construction of giant tools and machines to do extremely difficult and expensive things to a private enterprise whose mandate is to maximize rents for its private owners -- what else would you expect this to result in besides a massive system of graft and rent-seeking? I think there's some definitely incorrect claims you're making here (1) the resources in space absolutely are plentiful; infinite even by definition, but in the practical way our economies care about even them, when a single asteroid has potentially trillions of dollars worth of valuable resources, this is absolutely reasonable to argue is plentiful; especially when as an advanced society it isn't that difficult comparatively (and theoretically) to extract those resources. The resources we currently extract from the ground additionally have exponentially increasing costs associated with their extraction, and most alarmingly exponential environmental incidental costs that we as a civilization absolutely should be factoring into our economic activity; if mining an asteroid means we can close down all rare earth pits for good; and perhaps a good chunk of all the mines around the entire globe, I think that's a pretty good sustainable economic incentive. (2) There's plenty of surplus labour that can be eventually be extracted, either from the value of people working in the space industry, in the following mineral extraction industry and related manufacturing industries, or from the workers that may end up working in outerspace or robots necessasary to support such an industry; surplus labour comes from many things and can be acquired insitu, as a result of patterns of economic development, "migrations" and new technologies. Capitalism will create its own labour to exploit, that's its entire modus operandi, its very adaptable in these respects which is why it has continued to endure until now despite there being at least semi-viable alternative systems. I think this idea that because we'd have to go there and bring back the resources means its "dead" and thus capitalism will see no value in it when it can easily create entire new heirarchies of exploitation, invent new methods of production and capital to acquire makes this argument make no sense to me. Like look at crypto, it's literally just as "dead" as any asteroid if not more so, but the capitalists are pouring entire fortunes and kings ransoms trying to find rocks to squeeze for rock juice to sell to people. Crypto is literally something that doesn't exist and is in its current state only economically and environmentally harmful but they're still doing it all on their own. Capitalism as a transitionary economic system will lay the groundwork for its eventual overthrow and its efforts to exploit space is just another step in that process.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 23:06
|
|
|
Everyone stop right now and listen to Steven Weinberg’s dark matter rap from 1992: https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/weinberg.21/Rap/darkmatterrap.mp3 It’s in Angela Collier’s new YouTube video, which I am still watching, but I had to stop to share it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:08
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:History is a pretty good indicator of the future, to suggest otherwise flies in the face of entire mainstream philosophical schools of thought and to a lesser extent the basis of mathematics. Flies in the face of history, too. Before the obvious stuff gets mentioned, I mean on a larger macro systems level that we're currently discussing. Obviously the narrow you scope the less a good predictor history becomes.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:28
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Would not the precautions taken for the Moon samples also function for the Mars samples? If it was some kind of hyper-robust super-life that was ubiquitous and only kept in check by harsh martian environments, presumably it would have devoured Viking. nothing we find on mars - if we ever find anything on mars - is likely going to be worrisome in terms of being a big bad. anything that's likely to evolve in an environment so sparse would probably literally explode if brought to earth. i used to work in a cave and karst systems lab and one of the things we found was that we had to really dial back nutrients in order to culture anything lol
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:31
|
|
|
All you need is one rocket full of billionaires or other Everest enthusiasts blowing up and SpaceX won't be worth a nickel.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:37
|
|
|
Dameius posted:Flies in the face of history, too. We're actually terrible at it, always have been. But we post-rationalize and re-interpret after the fact and then we assume that we nailed it. You just have a decent number of people essentially being a render farm full of guesses and occasionally some of them hit. One sharpshooter fallacy later and it's "look at how well we did at predicting x!" No, Tommy predicted h, q, f, and z, and x is superficially like h enough that people base their entire worldview on Tommy's complete works. Look, I'm not excluding myself here, we all do it, it's quintessentially human. But we have to struggle to point that gaze at ourselves and our thinking and our tools just as often as we point it at everything else. If your compass isn't consistently calibrated it's going to end up pointing the wrong way.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
Name Change posted:All you need is one rocket full of billionaires or other Everest enthusiasts blowing up and SpaceX won't be worth a nickel.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
mediaphage posted:nothing we find on mars - if we ever find anything on mars - is likely going to be worrisome in terms of being a big bad. anything that's likely to evolve in an environment so sparse would probably literally explode if brought to earth. Oh that's kinda wild, haha. I never would've thought of that! It's just like those fish that live way deep in the ocean and just kind of melt when brought up to normal pressure. I guess that makes a whole lot of sense given how finely-calibrated our metabolism is to various nutrients, and at certain concentrations those nutrients become toxic.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:47
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:Oh that's kinda wild, haha. I never would've thought of that! It's just like those fish that live way deep in the ocean and just kind of melt when brought up to normal pressure. I guess that makes a whole lot of sense given how finely-calibrated our metabolism is to various nutrients, and at certain concentrations those nutrients become toxic. yeah they're just so used to snagging anything they can that they pop when put in a rich environment. you could actually map out how they'd steal elements from the dna of other microbes, haha. bug-eat-bug world, mang. i'd be more worried if we found one of these moons had a really rich ecosystem but even then i wouldn't actually be too worried about any of it. we should take precautions of course, i just don't think it's a real big deal. if we ever got a mission to a proper exoplanetary biosphere, well. all bets are off
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 01:56
|
|
|
Name Change posted:All you need is one rocket full of billionaires or other Everest enthusiasts blowing up and SpaceX won't be worth a nickel. Inshallah
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 03:00
|
|
|
ashpanash posted:We're actually terrible at it, always have been. But we post-rationalize and re-interpret after the fact and then we assume that we nailed it. I mean looking at military history this is pretty trivially incorrect; nation-states have generally have been able to adapt to lessons from the past to formulate successful policies for the present. Barring the usual caveats for example we can look at the NASDAQ trendline and conclude that in general your 401k or whatever it is will probably grow in value and there's never a point when not to invest or save for retirement. Maybe there will be a black swan event and the economy completely collapses but generally we can conclude, that based on this evidence, that such trends will continue. Maybe it is your particular specific belief that you think humans are just so darn anarchic that nothing is predictable on a macro scale; and that's whatever, but if all you're doing is looking at the ways humans have generally attempted to form theories and projections based on data and then saying its just post hoc rationalization then I think you're off the trail a little ways. We couldn't say anything with any level of certainty about say, climate change, without extrapolating future trends based on past data.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 04:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 21:52 |
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:I mean looking at military history this is pretty trivially incorrect; nation-states have generally have been able to adapt to lessons from the past to formulate successful policies for the present.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2023 04:21
|
|
