[WalterBright]

> silly little PR stunt

The media has been grossly unfair to Bezos. What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design. It was a massive display of faith in his engineering team.

Musk didn't do that. Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.

As for the BO rocket being totally automated, that was the original intent of the Mercury missions, until the astronauts objected. Nobody called them joyriders or ludicrous.

[errantspark]

One pilot died, the other bailed out successfully.

Branson didn't fly on the first flights because SpaceShipTwo is a completely different beast to New Shepard. SpaceShipTwo is a pioneering space plane with MANUAL controls. New Shepard is basically the absolute most boring way you could claim to have "gone to space". It's vastly vastly less interesting and ambitious compared to what SpaceX and even Virgin Galactic are doing.

[WalterBright]

It didn't have to have manual controls, and in fact the fatal accident was caused by moving the wrong control.

Automated controls are more ambitious than manual controls. Note that the Apollo 11 was supposed to be totally automated, but Armstrong saved the mission by overriding it and doing it manually.

> most boring

Well, until the automation goes wrong, then it is briefly very exciting.

[tigershark]

Only because of resources limitation in the ‘60s. He had to shut down some non-essential system to let the main process go on. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/apollo-11s-120...

Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs in Boeing’s Starliner that caused the failure to reach the ISS and that would have risked the astronauts life if they didn’t fix two issues (literally) on the fly.

[WalterBright]

> Only because of resources limitation in the ‘60s.

Doesn't matter what the excuses were. It was supposed to work, it failed, and Armstrong took over and saved the mission.

> Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs

Most every software bug today, once rooted out, looks like a mistake only an incompetent programmer would make. Except the best programmers make these mistakes, because humans are fallible.

If I recall correctly, SpaceX had some unintended disassemblies from software problems, too.

[tigershark]

SpaceX had no RUD or any problem whatsoever because of software during the commercial crew test missions. Which RUD caused by a software bug are you referring to?

[WalterBright]

Some of the early (unmanned) landing failures, if I recall correctly.

[xoa]

>The media has been grossly unfair to Bezos.

I honestly think you have it backwards: the media has been very kind to both Bezos and Branson, particularly the latter. This isn't surprising because the media doesn't really get orbital dynamics any more than they get most technical topics. Nevertheless a lot of them act as if Branson's and Bezos' flight were some big technical achievements or progress forward, as if they can just evolve the designs around the current limitations.

They cannot. Hybrid engines have garbage ISP, the entire design of the Unity is completely worthless for high speed period let alone reentry, every $ spent on it is pointless beyond a quick joyride that will relatively soon be obsoleted by real space tourism. NS is at least vaguely sort of more useful for BO, it has a hydrolox engine so it's not doing anything for them on that front but they got to work on their landing a bit somewhat more easily.

But the value of space comes from actually getting to orbit and then beyond, and that's a fantastically more difficult problem due to the delta-v needed, the rocket equation, our material science, etc. SpaceX's approach of focusing on the real hard problem which delivers serious revenue and opportunity then working backwards on economics, always with focus on orbit as their lodestone, has clearly been much more effective. BO is older than SpaceX and has yet to even once get to orbit or deal with reentry. At all. It's hard not to look at so much of NS and just see such a waste of years and dollars.

>What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design.

I guess? It had been flown and landed multiple times and it had a lot of margin to work with since it's just a big sounding rocket. They did a hyperconservative work-on-the-first-launch Old Space development process.

>Musk didn't do that.

You think Musk wasn't puckered launching 6 astronauts and tens of billions of dollars worth of other people's precious cargo to space? Musk didn't do that because it wouldn't have proved anything and been a pure waste and distraction from the actual serious mission.

>Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.

Branson is a daredevil and that design is garbage on a host of levels.

>As for the BO rocket being totally automated

So is Dragon 2. So will Starship. That's normal and good, it's manual that's bad. But it's also not a special achievement that justified 6 years after first launch and landing.

[WalterBright]

> It had been flown and landed multiple times

A whole 5 times. The space shuttle flew many times before the Challenger.

> You think Musk wasn't puckered

It's a whole lot different when your own ass is the one that will die.

> Branson is a daredevil

And yet he still didn't dare to take the first manned flight.

> it's also not a special achievement

It's untried and very complex software. We know how that often goes.

[systemvoltage]

The public has been primed too much by the media to literally spew hate like there is no tomorrow for certain individuals. On the right wing - it is Bill Gates, on the left wing it is Bezos/Elon. They got their clicks and ad revenue.

[WalterBright]

Personally, though, I would have taken with me as passengers the chief mechanic and the chief engineer, just to ensure the rocket works well!

[WalterBright]

Y'all might be interested that the Air Force used to take the chief mechanic along for the check ride after an overhaul. It wasn't policy, but it happened a lot. It ensured the airplanes got overhauled properly.

It's a good thing. I've also always been happy to fly on a 757. (I worked on the design of flight critical parts for it.)