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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

They weren't the first to build a new engine or an engine of that type or land upright. They just combined previous achievements in a better way. Their technology is incredible but it is all incremental improvements combined with a sustainable business model.

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Their major accomplishments were economic, not technological. Their crown jewel Raptor, applies full-flow staged combustion principles that were known and demonstrated on soviet test stands since the 60s.

Fusion power still needs to overcome fundamental, hard physics problems.

My understanding is that the physics are actually pretty well understood but it's just a matter of executing on them. Fusion is possible but we just need someone to actually... do it. Which AFAIK is the point of ITER.

ITER will NOT in any reasonable time frame actually do it, and will not be a commercial success.

Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.

I don't think ITER was ever intended to be a commercial success and it doesn't have to be. It's literally named the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

It is a research reactor. It goes first to prove it is at least possible to build a power producing reactor. That's all it has to do. Just exist.

How can the tech be "ancient" if they are the first ones building it, even if slowly. There may be many new designs by the time they deliver on an older one but that hardly makes the tech "ancient".

Obsolete on Arrival is what's implied i think. If deuterium–tritium fusion experiments start sometime after 2035 then it's potentially "ancient tech" given the accelerating tech timelines (singularity) which is exponential in character.

You can't wave your hands, chant "singularity" or "exponential growth" and actually have made an argument. Someone has to do the research - the singularity is not coming in 2050.

Progress in computer science, and the absurd utility of data handling improvements to other fields, has created an extremely unrealistic expectation in the minds of computer tech adjacent professionals about how quickly technology can actually develop, because the core technology of computing (more transistors) had a long period of exponential improvement due to the nature of how it's produced (lithography on 2D surfaces). Feature size shrinks give you exponential improvements.

But that period is ending for computing - there's no more room left in the silicon chip regime to keep doing it much past 6nm. And progress in other fields enjoys no such advantages: cellular biology for example, can't exponentially increase the time it to takes to grow a culture. They also can't shrink it easily - scaling biological research generally involves just scaling in size - facilities, space, grad students, everything. It is much more linear - there are very few easy wins beyond what improved informatics handling gave us (and where we did get big wins was the same mechanism - the availability of cheap silicon handling led to a rush to look for ways to capitalize on cheap silicon handling).

There's a reason computing is powering better surveillance, but brain-computer interface technology is moving exactly as fast as there are people working in the field, doing experiments, developing technology and doing slow, uncool research like patch-clamping single cells or whatever. Because the fundamentals are diverse, and there is no one single technical improvement which gives you a big scaling improvement (and everyone is hoping they'll find one).

The design of ITER was finished in 1998. Technology have changed a lot since then,although no one have built any near the size of it because of the expenses that are pretty much guaranteed to not give any money back.

That's fine but to act like new small scale experiments and designs obsolete technology that has never before been developed at scale is silly and frankly runs contrary to how technological and scientific progress are made. I'll never understand the biases of theorists. They act as if all theory isn't deeply indebted to practical learnings. You don't commit to a project like ITER because you believe it will turn out a cutting edge solution to a problem. You do so because you believe that whatever happens, in the end you will harvest many learnings that are widely useful.

First to land upright from orbital flight.

On top of the great points made by sibling comments the Apollo Lunar Modules landed propulsively from orbit with an additional party trick of having humans on board.

Also Blue Origin actually did propulsive sub-orbital landing from space to Earth before SpaceX, although admittedly from a lower altitude and velocity. Both came after the 1990s era Delta Clipper. Before that there were probably a lot of Apollo era test vehicles.

Each one got a bit higher and faster. This is the value SpaceX offers. They're doing the hard work of making things we know are possible also commercially viable.

Not orbital. Sub-orbital. Only their 1st stage rocket has landed, which mainly goes up, its nowhere near orbital velocity.

They plan to land the 2nd stage of starship, which will have reached orbital speeds. But that is a huge challenge that they have not attempted yet.

When did SpaceX ever do a powered landing from orbital flight?

The first ones that did, by the way, are the Soviets in the early 70s.

Do you mean on Earth? If you are talking about Soyuz, that was actually 1967!

If you mean space probes it’s actually more impressive, the Soviets landed a probe on the moon in 1966: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9

Ah sorry, I meant in atmosphere! But you are of course right!

The retro-rockets on 1976 Viking lander in Mars don’t count? Of course that had a parachute to assist, but I think it was still going really fast.

Sounds like the Russians actually did it in 1971?

Also since we are already speaking extra terrestrially Apollo 11 landed propulsively in 1969, with humans on board and it got back to orbit!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing...

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