It is neither a scientific nor a societal accomplishment, it showcases neither innovation nor courage. It's just - something that happened.
While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?
If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.
Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.
Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary ... Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality.
What happened today is only different because it was not government-funded[0]. I'm not allergic to the idea of government doing things (I agree with Barney Frank that "government is just the name for the things we decide to do together"), and so I really don't consider it to be interesting, or extraordinary, or insane. It's exactly what many others have done, just funded differently.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
The obvious, cliche response is "not nowadays". But, more helpfully - who has jurisdiction in space?
That is my fear. At the moment, the power with jurisdiction in space is the power that can get to space. And I want that power to be elected.
Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful. As eager as I am for humans to go further, I can't help but think that if we can't maintain that way of doing things - if humanity must, in order to get to space, give up on the hope of universal rights and self-determination (meaning democratically elected bodies of power) - then we're not ready. If we can't decide to go to space cooperatively, as one unit - if a few lucky individuals have to do it for us, even if they're right (which I believe they are), then we're not ready to go.
[0] That's a lie, of course. It was partially government-funded, because the promise of contracts with NASA et al is what's making this possible (to my understanding). But that's beyond my argument.
> Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful.
Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.
I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.
But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.
Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.
Not that insane. Everyone knew it could be done (since the 60s), and the guy was already insanely rich, so the means were available. All that was lacking was the will to do it.
Cute, but as a feel-good human interesting TV story, not life outlook-changing.
>Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
If SpaceX goes public (and my understanding is that it will soon enough), then government can buy a massive stake in the company to control it, if they so choose.
Only if parties with majority control are willing to sell. (Which can be a lot less than majority ownership --- see Facebook for an example[].) And there have certainly been hints that when (if?) SpaceX actually does an IPO, Elon will try to have similar measures in place, to keep shareholder activists from putting the kibosh on his private Mars program...
[] Facebook has a dual-class share structure, in which class B shares have ten times the voting rights of publicly traded class A. Zuck owns a lot of class B personally, and has proxies on much of the rest, giving him personally majority control. (If the other class B owners sell, the proxies probably go away --- but so does the voting power of the shares, which convert to class A.) The upshot is that Zuck retains personal control pretty much regardless of what anyone else does with their stock.
Whoever was the first to use "bitch" as a verb was almost certainly a male asshole who wanted to subordinate the woman he was talking to. By repeating it, that is the sentiment you are reinforcing, because the meaning does not change. You're normalizing female subordination.
The NASA's decision to support SpaceX with money and expertise is a step in the right direction.
NASA (and Roscosmos) should delegate to private companies all of the operations in LEO. They should focus their efforts on sending humans deeper into space.
I want to see a day when docking at the ISS is considered a boring affair.
The goal of spaceflight is not merely exploration, it is also colonization, and adventure. The rest of the Universe is just a place, and humans will go there. Not because it is the only way to learn about it, but merely because we can.
Machines will never describe the surface of a new world as "magnificent desolation".
Not really - some day, they'll share this trait with humans - but it will take some time. I want humans to experience this, even if briefly, before our much more capable successors take the lead from us relics.
Can we still save the term "life hacker"? For me, that'd be someone without a cellphone.
That would be me.
I don't own a cellphone since 2004. I've got tired of being constantly available (and disrupted), so I ditched the damn thing. It may not be practical for everybody, but it works for me. The world has its own pace and I have mine.
For me, the biggest inconvenience of not having a cellphone are those businesses (websites) that insist on a "cellphone #" being a required field during a sign-up or when requesting a quote.
Good for you! If it wasn't for my 3 year old daughter I'd have done the same thing and gone completely phone-less. As it stands I like knowing that in an emergency, I'm reachable. Instead I use a family plan that equates to about 20 dollars a month for my share which includes unlimted calls and texts.
I think with 'smartphones' being so expensive that phone contract prices in general have gone up. So far I've never owned a smart-phone and hopefully I can stay away from that bloated cost.
Disclaimer: I live in suburban amerika in a moderate-sized city with a low(er) cost of living. (Think LA is 1.5 x more expensive then here.)
While I see the appeal of not having a mobile phone, I'd say that if you never had a smart-phone, you could give it a try before you say it's a bloated cost. It can actually improve your life in many ways and on my side it's definitely worth the cost even if I don't call anyone that often. I'd be even glad to own a smart-... thing. It doesn't have to have a phone function.
I do appreciate having a map with me, being able to transfer money wherever I am, take a photo without carrying a full camera, read a book on a plane without adding the weight to the luggage, have some music available when I'm bored, not having to print tickets when possible, having all my notes/calendar without carrying an actual notebook, and a number of other things that simply improve my life without any downsides.
No phone an a Wifi-only iPad might be a good choice for your first paragraph (assuming you have reliable wireless at your home), although the size would hinder mobility a decent bit.
You can say that Knuth went of the grid to accomplish something extraordinary, but I did it once I've realized that my life is actually mine to live and that the world would not end if I'm not reachable. I quit being Atlas and the sky didn't fall.
<raises hand /> I don't have a cellphone either. I can't think of anything to add to the annoyances you already mentioned, but I would just like to point out that in terms of not being interrupted, ditching my cellphone is about the best thing I've ever done.
So, today, I could run mission control out of any office park in the world with sufficient space and quality IP connectivity to either my own antenna farm or the Deep Space Network.
This is indeed the future I was promised as a child.
Think of the difference in density of data displayed in info/cm^2. I'd bet one of those 3 screen sets conveys more than was visible in the entire room in 1969.
If they angle was different you could see the really huge monitors they'll have at the front of the room, so there's that at least. At least I assume so, the other mission control rooms I've been in have them and they have less people than this one.
In '69 all those huge monitors, telemetry displays, and cool panels were high tech. They built a room that screams "I am the future!". Today, all that stuff is commodity hardware that could just as easily be put to the task of playing some computer game or buying shoes as launching a spacecraft. And it inhabits a perfectly normal looking, functional room.
Yes. Its worth noting that the '69 room looks heavily purpose-built, designed so that most people can look over their own workstations at some common fixed displays (TV, clock, binary lights, etc.) and also it has a (soundproofed?) glass box, which I guess is for the media.
Nowdays most of this really isn't necessary of course. The media can watch the same screens from a different room and the workers can share the same view on different computers and work in pretty much any room large enough to fit them all. It is still somehow important though to have everyone in the same room (mission control still isn't separate people in their own backyards connected over the internet)....
Having directed large groups doing much, much, much less important things, the ability to run across the room and shout at someone when something goes wrong is still pretty indispensable. Plus it's fun.
So long as there aren't fake explosions with people falling out of their chairs. (And the comms officer falling a different direction than everyone else.)
Yes, there is a lot more techno 'theatre' in the '69 photo. Obviously it's low tech compared to now but it looks more dramatic. People will be launching rockets from the conference room of the Cape Canaveral Holiday Inn in 10 years time ;-)
I'm veering wildy off topic but the way people perceive spaces is really interesting to me. A great example; The debating chamber of the Houses of Parliament was destroyed by a bomb in WW2. It was proposed to rebuild it larger to accommodate the higher number of MPs serving, so that everyone got a seat for busy debates. Churchill vetoed this because he felt that standing room only in the debating chamber was more dramatic and served to underline the importance of the discussion of serious issues.
What exactly is the author's conclusion? To ask more questions?
It seams to me that in a post named X-vs-Y you should arrive at some sort of conclusion. Say, X is the way to go or something like that.
I'm not a db geek and I'm not pro-NOSQL or pro-RDBMS. Having no horse in the race, and a very modest knowledge of DBMS, I wonder what would be the best choice in this specific use case (building mailman archive)?
While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?
If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.
Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.
Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?