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Comment by wolfd | Hacker News Reader

This document was referenced by Smarter Every Day in his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

This was a good presentation. I liked how he didn't pull punches, but was also friendly with the audience. It was an intervention, more than a confrontation.

Being an outsider he approached it in a psychologically correct way. To harken to mythology, it is the court jester who tells the king what no one else will say.

Not to say Devin is a clown - far from it! Much respect for him.

*Destin

I think he missed the point. His entire focus is the landing on moon as the only objective, and doing that with minimal features, which is logical if your goal is just landing on the moon.

US already landed on the moon, now they want a framework that will allow a lunar base, taking into account a mars base. With that in mind, you need extra features.

So I think his entire talk is based on a wrong assumption (and funny to watch from aside, as it is a bit headstrong).

I felt the same way. Also, asking for things to be "simple" is an empty ask because nobody is trying to come up with ways to make things more complicated on purpose. It is very hard to take action on such ask.

Going to the Moon/Mars is hard. Establishing a permanent base is even harder, probably orders of magnitude harder. That's just the basic nature of the problem.

And I also noted, most likely subjectively, a certain anti-SpaceX bias. Maybe it was just me?

I think it was just you. The bias I got was that of anti current contractors and pro SpaceX. I feel this way since he implied that complex operations, such as refuelling in space, were only planned because the SLS was not powerful enough, and starship will be.

The fallacy here is that we don't need a Moon base to make a Mars base in terms of infrastructure.

It won't make sense to launch a mission from the Moon to Mars until the Moon has Earth-equivalent industry, and refueling a rocket at the Moon is questionable as the fuel required to go directly from Earth to Mars isn't much higher than putting something in orbit around the Moon.

We can maybe gain some knowledge from a modern attempt at a Moon base that we can apply to Mars, but then what planetoid did we explore to gain knowledge in order to land on the Moon?

If we want to go to Mars, we go to Mars, if we want to go to the Moon, we go to the Moon.

It's pretty clear you want a moon base before estabilishing a mars base (seems common sense why).

The fallacy here is that you need a capitalist reason, and that is wrong from a multitude of aspects.

It isn’t clear to me. One is not a prerequisite for the other, they can be done independently.

Am I missing something?

It's the same reason we did a slingshot maneuver rather than just point a rocket straight at the moon: leverage.

Metaphorically, you use time as a fulcrum to exchange a larger total travel distance for not dealing with as much gravity head on.

If we want to go to Mars, it makes sense to establish a moon base that we can use to store fuel and other supplies. Rather than having to escape (as much of) Earth's gravitational field and then head to Mars immediately after, we can utilize what we've gradually built up on the moon.

I was under the impression that the aero braking greatly reduces the amount of fuel required to land on mars vs the moon, and due to this the Saturn V had enough lift to put a crew on mars.

If Apollo-era hardware can get to mars, why rendezvous at the moon?

His point wasn't anything specific about landing on the moon or even the details of the mission. At least not the main point from what I can tell.

He had the opportunity to stand in front of involved decision makers and demonstrate to them that they were not communicating well. At all. And that lack of communication made it seem impossible, to him anyway, that they could even come close to landing on the moon in the planned timeframe without some major changes to how they worked.

He chose poor examples that didn't help his point at all (from my opinion).

I didn't get his point, other than - copy the first landing, you have the manual - and that seems like he misses the point. Maybe I got that impression because all the counter arguments he reasoned were made from the apollo lens, but in the end I didn't hear any solid argument from him, only a "teaching moment" from somebody that doesn't understand the context.

What was really impactful for me was when he showed the comparison of the Apollo mission plan image / diagram and compared it with the current one. He didn't even say much he just silently let the audience look at the two side by side, and it scene speaks for itself.

I also think the fact that no one could answer how many refuelings were needed or planned for the mission warrants attention, as mentioned by other commenters.

Loved the most of the presentation but i felt he lacked the big picture, it is no longer about just going to the moon but this time we want to potentially settle and expand to other planets. Because of this we are not just trying to replicate how we went there but it is such an invaluable document to do what we want to do.!!

I felt the same. In the apollo program literally every step along the way had never been done before, and the problems were solved by smart people putting in good work and the result is that we developed a ton of new technologies and skills as a country.

He seems to be saying: don't try new things, keep in simple and just do what we did 50 years ago again. Keep funding the old aerospace giants (Boeing, Lockheed, ULA, and a hundred different contractor companies) rather than giving money to companies that are developing new technologies. This partially makes sense, since he and his dad and many friends work for those old companies and are probably threatened by the new comers.

He clearly implies that politically-driven contracts have made the launch system overly complex, and that SpaceX could do the job for a fraction of the cost with better results compared to the old aerospace giants.

He paused on slide showing Starship on the moon to drive the point home.

The big picture is that instead of sending 16 moon-capable rockets to refuel one moon-capable rocket, just send 16 rockets to the moon.

You can build a lot of infrastructure with 16 rockets to the moon.

Wait, are they not using Starship to refuel? If they are then that's 1 Crew ship (SLS?) + 1 Starship with 16 round trips. Considering we don't know the failure rate for refueling with Starship, they might need 2-3 Starship rockets.

Actually, are they going to be refueling in orbit with crew on board? Or are they launching a rocket into orbit and refueling it, then launching another rocket with the crew to dock with the fueled rocket?

> NASA says SpaceX’s next Starship flight could test refueling tech

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38612585

> In 2020, NASA announced agreements with four companies—Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and a Florida-based startup named Eta Space—to prove capabilities in the area of refueling and propellant depots using cryogenic propellants.

Ah, it's first come first served.

> without astronauts onboard. Once that is successful, NASA will clear Starship for a crew landing on the agency's Artemis III mission, marking the astronauts' return to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

So it seems they'll use a Starship for crew as well?

I didn't get the impression that he was saying "don't try new things". It was more "practice good engineering". He ask people how many refueling launches it would take for the moon landing. No one knew. The engineers responsible for the project couldn't provide a number for one of the most critical things that needs to occur in the next couple of years. It took a government watchdog agency to come up with an evidence based number. That looked really bad for the program.

We are changing how things are being done. Before NASA was responsible for everything and more hands on approach but now it is hands off approach with fixed cost contract. Because of this you can expect things to work the same way as before but that doesn't mean it is good to keep the tabs on.

Real Engineering did a video on the "insane engineering of the Space Shuttle: a couple days ago that is similarly interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcBc0l7IrZU

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