Well, that's just a clever PR lipservice move. They couldn't win the contract because they didn't have the ability to, so rather than failing embarrassingly, they blamed their exit on their brand-new AI principles to make themselves look good. This was the consensus on HN at the time.
I lived in Florida, and recall hearing that much of the state is actually below sea level. I saw some forests, but much of the state is swamp, or former swamps that were drained for suburbia.
> Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp.
The view that it is worthless swamp, best turned into real estate, sugar cane, or other agriculture has greatly damaged the Everglades ecosystem. An ecosystem which replenishes the Biscayne Aquifer that the Miami metropolitan area drinks from, and which provides a bubble of fresh water to help prevent saltwater intrusion.
Going back to the main point, none of the natural land surface of Florida is below sea level, other than the trivial case of land exposed during low tide ("sea level" means "mean sea level").
If there were land below sea level, it would be covered by water. Most of the rock in Florida is porous limestone, which isn't an effective barrier to water. Parts of Miami flood during king tides, simply because of water rising up through the ground.
> Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” ...
This kind of comment is a disservice to all the engineers who actually figured it out. Elon Musk is certainly a visionary and a financier, but is not a 1000x engineer/mathematician who did all the work himself
The reality is that Elon is and was the Chief Engineer for the Falcon rocket family. He had the vision, the finance and he lead the engineering effort extremely directly and successfully. He overruled his top guys on multiple decisions and usually he turned out to be right.
Go listen to Tom Mueller on the design choices made for the Merlin example.
But of course nobody does everything himself, but for some reason I read this sort of comment made about Musk in every single thread but not with most other people.
While it is a good idea to spread to credit for SpaceX's acheivements around, Musk himself has done more engineering of products at SpaceX and Tesla than any of his peers. His title as CEO of both companies is somewhat misleading as he has very little involvement in business operations of either company and spends most of his time engineering.
Yes, it was very incremental. They even sent the orbiter around the moon on a mission before even attempting to land. And there were a number of other tests (manned and unmanned), and even ones without an official Apollo designation.
I assume to have those two directions as two camps in your company, fighting each other generates the most optimal result. If you fail, the cautious camp wins and carefull analysis and slow methodic itteration become stronger.
If you win, the move fast team takes over and pushes towards new exploration data and scaling up towards new problem areas.
Pre-sputnik and pre-Gagarin, the US approach to space exploration was conservative, and my understanding is that Braun was pushing for a less cautious approach [1]. One issue was apparently a reluctance to lean too heavily on 'Nazi' technology. This caution contrasted with the US' approach to airplane development, which had a lot of moving fast and breaking things (and people.)
Ironically, if von Braun had got what he wanted then, there may have been no Moon race and no Apollo program.
[1] Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, Mike Gray, ISBN 978-0393325133
Von Braun wanted to send people to the Moon (and he really wanted to get them to Mars), but I am guessing that if the US had adopted his plan to orbit a satellite with a modified Redstone rocket, and done so before Sputnik, followed by the first human orbital flight, there might not have been the impetus for a Moon race, no Apollo, and no Moon landing in 1969 or any time soon after. This speculation, of course, depends partly on how the USSR would have responded to these developments.
Von Brauns push for additional testing prevented the first human in space from beeing american.
"After the flight of Mercury-Redstone 2 in January 1961 experienced a string of problems, von Braun insisted on one more test before the Redstone could be deemed man-rated. His overly cautious nature brought about clashes with other people involved in the program, who argued that MR-2's technical issues were simple and had been resolved shortly after the flight. He overruled them, so a test mission involving a Redstone on a boilerplate capsule was flown successfully in March. Von Braun's stubbornness was blamed for the inability of the U.S. to launch a manned space mission before the Soviet Union, which ended up putting the first man in space the following month.[citation needed]"
I guess the story is more complicated than generalizations will allow. It is rarely obvious when decisions made in good faith will come back to haunt you, as with the decision to give the Apollo command module a sturdy hatch that could not be quickly jettisoned. For everyone saying the Shuttle booster 'O' rings were in danger of failing, there was someone saying that they had been fine so far.
In the case of MR-2, was the schedule to have an orbital flight before what turned out to be Gagarin's day of destiny? The response to Glenn's flight leaves little doubt that, in the popular view, it is orbital flight that counts as being 'in space', and the start of the Moon race might have hung on that perception.
As you described, the default is to yield, and so the vehicle can always yield and signal its intention to do so by breaking slowly. And I agree, there may not always be a sign (a storm or driver could knock it over), so the default should always be to yield.
That’s a good use case. Believe me I’m into man pages. Every 6 months I check the Apple store to see if anyone has created a good man pages app. But as primary learning material for most people: not so sure.
