If only that philosophy existed today.
NASA landed on the moon with 1960’s technology, not because it was easy in the 60’s, but because every single aspect of the mission was planned, tested, rehearsed, and made as simple as possible where it couldn’t have a redundancy. The only time something went really wrong was when a faulty tank exploded on Apollo 13, but due to having an entirely separate craft in the form of the lander attached, the astronauts were able to ride out the failure all the way around the moon and back to earth. Oh yeah, even the orbit they picked would let the whole spacecraft fly around the moon and come back to earth without having to do any engine burns.
Look at planned missions today. Launch the Human Landing system. Have it sit in space for an unknown amount of time while anywhere from 6 to 12 refueling rockets are launched to refuel the lander. Relight lander engines in earth orbit, go to moon, relight engines again to orbit the moon. Launch the Orion spacecraft with crew on board, this also must burns its engines once at the moon to enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous and dock with the HLS, transfer crew and supplies over. Undock Orion, relight HLS engines for a 4th time to deorbit and land HLS. Use an elevator to get from HLS to the lunar surface for the next week or so. Board the HLS, which needed at least 6 refueling tankers full of cryogenic fuel to get to the moon and has now been sitting on the 200 degree lunar surface for a week, and light the engines a 5th time to take off and enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous with Orion, and return home. NASA has demonstrated that Orion can do the mission. But HLS has not even shown the technical capability of doing this. Its engines have never been relit in space, it has never sat in space for a week to see what happens to the engines. The entire interior isn’t even built yet and NASA is just using a 9 meter steel circle to train astronauts on the airlock section because no one knows what it will look like.
This mission couldn’t be more complicated if you tried. Apollo needed a total of 1 engine relight on the transfer stage, and 2 engine relights on the command module: one to enter lunar orbit, and one to leave and return to earth. The lander used pressure fed engines that only needed to work once each. One engine got them from orbit to the surface, one got them from the surface to orbit. If the Ascent engine didn’t work, NASA had plans for everything from literally jump starting it with the descent module’s batteries like it’s a dead car, to having an astronaut use bolt cutters to cut the safety pins on the engine so the valves can be manually opened.
If your car doesn’t start in the morning, you might call off work and get it towed to a mechanic. What do you do when you’re trying to leave the moon, and your rocket engines won’t light because they’ve been sitting in space for almost 2 weeks? The nearest rocket engineer is 240,000 miles away back on earth, and so are all the spare parts. And what do you do if only some of those engines light, and the others either don’t or explode while you’re on a suborbital trajectory. Complexity kills on harsh environments. Space is one of the harshest environment we’ve ever been in, so things need to be as simple as possible and known to work.
The fact that this was your take away is concerning.
No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.
Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.
30 isn’t so bad as long as it’s not really humid out.
Not enough people whipped it out.
We’re forever doomed until the mass flashing event that frees of us our sins.
So now instead of getting plaque, I’ll just get tipsy on my saliva? And no one told me?
You want to know a better system?
What if each person had some kind of physical passkey that linked them to their money, and they used that to pay for food?
We could even have a bunch of security put around this passkey that makes it’s really easy to disable it if it gets lost or stolen.
As for shoplifting, what if we had some kind of societal system that levied punishments against people by providing a place where the victim and accused can show evidence for and against the infraction, and an impartial pool of people decides if they need to be punished or not.
DeltaV is the amount you can change your velocity in space.
To put it another way, if a semi truck company says it’s new truck can haul 20 tons of cargo 500 miles on one tank/charge, and then during the press release with an empty trailer, it has to pull to side of the road at 400 miles driven because it’s out of gas, do you think it can get to 500 miles when it has 20 tons in the back? And the previous 2 press releases had the vehicle spontaneously detonate just after leaving the driveway.
That’s what starship did, it ran out of gas at almost the finish line while completely empty. There’s no way it can get itself + 100 tons to orbit if it can’t even get itself to orbit.
No, that’s a card that’s been standard in Google searches for years. It basically copy pastes an excerpt from an article written by someone else.
The AI card is an entirely new feature that is being rolled out where an LLM attempts to fill the same roll without deliberately copying a third party source.
While completely empty.
An empty vehicle does not have the same performance as one with cargo.
Ignoring this point make you seem either uneducated on space flight or just someone blinded by the tech bro philosophy of “trust me bro it’ll work next time”
It is a significant difference. When it comes to orbit, there is no close enough, either you’re going fast enough or you’re not. They have not shown this thing can do what they say it can.
IFT-3 was completely empty and the tanks were full. Where is the weight of the crew decks, the solar panels and batteries, life support equipment, docking mechanism, food, water, and cargo? These are not trivial things, and they weigh a lot. Proving an empty shell can achieve a suborbital flight and be just barely not be in orbit is not proof of anything useful.
If they had shown there was a significant amount of delta-v left with this empty test article, then that’s one thing. But those tanks had a whisper of fuel left in them. I don’t believe for a second that it would have gotten that close when it was full of over a hundred tons of additional equipment.
Making it to space and making it to orbit are 2 different things.
It has not made orbit.
It has done a suborbital flight.
The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.
Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven.
Getting something that big off the ground is impressive, but we did it 50 years ago with slide rules and pencils. Getting something off the ground should not be a success for a company that already has an orbital rocket in frequent use. Having 3 vehicles fail to achieve orbit, fail to demonstrate critical features like fuel transfer and engine relight, and fail to re enter the atmosphere while under control, is not a success. I do not buy the SpaceX corporate spin that “everything after clearing the pad is icing on the cake” that’s not good enough for a critical piece of hardware that is supposed to take humans to the moon and land them there.
If ULA can develop a rocket that completes its mission on the first launch, and NASA can do the same, because they take the time to check everything, then why are we giving SpaceX the pass to move fast and break things when it’s clearly not working. They do not have a heavy lift orbital rocket. They have a rocket that can, from all evidence, achieve a suborbital flight while completely empty.
And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing. And now the Government Accountability Office has not even been shown that the Raptor engine is even capable of achieving the mission goals for Artemis. And their test articles are behind schedule and routinely failing in catastrophic ways.
I want to see humans back on the moon in my lifetime. I think we need to go and set up a colony so that we can explore our solar system better and develop technologies for sustaining humanity both off of earth and in the harsh conditions we will face as our climate changes. Anything that threatens the mission of establishing a human presence off of earth needs to be looked at closely and realistically.
Back in the 60’s we knew that the only way to get humans to the moon was to keep the equipment reliable and redundant, anything else was asking for people to die. We seem to have lost that simple insight in recent years, and Starship is the epitome of that hubris. A ridiculously complicated vehicle with a complicated flight plan that has not been shown to work in any capacity. That needs to be pointed out and investigated if for no other reason then it is delaying a major mission.
I didn’t bring up Chinese rooms because it doesn’t matter.
We know how chatGPT works on the inside. It’s not a Chinese room. Attributing intent or understanding is anthropomorphizing a machine.
You can make a basic robot that turns on its wheels when a light sensor detects a certain amount of light. The robot will look like it flees when you shine a light at it. But it does not have any capacity to know what light is or why it should flee light. It will have behavior nearly identical to a cockroach, but have no reason for acting like a cockroach.
A cockroach can adapt its behavior based on its environment, the hypothetical robot can not.
ChatGPT is much like this robot, it has no capacity to adapt in real time or learn.
But he wasn’t just a passenger like someone going on vacation. That person would have very little power to do anything about a pilot being possibly high or drunk.
Baldwin was more like the copilot to the drunk captain. He had plenty of power to say something was wrong, and had the responsibility to double check.
If your plane crashed because Captain Morgan the drunk ace missed a safety check, and you and the copilot survived, you would just shrug and say “well we all rely on professionals and this one just slipped through the cracks” you don’t think the copilot has any responsibility for not saying anything or at least double checking the pilot and speaking up if something didn’t look right?
We can trust dangerous things because there’s many people out there that do have jobs that involve double checking other people’s work. A commercial pilot has a copilot who shares the work, monitors instruments, and makes sure the checklists get followed properly. Doctors have nurses that help asses the patient for everything from symptoms to verifying if it’s the right or left leg that’s getting cut off today. Chefs have city health inspectors whose whole job is to come in and make sure the kitchen is clean and they aren’t serving rat shit in with the chili.
So when your job involves guns: famous for being rapidly deadly things, shouldn’t it fall on somebody to at least take a peak and make sure everything looks in order? And just like the pilot and copilot have to make sure the plane is in working order because it’s their responsibility, the actor who is going to be holding the gun should check it and speak up because the gun is their responsibility.
You’re the one who made this philosophical.
I don’t need to know the details of engine timing, displacement, and mechanical linkages to look at a Honda civic and say “that’s a car, people use them to get from one place to another. They can be expensive to maintain and fuel, but in my country are basically required due to poor urban planning and no public transportation”
ChatGPT doesn’t know any of that about the car. All it “knows” is that when humans talked about cars, they brought up things like wheels, motors or engines, and transporting people. So when it generates its reply, those words are picked because they strongly associate with the word car in its training data.
All ChatGPT is, is really fancy predictive text. You feed it an input and it generates an output that will sound like something a human would write based on the prompt. It has no awareness of the topics it’s talking about. It has no capacity to think or ponder the questions you ask it. It’s a fancy lightbulb, instead of light, it outputs words. You flick the switch, words come out, you walk away, and it just sits there waiting for the next person to flick the switch.
Counter point: one of my friends is a retired PJ. He was a professional soldier who was involved in armed conflict for years. He knows his way around weapons and absolutely does not fuck around.
We go hunting together, and he owns a lot of very nice guns. Even if he hands me a gun and tells me it’s clear, I still check it. I check it because it’s my responsibility to make sure I know what I’m doing when I’m holding the power of life and death in my hands. I check it if we’re just hanging out at his house, or if we’re zeroing in rifles. I’ve never found one of his guns to be loaded when he didn’t intend it to be, but I have found live rounds in other people’s “safe” guns.
Even if an “expert” on firearms tells you a gun is safe, it’s still a gun that’s in your hands. If it goes off, it’s on you if it kills someone. If you can’t be bothered to take the 30 minutes needed to learn how to check any firearm made in past 200 years, then you have no business touching any gun anywhere. That goes double if your job involves handling firearms in any capacity. If you regularly come into contact with guns, wether you’re a soldier, or cop, or an actor who does action movies, it’s your responsibility to know how guns work and when they’re safe and when they’re not.
Everyone keeps bringing up Brandon Lee when this shooting comes up. But these are grossly different situations. With Brandon, the gun was loaded with blanks, and the blank pushed a bullet that was stuck in the barrel of the gun out. Even if the actor had done a basic check to ensure the gun was only loaded with blanks, it’s entirely reasonable that he did not look down the barrel to make sure it wasn’t blocked. That I would agree falls on the armorer, they were using blanks on set, the Armorer should have made sure the gun was safe to operate with them. With Hutchins on the set of Rust, it would have been obvious that those were real bullets if he had looked at them. Prop bullets for revolvers or other shots where you see whole rounds are supposed to have the back of the bullet drilled out and/or a rattle installed in the shell so they can be identified as inert. A 5 second check would have identified the bullets were real and something was wrong.
He was handed a gun, didn’t check it, and shot a woman.
To put it another way: I use fall arrest harnesses for my job pretty frequently. My employer has a safety guy who maintains our equipment and is ultimately responsible for it. Do some of my coworkers take his word for it when he okays our harnesses, yes. Do I? fuck no. I always inspect my harness and report if something looks frayed or worn down. It’s my ass that works near the edge of a 100 foot drop, not Mr safety. Just because it’s someone’s job to do something doesn’t mean they’ll do it 100% perfect all the time, and when something involves a decent chance of death or terrible injury, it needs to be a 100% on job performance. So don’t rely on one person to be on the ball all the time. If something is deadly, it’s worth looking at twice or even three times to make sure it’s really safe.
Yes with a manslaughter charge.
Employers cut corners all the time to increase production or profit. They should be held accountable if their decision directly leads to someone’s death.
He had a hand in choosing the armorer. His employees were using the firearms on set for recreational shooting with live ammo. We don’t know if he knew that, but if he did then he’s responsible for not firing the armorer for a gross breach of safety. He was at least partially responsible for that and should face consequences for it.
And anyone who touches a gun should not just believe what someone says about it. That’s literally rule 1 of guns: they’re all loaded until proven otherwise by the person holding it. There’s many people whose friend handed them a gun to look at and promised it’s unloaded, only to ventilate said friend or an innocent bystander. Whoever has a gun is responsible for that gun, it’s a big responsibility but not a hard one. Guns are not mystical objects, it takes like half an hour to learn how basically every firearm made in the past 150 years works, and how to check if all of them are safe. You’re not flying a plane when you have a revolver in your hand. He was handed a gun, told it was safe, did nothing to verify that, and shot a woman because of it. If it happened to me and I killed my friend or wife, I’d already be in jail. But because it happened on a movie set, it’s suddenly a big question about who was responsible.
I have friends who own a lot of guns. I’ve held a lot of other people’s guns. As soon as it’s in your hands, it’s your responsibility. Doesn’t matter if we just got back from the FFL and it’s fresh out of the box. Doesn’t matter if there’s no bullets of that caliber anywhere on the property. Doesn’t fucking matter if someone you consider to be an expert hands you a weapon and tells you it’s clear. When a gun touches your hand, you are responsible for it and everything it can do. You take the 3 seconds it takes to clear it yourself and ask any questions that come up. If he had just looked at the gun and asked “why are their bullets in here” and “why don’t the bullets look like they’re props” then Halyna Hutchins would still be alive.
If you start having severe chest pain, simply drive as quickly as possible to the nearest business you have issue with, stumble in and say “you did this” before collapsing dramatically.