Hacker News Reader

Comment by samcday | Hacker News Reader

I'm sitting on my couch, just idly watching live footage of some people doing stuff 200 miles above me. Above the place I will spend the entirety of my life. Watching them do complicated things that, if we're lucky and don't destroy ourselves first, will ensure our species becomes multi-planetary. Maybe even space faring someday.

Life is weird.

View on HN

I watched Free Solo not long ago, yesterday I watched Falcon 9 launch then land flawlessly and today I watched Dragon 2 dock with the ISS.

It's mind boggling how apt humans are to what should be impossible.

Oooh, I'm eagerly awaiting that film to screen in Berlin later this month! I loved Alex's TED talk. Just that little taste had my palms very, very sweaty.

Which film?

Apparently there's a documentary coming out about Alex Honnold's free solo ascend of El Capitan. It's called "Free Solo"[1]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7775622/?ref_=nv_sr_1

It was already released and won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 2019 Academy Awards.

It's something that you should consider viewing if you have the chance. The cinematography alone is worth the price of admission // rental.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/movies/oscar-winners.html

National Geographic channel aired it today (March 3rd). But if you have the opportunity to see it on an IMAX size screen, I would wait until that.

Highly recommended! If you can, see it on IMAX for maximum palm sweating :P

Imagine the energy and money spent on bickering and wars and ultimately useless junk were not.

I'm not a fan of war, but many technologies and sciences were developed for military use, everything from mathematics for ballistics, food preservation, thermodynamics, antibiotics, nuclear energy, the lunar program, and GPS.

So yes, war is a horrendous waste and terrible detriment to humanity, but even war has had some beneficial side effects.

The same effort can be put into inventing these in the absence of conflict. You do need funding and you do need urgency, but that's a question of national will.

...and war seems to be the most effective source of national will.

Unfortunately, it (often) _isn't_. I'd love to live in that world, but it doesn't seem realistic.

Just wait until you hear about Wernher von Braun.

And how is that a refutation, logically?

War has enabled his "useless" creations.

Well said.

Might want to focus on that "don't destroy ourselves first" part.. And consider all the other things on the planet & maybe it's a good thing to save those too. Just because, when is the last time we discovered another planet with intricacy and diversity of Earth?

As far as I understand there is still some time before humanity becomes interplanetary in any meaningful way, maybe even many generations. And what is going on so far these days is mostly about not regressing.

Making rockets re-usable is a massive step forward and not about 'not regressing'.

In the past we even had space ships, which could start from ground, go to space, do stuff, come back and the could be reused. Having just a rocket isn't that much of an improvement.

That said: All the constraints on making it reusable and safe for humans are also a key factor why Space Shuttle was so expensive. With SpaceX's rockets not all parts need to resist the stress of reentry etc.

> In the past we even had space ships, which could start from ground, go to space, do stuff, come back and the could be reused

The 're-used' aspect of the Shuttle involved massive re-fits which took months for each vehicle. It was like having to send your car back to the manufacturer for a total rebuild (often including engine change) every time you went for a drive. SpaceX is a massive improvement in this respect.

And two expended boosters and an expended fuel tank.

Nitpick: the boosters were reused by parachute splashdown, but it was also really expensive due to (among other things) the corrosiveness of salt water. The External Tank was in fact expended.

Each SRB consisted of 11 cylindrical steel sections. After flight and recovery, these were dismantled, refilled with solid rocket fuel as appropriate, and then reconnected to form a new SRB with all of the O-rings, etc.

So also a complete rebuild, with reuse occurring at the segment level, not of the whole booster assembly.

Dragons are also reused (although at first, these newer ones will only be reused for cargo flights).

Additionally, SpaceX is serious about Starship/BFR. That's fully reusable and will be capable of going to the Moon (or even Mars) and back fully reusably: https://twitter.com/JaneidyEve/status/1102023437206388736

I doesn't seem clear at this point whether re-usable will be significant for activities beyond earth orbit. Partly the excitement comes from being a workaround for humanities reluctance to spend money on space exploration. Believe what you want, but from what I can find this doesn't seem to be a significant part of what would e.g. make humanity interplanetary. At least not yet.

Overcoming blockers is always significant.

Getting to orbit is hard, for anything big beyond earth orbit, we'll probably need manufacturing or at least some assembly in orbit. That takes a lot of trips from earth to orbit. Making that more efficient means more resources left for the real exploration.

I dunno if I really follow your logic here. It would be nice if nobody cared about money and we all just worked hard to make everything awesome or whatever. But, we (sadly) don't live in that world. So in this world that we do live in, bringing down the cost of getting things/people from the ground to really really high up in the sky can only be viewed as a step towards becoming multiplanetary.

>I doesn't seem clear at this point whether re-usable will be significant for activities beyond earth orbit.

beside everything else, getting retro-rockets work well at hypersonic speeds is a key to landing on Mars (I really loved the de-facto SpaceX propaganda series "Mars". Even better than "Martian" for me. The only slight disappointment is the cop out at the very end).

If you want to get back from Mars you need a reusable rocket.

By that definition, the Apollo program had reusable rockets. (Able to climb back out of a gravity well, leave orbit of a large mass, and return to earth).

Escape velocity of Mars is less than half Earth's or about double the moon's.

Did you notice NASA's RFP for a reusable lunar lander?

Did you notice ULA's reusable/refuelable ACES is aimed squarely at BEO?

And if SpaceX and Blue Origin bid for the 2 LOP-G resupply flights, they'll bid reusable launchers and claim significant cost savings.

Sounds like everyone has reusable stuff in their plans. Believe what you want!

I named 4 different organizations that think that reusability is important beyond earth orbit.

Also, saying "If you don't want to see that point I can't really help that" is not going to result in a good conversation.

My great grandmother was reading a pulp magazine about man going to the moon when she was young, her father made a point to check that she understood that such things were impossible if not extremely far off in the future. The only reason I know this story is that she survived to watch the moon landings and told my father, who told me. The moral of the story was always that it's very hard to predict technological growth, in particular, we tend to undershoot with our long term predictions. Personally I tend to be more weary of people that claim something won't happen in my lifetime than people that tell me something will happen.

For all its faults, and it had a few, Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu helped stretch my perspective to be ok with the fact that space travel could be a multigenerational activity even with a quantum leap in technology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com