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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

Astronauts train for years before going to space. Do these space tourism companies pretend that anyone with enough cash can do it?

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Astronauts train for doing astronaut things like spacewalks and other zero-g activities.

I would expect a tourist needs to demonstrate they have the fortitude to:

1. Not Die

2. (Possibly) not lose their shit (any definition)

These can probably be handled with a centrifuge after the tourist demonstrates surviving an extreme rollercoaster.

>(Possibly) not lose their shit (any definition)

This is the funniest thing I've read all day.

> Do these space tourism companies pretend that anyone with enough cash can do it?

No pretend required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Tito

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_British

Note that ISS tourists did months of training to go into space for a few days.

Pilots train for years too. Does it mean plane passengers have to as well?

Not all astronauts are pilots

They get a ton of training so they can operate all systems. Tourists will have highly trained pilots with them and the only thing they will have to do is to not touch anything and do what they are told to do when something goes wrong.

Elon's stated goal re: astronauts and training is that the technology should be sufficiently simplified to let anyone go up with minimal training. The idea of a heavily-trained astronaut is old, and the new thinking is that the people going to space should be able to spend their time up their doing whatever it is they are good at - even if just vacationing - rather than learning how to fly spacecraft etc.

I know this is a Jeff Bezos / Blue Origin article, but I would fully expect the same to be true here. Jeff has stated multiple times that he sees millions of people moving to space stations for work and general life. Earth should be left void of manufacturing and mining and things, which could be moved to space (and asteroids, etc) leaving Earth to be more of a natural environment for life to thrive.

I imagine that's the end goal but I have a hard time believing we will be there in just a few years.

Time will tell.

Nobody's proposing "just a few years". Both Musk and Bezos have grand visions that require difficult, complex technical and financial problems to be solved.

First up is lowering the cost of escape velocity such that "casual" flights are financially feasible. This includes reusable components, a very low failure rate, and an ecosystem of employees, engineers, and culture that supports it.

If M/B achieves their stated goals in this domain, then the next steps can be practically executed.

A big part of astronaut training is knowing how to fly the craft and knowing what to do if something breaks. If the machine is automatically controlled and reliable, you don't need as much training. (Maybe they'll send a trained person or two along with the tourists?)

Not sure I follow that logic. More automation might mean you won't have to use your training as much, but how does it mean less training? In the event all the automation fails you still have to know everything an astronaut would need to know were there no automation.

For Starship, there's absolutely no way a human could fly it anyway. Even if it weren't fly-by-wire, a human could not control the drag fins and the engines precisely enough to land safely. Even on Crew Dragon, which will (hopefully) fly in the near future with crew onboard, there isn't a hardware joystick. If the vehicle fails to the point where the computers aren't working, your only option is to deorbit. These spacecraft weren't intended to be flown manually.

Someone has to fly and troubleshoot the spacecraft when the inevitable failures occur. Most of the astronauts can be basically passengers but there has to be at least one pilot who knows how to switch SCE to AUX without a moment's hesitation.

Space ships are computer controlled nowadays. You can't fly them in any meaningful sense, and they don't have manual toggle switches like the old moon landers. There will be no pilot except the autopilot.

No that's not how it works at all. Autopilots are generally incapable of coping with unexpected system failures or spacecraft damage.

This is the real world, not Star Trek.

To take a real world example, Falcon 9 is completely autonomous during flight - the controllers on the ground can trigger an abort, and perhaps change the flight plan from a range of preselected options, but they're not going to attempt to take over the rocket and switch it to manual mode or something. They observe, they don't intervene during a normal flight, and if something does go wrong, they're not going to be able to save the situation. There is no pilot.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster. Unmanned boosters have always been automated.

Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree of manual control. This new generation of private manned capsules will be no different.

Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree

This is untrue for Soyuz or Dragon 2 - any capsule design is not pilotable. It will also be untrue for the upcoming starship for example. It might have crew but I struggle to think why it would have a pilot.

Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster.

Which just so happens to land itself.

The point I'm trying to make is that machines can land themselves perfectly well nowadays, and control software and its interaction with hardware is now too complex for puny humans to understand or interact with, so they're better off just letting it do its thing and land or crash - a human interaction during landing is not going to save the machine - things have moved on from the mooon landings.

The latest Soyuz capsules still have an extensive set of manual displays and controls for the cosmonauts to use when necessary. The point is not to hand fly the spacecraft during re-entry, but rather to deal with system failures or unexpected situations which the autopilot can't handle.

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