Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> we had been near the top of an s-curve when it came to space tech

Near the top of an s-curve in getting-to-space (“heavy lift”) tech, more like.

I’d say the field of actual in-space tech (i.e. technology that takes advantage of low-gravity / low-pressure / low-oxygen environments) is still pretty nascent. We still treat space as “Earth, minus some guarantees” (i.e. something we have to harden for) rather than doing much with the unique benefits of space.

It’ll probably take having a long-term industrial base operating from space to see much change there, though.

Imagine, for example, living on a space station, and having your food cooked using cooking techniques that assume cheaply-available vacuum and/or anoxic environments. :)

View on HN

Yeah I agree, there are "generations" of technology, and I think that people in the 60's looked at the progress of transportation tech from 1910 to 1960 and thought "at this pace we'll all be zipping around the solar system like it's nothing by the 2000s." It was not easy to form an intuition of why the first generation of space tech was going to hit physics-imposed limits that would "slow that progress."

To be fair we still made lots of progress with space tech after the 60's, and I think via SpaceX and others we are hopefully now starting a new S-curve unlocked by cheaper access to LEO.

60s space tech also hit a lot of limitations of computers of the time. SpaceX's Super Heavy is in some ways a reimagining of N1's first stage, but with control software that makes it viable to deal with engine failures in flight.

But a big problem is also that the progress in space tech wasn't organic. There was no economic incentive, it was driven purely by propaganda, national pride and political goals. Once that fell away it took half a century for economic usecases catch up to a point where private investment was viable.

An interesting thing to think about was people used to think of getting somewhere. Now we think of things coming to us. In a way, we did achieve the "zipping around", it's just that we did it via the internet and wireless communication. Of course, it is not the same, but it is similar.

"food cooked using cooking techniques that assume cheaply-available vacuum " - what would those be?

Vacuum isn't something that's hard to get if you need it, all you need is a motor driving a pump, so if any industrial food process or one of the fancy restaurant chefs would have a good use for it, they would be already using vacuum in cooking. A kitchen vacuum sealer is <100$ (I'm assuming that would count as "cheaply available"), and it's not particularly useful though for most other cooking purposes that come to mind.

> cooking techniques that assume cheaply-available vacuum

That also assumes that the atmosphere you're venting for that "cheap vacuum" is cheap as well.

You don't have to vent. You can just compress into storage.

So to get your cheap vaccuum you first have to make a vacuum in a chamber by sucking the air out before opening it to space? You can just skip the open it to space part and do it on earth!

Space tech might be considerably further along today, had we in the U.S. not limited our R&D after 1969. A reusable shuttle that cost over $1B per flight was interesting innovation in 1981, but it actually represented a dead end for the U.S. rather than the beginning of a new era of exploration.

Once the moon mission was accomplished, we lacked a clear target on which to stay focused. Build cool things, but what for?

Researchers could concoct all sorts of narratives, but it'd lost the spark that held the layman's attention and permitted the spend of political capital.

From what I gather from the era the next goals were pretty clear, even to the general public: "go to Mars" (or in the Soviet case "go to Venus"), and then go to Alpha Centauri.

If the Soviets would have won the race to the moon this might even have happened. But instead the Soviets decided to focus on space stations, and the US declared themselves winner and did largely nothing (by rejecting NASA's Space Transportation System proposal, which was also about a space station and a way to get there cheaply).

The space shuttle was a bad system for a number of political reasons. Its per launch cost was comparable to developing new heavy lifts or developing new missions to the outer planets.

Effectively nasa was spending their RnD money on opex and not getting any political capital back for it. Tragically the program had been set up with the promise of a space truck, if nasa admitted they didn’t deliver a space truck Congress would have been unlikely to fund a new program. Had the budget been allocated entirely to either technological development or novel explorations America’s willingness to fund nasa could have been substantially different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com