EPTNASA and the Private Sector - Page 249
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Keep debates civil. | ||
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oBlade
United States5670 Posts
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lestye
United States4178 Posts
On August 08 2024 12:40 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote: So, Starliner astronauts are stranded on the ISS and that mission is pushing every other Crew mission back. Rumor is NASA is about to send 2 and grab the stranded 2 astronauts so that they can come back. Another rumor is that they might be stuck there until February when the next rotation happens. Boeing clearly isn't up to the task, so who's next? I think its the latter because the ISS only has 2 parking spaces. | ||
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Sermokala
United States13984 Posts
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ZerOCoolSC2
8998 Posts
I think the biggest issue is Boeing looking highly incompetent at something they used to do regularly. But they couldn't figure shit out for whatever reason. I'd love to see them or anyone else be the 2nd after SpaceX. But at this rate.... | ||
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oBlade
United States5670 Posts
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ZerOCoolSC2
8998 Posts
Glad that there is now a plan in place to bring those 2 back. But man, going from 8 days to 8 months? That's a wild thing to come to grips with in space. Here's to a successful rescue and landing. Next up is Polaris Dawn on Tuesday morning. After that, we should be getting another Starship launch in September, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
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oBlade
United States5670 Posts
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Sbrubbles
Brazil5776 Posts
On October 14 2024 01:50 oBlade wrote: SpaceX caught the booster from Starship 5 at the launch tower midair with a huge pair of metal chopsticks and splashed down Starship successfully after a full flight. The steel rocket pipe dream might be real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1svfkWHpWNk That was freaking cool | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2638 Posts
On October 14 2024 01:50 oBlade wrote: SpaceX caught the booster from Starship 5 at the launch tower midair with a huge pair of metal chopsticks and splashed down Starship successfully after a full flight. The steel rocket pipe dream might be real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1svfkWHpWNk It's pretty much certain it works by this point I think. They could do the Falcon9 strat with reusable booster and expendable ship and it would still be a great machine. They won't, but they could. | ||
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BlackJack
United States10574 Posts
The Falcon 9 had become the world's only rapidly reusable rocket. During 2020, Falcon boosters had landed safely twenty-three times, coming down upright on landing legs. The video feeds of the fiery yet gentle landings still made Musk leap from his chair. Nevertheless, he was not enamored with the landing legs being planned for Starship's booster. They added weight, thus cutting the size of the payloads the booster could lift. "Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth. It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it." A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?" After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?" Except from Walter Isaacson's biography of the genesis of the plan to catch the booster with the tower. I remember being on the side of the majority of engineers thinking this was a crazy idea that would not work and even when watching the livestream I was expecting the booster to explode and damage the launchpad. Amazing that they pulled this off on the first try. Credit to Elon for taking risks. Sometimes they pay off. | ||
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Raidfather
1 Post
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21788 Posts
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ZerOCoolSC2
8998 Posts
On October 15 2024 21:13 Gorsameth wrote: Elon didn't do jack shit. The brilliant people working at Space-X did. At this point is basically a proven fact that the more Elon is involved the worse a project goes. I was waiting for it lol. Gwynn Shotwell runs SpaceX and she does everything in her power to shield those engineers. Elon has a say, probably too large of one, on how things operates, but Shotwell is in charge at SpaceX. Musk brings the vision and Shotwell does her damndest to execute but more importantly, stop Musk from fucking it up if it looks like it'll succeed/get funding/contracts. | ||
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Lmui
Canada6213 Posts
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BlackJack
United States10574 Posts
On October 15 2024 21:13 Gorsameth wrote: Elon didn't do jack shit. The brilliant people working at Space-X did. At this point is basically a proven fact that the more Elon is involved the worse a project goes. Such an odd post to make after I just posted the evidence that the feat they just accomplished was opposed by the majority of Engineers but spearheaded by Elon. It literally wouldn't have happened if not for Elon. | ||
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ETisME
12476 Posts
On October 16 2024 06:53 Lmui wrote: I won't disagree that the vision for SpaceX has something to do with Elon, but the execution is all on the engineers and the leadership from Shotwell. They do incredible work because of the engineering excellence there. Tesla similarly would probably be doing significantly better without Elon at this point, because they're doing moonshots that aren't really followed up with execution that matches the vision. I think you are vastly underestimating just how much influence a CEO has over the company. Both Tesla and spaceX were not an established company like Apple. A CEO risk appetite alone can change the entire company culture. Not to mention Elon is known to over micro manage, saying he didn't do much is massively understating his achievements. It was Elon that pushed to do gigafactory, that is in itself a giant milestones that don't get mentioned nearly enough. Any manufacturing companies would say the same. The amount of hate against CEO (or Elon in this case) is just confusing to me. There are people trying to downplay it by looking at his wealth, there are a ton of rich people in the world, even if you look at the past decade, how many of them achieved same level of success? In this day and age we celebrate so much of tech giants, shower them with money. I am biased but it's even harder to build a manufacturing wonder like space X. There's so much things to consider when it comes to physical products, the machines that build the parts, assembly, tolerance, logistics etc. | ||
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BlackJack
United States10574 Posts
On October 16 2024 07:22 ETisME wrote: The amount of hate against CEO (or Elon in this case) is just confusing to me. Really? It's pretty easy to figure out where it comes from. Nobody hated Elon 10 years ago when he was just the guy bringing electric cars to the masses to save the planet. There's a perfect correlation between the hate he gets and his turn to right-wing politics. The weird thing with the world today is that people can't just dislike someone for their politics. Instead they have to dislike everything the person has done because of their politics. If flash came out tomorrow and endorsed Trump there would be a significant amount of people that will say "flash was overrated anyway, boxer/nada/iloveoov are the true terran bonjwas." The perception of reality will change post hoc to resolve the cognitive dissonance of admiring someone's ability while hating what they believe. | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8998 Posts
On October 16 2024 08:49 BlackJack wrote: Really? It's pretty easy to figure out where it comes from. Nobody hated Elon 10 years ago when he was just the guy bringing electric cars to the masses to save the planet. There's a perfect correlation between the hate he gets and his turn to right-wing politics. The weird thing with the world today is that people can't just dislike someone for their politics. Instead they have to dislike everything the person has done because of their politics. If flash came out tomorrow and endorsed Trump there would be a significant amount of people that will say "flash was overrated anyway, boxer/nada/iloveoov are the true terran bonjwas." The perception of reality will change post hoc to resolve the cognitive dissonance of admiring someone's ability while hating what they believe. This is probably true for a lot of people, but I don't think that holds here in this thread. We criticize Elon solely for his SpaceX work and leave his politics out of it. We give him credit for SpaceX achievements all the time, but we also know that it isn't him per se doing all of the work. The engineers and Shotwell deserve a lot of the honor and credit. Too many times has Elon fucked around with the government because he got told no. And too many times has Shotwell had to bail SpaceX out. As to criticizing CEOs, what do you expect? They make a lot of money and they need to be kept in check. Blue Origin is a perfect example. Bezos has that company flailing about because he can't find anyone competent enough to run that. If he could find himself a Shotwell, he'd be neck and neck. Electron has a competent CEO and they're doing pretty well. CEOs who can't find the solutions are creating more problems. I'm pulling for BO to succeed so we have backup flights when/as needed. But I'm not holding my breath. | ||
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Turbovolver
Australia2394 Posts
A lot of backlash also came from him buying Twitter and making it shittier, as well as doing so to seemingly try to control the public discourse rather than to turn a profit. I'm not talking about politics when I say public discourse, as it was only more recently that he became loudly political as far as I've seen. I'm referring to stuff like auto-following Elon on registration of an account, Elon's tweets getting a special boost in the algorithm, people who pay getting favoured in the algorithm. Back before Twitter, before this stuff about him was known, he was just - as Blackjack says - "the guy that brings us electric cars". EDIT: Actually I don't think he bought PayPal, I think he sort of strong-armed his way onto the board of it. | ||
micronesia
United States24701 Posts
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