undefined | Better HN

0 pointsxenadu029y ago0 comments

With unlimited money almost any engineering problem can be solved. It isn't a miracle men walked on the moon, we just decided to go.

>Compared to what was achieved in the 60s it doesn't seem that impressive.

Is all of computing since 1960 unexciting and pointless? It's just making computers faster and cheaper, so what? The internet? We already had networks, who cares? It turns out that scale matters. Cost matters. Access matters. Details matter. If you can't see the value of treating rockets more like airplanes then you have a small-minded worldview and I don't know what to tell you.

History is littered with inventions that didn't amount to a hill of beans until someone else found a way to turn that invention into an awesome product and sell it to a much wider audience.

When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society?

0 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

babyrainbow9y ago· 3 in thread

>When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society?

Are you seriously implying that landing a rocket is an unprecedented step in that direction?

Do you think something like this would have been impossible if people had set their minds to do it, in the 60. I don't think so. I mean, we had missiles that could follow and destroy jets moving faster than a bullet...like, I don't know, 30 years back? Exactly that is why I think this is just marketing and PR (Not the actual stuff they are doing, but how it is seen and projected)...

simonh9y ago

>Are you seriously implying that landing a rocket is an unprecedented step in that direction? >Do you think something like this would have been impossible if people had set their minds to do it, in the 60.

It would have been impossible. They just didnt have the materials science to build lightweight engines, fuel tanks, landing legs and such. The computers needed to control the rocket would have been the size of a large building and have to be on the rocket to be responsive enough. Remote control wouldn't have been an option. Also GPS didn't exist and no contemporary positioning technology light enough was up to the precision required.

The 90s is another matter. The DC-X was pretty much a direct ancestor of the SpaceX and Blue Origin plans. Still, it would have required a manual or remote control landing, which would be horribly inefficient compared to an entirely computer controlled 'suicide burn' landing. Even so there's a world of difference between being able to do something and actually doing it.

fsloth9y ago

I don't know if they could have reduced costs as agressively in the 60's. The market was then smaller and making things more expensive (as the world population was smaller and productivity was lower than today). I don't know if this matters though. I'm sure soviet russia could have manufactured space tourist busses in stead of all the nukes and launchers they did as they played by a bit different economic rules. That would have been awesome. Instead we got just an opportunity for thousand megadeaths.

TrevorJ9y ago

Yes it is. The rocket costs 15 million. The Fuel is 200 thousand. Getting the rocket back is a huge potential realization in cost efficiency.

stcredzero9y ago

With unlimited money almost any engineering problem can be solved.

A lot of them can be solved. Knowing which ones can be solved economically is the whole point of Elon Musk's First Principles approach.

(I should apply first principles to games and simulations.)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse