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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

The "50s tech" was not based around easily reusable systems. It was all based on explosive bolts, solid fueled ullage motors etc.

On top of that the fuel was much easier to work with and did not involve needing to be able to handle pressurization and sloshing during flips.

It's 50's tech only in the same way that a Ryzen CPU is 70's tech.

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Just for a minute, then, let's think like engineers and not Starman Jones. Granted it was a test flight: so what were the objectives of the flight, how man y of them did it achieve, and how many were not? Get beyond calling it a success or failure and talk about what worked and what didn't.

> the fuel was much easier to work with

This is a technical detail where I hard disagree. The oxidizer was liquid oxygen, so that's the same. The fuels were either RP-1 or hydrogen. Methane is somewhere in between those two in difficulty. kept at -180 °C, compared to -253 °C for hydrogen, and LOX is LOX. In the Saturn V, sloshing of the RP-1 led to the Pogo Effect, but that was solved[1]. Granted it didn't involve the maneuvers of the Starship first stage, but in some ways it was worse, because it happened during full thrust at the end of the boost stage, not after separation. You can read a lot more about NASA's experience with pogo at [2], but it's worth noting that it continued to crop up as late as Apollo 13, when the 2nd stage center engine shut down early as a result.

Yes, SpaceX is doing some things new, but the engineering experience is definitely something from the 50s and 60s.

1. https://www.nasa.gov/history/50-years-ago-solving-the-pogo-e...

In terms of objectives, the stated primary objective was to get through staging without blowing up. That was a success. The secondary objective was getting to reentry for the Ship - testing the heat shield, which was a failure.

> the stated primary objective was to get through staging without blowing up.

So I was more or less correct at the top of the thread when I said, "if the launch works through staging, SpaceX fans would declare it a success", and I consider that a low bar.

I think you might build a rocket that was less prone to blowing up, but it might not be as efficient.

You might also not be able to build it with a room full of idealistic youths running on inspiration.

I guess if you're a Longtermist, killing a 100 people on a flight to Mars is nothing if you save the human race.

They don’t have people on the rocket now right? It’s just a bunch of money being vaporized.

There were no crew on the first two Saturn V flights, yet the engineers considered it worthwhile to build them with sufficient care that they didn't vaporize anything except fuel and oxidizer.

In the span of ~50 years, we've gone from "sending men to the Moon" to "barely sending an empty rocket to the orbit".

Isn't science great?

I'm confused by your stance here, because it's like you aren't aware that the Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX has launched 80 times this year so far, and 60 times last year, and those are all commercial launches with payloads.

Thats hardly what I would barely sending an empty rocket to orbit. Just because some new version is being tested using different technologies and methodologies of building and isn't fully functional doesn't indicate that we can't or don't regularly exceed what you say we're barely accomplishing as a people.

Yeah, I guess you're right. This is a thread about SpaceX, and I'm just hijacking it for my selfish reasons.

SpaceX is cool, I really hope they get to the Moon one day.

Let's pretend NASA is a carmaker company.

It successfully builds Golf 2, one of the most versatile cars ever made. That car can do everything and go anywhere.

Now, say that NASA wanted to upgrade that car after 50+ years. And now, that car can't even go 50 miles before requiring a refill.

Are we supposed to believe how the new car is better? Are we even supposed to believe that Golf 2 worked as well as NASA said it did?

Hell no.

Your analogy with carmaker companies doesn't communicate the illogic you believe it does as there are several instances where car companies produced inferior followups to successful models. Furthermore, the self-same manufacturers largely did improve their vehicles to high levels of reliability and performance.

I see you're back to peddling your moon landing denial as you come up with increasingly unfitting analogies while ignoring basic evidence for why such a conspiracy makes no sense.

I sometimes wonder if NASA has a dedicated team paid just to "debunk" people who claim that Moon landing is faked.

Nearly every comment I leave about it gets a (rather poorly constructed) reply.

EDIT:

After leaving a recent reply and getting negative karma on several other unrelated comments in like 5 minutes, I can confirm with high probability that my assertion above is correct. Thank you NASA!

Parroting how "conspiracy makes no sense" is dellusional at best: https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-1/

Just explain to me how the USA managed to fund two large foreign wars and a bunch of expensive Moon landing missions at the same time, but now it's too expensive? You can't.

Again, the "conspiracy makes no sense" argument is that the Soviet Union had the complete technological means to verify the landing (after all, they did not need to send people there to verify it). They had full incentive to show any convincing evidence that it was a lie. Yet, they never did. They never even wrote anything down, else we all know current Russia would be doing its best to publicize it.

There were hundreds of thousands of people involved in the Apollo program. Yet, once again, not one person has actual physical evidence of any conspiracy to fake the landing.

The fact that the country which literally had thousands of nukes pointed at the US (and vice versa), and has never shied away from propaganda, did not and has not credibly denied the Moon landing, is the standard you need to beat. Not piss poor analogies and comparisons like the ones you keep giving.

> I sometimes wonder if NASA has a dedicated team paid just to "debunk" people who claim that Moon landing is faked.

> After leaving a recent reply and getting negative karma on several other unrelated comments in like 5 minutes, I can confirm with high probability that my assertion above is correct. Thank you NASA!

News at 11, person takes society's consistent interpretation of their crackpot conspiracy theories as ridiculius as further evidence of a conspiracy.

> Just explain to me how the USA managed to fund two large foreign wars and a bunch of expensive Moon landing missions at the same time, but now it's too expensive? You can't.

Sure I can. It's not too expensive as in "can't", it's too expensive as in "won't" because most the public doesn't care about it and it's not deemed a national security issues (which the space race was) which would cause the govt to push it anyways and also try to convince people with a concerted effort that it matters.

To me it feels like you don't understand how the social dynamics of representative governance works, but it's really fairly sinoke. Things people want are easy to fund or do, and things they don't are hard, but the government has various levers it can press to change that to larger or smaller degrees over time.

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