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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine that this is a HN-bubble thing. Most people would probably get bored from just seeing some live footage.

That is condescending nonsense. Pretty much everybody would prefer to see rocks from outer space than hearing politicians congratulating themselves and the unity of our country.

Yeah it's more likely this is a case of wants of decision makers being prioritized over wants of the audience. This event is an avalanche of prestige. Of course politicians want to soak it up.

Nope. Same reaction from a wide variety of people including my wife who's not in tech and doesn't know what HN or YCombinator are. She was like "let the team speak already!"

You wife probably a highly educated person sharing similar views in life like you

So what you're saying is you'd need to be an uneducated imbecile to prefer politicians speaking to live space footage.

I think you're selling uneducated imbeciles short; surely even they prefer the space footage. Only the politicians doing the speaking prefer themselves.

SpaceX livestreams didn't get super popular for having a politician on them. They got popular for showing exactly what's happening with enthusiastic presenters narrating it.

Most people find speeches and politicians boring. They wanna see rockets flying, robots moving, etc.

“enthusiastic presenters narrating it.”

I seriously hate their narrators and all the cheering.

Last I heard, their narrators were regular SpaceX employees with day jobs. So somewhat understandable they have an emotional stake in mission success.

SpaceX livestream much more mundane things with tens of thousands of viewers

10s of thousands. That has to be some kind of record.

The first launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon with astronauts on-board holds the record for the most concurrent internet viewers on a stream tracked by NASA at 10 million.

Of course if you drop the internet requirement, Apollo 11 still is by far the most live viewed at 600 million viewers.

That makes sense for Apollo 11. I expect that one won't be beat until we land people on Mars. I figured SpaceX had some much bigger viewerships than 10's of thousands. (I've watched several myself.) That number must have been on the more (now) regular things like vertical landing the same rocket for the Nth time! Thank you for the update.

Not at all! Although some of them will be people like me having it on the side monitor day dreaming while they write CRUD :)

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