HN user
"Launches to higher-orbits have included DSCOVR to Sun–Earth Lagrange point L1, TESS to a lunar flyby, a Tesla Roadster demonstration payload to a heliocentric orbit extending past the orbit of Mars, DART to the asteroid Didymos, Euclid to Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, and Psyche to the asteroid 16 Psyche." Per wikipedia, not sure if those count as meaningful. Plus Europe Clipper in a few months.
I mean I guess you are correct it was late but it was still first relative to Boeing. So the timeline warranted less emphasis then say now when Boeing is delayed 3 plus years on top of that.
I’m not sure how you can say the Ukraine invasion has zero bearing on the “NASA…having no access to space”. Given starliner is a dumpster fire and NASA would not be able to reliably count on Soyuz for access to ISS, it was a remarkably prescient statement. Even if Russia hadn’t invaded in 2020 it was obvious that NASA having its own capability to get to ISS was a strategic priority, that was only achieved by SpaceX.
Given that starliner is still not operational and the situation in Russia the description seems pretty on point to me?
Well Starliner was originally contracted to be certified in 2017. So a few month slip on top of the 5+ year slip already maybe justifies some of the skepticism from ARS
I wouldn’t claim that he was lucky but upper middle class?
The guy went to Phillips Exeter for high school and was captain of the fencing team. Not exactly middle class.
Are you actually trying to say the mission when Columbia came apart on re entry and killed 7 people was successful? And you’re gonna say the challenger mission failure that killed people is the same as SpaceX losing a satellite and a dragon cargo capsule.
That’s one of the worst takes I’ve ever heard
Lol are you just making stuff up now? The second stage re enters the atmosphere and burns up.
I’m not disputing SpaceX had the advantage of learning from peoples mistakes. And I’m not arguing that they didn’t physically get the engines and boosters back I’m just saying that calling the space shuttle and F9 both reusable may be semantically true but is really not giving an accurate representation.
I mean from a technological point of view sure, but that just shows how bad the design was(compared to what we know now). The falcon program shows that it’s obviously way more economical to just ditch the 2nd stage and reuse the booster. F9 launches cost sub 20 million and a shuttle launch costs on the order of a billion. Squabble over whatever details you want about performance or who had to do what R&D but F9 is clearly in a different league.
Calling the shuttle reusable is such a massive stretch. It’s like the shuttle of Theseus they basically had to rebuild it every time and it cost something like 1.5 billion dollars. Basically could’ve built a brand new rocket every time.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Pretty sure there’s a quote from Herb saying that southwest was going to be “high touch, low tech”. Herb was a legend for going up against the big airlines and winning but he was the right person for the right time. A war time ceo if you will. Southwest doesn’t need Jobs they need Cook, someone who can build out and scale now that they’re established.
The airline industry as a whole is known to have antiquated tech and hard to clean data. Someone mentioned in one of the threads last week how difficult it is to modernize these systems where every system is using different timestamp formats. Southwest is just more antiquated and probably at least 5 years behind the rest of the industry in modernizing. Especially with crew systems which is what blew everything up last week.
Could try checking out bigger blogs that you like and joining their discord for better/more stimulating interactions than comments. Also if you’re in a big enough city Less Wrong and EA probably have in person meetups. If they don’t they have a lot of resources for starting them.
Secret Hitler. Kind of like a formalized game of mafia Everyone is secretly assigned a faction: liberals or fascists and one person is hitler. Liberals have to work together to try and find out who the fascists are and win if they vote out hitler.
Methane has roughly twice the energy density of coal.
Building quadcopter from scratch (ish?) using an arduino as the flight controller.
Pretty interesting/challenging if you haven't done anything too complicated with hardware.
This is a little bit misleading. You have to look at the entire history of the industry. A lot of consolidation has happened to eliminate competition. And pretty much every legacy airline has declared bankruptcy except for coincidentally, Southwest. Largely due to their founders strategy of avoiding overly leveraging the company. So much so that at one point during the pandemic when other airlines were overleveraged, their stock price did not crash and they were the most valuable airline in the country by a considerable amount.
Diversions mid-flight are pretty rare, usually they will choose to skip B before taking off. That said there are some interesting instances where airlines can "tanker" fuel by fueling up more than they need to in a city where prices are cheaper
They have an incredible loyal customer base despite some of the recent bad publicity. Also seems like if the price and schedule are the same, generally Southwest provides a better experience.
Not quite true anymore. The average scheduled turn is closer to 35 minutes on 700 aircraft and 40+ on 800s. Still much shorter than legacy carriers
The Crew-2 mission earlier this year reused the Demo-2 Dragon capsule