Not a whole lot is being made of this:
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured Space Exploration Technologies’ Dragon cargo ship and guided it into a berth on Friday, docking the first privately owned vehicle to reach the orbital outpost.
Using the station’s 58-foot long (17.7-meter) robotic crane, NASA astronaut Don Pettit snared Dragon at 9:56 a.m. EDT (1356 GMT) as the two spacecraft zoomed 250 miles over northwest Australia at 17,500 miles per hour.
“It looks like we’ve got us a dragon by the tail,” Pettit radioed to NASA Mission Control in Houston.
I wonder if twenty-five years from now, or maybe 100 years from now, this first commercial space flight will be a much more celebrated event than this year’s presidential election.
What do you think?
I doubt it. To me, it’s not that important of a milestone – it’s just a private corporation using existing technology for the first time.
I mean, we can talk about what a seminal moment the invention of the radio was, but does anyone really wonder or care what the first commercial broadcast was?
This presumes that there’s somewhere in this solar system that’s worth a great deal of human exploration. If it’s just a matter of robotic probes and rovers and automated mining ships out of Alien, I’m not sure what difference it really makes if they’re operated by nation-states or corporations.
It’ll probably all work out in the same way the British and Dutch East India companies operated back in the eighteenth century, but in space.
We could make an atmosphere for Mars. That would be cool.
The Martians might not be too pleased about us tromping in on them uninvited though.
I think this <could be> an important milestone, provided that the company is actually able to demonstrate their claim of reduced payload cost , as well as over-all profitability. I am hopeful they will be able to achieve both.
Well, this accomplishment is a direct result of Satan’s handmaiden, SCIENCE!!! And we all know how possessed by the devil that field is. Why, I bet most of the people working on that project believe in anthropogenic climate change, too. So the sooner that something like this dies, the better for the GOP and their crazy base. Regardless of the fact that it is being done, in part, according to their beloved “free market principles”. After all, Jesus is coming soon, right?? So who really gives a flying fuck about something like this. After all, we could better spend that money for new nukes to fight Romney’s stated arch enemy and #1 foe, Russia. Then he can launch a few their way on Inauguration Day and ring in the Second Coming to satisfy the Sarah Palin wing of his party.
“Is it me, or is this an odd way of looking at things? I think it’s a sign of good moral character if you are asking yourself how you can help the greatest number of people and how you can productively apply your talents to the problems of the world.”
Asking is a sign of good intentions, but ethics is really about good actions — which means what is actually done,and what the real-world consequences are. The quantitative approach to ethics — “the greatest number of people”, etc. — is not the only approach, and I would argue, not necessarily the best approach, to solving the problems of the world (remember Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, more concerned with missionary work among the poor Africans than taking care of her own children).
But even if it were, or in areas where it probably is (e.g., promoting public health), you still need an ethical sense and an ethical understanding in the first place. The utilitarian approach to ethics — “the greatest good for the greatest number” — is itself a product of industrial capitalism (clue: it developed in England in the late 18th-early 19th century.) Again, that is not to say it is bad per se, but it does not mix so well with ethical thinking as might be supposed.
For example, I recently read an essay on ethics and engineering, written around 1920. The premise was that the ultimate role of the engineer is ethical, i.e. developing technology for the benefit of mankind. Sounds good. But what actually benefits mankind? Ah, that’s an ethical question. Is it “better living through chemistry”? This guy had a wonderful idea: Not only do we need engineers for things, we need to engineer the human mind. This is the way to progress, the new challenge for engineering. Well, we have plenty of that today, don’t we? Are we having fun yet?
There are so many examples. The whole issue of organic, sustainably grown food vs industrially grown and produced food is ethically argued on the industrial side as “greatest good for the greatest number”. Including by many lefties. Curiously it also happens to produce the highest profits for investors. Yet its ethical flaws have become obvious, while the pluses on the organic side are manifold — to health, aesthetics, community, environment, economy, etc.
My point is that the quantitative approach to ethics can do a lot of damage unless there is a very complex understanding of human acts and consequences, not just some half-baked idea of the greatest good for the greatest number. And in the conception, it’s the human good that’s the actual ethical part (end),and the quantitative part is the technical add-on (means). But since the the means are also human acts, they need to be ethical too.
And by the way, the GREATER number, so f-ck the lesser number, right?
Right there is an example of the poor state of science reporting in commercial media. The reporter marvels that the two space vehicles connected while travelling at the blistering velocity of 17,500 mph, but velocity is relative. The two vehicles are travelling at great velocity, but only in reference to a fixed point on the earth. Relative to each other, the two vehicles are a virtual standstill. The velocity in reference to a point on the earth isn’t relevant at all.
I don’t think so, BooMan. As far as commercial applications go, it’s going to take the development of a highly successful, profitable, large-scale good or service to make a commercial breakthrough more important than an election.
The integrated circuit, the WW2 encryption machines, the vacuum tube, the gigantic walk-in computers – none of these things were more important than the elections in the couple of decades after the war. However, the release of the IBM PC, the Apple Computer, the Mac, the internet – these events are, arguably, more important than the elections in the last quarter of the 20th century.
This is pioneering, but show me an industry. That would be important.
The couple of decades during and after the war, that is.
Commercial space flight:
Unmanned or manned?
I’m all for unmanned probes/telescopes/robots in space; we’ve already had some success doing this. I’m not sure what the ROI is for private companies doing it tho’. Right now U.S. companies are sitting on at least a Trillion dollars in excess cash. I don’t see one of these companies talking about going out into space as a solid business venture. Clearly they’re not interested in investing on Earth much less space.
Manned missions I’m more or less against; space is dead. we already know how deadly space travel is, and how expensive it is. Unmanned projects make way more sense.
I’m not into the “man has to reach out to the stars” propaganda/hubris. Let’s for example fully explore our oceans as David Cameron recently demonstrated is readily doable.
It grieves me because it shows that, even if we can escape this doomed planet the corporate elite will continue to rule.
Until we build the ProleCraft and ProleRocket!!