11

Advanced Concepts / Re: Moving The Cloud to orbit

« Last post by Vultur on Today at 01:45 am »

A lot of the things that failed in the dotcom bubble exist now ... But it took a long time to get there, and the initial company didn't survive (e.g. Pets.com then vs Chewy today, Teledesic then vs. Starlink today).

Small quibble, the comparison with the dotcom bubble isn't with Pets.com, but with the financial practices of companies like worldcom and cisco. (Using "investments" in clients to prop up revenue, masking liabilities as income, industry-wide revaluing of assets to (fictionally) improve balance sheets whenever investors got skittish, etc.)

That's another comparison, sure.

But I think the idea that an application of a technology can be technologically workable, but not economically viable until everything else around it is "ready for it", is also valid.

There's a lot of discussion of AI that seems to present it as a binary Worthless Slop/Bubble vs World Changing Next Industrial Revolution argument. I am saying that it doesn't have to be one or the other, and that near term bubble and long term success are compatible.

Thus a large part of my concern with current AI data center efforts ... I think that the timeline means they're fairly likely to come on line at exactly the wrong part of that curve.

I don't think Starship will have the kind of launch rate needed anything like as soon as Musk hopes, and I think it's pretty likely the current AI market situation will shake out before that (one way or another, whether that's a huge bubble burst or Google winning definitively or...) so orbital data centers won't be able to contribute meaningfully to how that's resolved.

That doesn't mean that orbital data centers might not make sense in the long term, but trying it now seems super questionable.

12

SpaceX Falcon Missions Section / Re: SpaceX F9 : Starlink group 17-25 : VSFB SLC-4E : 21 February 2026 (09:00 UTC)

« Last post by zubenelgenubi on Today at 01:41 am »

https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/supplemental/
Supplemental GP Element Sets
Current as of 2026 Feb 19 02:17:09 UTC (Day 050)

Starlink G17-25 Pre-Launch   
Derived from a pre-launch Starlink-G17-25 state vector, provided by SpaceX. SupGP data is provided for the entire stack, as well as one for a single satellite.

Launch: 2026-02-21 09:00:00 UTC.
Deploy: 2026-02-21 10:02:06.740 UTC.
Launch window: 2026-02-21 09:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-21 09:04:19 UTC.

Backup Launch Opportunity #1   
Launch: 2026-02-21 09:10:40 UTC.
Deploy: 2026-02-21 10:12:46.740 UTC.
Launch window: 2026-02-21 09:10:40 UTC to 2026-02-21 09:11:29 UTC.

Backup Launch Opportunity #2   
Launch: 2026-02-21 09:57:10 UTC.
Deploy: 2026-02-21 10:59:16.740 UTC.
Launch window: 2026-02-21 09:57:10 UTC to 2026-02-21 09:57:59 UTC.

Backup Launch Opportunity #3   
Launch: 2026-02-21 09:58:00 UTC.
Deploy: 2026-02-21 11:00:06.740 UTC.
Launch window: 2026-02-21 09:58:00 UTC to 2026-02-21 10:08:29 UTC.

Backup Launch Opportunity #4   
Launch: 2026-02-21 10:08:30 UTC.
Deploy: 2026-02-21 11:10:36.740 UTC.
Launch window: 2026-02-21 10:08:30 UTC to 2026-02-21 10:09:49 UTC.

Backup Launch Opportunity #5   
Launch: 2026-02-21 10:09:50 UTC.
Deploy: 2026-02-21 11:11:56.740 UTC.
Launch window: 2026-02-21 10:09:50 UTC to 2026-02-21 10:11:49 UTC.

Backup Launch Opportunity #6   
Launch: 2026-02-21 10:56:20 UTC.
Deploy: 2026-02-21 11:58:26.740 UTC.
Launch window: 2026-02-21 10:56:20 UTC to 2026-02-21 10:58:19 UTC.

13

Advanced Concepts / Re: Moving The Cloud to orbit

« Last post by Paul451 on Today at 01:35 am »

A lot of the things that failed in the dotcom bubble exist now ... But it took a long time to get there, and the initial company didn't survive (e.g. Pets.com then vs Chewy today, Teledesic then vs. Starlink today).

Small quibble, the comparison with the dotcom bubble isn't with Pets.com, but with the financial practices of companies like worldcom and cisco. (Using "investments" in clients to prop up revenue, masking liabilities as income, industry-wide revaluing of assets to (fictionally) improve balance sheets whenever investors got skittish, etc.)

14

SpaceX Falcon Missions Section / Re: SpaceX F9/Dragon 2 : CRS2 SpX-34 : CCSFS SLC-40 : May 2026

« Last post by TJL on Today at 01:26 am »

Patch for SpX CRS-34...

15

General Discussion / Re: Musk: Moon Over Mars

« Last post by Greg Hullender on Today at 01:26 am »

And why aren't people who do think AI is a likely threat to humanity suggesting that?

It's not hard to find people suggesting that--try r/antiai on Reddit--but they're all cranks. They're like the anti-GMO people or the anti-vaccine people: they'll all off-topic for this thread!

16

Spaceflight Entertainment and Hobbies / Re: Star Trek Starfleet Academy TV Show

« Last post by JH on Today at 01:25 am »

As someone who counts watching Star Trek among my earliest memories, I am glad they are still trying to do new things with the IP. Better than yet another Star Wars movie about a giant laser that’s going to blow up a planet.

And I can’t say I like everything in the new series, but claiming the writers are either ignorant of or indifferent to previous Star Trek shows mostly demonstrates that you haven’t watched much of the recent shows.

17

SpaceX Facilities and Fleets / Re: Starbase Air Separation Unit (ASU) plant

« Last post by AndrewM on Today at 01:13 am »

Clips of the ASU from the Starbase "dailies"

"Is B19 taking the punishment for B18's failure?" | SpaceX Starbase [Feb. 6]

"Booster 19: Don't call it a comeback..." | SpaceX Starbase [Feb. 10]

"Test Tank is in the air at Starbase" | SpaceX Starbase [Feb. 11]

"Will this be enough water for Starship?" | SpaceX Starbase [Feb. 17]

18

Space Policy Discussion / Re: Jared Isaacman as NASA's 15th administrator

« Last post by yg1968 on Today at 01:11 am »

[Klotz] " A robotic mission to where?"
[Isaacman] "This conversation was very specific to Mars"
[Klotz] "So you want to fly something to Mars in 2028?"
[Isaacman] "Oh we definitely will. We are not going to give up the window."
[Klotz] (rolls eyes)

Irene was not born yesterday.

She didn't roll her eyes. It's at 9 minutes of the video:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=64097.msg2760037#msg2760037

19

General Discussion / Re: Musk: Moon Over Mars

« Last post by Vultur on Today at 01:10 am »

My own philosophy is different. I believe that the AI takeover is inevitable, so I hope that the resulting superintellegence will be a worthy successor to human civilization, whether or not the result includes any humans.

I don't understand this. If I believed this (I certainly do not), I would think the logical course of action would be reducing technology to a level where AI could no longer be developed. Doesn't that possibility in itself mean it's not inevitable? And why aren't people who do think AI is a likely threat to humanity suggesting that?

(before you answer "because 90% of the world would starve", I don't think we need modern levels of computerization to feed the world. Taking computerization out of hardware, scaling back to pre-Internet communication media, etc. wouldn't starve humanity.

and no, I'm not suggesting this myself, but that's because I don't believe AI is an existential threat in that sense.)

20

Spaceflight Entertainment and Hobbies / Re: Star Trek Starfleet Academy TV Show

« Last post by montyrmanley on Today at 01:07 am »

Yes. But a new, younger fan is more useful than an older fan. Something that you have to filter out--which is really hard for people to do--is that angry, middle-aged guys banging away on their computers about Star Trek or ranting about it on YouTube are not the target audience. Paramount wrote them off 17 years ago. Older people are not as susceptible to advertising as younger people are (you can look that up) and therefore advertisers pay less for them. The fans they're trying to attract are younger, which explains why they created Prodigy and why they created Starfleet Academy. It also explains why they did not approve Legacy, because making a show to appeal to the 45-70-year-old demographic was of no interest to them.

Once you filter that out, however, I think the problem is that the Trek producers don't really have a good idea of how to attract new fans. But also, they're more focused on that than they are on having something to say, or writing good stories. They're just doing what they know how to do. They don't believe in anything so they don't have anything interesting to say.

Disney found this out the hard way with their various takes on the Star Wars IP. There *arent' any* "new fans". The Modern Audience(TM) does not exist, at least not in enough numbers to make up for all old fans they abandoned. The IP's have thus gone into death-spirals from which they will probably not recover. Everybody assumed that the brand would be enough, that just saying something was "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" would be enough to trigger the "Hey, I know what that is!" monkey-brain response. Alas, that turned out not to be the case. Now both IPs are essentially dead brands. (Which is quite a feat when you consider what a dominant consumer brand Star Wars was even a decade ago. Star Trek, alas, has been on the wane culturally for decades now.)

The young 'uns have been migrating away from scripted dramas for a long time now. A lot of the 15-30 male demographic mainly consumes gaming and sports content these days (and p**n, I guess), and in fairly small chunks. It's not a question of patience or attention-span, really; lots of young people spend hours watching user-created content on the various streaming services. But the new stuff is far from the staid scripted stuff the studios and advertisers are putting out -- it's raw, unedited, raunchy, fast-paced, and all over the place thematically. It's highly targeted at audiences in specific interest groups: gamers, sports fans, hobbyists, etc. As technology progresses, production values go up and costs go down; some of the biggest names are niche streamers on YouTube. PewDiePie was the vanguard of a flood of new creators who can pull nightly audiences in the millions -- and these millions are engaged, loyal, and willing to spend. Advertisers are struggling to monetize this market because they know it's the future.

Hollywood has been dying for a long time now. AI is only going to hasten a process that was already well underway. The "golden age of television" in the 2000's was simply the last gasp of a dying industry. Disney, with the Marvel and Star Wars properties, consumed the seed corn and left the fields barren and dead. The whole concept of the movie star or celebrity director has passed away. Oh, sure, we still have Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, and a few others in the director's chair who can get movies made on their names alone, but they are the remnants of a dying breed. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt likewise are all that remain of the old "movie star" cohort, and even they are finding it difficult to get audience rear-ends into the seats.

I think we space nerds feel the loss of Star Trek keenly because for many of us it was the gateway drug that fired our interest in the space program. It was -- at least, usually -- an actual science-fiction show. It had space travel, aliens, and scientific curiosity (however silly the "science" usually was). It wasn't a show about space wizards and magic like Star Wars; it wasn't a post-apocalyptic nightmare like "Mad Max" (or the newer Fallout show). It was (mostly) an optimistic take on humanity as it moved out into the stars.

Hollywood simply does not have the capacity to re-create the Star Trek we all knew and loved. Millennials and Zoomers have neither the background in classic sci-fi nor the scientific curiosity to write good Star Trek stories any more. All they know is cheap relationship drama and gaudy effects-driven action, so that's all they can produce. It's not even their fault to a certain extent; modern Hollywood scribes (with a few exceptions) have never read Heinlein or Asimov, much less Shakespeare or Homer. They grew up reading J. K. Rowling and Maya Angelou and Stephanie Meyer. Even JJ Abrams, who is old enough to know better, was always more about spectacle and relationship drama than ideas -- he clearly wanted to be the next Spielberg, but lacked Spielberg's sense of humanity and Spielberg's ability to center his stories on human beings rather than the spectacle itself. Millennials and Zoomers, for the most part, are ignorant of literature and film prior to the 1990's, and this is true of Hollywood writers and producers (and actors) as well. Again, it's not their fault; they were just never taught.

Novels are a dead art form, and scripted movies and episodic shows are quickly following. Novels and scripted shows share a necessary link to the written word, a founding on "drama" as it has been practiced since the earliest playwrights in Greece. But those days are passing away, probably forever. Humanity is leaving the written word -- at least as a repository of culture and entertainment -- behind. As an old guy, I can feel bad about this, but it is the way of things.