This may go down in history as the most amazing (and maybe most expensive) art project of all time. I am just flabbergasted; this is astounding. I sincerely hope that the BFR comes to fruition in the way SpaceX has been billing it, and reasonably close in terms of timeline.
I'm in a suburb outside a city in Australia and see half a dozen Teslas when I walk to the park with my kids. It's absolutely mind blowing how far and fast they've reached.
Ha. If you were looking to win the "farthest from San Francisco" game, I think you just did.
It is amazing, isn't it? There's no guarantee that TSLA will still be around in ten years, but I bet their cars will be, along with the industry that was forced into existence by a non-incumbent player.
It's not just about the odds of this project. Missions like these make the public interested again. We might very well be in the beginning stages of a public-private space race, with "space startups" popping up in multiple countries (SpaceX, Blueorigin, [sic] ULA, Onespace[0]). These things can snowball, especially if somebody finds a way to extract resources from the Moon and asteroids.
This is an "art" project because of the media/domains involved, but it's not an art project.
It's very low-brow, but not the sort of independent low-brow that bursts with charm and zeal. It's too transactional, too structured, too contextualized, and too eagerly public. At best, this sort of big-money, one-off commission leads to the Teleharmonium and EPCOT and the Saatchi gallery, not Schiele or Baraka or I-Be Area.
If this project succeeds (which I hope it does, since that'll be good for humanity's efforts to get more active in space), it'll produce some works that can be appreciated as art. But it won't produce classics. People will forget about the works. The advancement into space will rightfully overshadow them. The works won't inspire other artists, and they won't advance any movements. They'll be curiosities studied by space historians, not art historians.
I had a friend like you once. On seeing someone just for a brief moment, she could comment for hours, saying things like "This person will never be rich", "Oh, she definitely has bad relations with her husband", "Obviously he's the kind of person that will fail every project". It turned out that most of her predictions that I could verify turned out false. She got some gut feelings and choose to follow that, but the data sample at her disposal was too small and she jumped to the conclusions way too fast.
An expressionist painter (now dead), a non-narrative movie-length documentary by someone who still lives, a series of deranged surreal video shorts also by someone living.
The only thing that unifies those three things is that you used them in a sentence together.
Can I play?
Tanguy or Man with a Movie Camera or Dead Mall Series !
Many of the most famous works of classical art in the world were transactional and "eagerly public" in their time. The great artists of the renaissance created many works entirely funded and instigated by rich benefactors or the church, and which were intended for the consumption an awed public. But nowadays we don't look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and think about the politics of the patronage relationship between Pope Julius II and Michelangelo. That's a historical issue, of no importance when considering its long-term artistic merit.
Great art transcends its origins, no matter what they are. Indeed, perhaps art is made greater by transcending its origins, just as it is by transcending the limitations of its form. The art created by this project probably won't be great, because most art isn't great. But it certainly could be. And, if so, your a priori dismissal of it will look about as informed as a contemporary renaissance critic dismissing a masterpiece as just another piece of church-funded propaganda.
I don't necessarily agree with your point. However, your mention of EPCOT is quite interesting...
I never really thought about it this way before, but Musk in a lot of ways is like late-life Walt Disney. Disney started having some _very_ ambitious projects, which never did pan out, especially after his death. Both were incredibly optimistic about the future, even when it was quite illogical. EPCOT was the idea of building a city of the future, and while it was never completed, it still inspired generations. He progressed the field of robotics, all in the name of inspiring and entertaining people, starting with the World's Fairs.
I think the technology and learning that will come out of this will be more than worth the cost. It's short sighted to only consider the immediate ROI. A substantial portion of development is also currently being funded by a private citizen (approx $1.5B of the final cost).
And honestly, humanity could use a sense of humor sometimes. We spent trillions going to war in just the past 2 decades when we could have spent a couple billion doing seemingly impossible projects like this. Projects like this also provide jobs and have the added benefit of directing our efforts into something far more useful and far less disastrous than something like war.
Essentially pretty much most of it.. tax deductions cost you more of your own money to pay for higher profit margins on privatised services and on lost maintenance on public infrastructure, and so you are definitely paying for it..
Sure, that's how taxes work. We collect it from everyone and then decide collectively how to spend it. We don't only bill people for the things they personally use. One of the things we use money for is arts. The National Endowment for the Arts gets about $150 million per year, or roughly .004% of your taxes. I don't know how much these tickets to the moon cost, but let's say $100 million. That would roughly double the NEA's spending for a year, which I think works out to about 40 cents per taxpayer (someone can check me on that, maybe I'm way off). It probably does a better job of getting kids excited about science and art than most other ways we'd spend that 40 cents.
So yeah, I'm comfortable choosing that about 40 cents of your share of government's funding goes to this project.
How about not buying some of those problematic F-35's? Or, maybe, skip the next invasion of a foreign country. Do you have any idea how much a bomb costs?
If they want to use my taxpayer money to do something we can all be proud of as a species, I’m all for it. Beats using those funds to forcibly destroy refugee families.
> How much of your capital do you plan to allocate? And do you plan to allocate any of mine (i.e., the taxpayer)?
Do you ask the same of, or have any say in how much of your capital is invested in other ventures, for example, how much your country spends on its military, or civilian surveillance?
So many "taxpayers" are concerned about a few hundred million here and there that could bring benefit to the entire human race but never blink an eye when the bloated military budget grows by a few hundred billion....
>> Doesn't it require a natural gift that you're born with?
It helps a lot, but from my experience having parents who can support you with lessons and prop you up well into your 20s is a bigger factor to being a successful artist.
>> Not to belittle astronauts, but space travel training is more teachable than true art.
In my mind it's much harder to be an astronaut than an artist, excluding extremely elite painters and musicians. And I doubt most artists would disagree with this.
I think that's what they're going for with this mission. Nearly every world-famous artist would be interested in something like this, so they won't be short of options. If you can, why not pick the absolute best?
Best? Who is better, Yo Yo Ma or Wayne Shorter? Bob Dylan or Paul Mcartney or Stevie Wonder? Or Bjork?
Ai Wewei or Banksy or Stan Lee?
Stephen King or Salman Rushdie?
Sorry for getting snippy, but my Point is, art, especially of all things, while it certainly has its quantifiable aspects, is a domain where talking about “absolute best” and “world famous” is not very constructive or useful, imho.
I believe you have to have good taste and take it from there. [1]
[1] Ira Glass quote:
> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Ironically, or fittingly, I've been reading a comprehensive collection of his short stories, because it was impressed on me early in my life that he was a great author, and I have recently been horrified at how terrible many of his more obscure ones are.
The interesting thing is that the quality does not simply improve with time and experience. There are extreme outliers.
Weird question: I've been trying to find a short story I read years ago, which I think is by Sturgeon. Is there any chance you have run across it?
In it, an engineer is brought into a war zone, where giant tank-like creatures are on the edge of overrunning the front lines. The lines must be maintained in a cave system to keep extracting a valuable mineral. The generals keep pressuring the engineer for weapons, but he wants to understand the problem first. After lots of analysis, he directs the troops to destroy a certain structure. Within days all the tank creatures die. Then the engineer explains that the cave system is actually the inside of a caterpillar on a cosmic sized leaf, and the tank creatures were its immune system. Killing the caterpillar allowed the troops to loot the caterpillar's body in peace.
Ever heard of it? I'm not sure that my memory is completely accurate.
Can you even train artistic talent? Doesn't it require a natural gift that you're born with?
(musician/artist here) I don't believe in 'talent' or 'gifts', and I don't believe art/music, like a lot of things, is something you can teach (mostly). You can learn it, but you can't teach it. (Botvinnik - founder of the 'Russian School of Chess' (!) - said that about chess, I keep seeing people in different fields saying that.)
You learn it by doing it. A lot. And learning from what you love, e.g. the greats in your field. And you won't do that day after day for decades unless you really love doing it. No-one else knows what you should be working on, or what you love. Everyone's bad at anything when they start. I hear a lot of people saying they wished they played flute (or something), but they're not talented. That myth does a lot of harm. I tell them, well, just start!. It's all anyone can do. Art is essentially about doing your own thing, not willfully, but following what your nature dictates. 'You' don't create it; it just flows out of you.
So I'd also think that space travel training is more teachable than art, for different reasons.
A (probably apocryphal) story: ...a woman once came up to Fritz Kreisler after one of his concerts and said to him, “I’d give my life to play as beautifully as you do.” To which Kreisler replied, “I did.”
One's own path. - If we take the decisive step and enter upon the path which is called our 'own path', a secret is suddenly revealed to us: all those who have hitherto been our friends and familiars have imagined themselves superior to us, and are now offended. The best of them are lenient with us and wait patiently for us soon to find our way back to the 'right path' - they know, it seems, what the right path is... - Nietzsche, Daybreak, 484
There was an anti-soviet joke popular among soviet intelligencia 60-70 years ago.
"Before the revolution, Tula province only had one writer - Leo Tolstoy. After the revolution, Tula province has 100 writers, all of them card carrying members of Soviet Writers Union; so situation with literature is now 100 times better".
I don’t think you can train people to be artists. You can train people to be better writers or painters, but I don’t think you can train people to have the mindset of an artist.
Ben Affleck, talking to Michael Bay about the movie Armageddon, in which oil drillers are sent to an asteroid to drill a hole in it, drop a nuclear bomb into the hole, and then detonate that bomb:
>I asked Michael (Bay) why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to shut the fuck up
The Apollo astronauts were also trained quite extensively in geology. Highly recommend the Apollo 12 episode of From the Earth to the Moon for a great look at that.
Surprised no one mentioned it already. Alexey Leonov, first man to perform a space walk, is also an artist. He penciled an orbital sunrise during that mission.
If the goal is to inspire them to spend their days after they return producing works of art, then your suggestion would likely be ineffective. Had the astronauts wanted to spend their lives creating, they probably would have become creators.
Right. In the optimistic case, people will still be learning about this art project while living in another galaxy. In terms of scale, there is the potential for MZ to end up as much more important, rather than on the same scale as, other patron of the arts. It is far too soon to tell.
I agree. I dread to think who they'll send. The musician will be a popular twerker rather than someone musical, and so on. It's a cute idea, but I expect the result will be cheesy fluff. We'll see.
I’m just fantasizing how it would be like, composing a song on my guitar in zero gravity while glazing at the stars. Whoever gets the opportunity, I cheer for you.
Chris Hadfield recorded a cover of Bowie's Space Oddity on the ISS [1], including playing the guitar in space. It gives me chills every time I listen to it.
Originally they only had permission to have the video on YouTube for a year.
When word got out that it would have to be taken down once the license expired they managed to get the license extended.
There wasn’t a big “shit show” just Chris’s son saying on Twitter (iirc) that this was the case and they (him and his dad, iirc the son did the editing on the video) were just thankful that so many people enjoyed it during the year it was up.
A few days/weeks later it was back up. Don’t think anyone talked about the deal but I want to believe that David stepped in himself to pull the strings needed for it to stay up. I love the original but dam Chris’s cover is a very close second for me...
Bowie is a genius,the song is amazing and still the number one version for me too, but in terms of art, context matters a lot, and you can't get more context than space oddity being played in space.
Other song played by Chris and the barenaked ladies that I personally enjoy a lot is I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)[0], space related songs being played in space make them much more special to me.
I was pretty skeptical when I heard that private citizens booked a flight on Falcon Heavy. When those plans got shelved and these popped up, I had a similar level of skepticism. I expected it to be some random celebrity that wanted to go on a fancy tour.
This is anything but that. I feel more than humbled to be wrong. Bringing a ton of artists on a once in a lifetime trip for inspiration purposes is selfless, compassionate, and warm. It’s awesome. I’m so glad I was wrong.
AFAIR, Burt Rutan said he wasn't that keen to watch Apollo-11 landing because he assumed it's soon going to be routine.
So far it wasn't. But why do you think it will not become more routine - perhaps a lot more routine - this time? Surely one can't count on that - but we do can dream and we do can bring some of our dreams to reality, even though we aren't always good with predicting when it'll happen.
There's plenty of stuff on the Moon, plus there's much less gravity. You can mine rocket fuel, water, or Helium-3 and then send it into orbit pretty easily, for example.
You're simply not being accurate in saying that there's nothing there.
The Moon may be just a stepping stone to greater things. Maybe we "mine" on it, maybe we use it to more efficiently send things into orbit, maybe just tourism, who knows? You can't possibly know what possibilities there exist, right now.
I think we're lucky that ancient mariners didn't listen to the people who told them "there's literally nothing, nothing, in the Great Water".
When I watched the NASA administrator meeting in which NASA plans were discussed, one of the reasons listed for going to the moon was that we have seen that our understanding of it is not complete. It was not the United States of America that discovered, for example, that there was water ice on the moon, though we later confirmed the discovery. Yet this is a critical insight into its composition which has major implications.
When I watched the NASA administrator meeting in which NASA plans for building a base on the moon were discussed, one of the reasons listed was also rooted in discovery. There are many challenges that such a base would face and it is better to solve them when the Earth is close and rescue is more reasonable than to go to Mars with those problems not yet understood and solved, since the time till return from Mars will be measured in months and years rather than days.
What makes you so stridently disagree that we have more things to learn while on the moon, when the experts disagree with you? Also, since they do, doesn't this also make his equivalence a very good one, rather than false? Certainly the argument that there is more yet to be discovered about the trench does not refute his claim, only serving to enhance the degree to which claiming there is nothing is not valid.
> There's literally (yes, literally literally) nothing there on the Moon...
There's a massive, atmosphere-free, stable, terrestrial EM shielded platform for large, human-maintained telescopes, and gravity for the maintenance staff.
They aren't going to actually orbit the moon, they're going around the moon. It's called a "free return trajectory".
This is actually less than Apollo 8 did (edit: only talking about the orbit): Apollo 8 actually went into lunar orbit with a burn, and then left lunar orbit with another burn.
However, this is using "orbit" in its formal sense. Most people would look at the diagram of the spaceship flying around the moon and call it an "orbit". I'm not going to tell them that they're wrong to say that.
This guy is only worth $3B, he may be spending half of his entire net worth to make this happen. I hope he inspires the richest billionaires of the world to fund such lofty ventures.
$10M-$20M is more than sufficient for a few generations (in a 100-200 years, our current understanding of the concept of money might not even be relevant, so it's pointless to plan for anything more than that). Anything more is just throwaway cash IMO. If you had the opportunity to become the first private citizen to go to the moon, you'd be stupid to not cement your legacy like that.
He hinted during QA it was 5% of BFR development costs, and Elon said a "material" percentage, which for expense reporting usually means >= 5%. Dev costs were said to be $5billion, so that would be $250,000,000.
The questioner asked "is it more or less than 5%" -- I don't think they were confirming 5%, just repeating the number back (and Musk refused to say anything about the percentage at all).
Besides the fact that he isn't spending $1.5B on it, really, what can you do with $3B that you can't do with $1.5B? There's really not that many more things that you can do. So spending it on a (hopefully not) once in a lifetime opportunity doesn't sound like that bad of an idea.
As others have said, this is way better than anything I had anticipated this private citizen arrangement to be. What a wonderful way to kick off human space travel round 2!
Seriously, Barack Obama? I'm neither republican, not democrat, but you've got to be kidding me with that recommendation. He was a politician, through and through. Yes, the first black one, but aside from that he presented very little that was materially difference from previous politicians. Just being first at something, given the random nature of the universe, isn't enough to wow me. Your ability to make things happen, and change the world - of which he did basically neither - is what wins you respect.
Obama is good with words but other than being the first black POTUS I don't see what inspiring thing he did.
>Bill Gates
Depends on who you ask. Bill Gates also caused a lot of damage in the tech world in my opinion and pushed us back many decades in software evolution.
>Steve Jobs
Who in their right minds would choose a marketing sociopath as an inspiring figure? Seriously, every person I know that views Steve Jobs as their idol is a jackass in some way.
I agree with the rest though. I'd put Musk up there with them simply for the fact that what he is doing with companies just flies in the face of so many modern assumptions of what a corporation is.
And yet, you're here, commenting on Hackernews, when you could be donating your computer and time to the poor. Note how the authors stops at 'even millions' presumably, just shy of the order of magnitude of his own net worth. Funny how that tends to shake out: "Everyone richer than me is immoral for keeping their money".
You might want to listen to the livestream -- Elon answers a question from the press about how certain the date is, and basically says the same thing you just did.
There shouldn't be any doubts, it's definetly will not be 2023 and its not the point.
Everytime Elon mentions date, media just takes it for granted and repeats itself everytime the deadline is missed.
In reality, if you have only broad understanding what is needed to be done and you can only make assumptions about how long it will take, you still need to target some specific dates and try to stick to them even if more often then not, you will miss these deadlines. In this case its the date if everything would go to the plan perfectly. But we are not living in the perfect world and who knows that difficulties could accur or how long they could take. How you can incorporate these in your predictions?
Its very difficult to properly predict big projects and this type of projects are in scale which is even more insanely difficult.
When Kennedy gave his moon shot speech, he set out a deadline. At that time, space travel wasn't even a thing and had to be invented. He could have said in our lifetime. He could have said someday. He said in "this decade".
Setting an arbitrary deadline is not a negative. It gives people goals to achieve vs infinite discussion/research. Even if the date does get pushed, it's not the end of the world. NASA is famous for its schedules getting pushed. When's the JWT launching? When did the Hubble launch? How far behind was the LHC? Yes, people complain, but I would rather have them late and working than rushed and not. Look at what Hubble has given us. Well worth the wait.
Not sure why Elon Musk gets so much hyper focused attention like this. He's not the only person to have projects run late. Look at the Red camera system. Look at Black Magic Design. Apple, Microsoft and pretty much any software dev has had to push back release dates. Any HN reader should be sympathetic as I'm sure everyone has had to push back release dates, or at the least not release every feature as scheduled.
"Space 1999" was one of my favourite TV series when growing up. I looked up at the moon for a long while on September 13th 1999 and wondered what the earth would be like if it was missing on the 14th...
Adddendum: I enjoyed the fact that the props used were not traditionally sleek and glossy like most other sci-fi series. The Eagle Transporters were utilitarian and multi purpose. The moon buggies they used similarly so. The space suits seemed to be more modern, yet, true representations of those used by the first moon walkers. etc.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] thread1 in 10 odds it happens?
It is amazing, isn't it? There's no guarantee that TSLA will still be around in ten years, but I bet their cars will be, along with the industry that was forced into existence by a non-incumbent player.
If that kind of outcome gets you implicated for failure, BMW must be distraught as it looks at those dwindling 3 series sales figures.
FWIW all the people trapped in the cave were rescued.
[0]https://www.space.com/40662-china-first-private-spaceflight-...
It's very low-brow, but not the sort of independent low-brow that bursts with charm and zeal. It's too transactional, too structured, too contextualized, and too eagerly public. At best, this sort of big-money, one-off commission leads to the Teleharmonium and EPCOT and the Saatchi gallery, not Schiele or Baraka or I-Be Area.
If this project succeeds (which I hope it does, since that'll be good for humanity's efforts to get more active in space), it'll produce some works that can be appreciated as art. But it won't produce classics. People will forget about the works. The advancement into space will rightfully overshadow them. The works won't inspire other artists, and they won't advance any movements. They'll be curiosities studied by space historians, not art historians.
Schiele or Baraka or I-Be Area ?
An expressionist painter (now dead), a non-narrative movie-length documentary by someone who still lives, a series of deranged surreal video shorts also by someone living.
The only thing that unifies those three things is that you used them in a sentence together.
Can I play?
Tanguy or Man with a Movie Camera or Dead Mall Series !
Did I win‽
Great art transcends its origins, no matter what they are. Indeed, perhaps art is made greater by transcending its origins, just as it is by transcending the limitations of its form. The art created by this project probably won't be great, because most art isn't great. But it certainly could be. And, if so, your a priori dismissal of it will look about as informed as a contemporary renaissance critic dismissing a masterpiece as just another piece of church-funded propaganda.
I never really thought about it this way before, but Musk in a lot of ways is like late-life Walt Disney. Disney started having some _very_ ambitious projects, which never did pan out, especially after his death. Both were incredibly optimistic about the future, even when it was quite illogical. EPCOT was the idea of building a city of the future, and while it was never completed, it still inspired generations. He progressed the field of robotics, all in the name of inspiring and entertaining people, starting with the World's Fairs.
No seriously...let's do it. We're humans - this is the kind of funny, beautiful, impossible stuff we can uniquely do.
Capital allocation? Bleh, don't be so boring and uninspired!
And honestly, humanity could use a sense of humor sometimes. We spent trillions going to war in just the past 2 decades when we could have spent a couple billion doing seemingly impossible projects like this. Projects like this also provide jobs and have the added benefit of directing our efforts into something far more useful and far less disastrous than something like war.
Allow people to vote on government budgets and you'd get your answer.
I'd far prefer to decide what carve up of sectors tax is spent on than choose between politicians.
So yeah, I'm comfortable choosing that about 40 cents of your share of government's funding goes to this project.
You spend more on war.
1. https://www.space.com/10849-nasa-budget-contribute.html
We need to teach our kids that, when the world is exceedingly generous to them, it's nice to care for the ones it wasn't so nice to.
Do you ask the same of, or have any say in how much of your capital is invested in other ventures, for example, how much your country spends on its military, or civilian surveillance?
Not to belittle astronauts, but space travel training is more teachable than true art.
Yes. 100%. It's a muscle you train.
>> Doesn't it require a natural gift that you're born with?
It helps a lot, but from my experience having parents who can support you with lessons and prop you up well into your 20s is a bigger factor to being a successful artist.
>> Not to belittle astronauts, but space travel training is more teachable than true art.
In my mind it's much harder to be an astronaut than an artist, excluding extremely elite painters and musicians. And I doubt most artists would disagree with this.
I think that's what they're going for with this mission. Nearly every world-famous artist would be interested in something like this, so they won't be short of options. If you can, why not pick the absolute best?
Ai Wewei or Banksy or Stan Lee?
Stephen King or Salman Rushdie?
Sorry for getting snippy, but my Point is, art, especially of all things, while it certainly has its quantifiable aspects, is a domain where talking about “absolute best” and “world famous” is not very constructive or useful, imho.
1. Yo Yo Ma
2. Stevie Wonder
3. Salman Rushdie.
[1] Ira Glass quote: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Ironically, or fittingly, I've been reading a comprehensive collection of his short stories, because it was impressed on me early in my life that he was a great author, and I have recently been horrified at how terrible many of his more obscure ones are.
The interesting thing is that the quality does not simply improve with time and experience. There are extreme outliers.
In it, an engineer is brought into a war zone, where giant tank-like creatures are on the edge of overrunning the front lines. The lines must be maintained in a cave system to keep extracting a valuable mineral. The generals keep pressuring the engineer for weapons, but he wants to understand the problem first. After lots of analysis, he directs the troops to destroy a certain structure. Within days all the tank creatures die. Then the engineer explains that the cave system is actually the inside of a caterpillar on a cosmic sized leaf, and the tank creatures were its immune system. Killing the caterpillar allowed the troops to loot the caterpillar's body in peace.
Ever heard of it? I'm not sure that my memory is completely accurate.
(musician/artist here) I don't believe in 'talent' or 'gifts', and I don't believe art/music, like a lot of things, is something you can teach (mostly). You can learn it, but you can't teach it. (Botvinnik - founder of the 'Russian School of Chess' (!) - said that about chess, I keep seeing people in different fields saying that.)
You learn it by doing it. A lot. And learning from what you love, e.g. the greats in your field. And you won't do that day after day for decades unless you really love doing it. No-one else knows what you should be working on, or what you love. Everyone's bad at anything when they start. I hear a lot of people saying they wished they played flute (or something), but they're not talented. That myth does a lot of harm. I tell them, well, just start!. It's all anyone can do. Art is essentially about doing your own thing, not willfully, but following what your nature dictates. 'You' don't create it; it just flows out of you.
So I'd also think that space travel training is more teachable than art, for different reasons.
A (probably apocryphal) story: ...a woman once came up to Fritz Kreisler after one of his concerts and said to him, “I’d give my life to play as beautifully as you do.” To which Kreisler replied, “I did.”
One's own path. - If we take the decisive step and enter upon the path which is called our 'own path', a secret is suddenly revealed to us: all those who have hitherto been our friends and familiars have imagined themselves superior to us, and are now offended. The best of them are lenient with us and wait patiently for us soon to find our way back to the 'right path' - they know, it seems, what the right path is... - Nietzsche, Daybreak, 484
"Before the revolution, Tula province only had one writer - Leo Tolstoy. After the revolution, Tula province has 100 writers, all of them card carrying members of Soviet Writers Union; so situation with literature is now 100 times better".
- Easy doesn't seem to have any place here.
- It sounds like bringing in diversity of perspective is a large priority here, and starting with trained astronauts would severely constrain that.
i think everyone replying to you just got wooshed.
I'd expect crew will accompany them - they've batted around a 100 passenger number in the past - and it's likely to be highly automated as well.
The sculptor's certainly not gonna go hop out for a spacewalk to fix an antenna.
Ben Affleck, talking to Michael Bay about the movie Armageddon, in which oil drillers are sent to an asteroid to drill a hole in it, drop a nuclear bomb into the hole, and then detonate that bomb:
>I asked Michael (Bay) why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to shut the fuck up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYN2P3E06s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A
Arguably, we're still cruising on the de Medicis' and Borgias' investments in the arts.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
When word got out that it would have to be taken down once the license expired they managed to get the license extended.
There wasn’t a big “shit show” just Chris’s son saying on Twitter (iirc) that this was the case and they (him and his dad, iirc the son did the editing on the video) were just thankful that so many people enjoyed it during the year it was up.
A few days/weeks later it was back up. Don’t think anyone talked about the deal but I want to believe that David stepped in himself to pull the strings needed for it to stay up. I love the original but dam Chris’s cover is a very close second for me...
Other song played by Chris and the barenaked ladies that I personally enjoy a lot is I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)[0], space related songs being played in space make them much more special to me.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvAnfi8WpVE
This is anything but that. I feel more than humbled to be wrong. Bringing a ton of artists on a once in a lifetime trip for inspiration purposes is selfless, compassionate, and warm. It’s awesome. I’m so glad I was wrong.
AFAIR, Burt Rutan said he wasn't that keen to watch Apollo-11 landing because he assumed it's soon going to be routine.
So far it wasn't. But why do you think it will not become more routine - perhaps a lot more routine - this time? Surely one can't count on that - but we do can dream and we do can bring some of our dreams to reality, even though we aren't always good with predicting when it'll happen.
No, it will not become more routine.
Not entirely true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization#M...
You're simply not being accurate in saying that there's nothing there.
I think we're lucky that ancient mariners didn't listen to the people who told them "there's literally nothing, nothing, in the Great Water".
You're making a false and dishonest equivalency. Those mariners didn't know what was in the Great Water.
We absolutely do know to a huge degree of precision exactly what is on the Moon. (A whole bunch of nothing.)
We know more about the Moon than we know about the Mariana Trench. We've explored the Moon to death already.
When I watched the NASA administrator meeting in which NASA plans for building a base on the moon were discussed, one of the reasons listed was also rooted in discovery. There are many challenges that such a base would face and it is better to solve them when the Earth is close and rescue is more reasonable than to go to Mars with those problems not yet understood and solved, since the time till return from Mars will be measured in months and years rather than days.
What makes you so stridently disagree that we have more things to learn while on the moon, when the experts disagree with you? Also, since they do, doesn't this also make his equivalence a very good one, rather than false? Certainly the argument that there is more yet to be discovered about the trench does not refute his claim, only serving to enhance the degree to which claiming there is nothing is not valid.
There's a massive, atmosphere-free, stable, terrestrial EM shielded platform for large, human-maintained telescopes, and gravity for the maintenance staff.
This is actually less than Apollo 8 did (edit: only talking about the orbit): Apollo 8 actually went into lunar orbit with a burn, and then left lunar orbit with another burn.
However, this is using "orbit" in its formal sense. Most people would look at the diagram of the spaceship flying around the moon and call it an "orbit". I'm not going to tell them that they're wrong to say that.
But isn't it exactly what Apollo 13 did?
He decided to share the trip, so he won't be "the first private citizen", merely "one of the first private citizens".
I don’t care what you have to say about Elon Musk’s flaws; he’s the most inspirational human to have lived in the past fifty years.
I am unabashedly a SpaceX fanboy.
Elon would be lucky to make the top ten.
I wasn't creating a list of people that wow you, or even a list of people that wow me.
The metric was "how many people did this person inspire in a positive way?" and Barack Obama undeniably did that by being the first black POTUS.
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2017/8/justin-biebe...
What SpaceX and Tesla are doing is absolutely breathtaking.
Obama is good with words but other than being the first black POTUS I don't see what inspiring thing he did.
>Bill Gates
Depends on who you ask. Bill Gates also caused a lot of damage in the tech world in my opinion and pushed us back many decades in software evolution.
>Steve Jobs
Who in their right minds would choose a marketing sociopath as an inspiring figure? Seriously, every person I know that views Steve Jobs as their idol is a jackass in some way.
I agree with the rest though. I'd put Musk up there with them simply for the fact that what he is doing with companies just flies in the face of so many modern assumptions of what a corporation is.
When civilians can go to space and return back without issues, we would progress as a species. As a civilisation.
I wonder if it’s possible to do anything without someone criticizing it.
I'd love to see it happen on schedule but I have doubts.
Setting an arbitrary deadline is not a negative. It gives people goals to achieve vs infinite discussion/research. Even if the date does get pushed, it's not the end of the world. NASA is famous for its schedules getting pushed. When's the JWT launching? When did the Hubble launch? How far behind was the LHC? Yes, people complain, but I would rather have them late and working than rushed and not. Look at what Hubble has given us. Well worth the wait.
Not sure why Elon Musk gets so much hyper focused attention like this. He's not the only person to have projects run late. Look at the Red camera system. Look at Black Magic Design. Apple, Microsoft and pretty much any software dev has had to push back release dates. Any HN reader should be sympathetic as I'm sure everyone has had to push back release dates, or at the least not release every feature as scheduled.
I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkKCFaqib8
Adddendum: I enjoyed the fact that the props used were not traditionally sleek and glossy like most other sci-fi series. The Eagle Transporters were utilitarian and multi purpose. The moon buggies they used similarly so. The space suits seemed to be more modern, yet, true representations of those used by the first moon walkers. etc.