
SpaceX makes history with successful first human space launch - dsavant
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/30/spacex-makes-history-with-successful-first-human-space-launch/
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macintux
Much discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361987)

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dang
Yes. We've merged most of this thread thither.

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jerome-jh
The first man in space was launched by the russians almost _60_ years ago.
That was history.

Then the americans sent men to the moon, that was history too, and _50_ years
ago.

We realized sending human into space was not really useful, so that more or
less stopped. The ISS was an international endeavor with questionable
scientific goals, but still it was fun and an unprecedented global
collaboration. The Mars rovers and some other space probes (Viking, Venera)
were true scientific achievements too.

What we see here is a private company re-learning how to send men in space and
calling this "history". No doubt it will be used to send highest paying
customer in space. It will also be used to send a large, low orbit satellite
constellation without the slightest amount of collaboration or concerting with
other space users. Other companies will compete to send their own
constellations, some of them will certainly fail in a few years and leave
their junk in space for tens of years. It has even been used to send a car
into space, although many scientists would have loved to send a useful payload
even in a test flight.

All this is financed by investors lured by the "dream" of sending men die on
Mars, and by a government that has lost the sense of reality. How great.

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huhtenberg
Mods, any chance you can give a boost to the launch coverage that is NOT from
TC, but from a bit more relevant and notable source?

Here's one from Ars, which had an excellent space coverage for ages -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23364529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23364529)

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dang
I don't see anything wrong with people posting TechCrunch articles to HN. All
these sites have their downsides and different users have different
preferences. But this is a duplicate of an earlier thread, so we'll move the
comments thither.

It's always worth changing the URL to a better source, though, so maybe we'll
use your URL on that one. Edit: it doesn't seem particularly substantive to me
either. So far I haven't seen an article that seems good enough to swap out
the main URL at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361987),
even though that livestream is past its best-before date.

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huhtenberg
For what it's worth and from where I'm sitting TC pretty much lost all of its
edge post-Arrington. It's now a mediocre source of regurgitated news on
ridiculously formatted pages with one of the longest list of 3rd party
trackers across all news sites. It's just... junk.

The live stream video should indeed be THE main thread for the event, no
argument there. It was just jarring to see it mid-page and the TC thread
sitting at the first spot.

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dang
Yeah, that's an artifact of the livestream spanning many hours while the
lifespan of HN submissions being measured in hours, so by the time the big
moment happened the thread was already halfway down the page. I've rolled back
the clock on the submission now to accommodate that.

I hear you about TC and will pay a bit more attention to that in the future,
but really we judge this by article quality rather than site quality
([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%20%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)),
so your best bet is always to propose a significantly better, specific
article. I'd have been happy to use the AT one instead, but it has other
problems: its first half is a photo collection, which is ok in principle but
raises other issues which I can explain if anyone cares; and its second half
swerves sharply into a political direction that would likely act as flamebait
here.

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airstrike
Great, but would prefer to read this from pretty much any source other than TC

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helsinki
Yes, the company, including Crunchbase, has little integrity. Trust me.

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J5892
Please elaborate.

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helsinki
I once pleaded with Crunchbase to remove a person from my former company’s
public-facing page, due to a legal and personal obligation I had.

They refused, pronouncing the integrity of their data. I lost a very valuable
friendship over that insignificant datum.

In addition to my loss, the person I requested to remove must now have this
page at the top of their google search results, which is a shame, especially
given that I added them to the page without their consent, which at the time
did not have such apparent consequences.

For what it’s worth, it was a small, two-person company. In my opinion, they
should have respected my humble request.

After this experience and others, I do often question the integrity of the
data-centric, journalistic community in NYC.

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macinjosh
Elon Musk is the greatest American alive.

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ardit33
he is not american though.... he is from South Africa...

So, yea +1 for 'smart immigration' in the US.

Edit: Elon has South African, Canadian and US citizenship... so, what he
calls/considers himself, it is up to him.

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101404
He's an African American, but still American.

 _Edit: why the downvote? Is he not?_

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benjohnson
Honestly... it's complicated. As I understand it, African-American is one of
the more recent ways of saying (with the intent of being polite) that someone
is a black skinned and ethnically African and is American.

The term was not meant to extend to corner cases like mine - I'm white, but
one of my ancestors grew up on the African continent in an island in the
Atlantic and spoke Portuguese.

I suspect that this term will fall out of favor soon and be replaced by
another.

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101404
By that logic, does American Asian only refer to people with certain facial
characteristics? And are American Europeans only those with a white skin
color?

I mean here in Europe we have plenty of Europeans that are not white. So, if a
black skinned German went to the US, people would suddenly label him "African"
American, just based on his skin color?

That seems quite a racist use of those terms tbh.

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krapp
Americans of European descent tend to refer to themselves by nation of
immigrant origin (eg: Italian American, Irish American, etc.)

However, because African slaves brought to the New World were denied the
ability to culturally identify with, or even know (after generations) which
African nation or tribe they descended from, the only common cultural identity
they could form, apart from that which slavery had forced upon them, was as a
diaspora from "Africa" as a whole.

"African American" is a term with a specific cultural and historical context
behind it linked to the identity of the descendants of slaves and to black
immigrants from Africa, and there is controversy about its use even within the
black community, but it isn't going to correctly refer to the descendant of
white Dutch colonizers in South Africa even if it does _technically_ fit. Or
at least not without coming across as racist itself.

Consider that racist if you like, but race and culture are messy and
complicated everywhere, not just in the US.

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101404
I will consider it racist, yes, I prefer a "colorblind" world. Btw, every
person in South Africa is the descendent of a "colonizer", black or white.

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krapp
"Colorblind" often means pretending racism no longer exists and ignoring it,
or worse, considering it racist to do otherwise.

While it might be nice to live in a "post-racial" world, it should be obvious
that we don't, yet.

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101404
Racism will exist as long as people look at the skin color or other generic
markers to judge others. If you think it's okay to do so, that's sad.

Fighting racism with even more racism, will world three opposite result. It's
not the first time in human history, that people mean well and create hell.
It's just a different topic this time.

