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The guidelines ask us to avoid being curmudgeonly. I'm sure you didn't mean to come across that way, but could you try not to make Hacker News the kind of place that responds with “meh” to a successful space mission?

by pwndByDeath16 hours ago|

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My pessimism comes from a hindsight that the Apollo missions, while amazing failed to create the future they promised. Looking at how the missions were designed, the political focus, the academic infighting of NASA scientists trying to keep niche research funded. I fail to see how this time, the same strategy will produce a different result.

I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.

To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.

by m4rtink16 hours ago|

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I blame the "space race" narrative - it made everything unsustainably expensive just to beat the goal of landing on the Moon by the end of the decade and before the Soviets. That also made the program even more dependant on political whims and easy target for budget cuts in the Vietnam era.

I recommend looking into the space flight plans from the pre Apollo - while tere were bonkers ideas like Project Horizon, most of the plans sounded quite sensible, with incremental building of space infrastructure and emphasis on cost and reusability (in the 1960s).

Of course when it became a race all the sustainability and infrastructure went out of the window and got sacrificed in the name of speed. :P

by icehawk18 hours ago|

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We can't build a TV from 50 years ago, much less a space rocket.

Because we stopped, we get to do everything over again with hardware from this century.

by pwndByDeath16 hours ago|

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My point is this path doesn't lead to the future, it leads to the sad state of space between Apollo and this Shark Jump.

The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.

by mlsu6 hours ago|

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Huh? The research done to develop the flight control computer for Apollo (and IBCMs of the time) lead directly to modern microcomputers. It’s hard to name something more impactful than that.

It could easily have taken another decade or two to develop the modern computer if not for the resources spent in the space program at that time. It still would have happened, but Apollo and the space program was soaking up something like 90% of computer demand for a full decade. Computers went from room sized behemoths to the size of a file cabinet in that time.

by pwndByDeath5 hours ago|

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Im not sure that's an honest rhetoric, we have seen many other things in the last few years that have increased the demand for compute. It would seem lunacy to propose, to accelerate the miniaturization of compute we need to send a bunch of people to bounce around the moon, then we can forget about the space nonsense. If the goal was begin the path that leads humans into so many resources it would take centuries before fighting over something was more profit than going to the next empty rock, we clearly failed.

by adamsb620 hours ago|

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They can't just build Apollo 18 and resume the program as if there weren't a 50 year hiatus.

Imagine if your employer wanted to start using a software system it retired in 1972. What would you do?

by m4rtink16 hours ago|

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Just another monday in any big old company adjecent to finance or airline industry ? ;-)

by brcmthrowaway20 hours ago|

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What is delta v/critical mass?

by pitched7 hours ago|

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Fictional books about asteroid mining, from what my Google searches are returning. I would love to learn that it was a real thing though

by pwndByDeath6 hours ago|

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Suarez is, IMO, very good at researching current/near tech and mixing it into a good story about what is possible with what we have right now. Nothing in the books is really out of our reach except the will and perhaps strategic discipline to make and execute the plan.