Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

> ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers,

NASA has been promoting that claim for years. But it's not real. Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.[1] Flight computers came from the USAF missile programs of the 1950s.[2] Nor was NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/801137/

[2] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2190783...

View on HN

I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical. If NASA's moon mission caused them to go deep in the archives of forgotten technology and resurrect ideas that had long been discarded, they deserve credit for that.

(I'm not saying this is the case, but you're also not saying that it's not.)

> I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical.

Probably.

IMHO, the US military was and is probably far more effective at making emerging technologies "practical" than NASA is. Their budget's bigger and they buy more stuff, often mass-produced. NASA does a lot of one-off and small-run projects.

The US military as a guaranteed purchaser, maybe. The US military as an organization, definitely not.

> The US military as a guaranteed purchaser, maybe. The US military as an organization, definitely not.

What do you mean? The military will ask for pretty aggressive improvements in capabilities, then be willing to pay essentially infinity dollars to get what they ask for. That was especially true during the Cold War. For instance, my understanding is the military played a crucial step in productizing semiconductors, because they were willing to buy them at volume when they were far too expensive for nearly every civilian use case. That volume allowed for the R&D to drive prices down and make civilian use practical. If the military hadn't been interested, things would have gotten to a much slower start.

We're on the internet which originated as a DARPA project, DARPA is part of Dept of Defense.

The US military and NASA enjoy a fairly flexible revolving door for technology and talent.

For example, see the Hubble vs the two prior spy satellites having the exact same tech.

No, they don't. The scientists at NASA are as good as those in the private sector. If the private sector needs it badly enough, it'll make it without government interference.

This is a really shallow strawman.

No one has been arguing that NASA scientists are better than private sector scientists. The argument is that having a seemingly-stupid goal that takes a lot of work can spawn off legitimately useful technologies that would never have been targeted by the private sector because moonshots aren't good investments. The theory is that it's a good way to very quickly iterate through many different ideas.

I agree.

This is just my opinion, but I feel like stuff is way more likely to be actually be accomplished if there's a tangible goal. A goal, even an arbitrary one, helps you actually figure out the limitations of a theory or design, and if you don't have a goal it is far too tempting to handwave away important questions and live in theoretical land.

In a similar vein, F1 racing has an enormous amount of engineering effort put into it in the name of winning a race and those efforts can have positive impacts outside of F1.

It does sadden me that these days their designs are much more restricted, as I enjoyed the wacky ideas we would occasionally see when the rules were less restrictive.

And sports, especially after the leagues/OIC fell hard on drugs, are pushing nutrional science (and medecine) like crazy.

Even in weird ways: my sister can afford to pay her rent/food herself while studying because she prepare meal plans for a water polo team, which helps her study and find ideas for her college projects. Hopefully she can get through her studies without working in a kitchen again.

There aren't that many NASA scientists btw and they mostly are drafting requirements for the private sector scientists to actually do.

Was that true during the Apollo program?

Yeah.

The Apollo missions flew on Rockets designed and Manufactured by Boeing (S-IC), North American (S-II), and Douglas (S-IVB).

The lunar lander was designed and manufactured by Grumman.

That said, a lot of engineering goes into setting good purchasing requirements and assessing the results.

no they wont bc the private sector cant sustain long term interest in projects that dont have profitable application on a 5 at most 10 year horizon.

Electric cars also existed 100 years ago, but that doesn't mean Tesla doesn't deserve credit for completely reestablishing the category.

Their engineers do get much credit, but Tesla cars (well, at least for another decade) will be known as douche-mobiles.

Not an insult. I'm highlighting a business branding issue. A mistake Apple, for example, would never have been so careless as to make.

Well, one difference is that Teslas sort of are luxury products. Given Apple marketshare in the US among consumers, it's hard to consider their products as luxury goods in the same way.

Funnily enough in many countries (India, China?) iPhones are definitely considered luxury/premium (compared to the competition, i.e Android).

Apple are the premium choice in the US as well. Green bubbles are seen as for plebs.

The fact that there's some percentage of status-conscious high schoolers (or whoever) that think that blue bubbles make them special doesn't actually make it so. They're idiots.

"Hey, look, he's a default!"

Green bubbles are annoying because they’re just way less feature rich, and are entirely antiquated. Every green message is logged and listed on my phone bill and the transcripts routinely are revealed in court proceedings?

Sorry it’s got nothing to do with classism, just objective differences.

How can something be premium when it has 60% market share? The iPhone is almost the norm in the US with Android being the knock off.

It’s like bringing Sams Club soda to a picnic when people are use to Coke and Pepsi

Marketing, M&A, and price?

See, it's a vicious cycle, the aggressive M&A strategy leads to a need to increase sales, which leads to a larger marketing budget, which finally trickles down in to the price. Now price is actually segmented itself, in terms of up-front elasticity and "walled-garden" elasticity, which Apple can monitor independently of device sales through marketing novelty through the app store and seeing if the nibbles are elastic onto services, say like Apple+. Historically they also have segmented product (XR, Pro XR) to get more data points for the degree of price elasticity, which is probably most responsive because they're the most expensive thing on the broad market.

Apple has only done two large acquisitions in 30 years. Next for $700 Million and Beats for $3 billion.

Even Apple’s cheapest phone - the iPhone SE is over $100 more expensive than the average Android phone sold in the US.

Apple has usually sold this years model, last years model and the year before that concurrently. Sometimes when the n-1 model is too expensive to sell at a discount they introduce a new phone (ie the iPhone 5C)

Sure. That's why I specified US. Hardly surprising. US-based company and higher income levels.

I didn't say you're wrong, just added it as an aside/addendum :)

Tesla is working on a Model 2 I believe they're hoping to market at $25K. I see them as similar to Toyota, Ford, etc who have luxury models or lines, but also want to service the lower end of market too.

Considering the first Cybertruck just rolled off of the production line, after being announced almost 4 years ago, and they've never produced the second gen Roadster after announcing it 6 years ago, I wouldn't put much stock in their development pipeline.

Can you elaborate what douche mobile means? And example of a non douche one?

Not OP but Teslas I've seen around the Bay Area while driving around have Big Altima Energy. If someone's driving high above the speed limit, swerving through slower traffic like their life is in danger, or doing a U-turn on a two-lane street in the middle of rush-hour its usually a Tesla Model 3. On the other hand, where I grew up it always seemed to be Nissan Altimas that had this kind of energy. I think the stereotype is not really about individual drivers so much as its about the popularity of the vehicle and its performance characteristics.

Both the Nissan Altima and Tesla Model 3 sell very well and are entry level ("entry level" here meaning entry level for the class of vehicles one is looking for, there are entry-level Mercedes' for instance) sedans with power behind them. So you have a lot of them both on the road, and thus more people who likely treat them as disposable and thus drive them recklessly. Any car that is super popular usually is popular enough that enough of the wrong kind of drivers have it, and so you can start stereotyping them. I think Model 3s have a lot of the wrong kind of drivers on the road. Maybe many of them care about saving the environment but they don't drive like they care about the car.

> Not OP but Teslas I've seen around the Bay Area while

How do you say you’re in a bubble without saying you’re in a bubble…

I thought it was obvious that what I was saying was Bay Area specific when I said Tesla drivers are like Nissan Altima drivers I’ve encountered elsewhere but go off.

A vehicle driven by people who engage in douchebag behavior.

The stereotype in the US is anyone driving a BMW, and any sort of lifted pickup. A non douchey vehicle, as a class of vehicles, would probably be a minivan, a Camry, or a Civic.

Not original commenter, but I think metrics of douchery probably vary person to person. Personally, the number of pithy vanity plates specific to the vehicle's energy source is what does it for me. I think it speaks more to the occupant and their outward projections & posturing than the vehicle.

thinking of the South Park fart smelling prius meme.

FTR - I have no problems with EVs, but I do give myself a good chuckle when I see someone who was proud enough of their vehicle purchase to turn their it into a billboard advertising something / someone (Musk) who has fallen from social grace.

I was gonna say the Prius, but that has its own douchey reputation.

I guess maybe a Camry? That’s a boring practical car that doesn’t carry much stigma.

One associated with Mr Elon Musk, and one which is not.

You choose who and what you associate with in this world, and your car is one of the things which, whether you like it or not, will define perceptions of you.

A premature rocketulation man-baby is not who I want to associate with or help fund.

reminds me of that one episode of South Park with hybrids causing a cloud of "Smug" pollution

And in San Francisco

> Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.

Okay, so... the tech existed but was too expensive to actually use, NASA threw a bunch of R&D at making it practical, and now it's cheap enough to use. I'd say that's a great case for NASA getting credit for making the tech useful; that they didn't literally invent it from scratch seems rather beside the point.

Do you know that it was NASA's R&D that made it practical or is that conjecture?

From Institute of Food Technologists (IFT):

Freeze-drying was invented by Jacques-Arsene d’Arsonval at the College de France in Paris in 1906. Later, during World War II, it was widely implemented to preserve blood serum. Since then freeze-drying has become one of the most important processes for preservation of heat-sensitive biological materials. During the 1950s, industrial freeze-drying of foods began. Freeze-drying is currently used as a preservation method for foods, pharma-ceuticals, and a wide range of other products.

https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...

So you're a hypothesis is that NASA was instrumental in figuring out how to reduce the cost or mass produce freeze dried food because... That was necessary for 4 astronauts?

Surely the military was more instrumental here...

Apollo CM and LM had the Apollo Guidance Computer provide very advanced digital fly by wire for the time. (in fact I think it was one of the first DFBW systems). Later DFBW research on F-8 Crusaders started out using the actual AGC as well, interestingly enough.

AGC was also one of the first machines to use integrated circuits (to keep it light, no doubt) so you could say that the apollo program also advanced computer research by quite a bit.

Those missile computers of the day were mostly analog, lots of gears 'computing' trajectories. Really amazing inventions but not really adaptible to changing circumstances. Which makes sense in an ICBM because it has all the facts known in advance. This is where the much more interactive Apollo computer was really new at.

Nike was analog. (I've seen the ground-based analog computers at Site SF-51 in Marin). Atlas was digital, but in the early models the guidance computer was on the ground, with the ground sending commands to the booster during boost phase. [1] Navajo seems to have been the first missile with onboard digital computing. Polaris was self-contained and digital; it had to be, since the sub had no uplink. Missiles showed steady forward progress.

Apollo had to solve many technical problems, but often specialized ones, such as how to handle liquid hydrogen in bulk and how to get stable combustion in a big engine. A major criticism of Apollo is that it produced too much specialized technology that was never used again.

The Space Shuttle had a different set of problems. It was supposed to be a practical space transport, but only the orbiter was re-usable and it needed a months-long major overhaul after each flight. Not until the Falcon 9 did something cost-effective finally get built.

[1] https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_402577

Reply on news.ycombinator.com