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Comment by foooorsyth | Hacker News Reader

Making this joke falls flat in the comments section of a rocket science article about Americans continuing to dominate space.

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"Americans dominate space" is the most American sentence I've read in a while. Imagine that, a few humans from a little corner of the universe dominating space!

Thanks to Starlink, something like 70% of the 7500 satellites orbit Earth are American. Or course by mass, nature still wins by a landslide, but as always, it's all in how in count things.

Space is pretty big. Is it fair to say that the USA dominates up to, say, Earth's Ionosphere?

Earth orbit is the only useful part of space.

There are 31 extra-planetary human objects/, 19 of which are American, and 12 are Japanese/Soviet/European/Chinese/Indian, so maybe a bit further than the ionosphere?

"Americans dominate the space industry" is presumably what they meant, and not inaccurate. On the other hand, even the American space industry uses metric.

Hubble wasn't so sure.

Nor was Mars Polar Lander – the most likely cause of its loss was a mistake in units that resulted in it using too short a deceleration burn as it prepared to land, meaning it hit the surface far faster than intended (IIRC we don't know for sure if it impacted in one piece, broke apart during descent). Tabloid headlines of the time dubbed the mission as a “close encounter of the thud kind”.

Not a consequence of units used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_...

It's space in the SV context, i.e. the competitive arena or market. Americans dominate the space space.

Americans: we dominate space and are the WORLD champions of football.

The thing I love best about jokes like this is that it changes based on your perspective.

Americans reading this: “f—- yeah, we do!” Upvote!

Non-Americans reading this: “lmao perfect parody of an American!” Upvote!

For clarity, Americans claim the WORLD champions of baseball. The championship series is called the World Series. In American football, it's just called the Super Bowl.

You might as well complain about the name of the World Cup, since it’s also only teams from Earth.

The EU was dominating space for around twenty years or so, but that has long passed and at this rate will never come again. The ESA and Arianespace dropped the ball so badly, books will be written about it.

Not to beat the dead horse but NASA predominantly uses metric units.

Also, they got their lead in space tech mainly because of a German scientist (Werner von Braun).

On the Apollo program, all the calculations were done in metric (obviously). The computers all worked in metric internally and then converted to imperial for display. They actually had to waste some of their very limited cpu cycles on converting to imperial because the US astronauts couldn’t handle the metric system.

Your comment contains a series of partial truths, falsehoods and misconceptions.

So Werner built the rockets and all the subsystems too or was just the technical fellow/consultant?

Sure, the US was in a better position post WW2. But Werner has been dead for years and the US still dominates space 10x or even 100x times. Engineering in the US is top notch.

As far as your other assertion- what’s your source?

NASA primarily used the imperial system (feet, pounds, and seconds) for the Apollo program. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and other systems were designed using imperial units because the entire spacecraft and mission control infrastructure were built around the U.S. customary system.

There was no wasting of CPU cycles. We even have the source code on GitHub to go look at:

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

Look in this assembly code. It is imperial.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...

Then, there are design documents and other engineering standards that tell us everything was in imperial units.

I am not buying what you are saying.

I took a look at the code, and I found references to both metric (meters, kgs) and imperial units (lbs) in there.

(AGC) calculations were carried out using the metric system, but display readouts were in units of feet, feet per second, and nautical miles – units that the Apollo astronauts were accustomed to.

https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...

> was just the technical fellow/consultant?

There is a direct lineage from the Nazi German V2 rockets to Saturn V. Wernher von Braun and his rocketry friends were involved at all levels of American rocketry and ballistic missile programs, and I am happy to say the latter wouldn't have gotten off the ground as early as they did without von Braun's guidance at all levels. At least until the end of WW2, British (and even German) aerospace was considerably further along than American equivalents. And even afterwards, the Europeans, Canadians, Brazilians and the Soviets have remained very productive in terms of civilian and military aerospace. This legacy continues today.

> the US still dominates space 10x or even 100x times. Engineering in the US is top notch

Good for the USA, but this has very little at all to do with unit systems and much more to do with just how much capital there is in the USA. And as everyone else has said, NASA uses SI. I bet these college students did, too.

Keep in mind that the metre is barely younger than the US itself, having been formalised in the 1790s.

Not sure if I would necessarily say that the reason the US is pretty good at space stuff is imperial measurements. Its probably imperialism, instead.

It's mostly because the US was the only nation to survive WW2 with its infrastructure intact.

Same story as computing, really.

Nope, that’s a lazy excuse. The US space industry was dead in the early 2000s. Astronauts went to the ISS on Soyuz.

It was more of an exploration lull and not much industry had came out of it quite yet as privatization was being implemented and so it’s the case the industry was actually just being born.

You are simply wrong for anything other than human rated flight. They didn't have the kind of PR that NASA and Space X have, and they were never human rated, but private satellites never stopped flying on Atlas, Delta, and Titan programs that variously went from the 1960s all the way up until the 2020s. All three of those rocket programs are direct descendants of ICBM programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launcher...

I disagree with the premise that it was lack of bombing of US infrastructure related though. Space programs are very simply the public output of ICBM programs. Most of the modern day is simply a direct descendant of ICBM programs. You like distributed and reliable communication networks like the internet? Built so ICBM silos could command each other even if certain hubs were nuked. You like the miniaturization of solid state electronics? That capability was paid for entirely by the US Air Force who wanted powerful computers under 100 pounds for advanced planes and precision ICBMs. Satellite navigation was also explicitly invented for nuclear missiles fired out of submarines to have an accurate fix for guidance purposes.

Basically the entirety of the modern world exists because the US of the cold war pumped trillions of dollars into producing ICBMs and planes that were genuinely "next gen" while every single private business takes the credit for stuff they never paid for. Computer and telecommunications companies would never have built this stuff on their own: They were fine with computers taking up an entire facility that they could rent out (cf modern clouds) and fully switched networks that were reliant on a big company to manage. None of them needed to sell you a "personal computer". None of them wanted a distributed, uncontrolled network like the Internet.

> You are simply wrong for anything other than human rated flight. They didn't have the kind of PR that NASA and Space X have, and they were never human rated, but private satellites never stopped flying on Atlas, Delta, and Titan programs that variously went from the 1960s all the way up until the 2020s.

Those are moribund programs that were being kept alive solely by the government because it wanted to ensure the US had launch capabilities for NRO and other classified missions. There was absolutely no innovation coming out of them to drive down costs or increase payloads.

The sector was dead from an innovation perspective and a failure from a competitive perspective.

Your screed about businesses taking credit for stuff is mostly unfounded. The internet’s foundation in DARPA is very well understood and acknowledged. However, all of the advancements to scale up to the scale of the internet today were pushed by Silicon Valley and academia.

DARPA and the military never cared about scale and still doesn’t because it’s not a goal.

Which is easy to do when you enter at the end and capture the highest skill scientists.

What does that have to do with rockets? The main resources you need for spaceflight are intellectual capacity and engineering skills. Plus a government that allows it to happen. Besides the US, China and Russia, the 4th place for number of launches in 2023 is shared by India and New Zealand. The latter can hardly be described as imperialist by any measure. All you need is a single company like Rocket Lab. It could easily happen in other places too, under the right circumstances.

Prior to losing WW2 for example Germany dominated the space and they were latecomers in imperialism with very little control over anything outside their own territory. In fact getting pushed around by more powerful colonial nations, and the economic sanctions that were put on them, were the main reason leading to the fascist takeover and ultimately the war.

Rocket Lab is mostly an American company these days. Headquartered in America, most of their employees in America, traded on an American stock exchange, doing contracts for the American military.

One could argue the US entering into WW2 is imperialism. Von Braun and a large number of other highly skilled and important people came from that, which directly migrated German rocket and Spacecraft innovation to the US.

How is that not arguably imperialism related?

Not to start a big discussion about WW2 but the US was passive until they were attacked. Over 2000 Americans were killed in Pearl Harbor. For a nation of its size and power, the US was decidedly un-imperialist up until then. Even after they'd beat the Nazis and Imperial Japan, they actually helped rebuild their economies instead of exploiting them. Granted, that might have been the smarter thing to do anyway and turned out a win-win. But it wasn't how most leaders thought at the time. Look at the Soviet Union and how they ended up oppressing the territories they "liberated". The Western allies also wanted to keep Germany down, as did some in the US government (see the Morgenthau Plan for example). Had they prevailed there might soon have been another war.

For a nation of its size and power, the US was decidedly un-imperialist up until then.

Its empire was never on the scale of the major European Powers. But by that point in time, it still maintained explicit colonial control over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii (still fairly recently subjugated) and numerous Pacific islands. Along with the Panama Canal Zone (which had its own postcal code, CZ).

It also exerted considerable influence over the affairs of many nominally independent countries in the hemisphere (Cuba quite notably), and engaged in several major military interventions up until 1933 (Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua). It also intervened substantially in the Russian Civil War, up until 1925, and was still engaged in wars of suppression against its indigenous population through the middle of that decade as well.

One could say its imperial project took a breather of sorts in the mid-1930s, and decided to rest on its laurels for a bit.

But "decidedly un-imperalist" it was not.

Dominated by a company that is led by an African-American man no less!!

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