Chuck Yeager has died | Hacker News Reader

Chuck Yeager has died

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636 pointsawnird168 comments

If you've ever noticed the unique cool, calm and confident manner of speech that airline pilots have on the intercom / ATC net, it was Yeager who developed that attitude and style of speaking [1, 2] within pilot culture.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_(book)

[2] https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/silky-smooth-c...

I'm sure Mr Yeager had an excellent style, but ATC radiotelephony procedures were developed in the 1930s and standardised by the ICAO in the early 1950s.

GP refers to attitude and style, not procedure. I've looked up the ATC audio of commercial pilots that I know, and despite being 100% from the Northeast US, they talk to ATC with a slow and mild drawl.

The depth of the voice matters also: https://www.ricemedia.co/the-science-behind-hating-someone-f...

I think you misread the parent comment. He's referring to the understated, almost nonchalant tone of voice all modern aviators and astronauts use, even during emergencies.

I have family and friends that were military pilots (of WW II vintage through to the 1990s) and would argue that the shared style is due to factors other than imitation. Among them:

• 1930s - 1960s (perhaps beyond) military pilots were selected by a highly meritocratic process that corrected for disparities in wealth, class and education (but not race, gender, sexual orientation). As a result, there were large numbers of pilots raised in poverty, with no college degree, & strong regional accents. These individuals became officers and then seeded the commercial airline culture that exists today.

• By the late 50’s at least, the military strongly selected for a particular personality type. All candidates for flight school were given psychological assessments. Among the factors selected for was how they reacted in emergency situations. Having lived among pilots all my life, I can absolutely confirm a tendency to remain absurdly unexcited by physical danger and fast-moving crises of any type. They also tend to under-react to situations that require resolution but that lack the same crisis atmosphere.

Anecdotal, but in summary my guess is the military developed a template and Yeager was an exemplary fit.

The line was every pilot wants to sound like Chuck Yeager and every ATC wants to sound like a NASA mission controller. I remember hearing that one in an SR-71 video (I think it was the air speed story).

> the air speed story

Found it! There's surely a better site out there, but this was the first I bumped into on Google.

https://247sports.com/college/north-carolina/Board/102717/Co...

And there I go, reading it for the umpteenth time.

That was a test pilot thing, not a (specifically) Chuck Yeager thing.

How else would they talk during an emergency? Do you think they'd shout and panic? Why?

Yes, they’d panic without training and practice. Because people panic, get frantic, or otherwise become emotional to the point of misunderstanding. Calm communication in serious, dangerous, or emergency situations is learned.

But other people who use radios, like the Army, don't speak in that drawl but also don't panic on the radio, and were doing it well before.

It's not the specific way of speaking that prevents panic. It's the training. It just happens that for a while pilots all wanted to sound like Chuck Yeager and then it just became the way new pilots talked because that's how all the other pilots they knew talked.

As a private pilot I learned what to say in the radio in case of emergency but they haven't tought us to be Yeager-calm. They told us to fly the airplane as the top priority, keep calm, think about the options and if the situation allows that, contact ATC and describe the problem with proper ATC prodecures. Of course it wouldn't help to freak out and yell to the radio. I never heard about Yeager before. I am sure he was great Air Force officer and perfect test pilot but I am not sure about this unique communication specialty either. Pilots are expected to be calm, well-trained, know the ACFT limitations and emergency procedures.

"Tower, I've lost three engines and a tail rotor."

"Copy, cleared to land 28R"

One of the coolest things I ever did was call him on the phone in 7th grade, and no joke, his secretary put him on the phone and I got to talk to him for a few minutes. He was nice to talk to, and humorously, had recently fallen off a horse... Again.

I was obsessed with the Discovery channel x-planes series, and ended up doing a video project for a local history day competition. My project partner's dad worked for an defense company, happened to know a guy that knew a guy that had his phone number.

Probably one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me.

I'm surprised by this. He lived in the town I grew up in, and we were told repeatedly to not visit/call/attempt to interview him. One of my friends tried anyway, and the interview was mostly grumbles about reading his book instead of asking stupid questions. He was known to be a sourpuss and to not hesitate hitting people with his cane.

Maybe he changed along the way, maybe not. But I found his Twitter feed pretty fascinating since he (or maybe his wife or somebody else) would answer questions tweeted at him. Seemed pretty open to me for someone of his age and importance.

To be fair, twitter is a lot less invasive and disruptive than phone calls.

Eh, I'd say it's relative. In my experience it isn't so different for the older generation, since they aren't as used to being so available/visible.

It's difficult to know how he would've felt about it, though.

You can take or leave a Twitter question. It sits there waiting to be answered. It isn't in a rush.

You either ignore a ringing phone or tersely tell the person who called that you're busy. Not quite the same dynamic.

He really liked Twitter. It let him sit up on his high horse, while everyone else flitted around. That's where he was comfortable. Being above. Face to face or phone calls with strangers made him "equal" which he didn't see himself as.

Not judging, just pointing out it's interesting you can have this very likeable and well-loved and appreciated guy who internally sees himself (in this vocation of piloting) as the best of the best, which places him above everyone else in his estimation, which is a point of view that people who see as negative, and yet he was well-loved and he made it work. Only piloting tho, other things he didn't see himself as better than others, but better than was where he was comfortable so he associated most with his piloting.

Slightly premonitive that I had a dream last night about astronauts and test pilots, and very clearly the phrase "the right stuff" was repeated a few times, and in the dream I related it to (I think there was) that movie in the late 80s or 90s about "the right stuff" pilots with a few big names in it. Nothing in the dream about Yeager but I consider that a definite hit tho. I don't think I often get preinfo in dreams tho, so that's interesting.

I hate to be the guy that responds to the obvious throwaway, but have you broken the speed of sound in an airplane? Have you been a 2 time WWII fighter ace? He was the best of the best, and an inspiration for a generation.

Hero has become a joke word used to describe anyone that goes to their job in the morning, but General Yeager was a bona fide hero whose achievements would be viewed by the vast majority of humanity past and present as bordering on godlike. He's what the ancient Greeks meant when they talked about heroes.

Indeed he is. He was shot down over German occupied territory, managed to get to safety, only to come back and shoot down more German planes.

He was unreal.

>Maybe he changed along the way...

> He was nice to talk to, and humorously, had recently fallen off a horse... Again.

Maybe it was the meds?

Maybe the questions were stupid?

A friend of mine met him and said he was a sour puss as well but still amazing man. Can’t blame him really.

Are you referring to Grass Valley, or elsewhere? Just curious FYI, spent much of my life there.

This guy is fascinating and has such a rich history. As with many people with decorated history, though, he had some blind spots. One of these was that he was thoroughly enamoured with his own skill at training an air force:

> Q: Of all the pilots you've flown iwth, which do you respect the most and why?A: In 1971-73, I flew with the Pakistan Air Force in the war with India. They were the best in the world because they had the most experience - over 75 hours/month.

In 1971, the PAF was decisively routed after attempting a pre-emptive strike, leaving their navy (and soon they were gone too) and their ground forces with no air cover. The outcome was that Pakistan was split in two and lost half her territory despite the US dispatching the USS Enterprise (with Task Force 74) and the UK dispatching the HMS Eagle in support.

His own aircraft (painted in United Nations colours) was destroyed on the ground by a man who went on to be India's Navy Chief many years later. His account of the engagement makes for a good read, and there's a paragraph on Yeager's reaction to the destruction of the plane too -

> I never found out how the UN reacted to the destruction of its plane, but Yeager's response was anything but dispassionate. He raged to his cowering colleagues at a staff meeting. His voice resounding through the embassy, he proclaimed that the Indian pilot not only knew exactly what he was doing but had been specifically instructed by Indira Gandhi to blast Yeager's plane. In his book he later said that it was the Indian way of giving Uncle Sam "the finger"

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/history/1971war/1278-chuck...

Amusing story, but a mild correction now that I've read it: there were two planes involved, a UN plane and Gen Yeager's Beechcraft. It looks like Adm Prakash whacked them both.

Story is amusing, though. Really sells the chaos of that war. The writer's wingman nearly clips him in the fog when they're landing at their home base to prep for the attack. Then on the attack he blasts a water tower, puts a few rounds in a camo'd C-130, and then knocks out this random Beechcraft.

A perfectly trained air force is not immune to poor strategy.

He was present, advising, and convinced they won in the air. Instead all they had in the end was that their opponent had air superiority in their Eastern theatre shortly after they reacted to the Pakistani pre-emptive strike. It was decided in days.

You really have to read Yeager: An Autobiography. It's pp 396-398. He was really convinced they were killing it. Neutral claims, of course, showed they were getting pummeled in comparison. His claimed 3-to-1 kill ratio was more like a 3-to-5.

> The Pakistanis whipped their asses in the sky...The air war lasted two weeks, and the Pakistanis scored a three-to-one kill ratio.

> I flew with the Pakistan Air Force in the war with India

That surprised me (as I'm too young to remember anything about the cold war), but the US siding with a country that was committing genocide in an effort to prevent a people from self determination. Pakistan killed millions of people and raped hundreds of thousands of women in their campaign, and it seems the US navy not only didn't condemn it, but actually supported it (including sending in a war fleet on the side of the genocidal marauders)

It sickens me.

It's just geopolitics. I wouldn't be too upset. Morality is a luxury on the global stage. It's about control. Kissinger and Nixon definitely were out of their depth dealing with this particular crisis. They tended to be a little blinkered when the USSR was involved in any way.

I guess I'll never understand the fear of the USSR and how much of it was justified in the big picture. This was the time when the US was overthrowing democratic governments and backing despots all over the world.

But for an individual soldier to be proud of his part?

Yeager was also a virulent racist so it’s not too much of a surprise.

Too bad. Just yesterday I was looking at Yeager quotes [1], these stood out as possibly similar to software, take what you will

  There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever 
    my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was 
    hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience. For 
    the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing 
    in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly 
    more than the others; that’s why they’re the best. 

  Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and 
    why every piece of equipment works is everything. And 
    luck is everything, too.

  Everybody that I’ve ever seen that enjoyed their job was 
    very good at it.

[1] I'm still looking for the quote about engine design, "few moving parts", easily mantained..

I like this quote! It's pretty applicable for all artisan-like activity, I think. It's well said and worth repeating over and over in different ways, but I wouldn't say it's a novel insight

Pretty sure that quote was in his Autobiography. I recall reading it when I read that book.

Honestly, I think XXX is an obsession is an aptitude or talent in itself.

Yea, it's easy to understand if you want to do something well, you need to spend a ton of time focused on it. It's another to actually commit that time and show up day in and day out with a mindset that's fresh and always looking for ways to improve.

I think the purity of purpose and sense of adventure is what attracts a lot of people to stories like Chuck's.

From time to time, he would answer questions on Twitter. Once someone asked him “What did you think of the (German fighter jet) Me-262 the first time you saw it?”

His response: “The first time I saw an Me-262, I shot it down.”

A fast eye and a cool hand, a marksman who progressed and thrived through an incredible amount of changing technology. Also incredibly patient with that technology, which is why he was great test pilot as well.

If I remember correctly, he had to lay in ambush over the airfield where the Me-262s flew from, and wait for one to be at its most vulnerable (on the final approach while landing). Then he swooped down and opened up with his cannon. The speed disadvantage was so large, that he would have no chance otherwise.

But it's a cool answer :)

You win playing by the rules of physics, not what the other person thinks the rules are.

The speed disadvantage between the P-51 and ME-262 is not as bad as you think.

Plus the difference in weapons would be in the P-51's favor, the ME-262 was armed with low velocity 30mm guns great for taking out bombers, but not great for dogfighting other fighters, meanwhile the .50 cal machineguns on the P-51 could open fire at around 800m and accurately score some hits.

The main problem with the ME-262 vs the P-51 was the Me-262 was still a little faster, so it could just decide to run away if it wanted to instead of engaging.

Ultimately though it didn't come down to what you were flying, it comes down to pilot skill.

He was one of my earliest heroes. The movie "The Right Stuff" was released in 1983, when I was 12 years old. The movie and Yeager's autobiography, "Yeager, and Autobiography" were frequently consumed during my teenage years. I often watch the right stuff right up to that moment that the focus shifts away from Yeager.

I learned plenty from Yeager's story and his accomplishments. I admired how he became a pilot in WWII, as a "Flying Sergeant", how he worked to break the sound barrier, and how he sought combat commands in Korea and Vietnam.

Today, I am reminded of one minor anecdote that had a big impact. In the book, Yeager describes the treatment he used to avoid permanent burn damage from his F-104 accident in 1963. During college I crashed on my mountain bike and suffered road rash on the left side of my face. The ER doctor advised me that I should expect permanent scars. Remember Yeager's treatment for his face, I used the same (an alternating application of Vaseline and Hydrogen Peroxide). The treatment left me with no scars, just as it left Yeager with no scars.

The lesson for me is that we can learn valuable knowledge in unexpected places, but we have to seek it out. Having heroes, respected authors, interesting subjects, and/or a focus of curiosity is a great way to learn and become inspired. Chuck Yeager met many of these for me, from 1983 when I first found him, to recent years enjoying his Twitter feed. He was a larger than life legend who encouraged me to be more daring, and saved me from permanent scars.

Godspeed General Yeager

Just grepped through the book and found the incident you mentioned, but there's nothing about Vaseline and hydrogen peroxide. Are you sure you didn't read about this in a different book? If so, any idea where?

  So, it was several days before I realized how bad
  things really were. My face was swollen to the size of
  a pumpkin, badly charred from being blowtorched.
  Ol' Stan Bear came in and sat down. He said, "Well,
  Chuck, I've got good news and bad news. The good
  news is that your lungs have not been permanently
  damaged from inhaling flame and smoke, and your
  eye looks normal. The bad news is I'm gonna have to
  hurt you like you've never hurt before in your life to
  keep you from being permanently disfigured. And
  I'm gonna have to do it every four days."

  I stayed in the hospital a month, and every four
  days, Doc started from the middle of my face and
  neck, scraping away the accumulated scab. It was a
  new technique developed to avoid horrible crisscross
  scars as the skin grew beneath the scabs. And it
  worked beautifully. I have only a few scars on my
  neck, but my face healed perfectly smooth. The pain,
  though, was worse than any I have ever known.

Wow, this is cool. I must have read about this somewhere else, but attributed it to the book. I last read the book in the late 80's, and now I am really curious what other memories have shifted in my head over the years.

As an adjacent comment mentions - this is why I love HN. Thanks for fact checking me and giving me a whole new list of things to ponder.

i love comments like this, another daily reminder why i love this site

Hey, they had that in Game of Thrones!

> I used the same (an alternating application of Vaseline and Hydrogen Peroxide). The treatment left me with no scars, just as it left Yeager with no scars.

There is 0 references to this treatment methodology online, do you mind explaining further?

(I was shocked google books didn't even pull an excerpt!)

That is a good question that the parent comment has prompted me to consider. As mentioned above, I have attributed the specifics to the Yeager biography for many years, but incorrectly.

My treatment was to apply Vaseline to my wounds to keep them soft, then 2-3 times per day to scrub the wound with a gauze pad soaked in hydrogen peroxide. It was very painful, but resulted in none of the predicted scars. Similar to Yaeger's treatment, but different in the specifics (as further review pointed out to me).

I am not a doctor, please don't follow any medical advice I share.

As for the 0 references, I found 1 (or .5, it only mentions Hydrogen Peroxide): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23561480/

In addition, I found the following: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5752/can-burn-s... http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=37867

This is super fascinating - I was always told that cleaning wounds with H2O2 could if anything, make the scars worse.

Be careful with hydrogen peroxide though. In researching it, I found a bunch of papers describing how hydrogen peroxide will permeate many different human tissues and then kill a wide variety of human cells, some of which don’t regenerate. For example, chondrocytes, the cells that produce/maintain cartilage.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=peroxide+apoptosis

Scared me off from using hydrogen peroxide as a wart treatment, even though it was having promising effects.

I also need more detail/info on this treatment.

I first heard of that name with Chuck Yeager's Air Combat on MS-DOS. An amazing game associated to hours of good time.

I can still hear the slightly tinny / distorted "Welcome to Chuck Yeager's Air Combat!" in my head. Good memories for sure.

EDIT: Nice, it's playable in a browser here: https://playclassic.games/games/combat-flight-simulator-dos-...

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator for me, one of the first games I played as a kid after a couple Infocom games I would play with my Dad.

Main thing I remember from it was, every time you would crash, you'd get a full-screen monotone bitmap of Chuck Yeager's stern face, ribbing you for your bad flying.

I had this game as well and also recall the bitmap and insults about your flying when you would crash. Also the comically understated 'wings ripped off' message you would get at the bottom of the screen when you pulled way too many Gs in a plane. :)

That was my first flight sim as well. I remember playing it on an amber monochrome monitor. I then recall watching a TV show where they were playing the game in color and thinking "wow, that game has colors?!".

Didn't Falcon 3.0 include video training courses on dogfighting tactics taught by Chuck Yeager? I was like 7 or 8 and distinctly remember watching video of a small room where he projected game footage on a screen behind him and several rows of audience dressed like fighter pilots

Pretty sure that stuff inspired me to want to become a fighter or bomber pilot. (Though to be fair I was in way over my head with that game) I became a programmer instead but sometimes I still think of that

edit- upon looking it up, I guess it wasn't him. Probably got that mixed up with his flightsim game

You made me look up the Falcon 3.0 tutorial videos, now on YouTube, obviously...

For some nostalgia a video of game play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmqPoI936K4

It was as enjoyable to me then as any modern title is today. Perhaps more so.

It was a fun game. Most interesting was that all in-game texts suggested that F-86 Sabre was better than MiG-15, but in practice MiG-15 was much better. You could easily win a dogfight against 5 Sabres in MiG, but not the reverse.

I still remember the advice on learning to land a plane. If you're going too fast, pull the nose up, too slow, push the nose down. If you're sinking too quickly, add throttle, sinking too slowly add throttle. This is the reverse of what you'd normally think in airplane controls. Push the stick down to point the nose down and sink faster. But, Chuck Yeager's advice was that intuitively, you actually get better control of the glide path by thinking about throttle as up/down rate and stick up/down as speed control.

I played the Mac version with my brother. We would often dogfight over the AppleTalk network in our home. My brother would often, possibly always, win.

Here's [0] a video of the Mac version, seems to have much better graphics than the DOS version and perhaps different quotes of Yeager as well.

---

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzQ5-o0s0Ao

The Mac (classic) version is how I first played the game as a kid and it was definitely the better version. Higher resolution and multiplayer over AppleTalk. Sadly the only Mac emulator I know of that can even attempt to do AppleTalk networking is Basilisk II, but it only works for posix OSs. The state of Mac emulation is still sad in 2020.

It's one of my favorites of all time. It has a great balance -- not overly complex so it's very casually playable, but enough good physics to make it really interesting and challenging. I still like to fire it up occasionally. It's not hard to find if you look around and it plays well with dosbox.

Same here. That game was amazing.

It had a decent physics engine for the time, which I appreciated. They talked about the basics of flight, energy management, maneuvers, and more.

Chuck would yell out "Check Six!" when an enemy was coming up behind you.

One of my favorite memories about that game was having to reverse engineer their anti-copying system. Growing up in Latin America getting legit games wasn't really a thing (both because of cost, but also availability), so I remember getting a copy of that game from a friend, who had copied it from a friend, etc.

I don't know if you recall, but the system worked by asking you a random question from the user manual ('what is the altitude ceiling for the MIG-15?', 'what is the maximum speed for the B-29 bomber?', etc.) My friend knew only one of the answers, which he wrote on a piece of paper for me. To start the game, I'd have to restart it a bunch of times until it asked me that specific question. Of course, that sucked so every time it'd ask a question we started taking notes and finding the answer from the awesome in-game plane database next time I got it to run... within a couple days we had transcribed most of the answers. It was my first encounter with such a security system and got me really interested in reverse engineering, which got me interested in understanding how programs worked... which ended in me being here 30 years later :)

was a great reason to buy a flight joystick controller!

I was really into flight when I was a kid. Sometime before I was a teenager my mom found Chuck Yeager's autobiography at a garage sale and thought I might be interested in it. Who would've guessed that the Edwards AFB test pilots flight adventures would pale in comparison to their off base antics at the local bar/brothel. Apparently not my mother.

RIP Mr. Yeager, I learned more about life from you than I expected to.

I recommend his autobiography ("Yeager") -- it's briskly paced and readable.

On the fun side, here's his appearance on "What's My Line": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Tywtn5UJI&t=2m46s

Check out this great 1.5 hour interview with Chuck Yeager from 1991. His comments on NASA were particularly interesting.

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

A similarly noteworthy pilot is Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown - a guy who holds the records for most aircraft carrier deck landings and has flown more models of aircraft than anyone in history.

This interview with him is definitely worth a listen as he was also involved in so many moments of 20th century history!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04nvgq1

Sad day but his past courage propelled us to new heights in similar ways his death will. Through remembrance and lessons learned. I've known his nephew for some time and he has a collection of very cool trinkets and memorabilia. Rest in peace general!

Please be like (a chairman) Chuck and try Kerbal Space Program. When you finished, install the RP-1 mod to stretch yourself even further. You can get some idea/sense how dangerous and rewarding what Chuck did back then.

After reading about how Squad screwed over their developers, I regret having paid for the game.

I hadn't heard about this and I have the game sitting in my backlog. Do you have a link about what happened?

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/4hw5x7/...

Sounds like a small scale EA. It's sad how commonplace that seems to be in the games industry.

If you've never read it, his biography reads like an action movie starting Tom Cruise, but it is his real life story.

Seriously, this is an amazing book: https://www.amazon.com/Yeager-Autobiography-Chuck/dp/0553256...

He was a two time fighter ace in WWII and broke the speed of sound. He almost died in a crash once as well, but walked away with half of his face burned up. The guy was incredible.

Since this is linked his to twitter, its interesting to note he has been very active on twitter. I've been following him for a while and he was always answering people questions.

At some point everyone's speed relative to ground goes to zero.

Chuck Yeager, James Doolittle - lives so incredible nobody would believe it if it wasn't true. It's why I tend to read more history books than fiction nowadays.

A small anecdote, I had the opportunity to shake the retired General Yeager's hand at a swearing-in ceremony at Beale AFB in 2006.

He seemed a bit tired after a long day in the Central Valley summer heat, and quite grumpy with a gaggle of NCOs from the recruiting office that asked him for an autograph. As it turns out his physician grounded him from flying his private plane earlier that week and I imagine that put him into quite the mood!

Truly one of the last of the old breed. Rest in peace General Yeager! To have have grown up in a world where ocean liners and steam locomotives were the primary means of long distance transportation to have experienced the cutting edge, making history along the way, then to have lived to see the modern age must truly have been wonderous.

Yeager wanted to be an astronaut but he lacked a college degree so NASA wouldn't let him.

But they decided he was good enough to run the school that trained astronauts!

I'm a kid of the 90's but my dad loves "The Right Stuff" so I grew up on that film. Such a cool story. Sorry to see he has passed.

Amazing guy, his challenges and the way he dealt with them, over his lifetime could teach a lot about handling stress and pressure.

His last tweet was professional and sort of sums him up in an eloquent, serene way.

"@usairforce

first time I flew M2-F1 lifting body. Handled fine.”

RIP Chuck Yeager.

You are a rare case of a verifiable legend. Legends never die.

amazing how such a racist asshole is celebrated. he's responsible for kicking the one black astronaut out from the mercury program. google it.

This is really sad. He was one of the greats.

44 years after the Wright Brothers first flew 120 feet, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. 22 years after that, man landed on moon.

51 years later ... still waiting for the future to arrive.

> 51 years later ... still waiting for the future to arrive.

I feel this acutely too. The trajectory we've been on feels a lot more Bladerunner than it does Star Trek[0] and it's honestly somewhat disappointing. All that promise, and possibly all that hubris, come to naught.

We have to acknowledge the impact the Cold War had and, perhaps, with it winding down as the 80s wore on the impetus was no longer there. Nobody wanted to spend the money on these grand developments and great explorations any more.

Yes, we've sent probes to many parts of the solar system but, whilst much better than not going at all, in no way is this comparable to going ourselves (it's much easier and safer, for one thing).

It is weird though, because the drive towards flight and, ultimately, space exploration predates the Cold War, kicking off big time back in the Victorian era, so it's unclear why the end of the Cold War also marked the end of that era of advancement. I don't think it had to be inevitable. Our dreams didn't have to become smaller; nobody forced us to become less.

(Of course I realise Mars is a much tougher proposition than the moon, but we haven't even really bothered to try, which is what frustrates me.)

[0] Don't worry: I realise Star Trek is ridiculous.

Not to be pedantic, but Star Trek predicted that America would experience an extreme period of inequality and social decay in the 21st century, only finding its way out of its selfish, destructive ideology after being ravaged by nuclear war. Seems pretty accurate to me (minus the whole genetic engineering war interregnum, but who knows, it’s only 2020...)

https://www.startrek.com/news/ds9s-take-on-homelessness-is-a...

Not sure why this is being downvoted, it's accurate. As far as predictions of the future go (or the past, as it were), Star Trek (DS9 in particular) got a lot of stuff right. Though I think Star Trek had Irish Unification happening in 2020 so we're already a bit behind.

Star Trek predicted 2024 for Irish Unification.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Irish_Unification_of_20...

Tiocfaidh ár lá indeed.

Amusing that a date picked in 1990 could end up accurate when you consider shifting religious demographics in Northern Ireland and the potential impact of Britain leaving the EU.

I'm typing this on a pocket-sized device that can translate between hundreds of languages, instantly send a message to the other side of the world, and answer questions tapping into an encyclopediac database of human knowledge.

The phone doesn't do that stuff, it just communicates with a larger infrastructure that can do those things. Agreed that machine translation, telecommunications, and wikipedia are great inventions though.

Yes, smartphones are dope. But, what then? What's the next groundbreaking evolution?

> What's the next groundbreaking evolution?

Maybe it isn't technological, but psychological. Our minds haven't evolved all that much. We need to be kinder, gentler, more respectful of other people and other species, and learn to live in harmony with the environment, rather than always being at war with nature.

And maybe an ability to regulate technological changes and the effects those changes have on us.

For example introducing more rigorous testing to medical devices, or learning to use addictive media in a reasonable way. Or maybe learning to live with less, rather than demand for more.

This is the most unrealistic advancement in Star Trek.

That wasn't really Star Trek though. That was Picard's personal viewpoint. Many Star Trek captains felt, and acted, differently. Though it does reflect a part of Roddenbery's vision as well.

I can get a drone for five hundred bucks that fits in the palm of my hand, flies for a half hour, and shoots 4k video.

I think that's pretty neat.

My watch is pretty neat. Self-driving cars, when perfected, will prevent incredible amounts of death and suffering. Electric bikes and the plummeting costs of solar tech and batteries will save the planet. And it's unbelievable how fast these covid vaccines were developed, tested, manufacturered at gigascale, and (soon) distributed to every corner of the planet.

Is this an intentional reference?

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Yea, yea... but besides the Internet, smartphones, smart watches, self-driving cars, electric bikes, solar tech, advanced batteries, and amazing mRNA vaccines, where is my promised future??

Yeah we're missing 2001's lunar hotel and human spaceflight to Jupiter, but killer AI seems on point.

Quadcopter/drone tech seems like it's bringing us closer to Blade Runner's flying cars of 2019, although noise and safety are major issues.

and jetpacks! Aside from internet, smartphones, smart watches, self-driving cars, electric bikes, solar tech, advanced batteries, amazing mRNA vaccines, what has technology ever done for us? Nothing!

r/unexpectedmontypython

I was a "NASA" kid, was 5 when man landed on the moon, blew off a uni exam to watch the first shuttle landing, still amazed when a Falcon 9 lands on a ship, can hear "1201 alarm, kicking up some dust" and see the grey video and the shadow of the LEM...

But Chuck Yeager making that first "boom" is still the boundary between yesterday and today.

I would say that Gagarin's flight was more a boundary beween before and after than was the flight of the X-1.

yeah, butt it's medicine just a radio

While I posit that the Internet is humanity's greatest invention, it still has yet to be utilized in a net positive way.

...that are tuned to exfiltrate as much data as humanly possible, through which fundamental human rights are regularly abused/facilitated; that are spreadmainly to facilitate greater access to potential opportunities for financial transactions.

Their operating system is designed specifically to resist general utilization, and intended primarily as a vehicle for conspicuous consumption.

To be frank; short of a revolution in human ethics/morality/spirituality, the wonder that is the modern smartphone will not become half of what it could be.

And goddamn. Rest in peace, Chuck. They won't even hear ya comin'.

If you think computers are used for bad things, just wait til you hear what people do with airplanes and rockets.

100% in agreement. Rather, we went from big, visual, dramatic accomplishments to whatever we have now -- a tightening of the status quo? advances that boost consumer spending?

I'm reading The Trouble with Physics (2007) now, and it's about the same themes (lack of progress in physics since ~1980s [besides higgs boson i guess]).

Overall though, seems that human advances, for the sake of humanity, have fallen by the wayside for...stuff like the red-bull sponsored jump

Besides the Highs-Boson, the LIGO, Hubble, JWST, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Don’t jinx Webb before it’s in orbit!

This comment can’t be improved.

There have been amazing leaps in astrophysics; gravitational wave detection, planet detection around other stars (>4000), first image of a black hole, not to mention all the space probes doing science throughout the solar system. Outside of astrophysics, I think CRISPR has tremendous potential as well.

I don't disagree that too much of our collective intelligence is spent trying to sell advertisements, it's a shame.

I am optimistic about the future of the human race.

I won't put a persuasive essay here, but just say, I am optimistic about it.

Hopefully not for long. Tomorrow hopefully will be a big step forward with SpaceX's 12.5km hop.

EDIT: Or the Israeli ex-gov guy saying "It was definitely aliens".

Context for aliens:

https://m.jpost.com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chief-...

Hopefully Commander Orange was kept in the dark about this. Then again the aliens can just use a neuralizer on him and we might be spared the coming inane tweet storms.

Would watch this Netflix show

> Eshed provided more information in his newest book, ...

Ah, that explains it.

'We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters"

- Peter Thiel

A decade earlier, in a 2000 IBM commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo

In 1970 there 300 million passengers transported in a plane. In 2018 it was 4.2 billion.

The future is that vastly many more people fly in a plane every year and it's much, much cheaper than it was in 1970.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR

We have rocket stages that fly back to the launch pad to be reused.

That's not new - we had a space plane that could do that in 1981.

Reminds me of this tweet: 60yrs from Wright Cycle Co. to Supersonic

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1332292031427833858

The International Space Station, started 1998 and continuing, is a great milestone. Continued habitation of space by man is an achievement as big as the others ...

I know it's impressive but somehow "we have remained in this same place for 20 years straight" doesn't really scream progress to me.

I remember reading a great presentation about how progress plateaus. People got jet engines and imagined space colonies, but at a certain point it was "good enough" and Mach 0.8 jumbo jets were fast enough to carry us halfway around the world...

51 years over 3 billion humans have a pocket super computer that has access to the entirety of human knowledge and the ability to instantly communicate with any human anywhere on the planet

The future comes in many forms and I find this kind of talk to overlook the phenomal advances all fields of science have made.

From the stars to the cell, the future isn't lost

Laser based additive manufacturing in solar orbit when

Well technically we've been doing that all along

Should have specified serial production O’Neill colony built on it

1903 - 1947 - 1969 - 2020, so 22 years not 12 (sorry, it just didn't feel right so had to check).

12 years after Armstrong was the first Columbia flight.

We definitely did a lot in space since the one small step. The whole concept of orbital stations went from idea to everyday reality. Commercialization of space - like, successes of Ariane-4 and then Dennis Tito and others is also a significant step. We're expecting more any year now.

In some sense, the space shuttle was a step to the side. The original idea was to get travel to orbit almost on level of airliners, reasonably priced and with short turnaround times, a mission every week or so.

The final design of the space shuttle was not able to support this kind of use. Very expensive and refurbishment demanded a lot of human work. So it sapped a lot of money and workforce from the space program.

> The final design of the space shuttle was not able to support this kind of use

It very well could have been. The trouble was that the initial cost projections called for 50+ flights per year, but demand only warranted 3.5 flights per year on average.

It's a fate that every heavy orbital transport system shared so far - just look at the Falcon Heavy. How many launches did it have? Two (technically three, if you include the maiden flight)? That's 1 flight per year with another two classified DoD payloads scheduled for next year.

There's simply no demand for heavy lift vehicles outside of building space stations and DoD contracts. In the end STS was too big and expensive for just ferrying people into space and too complex for just getting payloads into LEO.

It could've made up for that by always doing both, but there simply wasn't a destination in LEO for people to go to and not enough 27.5t LEO payloads (~10t GTO).

For instance in 1985 there were only 25 orbital launches in total, 9(!!!) of which Space Shuttle launches and 6 other US rocket launches. Nowhere near the envisioned weekly or even just fortnightly launch cadence required to get the cost down.

Yes, the demand wasn't there. The space shuttle had enormous LEO capacity, far exceeding actual needs. At least routine needs. As you say, two to three times a year...

AFAIK the final design of the heat shield did not allow for much shorter turnaround time than several weeks. It was necessary to inspect around 30 thousand tiles by "eye and hand" and those tiles were unique, so replacements had to be precision made. This is a system that just eats time of qualified people.

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

I wonder what SpaceX will do about that.

They also use tiles and they will need to inspect them after each flight, too. Today we have new techniques available. I think the shuttle could be inspected much quicker now than 10-20 years ago - AI can help a lot with automated checks and 3D-printing as well as simplified tile layout (like the Soviets used for Buran) would also shorten inspection time and reduce cost.

I honestly see the main risk with Starship in the heat shield. Musk loves to take unnecessary shortcuts like no flame deflector tunnel on the launch pad which lead to completely avoidable problems (like the SN8 static fire that destroyed an engine due to debris from the launch pad).

The Shuttle had foam damaging tiles and Starship may have debris from the launch or landing damage heat tiles. They will have to be very careful with that and not be arrogant about it.

Thanks. Fixed it.

We went to the moon in half the time it took us to go from first flight to the speed of sound.

We accomplished a lot in about 70 years.

Godspeed, General.

It's not a great day for flying.

(if people aren't familiar, that's a reference to the Chuck Yeager's Air Combat flight sim)

A few weeks ago his account tweeted this:

> Nov 28, 1964 – Launch: Mariner 4, NASA launches the first Mars fly-by spacecraft. Unmanned exploration is what @NASA should stick to.

Was this really his opinion?

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