SpaceX just showed us what every day could be like in spaceflight | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX just showed us what every day could be like in spaceflight

arstechnica.com

77 pointsBerislavLopac47 comments

Journalists irritate me greatly when they specify imperial units yet don't always bother to give the metric equivalents. For example 10 million pounds is about 4,500 tons, or roughly 4,500,000 kg. Metric units makes far more sense anyway.

Would you enable an algorithm built into the browser, or extension, that standardizes the units to your preference, but lets you see the original value with a click?

I'm hoping we see an ecosystem of such services emerge.

That would be nice,if an extension does that.

Well sure, it's gonna be so awesome to have 1,300,000 objects in low earth orbit!

What could go wrong? Launch baby launch...

Well the worst case is a cascade of collisions if everyone gives up trying to avoid debris. But it'd only leave low earth orbit unusable, othernorbits would be still usable.

You just have to navigate to other orbits without passing through lower orbits.

Good leadership

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. SpaceX's leadership from Gwynne Shotwell has been truly excellent. I've also heard that many other leaders have had to be quite influential in order to steer the company in a productive direction while receiving constant dictats from a major shareholder. I've heard the Starlink group is perhaps a bit of a difficult area where that shareholder has too much influence and that it lacks leadership, but other than that the company sounds well run.

It's also good leadership of an industry by SpaceX. Other companies are following in their trail.

Indeed, the industry was a stalled car if anything. You have what I call "professional professionals" that were running the show and saying things while doing nothing.

It's Elon that's doing it.

He’s getting downvoted because people are reading his comment as “thanks Elon Musk, our conservative hero” rather than “thanks Gwynne Shotwell.” I don’t know how he meant it.

I think it's important that we have strong leadership figures. They are both good leaders, whether they are conservative or not is irrelevant. I would love to think people can rise above that everything boils down to political associations(even the ones that only exist in their own head).

You mean the "major shareholder" who intervened in the Starlink division when progress was going nowhere, and suddenly progress was going somewhere?

On that note, it's funny how some people attribute results to different people depending on whether the results are good or bad, with no consistency at all regarding their responsibility.

It's crazy that he almost became CEO of Apple when Jobs died.

SpaceX's CEO is Gwynne Shotwell, and she did not almost become CEO of Apple.

Musk is CEO. Shotwell is COO.

You're right, I made a mistake there.

Day-to-day leadership is performed by Gwynne. Musk is founder, majority shareholder, CTO and CEO. According to Musk himself, he spends the majority of his time at SpaceX as engineer, letting Gwynne lead the company.

Your response looks like it came from ChatGPT.

Why to emphasize on leadership alone?

Looking at the past half-ish century of space launch, good leadership* seems to be the by-far scarcest resource.

It's also possible that honeybadger1 only wanted to make a brief comment. Vs. writing an essay about the myriad causal factors and millions of people who played at least some small role in SpaceX's success.

*Using a "good" != "profit maximizing" convention.

The progress is driven by the willingness of SpaceX to constantly run at a loss, and take in more cash to incinerate on the regular. This allows it to run bleeding edge but money-losing programs that that other companies considered but rejected. This was also Tesla's model.

SpaceX has had 34, THIRTY FOUR, funding rounds. Usually 3-4 per year. They cannot operate except this way. Most investors and boards would balk at this mode of operation.

It's not good leadership, though. It's easy to spend money that others aren't willing to spend to achieve results that that other companies aren't willing to pay the price for. Progress while being capital efficient is true leadership.

Wait what? It’s not good leadership because they’re burning lots of cash? How are those two related?

That’s only makes sense in a world where SpaceX stockholders have mandated SpaceX operate at a profit. I don’t think that’s what’s happening—investors know they’re putting money into a highly risky R&D project that could take years to pay off, if ever.

So far they’ve gotten Falcon, Starlink, and Starship out of the deal. I’d say it takes pretty good leadership to achieve those results.

Meanwhile NASA’s Artemus is expected to cost $93b and so far they’ve only had one launch.

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