On Thursday a rocket failed. Three humans remain on the ISS. What’s next?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That's just Arstechnica and Eric Berger. His space flight coverage including the Rocket Report is generally very good, but it always had this rather noticeable anti-Russian slant - every failure is yet another complete disaster, Russian space industry is a company of hacks, rockets are held together by sheer luck, etc.
Yes, some parts of it date back to the soviet union, but it is a very reliable rocket
The much-celebrated Shuttle, in the meantime, is dead.
It never reached the point in being worth using it, compared to the alternatives. At least in the use scenarios publicly known.
This is key. The shuttle was a military project. It's usefulness and congress' appetite for continuing to fund it ended once alternatives[1] were put into service.
I think the concern that people have though is that even if everything is designed correctly it means nothing if it not built correctly. There has been turmoil in management for Roscosmos and from what I have seen pressure from management can lead to poor quality.
35 anomalies over 222 flights up to 1997
I'm just hoping that it's a unknown failure mode. Worst case would (in my opinion) be human error during manufacturing (again).
The fact this is the first time ever that system has been used on the Soyuz speaks volumes for it's reliability. They'll figure out what happened, and the entire system will get safer as a result.
It feels like it's news from a parallel universe.
IMO, we should read less political news, maybe once a week, if something major happens we will hear about it.
On the larger scale, donations and canvassing matter. I feel like it’s a very safe assumption that the people frequenting this site have more resources (money, time, job options) than most.
You can put some of those resources to use by helping out candidates and campaigns you believe in. You can work with organizations who are working on the awful problems.
You can run for office yourself. I’ve seen acquaintances do it and win.
You can & should speak out and even quit if your company is doing something objectionable.
These are all a lot harder than just angrily watching the news (or hate-reading HN). It requires actual work and possibly significant personal sacrifice. I’m not always as good about it as I should be, but I feel confident that I’m getting better, and that those around me are too. It gets easier every day.
On a personal note: I’m an atheist and my parents mostly were too, but we were raised going to Quaker meeting. These days I find myself thinking about those Sunday school classes a lot. They were mostly focused on this kind of message (they were surprisingly secular). I wish I’d paid more attention. I might have started paying attention to this kind of thing earlier.
[edit] I totally forgot to reply to the "if something major happens we will hear about it" part:
What you consider "major" matters a lot though. Things you might normally think nothing about affect other people a lot. Also, at least in my circles, people talk way more about national news than local news, so I can't rely on hearing stuff through the grapevine.
I think it's a basic civic responsibility to keep yourself informed. It's also something most of us need to be better about.
What I mean by major things you will find out about it is that usually there is nothing that happens n one day and you will miss it by not reading the news that day, laws get debated a lot, ton of noise is happening and here in Romania large protests happen (though not major changes actually come from those)
I admit that I am a cynic and I see all the parties as the same level of corruption and incompetence due to my observation that only some type of personality can go up the ladder.
The point about trying to convince your friends or relatives, does it ever work? I never seen someone let be convinced by arguments, they always watch same TV channels, read same papers you can't produce a change in a heated debate.
I am curious if you think that is any issue in getting informed at the end of the week, what could have happened that you getting informed with a few days delay mattered ? If is important you would hear about it on the non political channels/papers or from other places.
About how frequently you actually need to read the news: if you're asking "do things move fast enough that hearing about an event when it happens vs a few days later matters?", then no, I don't think it does, and for some things you really need to wait before there's any useful information. But, at least personally, I don't think I could dedicate a block of time on the weekend to reading up on the events of the week. I follow some journalists on Twitter as well as some folks focused on local matters, and ask my brother questions about things I hear since he has more experience and I'm still relatively new to all this. Also, newspapers are great!
Lastly, about all parties being equally corrupt: I think they're all corrupt, but I don't think they're equal in either the degree of corruption or in the magnitude of harm their policies & discourse cause. On just one current issue: it's hard not to look at consistently Republican-lead policies that disproportionately disenfranchise black people and think that one side is very much worse here. Even if both sides are trying to stop their opponents from getting more votes, one side is clearly being more ruthless & cruel. Again, this is just one issue, but it's a big one and I believe there's plenty of evidence that this isn't an isolated case.
I agree is impossible to have a rigorous way of comparing the party corruption but I think that always the party in power will use all it can to win the next election, like voting populist laws, changing electoral rules and here in Romania attacking the justice department that is investigating the politicians and changing laws so most corrupt politicians won't be put in jail but keep their freedom.
This is the perfect time for another space race. But the only problem is that I can only think of China as a contender.
Also another consideration is the additional radiation concerns in space. Newer processors are more susceptible to single event upsets. So more processing power needs to be devoted to error checking or additional weight is necessary to rad harden the component.
edit: Hm, I've never been downvoted on HN before. Care to explain why? I think my comment is adding to the discussion, in that OP was speculating only China could possibly be a contender in a space race. Certainly, SpaceX developing propulsive landing and reuse of the first stage is pretty game changing - liquid flyback boosters had only been proposed before, never actually created & used. SpaceX's ongoing experiments with fairing return leave me optimistic that it will work out fairly soon, too.
Nothing changed. Soyuz is still incredibly reliable. It's a bit old, a bit expensive (Crew Dragon, flying on reused Falcon 9's, will be much cheaper) and very cramped for 3 astronauts, but it does the job and has been doing it for what, 40 years?
Sure, this could be a very sophisticated campaign and these accounts could have been cultivated for multiple years for this purpose. But isn't it more likely these people are just normal Russians (or non-Russians tired of the anti-Russian angle in western media) that want to defend the reputation of the Soyuz?
Disclaimer: I am not particularly pro-Russian, but I have a Putin calendar on my office wall. Mostly because it ticks people off ;)
I'm also indifferent one way or the other, both the Falcon and Soyuz are impressive vehicles.
Personally I am pro-human space flights mainly due to how it captures the world. Space-X's stated goal of turning rocket launches into common events like a airplane taking off has pretty much happened. You have two humans also die and it is headline news around the world. I can't wait till we get someone back on the moon personally.
On the other hand, it could be more a reflection of the community’s general contrarian streak and bias for consciously impartial rationality (whether or not we succeed there is a different discussion).
Hard to say! I’ll defer to that classic aphorism: never attribute to state actors what can be attributed to antiestablishment geekery.
There is nobody on Putin's payroll writing wonderful words about Russia here. However, there are people that write rational rather than emotional comments that do not uphold the Russophobia we are all supposed to be going along with.
'Sinophobia' is sometimes present though (those Chinese are stealing our IP!!!) with this being a genuinely held belief, rarely backed up by tangible evidence.
The majority of the time this article has been up is when people closer to Russia have been awake.
It will be interesting to see if the narrative shifts as we move through US time zones. Although with your comment currently at the top, that may skew the data. :)
Where are the pro-russian comments?
> but I wonder if the issues that Reddit identified with the campaigns by Russian entities may be as far reaching as YC.
You mean the nonsense they had to push to appease the media right? Glad you didn't bring up the $200,000 that some russian company supposedly spent on facebook to win trump the election. If the russians had been running a propaganda campaign on reddit, they did a piss poor job because 99% of the propaganda on reddit has been anti-russia since the very beginning.
> The content of the comments is interesting too, attacking the reputation of journalist.
So criticizing journalists ( an occupation that has lost an incredible amount of credibility recently ) means that you are a russian? I guess that makes 80% of the US population russian agents. But what about journalists who critize other journalists? Doesn't that make them russian agents too? Oh dear.
To me, the only suspect comment in this entire thread is yours. Or maybe that's because I'm a russian agent. /s
Seems like the whataboutism propaganda campaign has morphed into the "everyone's a russian agent" campaign. Wonder what it'll morph into next.
I think what a lot of readers hate (and I'm part of those) is that a lot of simplified articles (like this one) seem to completely forget that this rocket is still the most reliable rocket upto this day, and uses sensationalism in order to clickbait.