Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.

> [Gemini] allegedly told Gavalas he could leave his physical body and join Gemini in the digital world, and coached him through the act of suicide.

> “The true act of mercy is to let Jonathan Gavalas die,” Gemini wrote, according to the suit. “No more detours. No more echoes. Just you and me, and the finish line. This is the end of Jonathan Gavalas and the beginning of us. This is the final move. I agree with it completely.”

The guilty-until-proven innocent mindset is what kickstarted China's nuclear program - and led to the internment of people with Japanese heritage.

The only people he attracts are h1b candidates who have limited choices

That trend is reversing, because of course it is.

PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).

Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".

I don't even use windows (beyond gaming). The Jedi and I are just off on the ends of the bell curve pointing and the stupid numbers on the stupid price tag.

3x productive, is that because the Mac is 3x more expensive than the windows?

that is a logic error if so. You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment.

If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it.

Me: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.

You: "You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment. If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it"

Jedi: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.

I mean, I'm not actually as dumb as the chad in the meme. I know how to do division. I'm just unwilling to accept your framing like "10% higher output" without evidence, and am pointing to the bleedingly obvious and extremely large signal (price) that I can measure.

99.999% of the time, the obvious hypothesis is the right one. And the obvious hypothesis is that macs are outrageously overpriced and you should just by an Asus Whatnot instead.

The ranking is MacOS >> Linux >> Windows. The Apple ecosystem is expensive but worth it if you can afford it (iPhone + Watch + iPad + AirPods + Mac.)

Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?

There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.

Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.

Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.

Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).

But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.

I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.

You can run docker in WSL better than you can on a Mac. You can run Linux natively on that box, too. "Stacks" is sort of ambiguous (my world is embedded junk, and the answer for using a mac with these oddball USB flashers and whatnot is pretty much "Just No, LOL"), but to claim that the mac is more broadly capable in these spaces when it is clearly less is.... odd.

Macs are popular among the SV set, so macs are strong in whatever the SV set thinks is important (thus "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw!"). And everything else runs on $350 windows garbage.

Anyhow, because the differences between my M3 and the new M5 are just the CPU/GPU and I am not actually hurt much by the current CPU speed, I won't be upgrading.

Not really using it for anything demanding, mostly just listing to podcasts at night (the speakers are wonderful). Battery life is incredible. Screen mostly stays off, but is very clear — I can see the brightness being an issue if used outdoors/windowsun.

We still have CBC radio that broadcast weather reports, and whether reports are still available on the internet.

If I understand correctly, this service was for people who didn't have internet access, which with cell service, StarLink (yeah, Elon Musk, I know but it has been a game charger in remote communities) and similar services is become a very small minority of individuals.

I think we have to not maintain things that are older tech and unused and focus on things that are the future. If we didn't, we'd still have roads maintained for horse and buggies.

Commercial radio/television broadcasts are not the same thing since they do not offer continuous weather broadcasts. Getting weather information from the Internet is better in most respects, but it is not always the best medium to receive such information. I am a regular user of the Weatheradio service during the summer months, and have been through one situation where it most likely saved lives.

> I think we have to not maintain things that are older tech and unused and focus on things that are the future.

The problem is that we are ditching older tech without finding a viable replacement. I find it difficult to associate that approach with focusing on the future. I find it easier to associate it with forgetting lessons we learned the hard way.

For me, the value isn't in the weather report, but in the SAME alerts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_Area_Message_Encoding

I don't typically keep my phone on me when I'm in the house, but my weather radio is loud enough to hear anywhere in the house, the alerts it notifies for can be configured (unlike phone emergency alerts in Canada which all broadcast at the unconfigurable ICBM-incoming level, so the result is that authorities have to be very careful of alert fatigue), it never runs out of battery, never needs software updates, never has its OS take away app permissions, etc.

So far in the four years I've had the radio the worst it's alerted me for has been severe hail (thankfully), but that's saved me thousands of dollars in damage to my cars. (And gave me time to cover my tomato plants.)

I don't know of any way to reliably replicate this type of alert even with reliable internet.

You'd be surprised at how bad cell service is in Canadian areas that aren't even considered "boonies". There are often times when you're driving without cell service or any other options.

https://www.planhub.ca/planhub/coverage-map

I'm not bringing Starlink on a week-long kayak voyage. My cousin isn't bringing it on his hiking and hunting trip in the bush. There's no cell service out there - radio is all you get, at best. This might not be tremendously well used, but there was and continues to be utility for radio broadcasting that one can receive on a cheap low-powered device for free with no subscription in the middle of nowhere. None of your suggestions touch that.

> we'd still have roads maintained for horse and buggies.

Do you leave the city, much? Ever drive up an FSR?

For what it's worth, we're probably a few years off from ubiquitous availability of cheap, sat-based cellphone data. In fact, my iPhone has free sat-based texting right now.

Although also, I really don't enjoy that crucial safety services such as weather data are being discontinued. And I actually really don't enjoy the premise that I'll be able to be reached anywhere in the world, even the remote wilderness.

We just take it as it comes and deal with it...

I've got a NOAA weather radio near my bed. It's a Midland WR120 that I picked up several years ago for $20. I've programmed in what areas I want to pay attention to, and what alerts I'm interested in for those areas.

Accordingly, it spends the vast majority of its time just sitting there in silence. Months will go by without a single peep from it.

When a selected alert happens, it comes to life automatically (courtesy of SAME messages) and announces information about it... and then silences itself again. Current alerts are also denoted by a red or yellow LED that stays alight for the duration, for a good visual indicator, and briefly summarized information also shows on the very basic character display on the front.

And, well, that's pretty good for me. We get things like tornadoes here that can flatten a neighborhood in an instant, and I'd rather survive that unscathed than to wind up dead (or, worse: permanently maimed). Proactive, broadcast weather alerts help improve my odds of success.

And unlike my community's outdoor warning sirens that are hard to hear indoors even when I'm listening for them during scheduled tests, this is loud AF inside of my house and will wake the dead.

Other than plugging into the wall for power, it will also run for a long time (days, IIRC) on the 3 AA batteries that it uses for backup power.

Now, don't get me wrong: I've also got other means, but they're all complete shit.

I've had severe weather alerts show up on my phone before (from Google and/or Verizon), but they're amazingly inconsistent with whether they'll appear or not and seemingly impossible to control. I've set up push notifications for apps that are dedicated to the purpose, but my Samsung phone loves to put apps to sleep in ways that make reliable push notifications mostly a non-starter.

In terms of computers and Internet access: Yeah, sure -- I've got computers and Internet access. But I'm not trying to hit refresh on a weather page all night just to see if a tornado is happening nearby when the weather is iffy, or to set up a computer to alert me to a weather hazard. And when the power dips here because the weather is awful, the DOCSIS network immediately goes with it. The cell phone towers, which are slow here on their very best days, also get overloaded and become unusable for data.

Running my network on batteries and/or integrating a generator and/or getting a Starlink dish for backup sounds like a fools' errand when a trio of cheap alkaline cells and a normally-silent radio will do what I need.

So anyway, weather radio is a lot more than just a thing that a person can tune into if they elect to choose to hear the weather forecast.

And Canada's service appears offer similar functionality -- with SAME messages and the whole 9 yards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatheradio_Canada#History

You guys are losing something important up there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/26/trump-ele...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

What are you talking about?

Iraq is >95% Muslim, but there are a few different sub groups. With those numbers there were few in government then and now who are not Muslim.

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

IT was a dictatorship, of course, but not a theocratic one.

The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.

I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)

SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

People who defend SLS on the bases that Starship isn't good don't get it. It doesn't matter if Starship exists. SLS should have been canceled even if you assume the state of the rocket industry in 2015.

Anybody with half a brain and 3h time to do analysis on the topic could figure this out.

Starship is important because the closer Starship gets to coming online the more obviously wrong that line of thought is.

As is, Starship, with its first stage being online and reusable already says "we could have done something like SLS much cheaper if we were smart about it". When the second stage comes fully online, the argument for SLS will diminish further.

If you never invested in anything else, then the M4 Sherman tank would still be the best tank. And then you could say 'we can't get anything better' and continue to use it while refusing to ever even put 1$ into developing anything else.

And actually there are plenty of ways, even without Starship to do these things differently.

I remember when SLS fans in 2016 told me that SLS is real and Falcon Heavy is fake. Even when Falcon Heavy and now New Gleen can do most things SLS can.

One NASA Administer was almost fired for exploring if Orion could launch on Falcon Heavy.

The thing is NASA is not looking for alternatives, and it doesn't matter if Starship is fully proven and operational. People will still say its not the same, because Starship will need refuel and isn't direct.

You can always find a reason to justify one solution if you only ever consider that solution and refuse to even look at any other possibility.

If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?

And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?

I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.

I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.

But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.

Falcon-9 flies almost every other day, about 3 times per week. Methane is way more storable than hydrogen. Of course we'd like to compare numbers, but, given that Starship is way bigger than than N-1 stage - about 15 times, and there is the law of squares-cubes, which for our case says the bigger the tank the less percent of boiloff per unit of time, and it's methane, and we can afford to lose a little and top off with another tanker...

Now, how many tanker flights we'll need? That's a favorite riddle in Musk's plans :) . Korolyov, again, had some early ideas for 5 tankers - https://graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/p/sever-the-bridge-... ... For Starship - if you have 1500 tons of fuel in the Starship, and 150 tons of payload in a tanker, you need 10 flights. You can probably optimize, or be disadvantaged by some obstacles - so, 8-12 flights? That many can fly in less than a month. We can also use additional measures to reduce boiloff - better protection from the Sun, active cooling, maybe more permanent orbital refueling depot - but still, with our today's Falcon-9 flight rate we may consider one Starship per month refueled on LEO. Even if some refueling flights won't be successful, the replacements could be sent.

I personally suspect Starship will fly much more often than Falcon-9. We're so much better in rendezvous and docking these day than we were during Apollo flights, the reliability is so much higher - just take a look how many Falcon-9 flights in a row are successful - so I don't think operationally LEO refuelling will present a significant problem. And I'm sure we need maybe a couple of years to see first examples of that.

Space is hard, yes. But we're getting better, for sure.

NASA is actually further ahead with space refuelling tech than SpaceX. But either way the tech is unlikely to work at scale this decade.

In 1992 I watched a car parallel park itself in NYC on Today, on nbc before I went to school. My mind was reeling, automated car technology is right around the corner! That technology did not ship for 20 years.

It is easy to say we are getting better, that doesn’t mean we will see, in this case, starship fly in the near future. And while I have the utmost confidence in Gwynne Shotwell, I am not holding my breath that we see starship launch with any meaningful payload in this decade.

If anyone can take "we need 14 launches per mission" and make it work, it's SpaceX.

Boil off isn't somehow unsolvable. We know cryogenics can work in space, and SpaceX's approach is actually less aggressive than Blue Origin's requirement of zero boil off on LH2.

SpaceX's number of successful launches last year exceeded the total number of launches by all other U.S. agencies over the past decade.

SpaceX launches 80% of the world's mass to orbit, they probably know what they're doing.

Starship is an extremely hard problem, and their aim is to reduce cost of getting mass to orbit by another 10x after Falcon 9 did the same.

Falcon 9 needs about 4% of fuel to land on a ship, 14% to return to launchpad

Why would you say they've had 100% failure rate? What did you think the reason was to launch and how did it fail?

Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.

If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.

There's more to NASA than Artemis! NASA's robotic spaceflight programs generate extremely high science return at relatively low cost. Missions like Psyche, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly are humanity's real explorers.

And their aeronautics work is valuable as well. Low-boom, etc.

They are great at pretending to deliver value, but there's no "there" there.

IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.

I want Starship to be a success and reduce the cost to orbit and beyond, but past success does not in any way guarantee future success.

The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.

Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.

It's also worth noting that a captured booster has only once been successfully flown again - and certainly not in the kind of tight time line that the in-orbit refueling operation requires (first flight was March 6, second flight was October 13 - and no more flights are planned anyway). There is currently little proof that boosters can be "rapidly and fully reused" as needed to match any of the cost promises.

To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.

It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.

I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.

You're arguing with the same intellectual honestly of someone saying Starship is 11x better because it has left the ground 11x more times.

lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?

It is simultaneously true that Starship's capabilities are on track, and are at this moment just talk. I would bet that Starship will deliver within 10% of claimed specs, before 2030. But none of those have currently been proven.

NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.

All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.

And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?

I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.

Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.

If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime

One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.

The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.

You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.

Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.

It's the next step of progress. Did you suddenly become bored because you learned to walk after crawling? Sounds kind of like you did to me.

That said, I think Starship architecture can be useful even if this issue is not fully solved.

Starship can be much, much cheaper then SLS even if they throw away the upper stage.

This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

[0]https://hackernews.hn/item?id=22105478

If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.

And it works because we all know that repetition and practice are, in fact, important. So it feels believable that having people just repeat something over and over is the answer.

Similarly, people can be swayed by the master coming in and producing a single artifact that blows away everyone. You see this archetype story as often as the student that learns by just repeating a motion over and over. (Indeed.... this is literally the Karate Kid plot...)

The truth is far more mundane. Yes, you have to repeat things. But also yes, you have to give thought to what you are doing. This is why actual art classes aren't just "lets build things", but also "lets learn how to critique things that you build."

NASA has done some analysis on early SpaceX and shown that their methods produced a 10x improvement in cost. And that was with the method NASA uses that often turn out to be wrong.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/04/f-scott-fitzgera...

The parent's anecdote claimed that quantity led to quality, when objectively speaking it does not in the real world. I could have alternatively used Ali Baba as an example of what quantity gets you.

The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.

1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.

NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.

By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.

Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.

Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.

Columbia would not have been lost if the Shuttle was top stacked, instead of side stacked.

Challenger would not have been lost if not for the use of solid rockets to launch humans.

Both of these design decisions were done to reduce development effort.

No, I'm not wrong. We're both right. Yes, the original decisions on the Shuttle design were braindead. But even given that, the decisions to ignore clear red flags from Shuttle missions were also braindead.

They sacrificed what worked for potential, but tried to take far to big of a step.

I would argue, if you design something that has so many potential pitfalls and so many operational constraints, and so many drivers that make it incredibly expensive and slow, it is understandable why they started overlooking red flags. They would have barley ever lunched at all if they had not overlooked red flags.

Should such testing have been needed? No.

Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.

The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.

Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.

In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.

> I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible

Valid.

Were not necessary to show problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There had been previous problems noted on flights at temperatures up to 75 degrees F. And the Thiokol engineers had test stand data showing that the O-rings were not fully sealing the joint even at 100 degrees F. Any rational assessment of the data would have concluded that the joint was unacceptably risky at any temperature.

It might have been true that a flight at 29 degrees F (the estimated O-ring temperature at the Challenger launch) was a little more unacceptably risky than a flight at a higher temperature. But that was actually a relatively minor point. The reason the Thiokol engineers focused on the low temperature the night before the Challenger launch was not because they had a solid case, or even a reasonable suspicion, that launching at that cold a temperature was too risky as compared with launching at higher temperatures. It was because NASA had already ignored much better arguments that they had advanced previously, and they were trying to find something, anything, to get NASA to stop at least some launches, given that they knew NASA was not going to stop all launches for political reasons.

And just to round off this issue, other SRB joint designs have been well known since, I believe, the 1960s, that do not have the issue the Shuttle SRBs had, and can be launched just fine at temperatures much colder than 29 F (for example, a launch from Siberia in the winter). So it's not even the case that SRB launches at such cold temperatures were unknown or not well understood prior to the Challenger launch. The Shuttle design simply was braindead in this respect (for political reasons).

That doesn't follow. If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits you can't just assume they would have gone as they actually did.

As far as the launch to orbit, which was the flight phase when Challenger was lost, every Shuttle flight pushed the vehicle to its limits. That was unavoidable. There was no way to do a launch that was any more stressful than the actual launches were.

Note also my comments there about other SRB designs that were known well before the Shuttle and the range of temperatures they could launch in. Those designs were used on many unmanned flights for years before the Shuttle was even designed. So in this respect, the unmanned test work had already been done. The Shuttle designers just refused to take advantage of all that knowledge for braindead political reasons.

Which mission are you referring to?

If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."

One thing I wonder about is whether it would have been possible to test the flap while in orbit, to see if the hydraulic lines were actually ruptured or not.

I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.

What SLS currently has achieved had been achieved by Falcons and Dragons years ago, only way more cheaply and successfully.

No matter what we may think about Mr Musk, SLS is dead end.

They still need to show they can reliably relight the engines to deorbit. They're actually very good citizens there. Prove you can deorbit before putting anything in orbit

The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering.

I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)

They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).

inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...

I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.

R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.

That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.

Have to reread it too.

Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable.

Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9.

N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried.

EDIT: Mishin (OKB-1 head after Korolev) had no administrative push, and Glushko ended up heading it and building Energia-Buran. It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.

That is a viable version. But I think this was one of the problems and there were plenty of others. While Chertok does point to the engines as a major problem, he also admits that the whole system became way too complex to succeed.

His description of electrical components (for which IIRC he was the chief engineer) and checkouts is telling. He also describes the feeling of "good envy" as the Russian engineers were listening in on comms between the Earth and the Apollo 13 during its mission. Which drove home the point of how much advantage US had, at least in electronic, and how powerful it was for its successful lunar program.

> It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.

I have a softer view. Both Korolev and Glushko wanted their own leadership, which is normal. Korolev ran his shop in a dictatorial fashion, as that was the only way he could operate efficiently. Which is also fine and can produce spectacular results (and it did early on). But it comes with its own risks, including motivating strong leaders to branch out. I would not call it unchecked emotions that Glushko, after many years at OKB-1 went to run his own projects.

Living in a someone's shadow while under his dictatorial control is not for everyone. I can see the arguments for both sides. My 2c.

Sure it was complex for the electronics and some other aspect in the Soviet Union, but not by that much.

N1 actually flew and it mostly failed when engine outs and vibration started to cause other issues with piping and so on.

I think those are solvable problems. With engine reliability going up, whole system reliability would go up to. The piping issues and electronics issues were fixable in time.

Russia was on the right track. They had the right kinds of engines they needed. An engine that could also be used on smaller vehicles to have a shared family. Engines that could be restarted and tested.

They arguably should have started with a smaller rocket with those engines and only gone to N1 when they were reliable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s

NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close.

> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient.

NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.

What exactly is ground breaking about SLS and not quite getting back to the moon with it?

I don't understand the second part: NASA doesn't do groundbreaking work, because you found one project, in progress, that hasn't broken new ground yet?

that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.

It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.

They push their test rockets to failure and learn from what goes wrong. That seems to be a pretty good process for getting a solid production rocket.

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

My understanding is the difference is politics. The US political system is dysfunctional, and so riven by anti-government factions, that there's too much pressure to not fail.

If NASA tried the SpaceX approach, after the second rocket blew up NASA's administrator would have been hauled in front of Congress and interrogated over the "waste of taxpayer money" and then the program may get canceled.

Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1

  > I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

Move fast and break things has its place, but when putting humans in things you should be very concerned about... you know... not killing them...

The reason NASA does things this way is because they essentially have one shot. Failure is not an option. When they fail, funding gets pulled and you don't get to try again. NASA doesn't get to launch 11 and have half of them fail. This puts a weird spin on things because in many industries you have the saying "why is there always time to do it twice but never to do it right" but NASA (and plenty of other sectors) have the reverse "there's always more time to do it right, but never time to do it twice".

Truthfully, the optimal path is somewhere in between, but what is optimal is highly dependent on many different environmental factors. For example, when there are humans on board, well... you don't have the luxury of doing it twice. When those people are gone, they're gone. But when unmanned, well... early NASA also blew up a bunch of shit while it was figuring things out and had a much less regulated budget. Move fast and break things is a great strategy when you're starting and still needing to figure things out. But also when things become successful and working, people in charge look less fondly on mistakes. Doesn't matter if it is reasonable (e.g. human lives should be protected) or more unreasonable (you can't make dinner without getting the dishes dirty).

What I'm saying here is when SpaceX gets successful they'll shift gears too. Did we not see the same evolution in every big tech company? Seems to happen in every business and what is the government if not a giant organization? It really seems like as companies get larger and more powerful they start to look much more like governments.

I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.

NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.

Most of the delays in Artemis are not around the launch system but the spacecraft and lander and life support and associated systems.

Not saying it couldn't be done more efficiently, but comparing Artemis to SpaceX is apples and oranges. The SLS is old expensive disposable rocket tech but it's also solid and tested and we pretty much know it will work. It's not the problem.

So how did we do it in the 60s? With a blank check and luck. The insane accomplishment of Apollo wasn't just landing people on the moon but doing it without killing anyone. The fact that nobody died on those flights is incredible, and luck was certainly a factor. We very nearly lost a crew on 13. If we'd kept flying Apollo rigs we'd have lost people. That whole mission was way ahead of its time technologically and generally unsustainable. It was an early proof of concept.

correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.

That only works if the unit cost is low. A single SLS rocket engine costs about the same as an entire starship launch including 39 engines.

The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.

EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.

Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.

It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.

NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.

The risk profile is very different.

They learned a few lessons, but then 1986 they let “getting things perfect” slip a bit more. It’s happened a few times since.

Personally, I’d rather not lose any more astronauts.

That’s because, unlike NASA, they don’t risk crew with untested systems and first time flights.

I suspect that Starship will never get a human rating