Watch live as SpaceX crew carry out first-ever commercial spacewalk | Hacker News Reader

Watch live as SpaceX crew carry out first-ever commercial spacewalk

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52 pointsBrajeshwar29 comments

This is wonderful. It’s increasingly obvious that commercial spaceflight programs are going to get the most mass and people to the Moon, Mars/Venus and Europa/Enceladus. It’s really nice to see motivated and competent people get together to push the boundaries of human achievement.

Hopefully, but it's early days. Only SpaceX have achieved much yet.

Boeing and Blue Origin aren't doing great (yet?).

Hopefully Boeing Starliner can start shipping astronauts to, and more importantly, from the ISS.

Hopefully Blue Origina can fly, eventually.

There's a bunch more companies, Sierra Space with Dreamchaser, a space plane that will dock with ISS or whatever replaces it. But there's Gravity, Rocket Lab, Astra, Relativity, Stoke etc. It's never been such a vibrant sector.

Blue Origin seems to be a vanity project for Bezos. While he seems to be taking it more seriously than Branson does Virgin galactic, he hasn't seemed to try all that hard to make as serious a competitor as Elon has with SpaceX. Elon wants SpaceX to be more than just a glorified suborbital tour-bus and is making actual progress on commercially exploiting space for more than taking millionaires and celebrities up to see freefall for a few seconds. Boeing... well Boieng is lucky if their planes don't fall apart on take off or fly themselves into the ground this decade and their spacecraft show early signs of being victim of the same systemic issues from Boeings cost saving measures like not bothering to test their shit properly first or attach all of the nuts a bolts that are supposed to be there, or make vehicles that don't autopilot straight down unless you buy the deluxe package

I'm not sure that's a fair assessment of Blue Origin. You seem to be ignoring New Glenn, their heavy lift vehicle with a reusable first stage, which will be the first non-SpaceX offering of a reusable vehicle. It may launch this year!

Bezos' only mistake, as far as I can tell, is trusting his old space experts as to the necessity of moving slowly and minimizing risk. Still, they have made fantastic progress.

Blue Origin is basically the Scotty Pippen of launch companies. It's hard to judge them objectively due to their proximity to the GOAT. If it weren't for SpaceX, they'd be the hottest company in lift tech.

Looks serious: https://www.youtube.com/@EverydayAstronaut

Good job for spaceX and great achievements. Still i think people see Space as a frontier, so it doesn't make much sense to have mass space tourism. There's now 1 or 2 generations of people that don't remember a time not long ago when there were more than 1 space stations, when the moon was visited again and again, there was a thing called 'space shuttle' and spacewalks being carried out regularly. But it was all for a purpose, not for leisure. This feels insignificant to me

There are two space stations (ISS and Tiangong), and there will soon be more. SpaceX flies more Dragons every year than the Shuttle ever managed. Humans (probably the Chinese) will return to the Moon in the 2030s and this time we just might stay.

I've always been a strong supporter of space exploration and a big fan of SpaceX in particular, but my world view has taken a turn in recent years.

As a species, our emissions have to peak next year and then be halved by 2030 to prevent the worst of climate change. That won't even be enough if the recent "hot models" turn out to be accurate. Hundreds of millions of people (at least) are going to starve this century if that goal can't be met, and the less severe consequences will drastically roll back the average quality of life. We're living in the final years of a golden age.

I admire the aspirational vision the company and its employees are pursuing, but it's a naive one. All these brilliant engineers have been seduced by it but they will more likely spend their retirement in a refugee camp than on Mars if our priorities don't change.

Couldn’t you make this comment on nearly any thread on this site? Why is it relevant to space related stories?

SpaceX is one of the most competitive employers for engineers. They're vacuuming up young talent in the US faster than NASA and have a tremendous amount of funding from both the private and public sectors. Imagine if the same resources were being funnelled towards carbon capture projects.

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