Wow no stranger has ever said that to me before and I really liked it, thank you! /desperate acknowledgment
I don’t write, no social media either. Just staying in my place, a lurky digital hermit since the 90’s
It made me very happy, for some reason, that people are systematically and thoroughly studying a subject as obscure as this (fluid dynamics of peeing in insects). I now question if research is happening on every single ridiculous notion that crosses my mind. I bet a bunch of people are actually interested enough in that computation that a field of study exists for it, that I know nothing of, and couldn't find out about if I tried. What all of actual fuck are people looking into?!
Reminds me of the first time a bought a mattress. The guy was 60 years old and had been doing it his entire life. I was blown away at the depth of knowledge one could have on mattresses and mattress technology.
Ive posted it before, but i once learned way more than i ever wanted to know about time, specifically time regarding computers, all to answer a question from the business side of "well why cant we have nanosecond time matching across 10+ systems", and the reason is, because its really really hard and really expensive. This wasnt for science either, it was for VR, making the request even more ridiculous, and putting me in an even deeper hole, finding out the minimum response time of the human brain and eyes. I could talk a lot about it, but most peoples eyes glaze over about 30 seconds in
More like: we've used technology to create such a mess that humans can't un-mess it. So... let's use AI to sort it out.
Doesn't make sense. If things get out of hand: stop making things worse, reflect & perhaps take a step back. Back to a state where things were manageable.
If eg. there's too many apps, then the fix is to organize them better. Or provide user-settable filters. Not throw in profit-focussed, shady opaque algorithms (or AI) to present user with what user is 'supposed' to like.
- Stated reasons for doing things are clearly not the real reasons.
- Providing honest negative feedback seems to be the the key to success.
- Artemis engineers might fear talking honestly.
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Personal comment: The timeline was fubar from the beginning. Remember when VP Mike Pence made a surprise announcement that NASA goes to the Moon 2024 surprising NASA director. Then NASA committed to it and scrambled to adjust everything.
I wonder if he mentioned the reason for Apollo: a muscle-flexing exercise to show the Soviet Union (and the rest of the world) who the boss is. Once the point was made, there was no need for further Moon or outer space exploration, and predictably the program ended.
We don't have that rationale now. Various presidents come with different ideas for space exploration, but the fundamental need is just not there, and without that, the budget and the focus is not there.
The only way for us to get back to the Moon is if we can do it on the cheap. So cheap that it doesn't cost a lot of political capital to do it. And for for that SpaceX seems like the best bet. Maybe not in 2 years, but at some point.
In the time that it took you to ask several people for the TL;DR, you could've watched the video.
I guess I summarize things different than others, but at the 32:00 minute mark, he talks about what he was actually scared about:
NASA is essentially, a business (my addition) -- that does not know how to communicate. The left hand very much does not know what the right hand is doing. He brings up a fantastic example of how many rockets are required for a particular phase of a mission and showed how multiple people gave different answers without even realizing their launch date is set in stone.
> He brings up a fantastic example of how many rockets are required for a particular phase of a mission and showed how multiple people gave different answers without even realizing their launch date is set in stone.
Careful here - multiple Starship refueling launches shown in the video (I've counted 24 tanker launches) are not set in stone and might be not that important for the mission itself, it's just an example of a valid question with added concern that we've yet to have this uncertainty resolved. It may look like an Exhibit A of mismanagement, but could be a very different thing.
I think the most important think he's saying is that NASA is not enough focused on the success of moving forward.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE someone post a TLDR. The dude is pleasant to listen to, but he goes ON and ON and ON about his life story and what not. Please just give us the bullet points.
He’s basically saying the complexity of current Artemis mission design is indicative of lack of communication, mainly due to politics. He points out some of the obvious problems that isn’t being discussed openly (e.g., large number of untested refueling procedure which needs to be done to get one vehicle to the moon). He is trying to persuade the audience to challenge the current way of doing things, and look to the past successful Apollo programs to see why they were so successful.
I did skip some life story part when watching the video - but the talk was not bad at all. You can use the FF button and use 1.25x speed if that helps. I think it was worth my time.
And to communicate truthfully about why things are being done in the way's they're done.
The in-orbit refueling with lots of Starship/SuperHeavy launches is to increase the payload capacity. That's partly needed due to limits imposed by the Gateway architecture (which are largely due to limits of the Orion capsule). But it's also, and IMO more importantly, due to the fact that a manned mission to Mars (which Artemis is supposed to develop technology for) will certainly need in-orbit refueling.
It's a more complex design than Apollo. Some of that is justified due to engineering goals of the eventual manned Mars mission, even though it is detrimental to the moon mission. Some is justified due to political expediency.
The public statements of the agencies involved have often omitted the real reasons for the decisions, and instead invented justifications expected to be more acceptable. They don't want to say "Orion & SLS are used because it's a jobs program" or "we're spending a lot of money & time now on an in-orbit refueling system a moon mission doesn't need because we got the budget for it and haven't gotten the Mars mission we hope to use it on funded yet".
I'm only about half-way through, but if you skip to 30:50 he makes a big point.
And frankly the lead up to that point was necessary, which necessity is also part of the message he is delivering.
Isn’t this disingenuous? As far as I can tell, Starship can make it to the lunar surface with a significant payload without refueling. The refueling launches are only required if you want to maximize the payload per lunar trip.
- delta-V for LEO-to-the-Moon flight - 3100 m/s
- delta-V to get to low Moon orbit (a-la Apollo) - 1000 m/s
- delta-V to land on the Moon from low orbit - 1700 m/s
- extra delta-V during landing like with Apollo LEM for
emergencies - 700 m/s
- delta-V to get back to the Moon orbit - 1700 m/s
- extra delta-V during lift-off like with Apollo - 500 m/s
Total - 3100 + 1000 + 1700 + 700 + 1700 + 500 = 8700 m/s, that's a pretty large delta-V, almost like an Earth SSTO.
Raptor Isp - 3500 m/s, fueled mass - 1320 tons, empty mass - 120 tons, mass ratio - 1320 / 120 = 11. Tsiolkovsky formula:
exp(8700 / 3500) = m_fueled / m_empty = 12
that is, we need Starship HLS to be somewhat lighter to get to the Moon surface and back to low Moon orbit from LEO than the current numbers for Starship, and that is without any payload.
It's definitely not the final numbers, so the results will change, but
> Starship can make it to the lunar surface with a significant payload without refueling
is questionable at the moment.
If you mean cargo flights with no return to the Moon orbit - rather than crewed flights as agreed with NASA today for Starship HLS - then of course the numbers are better.
The Artemis mission involves landing astronauts on the Moon and bringing them back to Earth. Not landing an empty Starship on the Moon. Maximizing the payload is really important when need to carry humans, and launch a whole large spacecraft off the Moon.
He is pointing out issues with communication and people not knowing a lot of the required information. Kind of like people only want TLDR instead of actually understanding the point of the information.
I think it is important to remember that you are catching a person on their journey of acquiring and internalizing information. The reservoir of available information is almost limitless - so no one is going to come close to knowing it all. No point in testing for that. We all navigate the world on different trajectories through this network of information - so your milestones may not be the same as theirs. No point in confirming that theirs are the same as yours.
What you want to look for is their ability to process information, ability to internalize it, and their ability to bring it to bear in solving the problems they will be confronted with. You may have to do this with markers that don't necessarily match your own.
The richness of the network of information they have acquired so far is a marker. The nuances of the insights into that information they have acquired is a marker. The organization of this information into readily usable tools is a marker. These are what you should be looking for, rather than some preconceived ideas of what the markers need to be.
There are way way way more of them, so if you randomly select from the set of all possible configurations, you are much more likely to get something spread out and chaotic then something with a recognizable structure. As atoms and molecules bounce around, they are effectively randomizing. After a few dozen interactions each, they're basically in a new state. Repeat over and over and you're basically just drawing from that same set again. There's a chance that all of the air molecules could bounce to one side of the room at once, but the likely hood of that makes it something you won't see in the lifetime of the universe. So if you see a video where all the air rushes from half the room to fill the rest, you can be effectively certain you're watching the video forward and not in reverse.
From other replies to your question I understand that you use "chaotic" in the mathematical sense while other commenters use it in the colloquial ("random") sense.
12345 is less plentiful then 32415 or 32154 or .... What we considered "ordered" has less possibilities then "unordered" not just in a string of 5 numbers but for most systems. That should help you get the intuition. Lmk if you need more elaboration.
