Business, History, Space, Technology and Society

IFT-5 Takes

14 Comments

14 thoughts on “IFT-5 Takes”

  1. Elon Musk and Space-X launched a skyscraper, brought it back and then parallel parked it.

    Meanwhile, NASA i
    NASA grant (2022)
    Amount: $50,227
    Recipient: University Of North Carolina At Charlotte
    Purpose: Exploring synergistic opportunities between Charlotte-area environmental justice initiatives and NASA earth science informAation

    nd California built 50 feet of train track, for $150-billion over 25 years

  2. I’m not sure it is the golden spike moment yet, but both lines are now inside the Utah border. The first time a booster launches twice in what? A week, two days, same day? That will be the remembered milestone. This is just one more milestone, but one that does make NASA manned launch system obsolete.

    I do agree that it is as momentous to as the transcontinental railway in opening the frontier for all who want to go into it.

    1. What will be interesting is when the first vertical landing from orbit takes place. Supposedly next year.

  3. But for the regulatory climate, there’s nothing to stop hardware-rich SpaceX from popping an obsolete Starship on top of the recovered booster and seeing if it’ll fly. Maybe one day Musk’s birthday will be a Solar System wide holiday, celebrated by fireworks in front of his visage carved into the base scarp of Olympus Mons. Oh, who am I kidding…?

    1. All that, and more.

      Musk is the Hank Reardon, the Delos David Harriman, perhaps the John Galt of our time.

  4. This really is an inflection point for NASA. They need to rethink the entire process from design to production. They must now become the preeminent builders of space hardware. Of equipment needed for space, or they will lose the majority of their budget, and be relegated to the ranks of a purchasing department. Their present manufacturers will need to quickly pivot to building inovative, useful, needed, space hardware or the whole cart will tip over.

    1. Yes, with the launch bottleneck eliminated, what we do in space is more important than how we get there

  5. Lots of sharp comments, but I just had to fact-check the jab about DocuSign; the web seems to agree that DocuSign had maybe 7000 employees at its peak while SpaceX has 13 or 14 thousand.

    (Why DocuSign needs even 7000 I have no clue.)

    1. SpaceX does a lot of things. They’re still building and launching Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets (about 99 so far this year). They’re building, launching, and operating thousands of Starlink satellites and making tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Starlink terminals. They’re also working on a less well known StarShield program for the DoD. They’re flying multiple Dragon crew and cargo missions each year.

      And then there’s Starship. I don’t know how many SpaceX employees are working on Starship, including the Raptor engines, but it’s almost certainly less than the number of DocuSign employees. Could it be less than 75% of DocuSign’s reported 7,000 employees (5,250). Why yes, it could well be.

      1. Maybe so, but with further developments DocuSign will enable the FAA to get a launch approval document from one desk to another desk in the same office in mere seconds instead of months.

  6. The we don’t build great things isn’t a knock on our technological achievements. It is a criticism of the lack of beauty in society.

    This is why Musk has Tesla build what he considers to be cool looking cars.

    Hopefully we we get out into the solar system, we don’t live as depressed and repressed pod people because a certain set of our population doesn’t understand why aesthetics are important to the soul of humanity

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