Kraftwerk played live with an astronaut on the ISS (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Kraftwerk played live with an astronaut on the ISS (2018)

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145 pointsCaliforniaKarl28 comments

Expect to see stuff like this become more and more "normal" in the future, thanks to access to space becoming drastically cheaper. Falcon 9/Dragon seats are now available for civilian purchase, as well as license to stay on the ISS.

Some examples: Axiom Space [1] plans to send three private passengers to the ISS on 2021, as well as adding their own commercial modules to the ISS. Tom Cruise seems pretty set on filming his next movie in space too [2].

Furthermore, if the Starship [3] project is successful, space is going to become _cheap_, perhaps even to the point that anyone in the upper middle class might be able to purchase a ride.

Exciting times.

[1] https://www.axiomspace.com/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/5/21248460/nasa-tom-cruise-m...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

I feel like shooting a movie in space would make for very good marketing but rather boring footage. Very cramped quarters, very drastic security measures would probably make for rather unimpressive footage compared to what's usually achieved through CGI. Space is big, space is slow, space is quiet. It will be quite an interesting challenge to make it look visually interesting in an action movie I think.

Although I suppose that watching the movie knowing that it was actually shot in space will be novelty enough to keep the audience captivated, but that'll only work for the first few movies going through the hassle of doing it, then the novelty will wear off and I expect that at that point people will be back to using much cheaper, simple and flexible CGI.

All scientific realism and other criticisms aside—I thought Gravity did a pretty good job with essentially what you described as the setting of the film.

Mostly spent focusing on pretty cramped quarters in a capsule. They figured out some ways to introduce drama. I think what might be the most stunning would be some of the exterior footage. I wonder whether that would introduce some sort of barrier-breaking in the mind when watching a film taking place above the earth knowing that the earth in the film is real footage in "real time" and not stock or CGI.

Suspension of disbelief failed when main character reached station with wildly different orientations with almost no delta-v in a stupidly short amount of time.

That's a fair point, but I think zero gravity + green screens will be a really unique opportunity that is hard to replicate anywhere else but space. You can do things you can't in a studio.

> Axiom Space [1] plans to send three private passengers to the ISS on 2021, as well as adding their own commercial modules to the ISS.

I just love when a super expensive taxpayer-funded space station (which is apparently also inefficient at science/$) gets used to make rich people richer.

If that gets you riled up, just wait until you hear how much commercial freight is transported over the interstates!

If you had bothered to do any research before posting this, you'd have found that the private passengers will pay $33,750 per night to be there, plus $105 each day per bag stowed, $42/kwh for power, and $50/gb for internet.

https://www.nasa.gov/leo-economy/commercial-use/pricing-poli...

$50/GB is less than some cellular overage fees.

I'd love to see the agreement that allows a movie to be shot in space. If they were to pay for the seats directly, it would be too much of the movie's budget.

Regardless, love to see it happen.

Just wondering, when you think _cheap_, what does that mean? 5 digits? 6 digits?

This has almost nothing to do with the post.

I'm very curious to know as a side point -- what kind of communications path goes to the ISS? Or for example, when SpaceX's rockets live stream the video during launch? The video quality on those broadcasts is really good. The diagram in that article is only a cartoon representation, I'd love to know actually how the signal gets carried.

Do they purely use ground-station-direct-to-orbit path, or is there some satellite-to-satellite "routing" of the transmission? Do they use some NASA ground station network, or pipe it through commercial ones as well? What kinds of frequencies are being used? Microwave (X/Ku/etc?-bands)?

Also reminds me of "Space Oddity" [1] performed by Chris Hadfield [2] in 2013 on the IIS. He even released an album with songs recorded up there [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hadfield

[3] https://music.apple.com/ca/album/space-sessions-songs-from-a...

Reminded of JMJ colab in 1986 and was supposed to play a concert with a Ron playing saxophone up in space. Sadly tragedy curtailed that endeavour.

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/05/us/challenger-astronaut-a...

Well, that was outstanding. i haven't seen Kraftwerk live since 1991 or 1992 but that was a gig I will never forget, and they're still changing and adapting. I wish I'd had the money to get tickets for their Italian gigs.

> and they're still changing and adapting

Saw them for the first time in maybe 2014 or so. I hadn't followed much about them except listening to their music, so I was expecting them to be playing with a full setup of vintage 70's gear, mainly because there are a lot of other groups formed in the 70s who are still big and are doing that.

I was really excited to see them mostly using iPads and microsoft Surfaces hooked up to several keyboards and other MIDI controllers. I think they just always want to be trying out the newest musical tech.

It seems like an enormous amount of effort just to make your entire life an excuse to fiddle with tech, lol. Long may they continue

watched them live last year in Teatro Antico di Ostia, wonderful show to see them live, worth the ticket price.

Amazing, I got chills watching this.

Here's the first time bagpipes were played in space, aboard the ISS. https://time.com/4104158/international-space-station-bagpipe...

The twist here is that the astronaut was honoring a good friend of mine after he'd died.

My buddy Vic trained the astronauts on medical matters and first aid. He showed my how you can't do CPR in space the normal way, because you'll just push yourself across the room, so there's special stuff like this that they need to be trained in.

He gave me the real back-stage tour in Houston, which was incredibly cool. One nifty thing he showed my was how they simulate the communications delay in training. It's remarkably easy and obvious: they just use Tivos.

I am reminded of astronaut Cady Coleman's flute duet with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, in 2011:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeC4nqBB5BM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Love_(Kraftwerk_song)

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/048927-000-A/kraftwerk-pop-art...

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/rCQEzgtWv-E

Is there an app that I can use to create similar sounds as AstroAlex directly on my iPhone? Lemur (which was used here) seems to best just a remote for synthesizers, correct? Also, 25 bucks is quite steep for just playing around.

SynthScaper[1] could definitely make those sounds. Mind you, probably most of the Korg iOS synths can probably do it too.

[1] https://motion-soundscape.blogspot.com/2017/07/synthscaper-s...

Correct, Lemur is just a remote. I've heard great things about TouchOSC, which would fill a similar role at a fraction of the cost: https://hexler.net/products/touchosc

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