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SpaceX Astronauts Begin Spacewalk, Putting New Spacesuits to Test

https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-launch-polaris-dawn-space-walk-bfed7f84
The interesting thing for me is how this mission underscore the difference between SpaceX and other space companies. SpaceX have become an entire commercial space agency, able to supply everything from the rockets and capsules, to the ground operations and even the space suites and to do that in a complete package.

If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. That is a pretty big deal.

That's because SpaceX is run with the goal of building actual space transit capabilities, not milking the taxpayer and distributing pork to as many politically influential districts as possible.

Until SpaceX and post-Apollo most of the space program was really a pork distribution system and a way to keep certain high-skill labor areas 'hot' in case we need them again. It wasn't a serious effort to learn about the universe or build a real presence in space. Some of that did happen but it happened almost as a side effect.

Edit:

Honestly I think SpaceX is just a decent aerospace company. They've appeared superhuman by contrast with companies like Boeing that have done nothing to innovate in the sector since the 1970s. When the comparison is with people completely asleep at the wheel, mere competence looks striking.

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> If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen.

To whoever wants to be the first one to drop acid in space, the doors are open

When you throw open Huxley's doors of perception you get an extraordinary experience in the most quotidian of conditions. Like watching a river run by or just watching the washing machine run. Non psychonauts have to do extraordinary things, like become astronauts, to get to a similar level of awe-struck. A trip on a trip is a tragic waste of a trip.
Agreed. Also the hardware glitching while observing it mostly reveals truths about the hardware, very little and indirectly about the world it resides in.
When you're uber-rich I guess you want something no commoner can do.
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One might suspect the CEO has dibs on this one.
> the first one to drop acid in space

Seems unlikely we'll ever definitely now, but I suspect that whomever does it next won't be the first (or second, or third).

Esp. on longer ISS trips. I can't believe this hasn't already been a sanctioned experiment.
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They also tested SpaceX's laser links, which are critical for Star Wars / Brilliant Pebbles goals,

https://www.reddit.com/r/KamalaHarris/comments/1eunob4/elon_...

I think a large part of it is because of Elon Musk's obsession about controlling (if not owning) as much of stack as possible. That mentality goes into even the things you do not own, but lease.

In the Isaacson biography there's a theme across his ventures, sparked by early misfortune, about being in control of things end-to-end because then you have more flexibility to optimize, make more leaps that can come from orchestrating creative adn bespoke integration options.

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Except for the whole launch facilities thing they lease from the government.
It’s clear they’d be fine without that; they could probably have Texas ready for manned launches fairly quick.

More likely they lease launch facilities from the government to minimize regulatory interference from… the government.

Given the incredibly hostile regulatory environment they've faced in Texas trying to operate their own private launch site, I think there are very clear benefits in using an established public facility that isn't under threat by constant attempts (often in outright bad faith) to curtail its activity or even get it shut down. It's not a question of money or capability.
>private launch site

But you know it ISN'T private, because every rocket ever designed will end up in public space, either literally in outer space, or dropping parts in the ocean, or a tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of exploding somewhere less convenient.

This idea that you can just make your own little closed off launch pad and therefore ignore society is stupid.

Some of the more onerous pushback comes from people who have been ignored before and turned out to be right. For example, when Dupont and friends first started producing PFAS, someone out there was crying foul about "hey maybe we shouldn't just dump this everywhere", and they were ignored, it was dumped everywhere, and now we get to deal with the consequences because nobody listened to those people.

This has happened hundreds of times, including serious things like lead paint and leaded gasoline, which we KNEW caused direct and measurable harm to people, and yet was completely ignored. A portion of the public has obviously lost ALL trust for the private sector claiming any sort of "this couldn't possibly cause problems" and are willing and able to take action.

If you are a "big" enough entity, there is no such thing as "private". Anything you do, affects a lot of people, and you should be treated that way.

Perhaps you can show me where you think I said SpaceX shouldn't be subject to regulatory oversight.
which they have also massively refurbished and could have handled themselves if not for regulations around creating a launch site.

there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon

> there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon

Other than when a powerful and explosion-prone rocket destroyed its launchpad, hurling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete thousands of feet. But it's almost 18 months since that happened.

That incident probably underscores the parent poster's point quite effectively.

That launch was on 20th April 2023, and the next prototype test launch was only 212 days later on 18th November 2023, although I think the pad redesign/rebuild/repair work was complete by the end of July 2023.

So only 3-4 months to redesign/rebuild/repair the pad (although it's probably reasonable to assume some design work had already occurred).

At the end of the day it wasn't a major problem. SpaceX tried something new, it didn't work out, so they had to fix it. Nobody was hurt. Property damage was minimal. The repair didn't take very long. All in all a good example of learning from your mistakes without spending too much time or money overthinking it.
In civil engineering terms, if falling apart with debris thrown thousands of feet doesn't count as a "technical issue" what does?

I'm no rocketry expert, but I'm old enough to remember the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; I'm pretty sure if you've got falling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hitting your space vehicle during launch, that's an issue.

The launch pad didn't explode, the rocket on the launch pad exploded. A fully fueled falcon 9 has about as much energy as a small nuclear bomb, it's not a technical issue if your structure is unable to survive that at point blank range.
Oh, definitely, of course it wasn't a good or desirable outcome.

But it was also a prototype being deliberately tested to destruction, so the context as compared to Columbia was quite different. (And it wasn't just the rocket itself that was a prototype, the pad and tower were at least a little as well).

And this has always been SpaceX's approach, rapidly iterating their design by building, testing, destroying, rinse/repeat - so it sometimes feels a little difficult to compare to a more NASA-style design process where a (usually) small number of items are produced with a significantly lower tolerance for failure.

(Edit: And how much better is it to learn these design lessons before the cargo is more fragile/delicate/squishy?)

Whats your point
That building a rocket launch pad is in fact more difficult than pouring a slab for a garage, and there some nontrivial technical issues involved.

Having chunks of the launchpad go flying isn't just an inconvenience - flying debris during launch can damage critical rocket systems, as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster demonstrated.

and they figured out how to prevent this happening by the next launch just a few months later. So it turned out to be fairly trivial after all. SpaceX is able to iterate in months what it takes Nasa and its contractors years to do.
Haha well that’s gonna happen from time to time when you try new things.
Can't be taking risks. You might actually accomplish something.
Soon to change with Starship launching from Boca Chica. And planned to be able to launch from essentially anywhere, eventually (in Musk Time so give it a decade).
I have seen no plans for a 4th launch/catch tower.. has he even hinted at more sites? Or are you referring to the historical BFR design when musk planned on landing them on the ground like falcon?
The government took all the good land for this in the 60s. So the government mostly just has the land in the right places, that's a really important part. Building most of the ground infrastructure, is still custom to every rocket company.
So space will become more expensive.
Go look up the cost of a soyuz launch, let alone a shuttle launch, and then tell us more about how this is making space more expensive.
That's why I wrote will become.

SpaceX doesn't have real competition after Boeing failed.

What happens in such a monopoly?

The prices rise.

Not necessarily.

First, the competition is international, and some is from governments who need a non-US supplier.

Second, the goal in most corporations isn't maximum profit per item but maximum profit per year, and if they can indeed deliver the prices Musk is speculating about of getting a million people to pay 100-200 thousand USD each to go to Mars, that allows the overall market to be much larger than if he can only charge 150 million (or even 1.5 billion) for 4-seat rides to a low orbit space station every six months.

Boeing hasn't completely failed. Their ship actually worked just not with enough confidence to put people in it. That doesn't mean they're out of the game. There's still Blue Origin and also a bunch of smaller competitors working on different segments besides human transport. Astroforge seems ready to start mining asteroids and got up and running with shockingly little money due in no small part to the growing supply chain of components for commercial space travel.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2023/10/18/this-aster...

Rocket Lab is growing into being a real competitor. They've been very innovative and successful in the small satellite market and, given what we've seen so far, I have confidence they will also succeed with Neutron which is their upcoming fully reusable medium-lift launcher aimed at supporting launch rates needed for megaconstellations. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/neutron/
That's the same kind of will be as mine.

One of us will be correct.

With the Starship the price to get a 100 ton object to orbit or one that is greater than 5 meters in diameter will suddenly become possible. Something previously cost infinity dollars will then be whatever price SpaceX charges. This is a decrease.
Things you don't do, no matter why, cost $0.

My Rolls Royce which I can't afford is a lot cheaper than the car I can afford which got more expensive than my previous one.

That's not true because your lack of a rolls Royce has forced you into buying a Kia, and not only suffering the cost of that vehicle, you are paying the lost utility and comfort of the rolls Royce.

Similarly, space operators who can't launch goldie-locks efficiency payloads are paying for multiple inefficient small loads instead.

This is a very strange way to think. You could apply it to anything that could not exist in the past that people happily pay for today. "Medical care was much more affordable in middle ages!"
SpaceX is ahead for now and may continue to be ahead but does have very real competition domestically and abroad.

  Tesla : Rivian/Lucid :: SpaceX : Blue Origin/ULA
  Tesla : BYD :: SpaceX : LandSpace [0]/Galactic Energy [1]
0. https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1833761435362447760

1. https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-vid...

Despite their slow pace, it's quite clear Bezos and Blue Origin + ULA will continue to plod forward. They're real competition with plenty of money behind them.
Tesla is another company that had a near monopoly in their market space for a couple of years, but that didn't stop competition from showing up. It is notable how their margins have dropped as competition heated up however.
Competitors from China.

I doubt that will happen for US satellites

There's plenty of competition, especially from China.
It would be hard to make things worse than big classical aerospace.
Yeah its gone be more expensive then literally not able to buy something. Practically infinity expensive.

Because this literally something you couldn't buy before. Maybe if you went to Russia and gave them a lot of money.

SpaceX has made everything cheaper in Space cheaper and many things possible that literally weren't a commercial thing before.

Like cloud computing made things cheaper.

But now the companies need money for AI and prices rise.

Without real competition what stop SpaceX from rising its prices?

You do realize one of the best ways to attract competition is to raise prices and increase profit margins to the point where it's worthwhile for competitors to enter the market to take some of that profit?

If you look back historically, the idea that monopolies were broken up because of their ability to raise prices without the check of competition just isn't really telling the full story. Consider this from the Congressional Record of the House (1890) by a proponent of the then under debate anti-trust act (https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/..., page 4100):

"Some say that the trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to 1 cent a barrel it would not right the wrong done to the people of this country by the "trusts" which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprises."

The argument wasn't that the "trusts make products -cheaper-" idea was wrong, but that it didn't matter.

The only way to maintain a natural monopoly is the ensure that the barriers to entry for competition are sufficient to make new entrants unviable. One way to do that is to leverage economies of scale to lower prices to the point where a new entrant simply can't compete on price.

Do you think companies should be able to pay for all their IT needs with their IT budgets from 1995 and if they can't 'capitalism bad'. You realize how dumb this is?

Yes, if you want to do new things, like AI, you need to pay more.

If you want to only do what you were able to before, the price of that is lower. Wtf are you talking about.

Did you miss the fact that reusable rockets have made it cheaper? Have you kept up with the economics of space travel?
That why I wrote will become.

Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper?

Guess what happened next?

Cloud services have a lot of competition.

I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low.

The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity.

Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.

> Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper

No. When was that? Cloud made things easier and faster not cheaper. You trade money for convenience.

As opposed to the traditional astronomically expensive public launches which haven’t had any real innovation since the 1960s?

The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.

Will become more expensive? Are you willfully ignoring the actual data?
The actual data doesn't show the future, does it?

What happens if a commercial companies beats its competitors?

Prices rise.

No, not necessarily.

Trivially, in a monopoly, raising prices infinitely for a product does not maximize profit.

SpaceX has effectively had a monopoly on commercial space launch since it was first able to actually use reusable rockets. Because the innovation of reusing rockets has brought the marginal cost of launching so far down prices will continue to go down.

Right now SpaceX is supply constrained, not demand constrained. All of their launches are booked. As SpaceX's supply increases they will be able to bring launch costs down even further until they hit an equilibrium of monopoly pricing that does maximize profit.

Yeah, the way capitalism made goods more expensive. /s
You mean like Insulin in the US? Or healthcare or housing or education etc.?
You're referring to extreme government regulation making it prohibitively expensive to start up insulin providers that compete with the established government protected monopolies. Which is anything but Capitalism in action.

The same goes for healthcare in general. It's one of the most regulated sectors of the US economy and the government places an extreme cost on doing most anything in that sector through hyper regulation and very epic scale barriers to entry. The US is very far from being a Capitalist healthcare system, it's in fact the worst of both systems: it's a hyper regulated corporatist system, intentionally protected by the government from competition, captured by corporations.

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Is lobbying and a broken IP system really capitalism?
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The way monopolies do.
There is no monopoly bigger, or more expensive, than government, which was previously the only player in the space.
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I don't think you can monopolize going up.
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I think the spacesuit looks kinda bad.
Bad as in good?

I think they look pretty cool. I wouldn't want to survive alone on Mars with one, but they look like they've had some brand design input.

Bad as in bad.

A lot of space technology is purely functional, but these clearly have poor design taste put into them. The old suits that the Apollo era used were probably almost only functional, yet even they look better.

Not sure how it is possible to consider fashion vs getting to do a space walk.
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I think they did consider fashion for these suits, they just did so poorly.
I think it's hard to make the suits look sleek and cool if only because you need to fit many layers of insulation and rotator joints, tubing, etc. Makes it very difficult to have something tailored and fitted, which seems to be what SpaceX is trying to do. There could be a mobility advantage in having a suit that is closer to your body though, as in less risk of having your suit tangled or damaged by objects around you.
I'm not really making a judgement about their competence, the results just didn't turn out well. I think these things are indeed very difficult. To hazard a guess about the competency behind this, they had some people filling double roles doing the fashion of the suit. That they essentially asked an engineer with a side gig as a designer to make it.
They look poor compared to what? They're more modern looking than the ISS suits currently in use.
I think the suits used by the ISS look better.
It seems very rigid, but it's also much less bulky than the current ISS EVA suit batch. The requirements are very different though - ISS suits are modular and designed to stay in space for as long as possible before needing to get back down for a refurbish.
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Robosapien vibes…
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