"Ten minutes by air from Tampa to California" There's a conventional jet, then a rocket booster, then a hypersonic cruise, then deceleration and landing. So think the "ten minutes" bit is ingenuine.

But the underlying technology is interesting, even if I can't understand it.

dearMoon canceled! dearmoon.earth/pdf/dearMoon_EN_240601.pdf?0531

that's based on a Google Maps distance of Tampa's airport to the SE-most corner of California of about 3100km

drat I misspelled "or." that's a new low

@ErinAnne yep yep

Boeing to roll the dice on a leaky Starliner June 1: Here's how to watch

@uhoh hoping that all goes well, but it’s never a good feeling when there’s known issues on human payload missions

@ErinAnne like a 10-minute long roller coaster ride. I wonder if there’s a way to have seating that will swivel/adjust to keep it all as eyes-in acceleration. I feel like that’s more comfortable than eyes-out.

yeah I think 3G eyes-out could be a bad idea

I didn't watch the video, either, so maybe they have some kind of sensible explanation of what they meant, but my bet is that they're just another hypersonic vehicle startup. All the kids are hypersonic nowadays

unless they explain how they're going to solve any of the practical problems it all gets kinda tiresome

arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/…

after like a decade of CCDev I just...Starliner is so sad. Dragon 2's been a media darling and a damn fine vehicle and Starliner is just...sad

even Orion could downlink streaming video and it was first conceived in the 19th century before the term "engineer" was even coined

@ErinAnne almost exactly on the 4 year anniversary of the Demo-2 flight of Crew Dragon, no less

@ErinAnne "Starliner is just...sad" I feel the same way, but feel funny about saying it out loud (or in ASCII) I'm affraid I'll jinx it, then it will be my fault. Didn't the original crew commander gracefully bow out for "family reasons"?

@uhoh “family commitments in 2021” - in hindsight those were totally in danger of conflicting with the 2024 launch date

americaspace.com/2020/10/07/…

GLS issue, Starliner launch scrubbed for today.

This is a problem with large corporations. Once some average intelligence gets entrenched at the top, intelligent people below cannot survive for long.

And Elon Musk was able to reverse it.

@TheMatrixEquation-balance This is exactly the problem with most of the companies Elon has run - they needed to put in team to stop him breaking the company, as he is definitely average intelligence in most areas that companies consider important - so really good intelligent people below him tend to leave before he fires entire teams.

He has damaged so many companies, so very badly

Pretty much all the folks I know would leave any company that hooked up with Elon in order to avoid being dragged down

@RoryAlsop - I disagree with your effort to frame yourself as a person of average intelligence. You are much better than that. But in the corporate world, only people ambitious and not very intelligent make it to the top. And to reverse this natural trend, it takes constant fighting. This is what Elon does, for better or for the worst.

Why expecting happiness while spending the least amount of effort rarely work in life? philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/113594/…

@TheMatrixEquation-balance This is entirely a problem with the values capitalism encourages. It frames success as money/wealth. But folks like Elon, want employees who will all work themselves to the bone, which a) does not give the best results, b) harms employees and c) is contraindicated for any organisation wanting to be successful long term

Some folks are happy working at their hardest, and some aren't. Some deliver best output at high stress, most don't. Almost nobody is happy at the least amount of effort, but many are happy when their effort is recognised

@RoryAlsop - If you are really interested in the truth, you need to look at things from the Creator's point of view (God or the Matrix). And when you look from this perspective, especially in the historical context, you will realize that most of the time in history, it takes extreme efforts (wars, revolutions, Elon Musk) to achieve progress on a global scale.