You mean the... wait for it... Apollo lunar module?

Didn't say it was't. I just said it was a lunar mission, but not a mission to the moon.

No question about that. Any mission where the astronauts return home in one piece is at least partially successful, because that one ultra-critical part still went right.

I have to disagree with that. Yeah, the shuttle design sucked in a lot of critical ways, but we mostly have the military to blame for that, because of their requirement that satellite retrieval be a critical feature in any future NASA craft. Pretty much all of what doomed both of the failed shuttle missions ultimately stems from that design decision and the compromises that came out of that decision (specifically, the need to put the shuttle on the side of the stack stemmed from the need to use the SSMEs to have enough lift capacity to bring large satellite payloads to orbit).

Challenger failed because of that. Columbia failed because of that.

Sure, there were other causes. Challenger also failed because warnings about the o-rings were dismissed by middle management and not brought to the attention of the people who could do something about it. It failed because nobody saw the leaking plume and thought, "The tank could blow. We need to do an early SRB sep and an RTLS abort or an abort once around (depending on alitude).

Columbia also failed because NASA failed to deal with the foam problem that had plagued numerous previous shuttle missions. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have any plan in place to repair critical leading edge tiles in orbit. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have a plan for launching a rescue shuttle if something went wrong. Columbia also likely failed in part because NASA didn't replace the oldest bird in the fleet with one of the newer, much lighter versions, which weighed about four tons less (112.4 pounds per square foot of wing area on Columbia versus 107.5 pounds per square foot for Endeavor, for example). Maybe that small difference wouldn't have made it survivable, or maybe it would have.

Columbia also failed because they deliberately didn't look to see the state of things, believing that nothing could be done, and therefore they did not launch a supply rocket to restock them so that they could extend the mission until they could come up with a solution or launch a rescue shuttle. They did not sacrificially open the landing gear early to cool the wing and allow plasma a path out of the damaged wing during reentry (and increase drag). They did not deploy the drag chute early sacrificially to increase drag. They did not perform all of their turns in a way that would minimize heating on the bad wing or bring the thing down in a continuous curve to increase heat on one side and decrease the heat on the other side. And so on. None of those things were even discussed, because they took it as a foregone conclusion that there was nothing they could do, so they didn't even try.

But at the same time, the number of things they *did* think of, at least during the design stages, is incredible. For example, if they *had* caught the Challenger problem in time to do an early ET and SRB separation, they trained for aborting back to KSC, and the crew could have been saved. Columbia was pretty much screwed without a rescue mission, of course, but the fact that the computer could basically autoland the shuttle (except for the landing gear, which required an umbilical and some new software) meant that *if* they had caught that in time and sent a supply mission and a later rescue mission to bring the crew home, they could have attempted a landing of the shuttle without sacrificing anyone. It meant that if the crew became incapacitated, it could probably mostly bring itself to a landing, albeit a very tile-destroying landing. And so on.

So at least for Columbia, it isn't so much that they believed that they were smarter than they were so much as that they gave up. I don't know which is worse.

I definitely don't think it's worth the expense. They're doing three flights with the design and then throwing it away for a different version in the fourth flight, then throwing it away again in the ninth flight, meanwhile, assuming SpaceX continues on its current trajectory (with Starship block 3 launching in 2026), the Artemis block 2 lift vehicle will be hopelessly out of date years before its first launch (post-2030, with a quarter the payload capacity, and at orders of magnitude higher cost).

It's the best rocket Congress and defense contractor lobbyists could design.

*shrugs*

I *would* argue that Apollo 8 and 13 did not go to the moon, though Apollo 8 is notable for being the first human spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which means it still a huge milestone. Apollo 13, of course, failed spectacularly in its attempt to reach the moon, and is notable for being one of the most amazing saves in the history of the space program. And clearly they are both lunar missions, in that they are moon-related, whereas when I think of a moon mission, I think of a mission specifically to the moon's surface. Very esoteric linguistic distinction, and I may just be splitting hairs.

About 5.56 billion people have Internet access, but subtract 1.12 billion for China and 130.4 million for Russia, because I'm pretty sure neither has access to U.S. social media, an that leaves 4.3 billion. So it's *maybe* possible that 69.8% of the Internet-using world uses Instagram...

But yeah, a lot of them almost certainly are bots.

Artemis (block 1), not Starship. So more like 50 launch attempts, 1 launch, no explosions. :-D

In all seriousness, three launch attempts, but it felt like 50.

Because an average person reading the headline would think that they are going to the moon, not that they are going around the moon. "NASA plans moon-orbit mission for february" would be clearer and not that much longer.

Yeah, no question. Better to tell them something that they won't understand than to tell them something that they will misunderstand.

The only Iranian I've ever met (that I'm aware of) said that when he met people, he usually called himself Persian to avoid the stigma that comes from saying you're from Iran, presumably out of fear that Americans would assume that he was a fundamentalist just waiting for a chance to shout "Death to America" and blow himself up or whatever. He didn't put it exactly that way, but that was the gist.

Who made claims that oxycontin isn't addictive? The government? No. The manufacturer. The government merely allowed them to do it until their claims were shown to be false.

Spreading claims that would encourage a pandemic to get massively worse by discouraging vaccination falls squarely under "detrimental to public health". At no point were *legitimate* studies that showed safety concerns in any way squashed to favor any company's interest. That's why we know that vector-based vaccines were responsible for a statistically significant number of strokes and heart attacks in otherwise healthy people.

The studies that were squashed were a bunch of very weak, mathematically garbage studies that contained errors so obvious that even I, a non-medical person, could shoot dozens of holes in their methodology. A small number of individuals were behind publishing fraudulent study after fraudulent study, and they kept doing this despite broad consensus that their methodology and their conclusions were pure, unadulterated bulls**t. They did this by publishing in journals significantly outside the areas that were appropriate for the papers, relying on the journals' lack of people with adequate understanding of the subject to shoot it full of holes and recommend not publishing it.

And these folks had a tendency to go on YouTube and spread their bulls**t, using their publication in a "journal" (of physics, social sciences, psychiatry, chiropractic medicine, etc.) to support their absolutely fraudulent claims. YouTube quite literally became a dumping ground for trash science that made the National Enquirer look like respectable journalism by comparison.

It got to the point where my canned response was, "If you are showing me something in a YouTube video instead of a peer-reviewed journal, I automatically assume that what you are saying is pure, unadulterated bulls**t, because out of the roughly one hundred times I have not made that assumption, I have found it to be true every single time. If you want me to read it, write it down, so that at least I can skim it in three minutes and point out why you are wrong without wasting an hour of my time watching your stupid video."

IMO, YouTube was right to crack down on that. When people without medical degrees are basically giving medical advice that contradicts broad medical consensus, this is almost guaranteed to be harming society. And nothing good can come of that. Children dying of measles, smallpox, polio, and other vaccine-preventable conditions is not something we should aspire to. Regardless of whether they have freedom of speech, that doesn't mean companies should be required to be their megaphone. And regardless of whether the government was the group who pointed out how potentially harmful the things they were saying are, the stuff they were saying was still harmful.

The closest thing I can think of would be the "There are no studies showing that masks are effective when worn by the general public" statements early on when they needed all the N95 masks for medical personnel. But even that wasn't really disinformation; it was just stating the absence of supporting evidence, and later, when supporting evidence appeared, there was no longer a lack of supporting evidence.

There's a difference between being wrong and spreading disinformation. The former requires either knowing that you're wrong or having a mountain of evidence saying that you're wrong, but still saying it anyway. There are definitely some grey areas, particularly in areas related to myocarditis/pericarditis, but there were also a lot of folks spewing stuff way, way on the other side of that grey area. :-)

There's definitely a big difference in my mind between the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it considers to be detrimental to public health and the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it sees as being mean to our current leaders. The former seems way more acceptable to me, in much the same way that regulating commercial speech and licensing doctors are both way less objectionable than regulating political speech.

Along with toothpaste and glue.

The biggest difference seems to be that the young folks are impressed with AI because it can do a lot of things some of the time, just like an inexperienced person. They put up with mistakes from AI because they're used to a certain level of errors in their work.

The older folks are unimpressed with AI because, unlike their juniors, whom they put up with because because they know that they are teachable, AI isn't teachable, so they have no real use for it. And they aren't too thrilled about their juniors using AI, either, because that means the quality of their work probably won't improve over time, which means more work for them fixing the mess, without the promise that things will eventually get better.

To be clear, I meant the sensor suite and steering rack and support parts, not necessarily that there would be a working brain available to the general public by then. Leaning towards yes, but no guarantees.

I'll grant you that the liability issue is a giant question mark.

Why would you think that? Cameras a cheap, and LiDAR prices are coming down, too. As companies build them in larger and larger quantities, economies of scale and competition will drive the price down rather quickly. Best guess is that in five years, self-driving hardware will add about $15k to the price of the vehicle if they use LiDAR, or $6k if they don't. And that's including the cost of stuff that a lot of cars come with already, like the electric steering rack. I'd be shocked if it were significantly more than $20k.

So as drivers replace their cabs or semi tractors, they'll spend the extra $20k or whatever to buy versions that are self-driving. For that matter, once the tech is reliable enough, you'll likely see retrofit kits come on the market. There's no good reason you'd replace a working tractor unit when you can just swap out the steering rack, bolt on cameras, and add some electronics, and that's true whether you're an owner-operator or the manager of FedEx's fleet.

Oh, absolutely. Most local delivery uses people who already work at the business, and delivery is just a small part of that person's job. So that impact is likely to be close to zero. But that still leaves probably probably around 5 to 10 million taxi drivers and probably three or four million truck drivers.

But taxi and truck drivers won't be replaced overnight. Most taxi drivers and many truck drivers own their own rigs, and although they may eventually replace themselves with robot rigs, they would continue to earn the revenue after doing so. They certainly have no incentive to fire themselves.

Ultimately, somebody has to own the rigs. There's nothing that necessarily requires that robotaxis be fleet vehicles owned by some big company like Uber, no matter how much companies like Uber might prefer it to be that way. Replacing all of those taxis with robot cars costs money, and Uber isn't capitalized that well. Uber's cash on hand wouldn't even be enough to replace all of the taxis in the United States. So while this may shift things around some, I wouldn't expect a taxipocalypse.

Sorry, was thinking orders of magnitude, not orders of complexity. :-)

I'm not sure why he thinks it will be a problem for drivers. A study a few years ago showed that something like 96% of all Uber drivers quit within the first year. So worldwide, we're talking about only O(350,000) people who will have to find something else to do. The world economy can easily absorb such a tiny number.