

The Story Behind Upcoming Film “Spacesuit” (2013) - cromulent
http://www.thecredits.org/2013/09/bras-in-space-the-incredible-true-story-behind-upcoming-film-spacesuit/

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gdubs
"Moon Machines" \-- an incredible series if you haven't seen it, with episodes
on building the flight computer, etc -- has an excellent episode on the story
behind the spacesuit:

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxxikn_moon-
machines-2008-p...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxxikn_moon-
machines-2008-part-5-the-space-suit_tech)

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AYBABTME
Just finished watching the whole series after your comment 6h ago. Was very
nice, and gave perspective to engineering practices, notably testing, time
management, complexity management. All kinds of things we have to deal with in
the immaterial software world, they had to deal with at such large scale, with
little room for error.

Also the episode about the guidance software was all the more relevant.

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gdubs
Great way to spend a Sunday! Yes, the guidance software episode is
particularly relevant; it was the first one I watched. Puts today's software
engineering in perspective.

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efiftythree
There really needs to be more, very public, displays of stories like this one.
Whenever I hear someone ask why we should invest in missions to Mars and/or
the Moon this is the kind of thing I think about. How many amazing things that
we take completely for granted were created in order for us to send humans to
the moon and live in space?

Setting our sights on harsh and distant destinations creates a massive vacuum
of technological innovation. I firmly believe that solutions to energy,
hunger, conservation/human impact on ecosystems can be found on our journey to
the further reaches of space.

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declan
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying -- these articles are great reads -- but
remember there's also the opportunity cost of taking money via taxes from
entrepreneurs and private-sector innovators who, in aggregate, would surely
have come up with some of their own innovations with additional resources. And
perhaps they would have been even more useful to humanity.

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pedrocr
As far as I know the argument for that is not very strong. Despite all the
mythology around entrepreneurship startups are known to be good at piecing
together existing technology into scalable businesses, not primary research.
Moonshot level breakthroughs need large sums of money being thrown into the
unknown. And that is something for the state like in the foundation of SV[1]
or large monopolies like Bell Labs inventing the transistor.

[1] [http://steveblank.com/secret-history/](http://steveblank.com/secret-
history/)

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declan
Ah, but I wasn't talking only about startups.

NASA has received something like $800 billion in funding in current dollars. I
suspect you would agree that, if that sum had been left in the private sector,
_some_ interesting and innovative things would have come of it. Obviously we
can disagree about the amount.

There's also the separate argument that lavishing so much funding and
authority on NASA allowed it to squash the private space industry for many
decades, setting humanity back many years. This was the case until fairly
recently, when the 1998 Commercial Space Act helped to change this.

Here's an article I wrote in 2007 about NASA. Unfortunately the original
appears to have disappeared in a CNET site redesign last month but (sigh)
FreeRepublic copied and pasted it here:

[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1908035/posts](http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1908035/posts)
Space, by contrast, until recently has remained the domain of NASA. Burt
Rutan, the aerospace engineer famous for building a suborbital rocket plane
that won the Ansari X Prize, believes NASA is crowding out private efforts.
"Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan
said during a recent panel discussion at the California Institute of
Technology. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned
spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by
saying), 'No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old
technology.'"

Also remember that government bureaucracies aren't exactly known for their
careful use of funds. The Space Shuttle concept was pitched to the public as
costing only $5 million a flight; it ended up costing $1.3 billion a flight,
with a 1-in-50 chance of disaster upon each launch.

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pedrocr
The options aren't 800billion for NASA or 800billion for Burt Rutan. The
options are 800 billion for NASA or a slightly lower tax rate for millions of
people and corporations, mostly the wealthier ones (as those pay the most
tax). Do you still think those dollars would have generated as much innovation
in the private sector?

I agree that NASA hasn't done the best use of its money, the space shuttle was
particularly useless. But the solution for that isn't to not have these large
well-funded research programs. It's probably to make more efficient use of the
private sector to run parts of them. But even NASA does that already. This
article itself was about an underwear company designing a space suit because
NASA contracted it out. Do you think these guys would have developed the
technology they did if it wasn't for the Moonshot?

Even your article just seems to argue that NASA is late in letting go of now
mature stuff and letting the private sector take over. Do you actually think
we would have ever gone to the moon without the USA/USSR space race? Even the
aviation comparison is suspect. How much of the technology in the modern
airliner is the result of large governments funding military aviation?

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ars
According to Wikipedia this article isn't really very accurate.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILC_Dover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILC_Dover)

They lost the contract because the suit didn't work, not because of
bureaucracy.

The company that made it was already making pressure suits for the Navy and
Air Force, they were not a bra maker (a sister division did make bras, but the
parent was primarily a latex company not a bra company, they made life rafts,
canteens etc).

This article is basically the Hollywood version of the story: i.e. just a
small resemblance to reality, but mostly story, little fact.

