It seems to me that if SLS goes… so does Gateway. That said, one thing to note: There are not that many stable lunar orbits. Unlike the earth, the moon is very lumpy. It is the reason why most lunar orbiters end up doing a planned crash as their end of (relatively) short life. From that standpoint, orbits that are a bit further out are much more appealing to have relatively low delta v requirements.
All that said, once Starship is regularly in use for lunar delivery… I suspect we will have a fundamental new paradigm for space.
Reading this, this line deeply resonated:
“People that out of necessity grow a thick skin with not fitting in and being OK standing out.”
I think this is a pre req to trying to do what a founder is working to do: Change fundamental belief states of the vast majority of people. It is extremely uncomfortable to stake out a position no one else believes in… yet. It requires courage (and thick skin) to get people through the disbelief curve.
Sure, gp misspoke in saying "copyright" but correctly linked to a relevant article about trademarks and was correct in the sentiment that owners of widely used brand names need to be vigilant about their intellectual property.
Question: If this change goes into effect, will it effectively open up banking for all the cannabis related/cannabis adjacent companies? Seems like a really smart move to bring them into the financial system.
This makes medical cannabis possible, but only under the same rules as pharmaceutical drugs. It does not address recreational cannabis at all, and most medical marijuana retailers are also not pharmacies.
In it she covers the latest and greatest robot news, with occasional commentary/perspectives.
However to more directly answer your question, you need to know/talk to someone in the industry at the moment. I am not aware of a single “spot” that gives an honest in depth appraisal of where we are.
From my experience there is a ton of new “hardware” coming out, not just in the humanoid space (Agility Robotics being imho the most “real”), but also in lower cost robot arms, end effectors, sensors, and compute.
Where things are harder to track is where we really are in the software realm. If you look at software driving this hardware, most of it is early stages. Perhaps TRL level 3 to 5 at best. The higher TRL is non-intelligent control software (that is based on decades of work). The newer, AI/Machine Learning/“Smart” software tends to only have limited roll out. At best it will be a startup at the relatively early stages, but more often then not it is still a researcher sitting at a University or a large corporations research lab. In either of those cases, you will see single to at most double digit examples of those systems actually doing work.
However, to your point, it is super easy to create a single (or even a series) of cool videos… it just takes one success in 100s of takes. It is harder to make something that will perform day in and day out and really change the industry/world.
This is something I think about quite a bit:
There are about 8 billion people on this earth. Of the 8 billion, I would argue only 1 in 10 (800 million) have their basic needs met and a decent education. This is the pool of people most of our innovations, business and scientific come from.
Imagine what would happen if we doubled or tripled that number.
How many more companies founded, inventions created, or if you care about art, new creations never imagined.
We really MUST do better, it is in all our best interests.
Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science.
He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose.
It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time.
This was his MO.
Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software…
My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time.
There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.
I don't buy it. Every supposed super genius I ever heard about in the end had a tactic to their work. Even the high iq people have to have an approach to harness the intelligence.
This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done.
FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.
Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.
lol, yes… it is indeed fun to share these stories.
Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:
First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.
The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.
While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.
This is overall a good, and needed thing. While the BE-4 engines from Blue Origin are fantastic, they need the level of system maturity that is represented by ULA. Together, I see a real chance to be competitive with SpaceX long term. Yes, they have work to go before they could do reusable launch, but the combined company probably has the best chance to do so.
The more reusable launch providers the better for the industry and for human kind.
Common Sense Skeptic is a ridiculous person whos literal whole identity is to trash everything related to SpaceX. When you said some commentator' I already knew who it was before I looked it up.
SpaceX could cure cancer and he would make a series of tweets about how its not an accomplishment because not every person with cancer is already cured.
For years now he has always used the worst interpretation possible and declared everything SpaceX hasn't done as impossible, and if they do it it suddendly becomes unimportant and something that others have done already done much better. And every prediction on the future is a worst case prediction.
And then he does the opposite for anything not called SpaceX.
He is also not an actual journalist with deep research or even really educated on the topic. His audiance seems to be mostly the anti-Musk people who dont usually care about space but need to say negative things.
He basically a meme, more like somebody playing character. He took the thunderfoot playbook and in order to make money on Musk hate. And yes, there are lots of only pro-Musk hype people around as well, and they are equally stupid.
They don’t though. They are a good fit for UAL because they are already run by accountants and ex-Boeing managers. Merging 2 failed businesses into one is not a recipe for success.
SpaceX launches keep exploding and to be compliant with Nasa requirements they need to start launching about now (they need a lot of successful launches not too close together)
They proposal also requires dozens of in orbit refils and was rashly awarded in very sketchy circumstances by a NASA executive that now works for spaceX
(NASA was supposed to award 2 contracts for X billion dollars, the new budget has only ~200 million dollars so the executive calls spacex to have them ask a lower price)
Overall my impression is that SpaceX/Musk lives on hype ("Success maybe, Excitement guaranteed" cit Musk) While Blue Origin is trying to build something solid slowly (having infinite money helps...)
I do not mean this as a criticism of Musk (the original video is quite scathing). For a good representation of my personal opinion of Musk I would point to the Slate Star Codex review of his biography https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
> was rashly awarded in very sketchy circumstances by a NASA executive that now works for spaceX
Except that it wasn't. That's just one of the CSS things that only he actually believes.
> so the executive calls spacex to have them ask a lower price
Except that not actually true.
In fact, a NASA official just recently got fired for this. If anybody had real evidence that this happened, the person responsible for selection would have been fired.
> Overall my impression is that SpaceX/Musk lives on hype
They just launched their 300 rocket and landed over 274 of them. They have many times tested the most advanced engine in the world. They supply cargo and crew transport to ISS. The are the largest rocket and sat operator in the world. This is the literal opposite of 'just hype'. SpaceX has actual revenue, something that actually makes sustainable over time.
BlueOrigin, the company CSS loves to hype because they are not SpaceX are literally just a vanity project. They have no done much yet and the re-usability of their rocket is 'hype'.
It really takes the mastermind delusional CSS to pretend the opposite is true.
Are they? Outside of being staged combustion they aren't that impressive. Their chamber-pressure is still really low. The TWR isn't that great. For a staged engine they are entry level.
Their re-usability is theoretical at this point. The early engines the delivered to ULA are not the reusable version that will later go on New Glenn.
> I see a real chance to be competitive with SpaceX long term.
'competitive' as in actually peer competition, not really.
But I guess they can 'compete' by 'Jeff Bezos is gone finance the company for many 100s of million of $ every month' for the next decade.
Many engines that are not reusable can be started multiple times. Actually having the certification that you can relaunch with the engine after you have done a reentry and landing is required.
Surprised they didn’t include the blue cube… Defense and Defense applications (including NASA) were some of the key funders for much of the “silicon” in Silicon Valley…
The Blue Cube, the USAF Satellite Control Facility, was not that advanced. They were using much the same technology as the Apollo control center, well into the 1980s. A modernization program, involving a midrange IBM mainframe, had been a flop, so they were stuck with two decade old technology. Like NASA, it was hugely labor-intensive. They were proud that they'd never lost a satellite through an error.
The Blue Cube "drove the bus", that is, they controlled satellite position and orientation. This was done with a low-bandwidth link, omnidirectional antennas on the satellite, and huge steerable dishes on the ground at eight locations around the world. Two of those dishes were outside the Blue Cube. Once a satellite was stable and its directional antenna pointed properly, more bandwidth was available. The payload organization then talked to the payload, which was usually a camera or a radio of some form, over their own links. Very USAF - there are pilots, who drive, and there is cargo, which is along for the ride.
Talking to a satellite as it passed over one of the eight ground stations involved connecting up three computers, one of which was emulating a vacuum tube machine. Connecting meant patch cords, not Ethernet.
We at the aerospace company that built the place had one of the first color Sun workstations. Two monitors, low-rez color and high rez monochrome. When it came in, somebody ported over an orbital mechanics program and loaded up the 3-line element sets for the USAF satellites, to display a wireframe globe showing where they all were relative to the ground stations. A visiting USAF general saw this, and demanded that it immediately be shipped to the Blue Cube, where they were doing that job by hand, plotting lines on maps from coordinates on printouts. This was done.
Eventually the whole operation moved to Falcon Air Force Base in Colorado, with different technology. I was out of it by then.
I was a hick from Kansas when I showed up for my job at Apple back in 1995. So it was a local engineer that pointed out the blue cube to me, told me it was where all the secret satellite downlinks came in.
In Graduate school I fasted for a week. It was deliberate as a cleansing activity for myself. Before this I had never really did any extensive fasting.
To directly answer your question, I didn’t talk to a doctor ahead of time, but I did make sure to drink lots of water during that period.
I remember the hardest day was day 2. For the first day, you “feel” hungry as your body is accustomed to eating, but it is day 2 you are genuinely hungry. However, per the article, after about the third day you simply don’t notice yourself being as hungry anymore.
I noticed then (and notice now when I fast) positive effects on mood, and ironically energy.
The only drawback I have noticed is that the first meal after a fast, especially if a large carbohydrate based one, seems to have outsized effects on drowsiness.
All that said, once Starship is regularly in use for lunar delivery… I suspect we will have a fundamental new paradigm for space.