Especially when co-president Musk is tweeting that the F-35 is a dud and the US should leave NATO.
That's a double whammy for European countries who signed on to spend hundreds of billions on these planes in the belief that they're part of a NATO security umbrella. Now it seems like NATO will soon be in shambles and the planes might not even fly if that one drunk frat guy with Nazi tattoos running the Pentagon says so.
Finland bought F-35's recently, and the Finnish government is saying that nothing should change because America will hopefully be back to normal before the fighters are delivered. I don't think that kind of ostrich strategy is going to pay off.
Finland can't afford that kind of thing. It's a bit unique because it has a large and well-trained army (by European standards) but a smallish defense budget.
The Finnish military basically runs on the collective trauma of the last Russian invasion. There's a general conscription for male citizens, and reserve forces receive regular refresh training to keep their skills active. But you can't transform that kind of spirit into fighter planes.
I lived there for years as a legal resident. During Covid I got a national interest exception allowing me to return to USA from Europe while the border was closed to non-citizens. So I have reason to believe my immigration sheet is clean.
I’m still afraid to go back now. It seems like they’re simply making an example by throwing random people into weeks of detention at the border. A green card holder credibly claims he was tortured over a decade-old marijuana misdemeanor on his record.
Needless to say this perception is pretty bad for American tourism, business travel, conferences, etc.
The woman who had anti-Trump photos on her phone. The woman who had "sympathetic" photos of Hezbollah on the phone. The professor who attended a Pro-Palestinian protest.
I don't get it. I thought we were free speech people. Now we are literal thought police? Since when is it illegal to have a picture on your phone that isn't CSAM?
And before people ask, yes I believe in free speech for everyone, even people I dislike and don't agree with.
>The woman who had "sympathetic" photos of Hezbollah on the phone
Although I personally disagree with her, I think you're correct here. They clearly wanted to make an example of her.
>The professor who attended a Pro-Palestinian protest.
This is disingenuous, he was the leader of the group that organizes those protests. In Europe, I probably wouldn't be welcome too long if I was the leader of a neo-nazi group while on a visa.
I wasn't very convinced by his arguments - the main one being:
Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.
To be a little snarky here - so Senior NASA officials: honest, Musk: liar?
If, hypothetically, NASA was pressured for political reasons, I don't think Senior NASA officials would reveal it to the public anyway. So the fact that they said it's not for political reasons doesn't really prove anything for either side of the argument.
What about all the other things. For example the crew dragon was docked back in september waiting for return. The last administration could have called for return at any point before the inaguration to claim glory, but didn't because they aren't hacks.
Having a docked ship is not enough. There must be a docked ship on station at all times for evacuations. The thing that was needed was another ship to take some people back and not everyone (well, all but any Russians, since they have their own ships).
Wrong, they could have packed all 4 astronauts (the 2 that came to the ISS on the dragon and Suni and Butch) into the docked dragon and returned at any point. They only waited for the next dragon (crew 10) so that not only the 3 people using the Soyuz would be left on the ISS. But this would have absolutely been possible. The remaining crew would have used their Soyuz in emergencies anyways, they don’t need the dragon.
There's way more than just them. Thanks to all the delays the 4-man SpaceX Crew-8 [1] stayed on the ISS until October 23rd, becoming the longest Dragon stay ever. And the 3-man crew from Soyuz MS-26 got there on September 11th, and is still there.
In fact reading the Soyuz MS-26 Wiki, one of the many records this whole debacle ended up breaking is that when the MS-26 entered into space, there were more humans in space than ever before, with a total of 19!
Did you read my comment? Currently, there is one Dragon and one Soyuz docked to the ISS. If Crew-9 had left earlier, before the Crew-10 Dragon had arrived, there would have been only the Soyuz left.
Do the Soyuz still touch down in a desert in a place like Kazakhstan or do they touch down on water nowadays? The desert solid ground touch downs seem so brutal.
Soyuz is always landing on ground (except in emergencies, and Soyuz 23 broke through a frozen lake). They do have Retro rockets that are fired shortly before contact and dampened Seats, but from the reports I heard, it's still a very rough landing.
But Crew 10 had also been planned for a while, so the narrative that Trump ordered a new ship to go up "NOW" can't be true. For example, heres a post about NASA moving the launch date to March, in December last year: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/commercialcrew/2024/12/17/nasa-ad...
This is definitely true. The only questions are: a) could they have gone back home on the retrofitted seats on Crew 8 or b) could there had been a Crew 10 sooner to allow them to go home on Crew 9 sooner. I don't really know what's up with those questions.
Did they care more about "not manipulating NASA for political points" than about astronauts who were stuck in space for 9 months, with all the harmful effects that it entails?
Standard rotations are about 6 months - Butch and Suni were supposed to be up there for 8 days... Their families, their lives, and everything normal for way longer than planned. Health routines or not, that’s a brutal toll—mentally, emotionally, not just bones and muscles. Stop downplaying it like it’s no big deal
Just because they signed up for it, doesn't mean we shouldn't try our best to prevent it. Staying for 9 months in space is not a small deal for people's health.
So NASA did indeed try to prevent it, and weighed it against a multitude of other considerations, and actual experts running actual missions have explicitly and patiently explained the what, the how, and the why.
>All you said are literally in the descriptions of the jobs they signed up for.
Dismissing every exceptional circumstance as "the jobs they signed up for." is absurd. That's like saying the crash of flight 5342 that killed 67 people is what those passengers signed up for, so it's no big deal.
Turns out they were prepared for this circumstance, had a back up plan, and communicated this plan many times.
Just because you don't like this plan doesn't mean it's bad/political/whatever other fantasy you may come up with.
> That's like saying the crash of flight 5342 that killed 67 people is what those passengers signed up for, so it's no big deal.
Nope, it isn't like that at all. None of those passengers trained, rigorously, for an extreme number of extreme situations. Unlike astronauts whose training includes all that, and more.
And risk and exceptional circumstances are absolutely one hundred percent in the job description. Unlike the passengers in the your analogy you pulled out of an unmentionable place.
An earlier article[1] goes into more detail about how the decision was actually made, which provides more perspective about truth vs narrative. It is much more interesting than the one linked by the GP.
NASA in practice isn't what most people think it is. A lot of stuff they're doing is just a mixture of a terrible idea (SLS) and will never go anywhere (Artemis), amongst others. People in-the-know in space are fully aware of this, including NASA officials.
But they keep cheerleading it all and pretending that everything will just be awesome. The reason is that NASA is basically forced to be political (at least their heads seem to feel that way), or their funding will get cut. And this also trickles all the way down to the astronauts who play politics for the sake of being able to keep flying.
It's become a highly dysfunctional organization, so yeah - "Senior NASA official" is certainly not a reliable source on anything remotely related to politics, and this is hard in that domain.
Blaming NASA for SLS is something I keep seeing but isn't it entirely congressional pork barrel politics that makes the SLS what it is? What degree of control does NASA itself have to force a project of that scale not to devolve into such a mess despite congressional corruption?
It's a mutual affair. Congress dictates the programs and NASA carries them out with substantial discretion. But I think the thing that really makes NASA deserve the blame is that they cheerlead for it all endlessly, and compel their astronauts to do similarly. More or less literally every single interview NASA carries out or does with their astronauts, they'll make sure SLS/Artemis are brought up, and pretend it's all just amazing.
This results a very misled electorate, which are the exact people that could (at least in theory) put pressure on their representatives in Congress to stop wasting tens of billions of dollars that could have easily had us on the Moon, if not Mars, long ago. But even more in general - people are forced into doing stupid things all the time. That's part of life. But the second that you begin praising those things, you are now a part of the problem.
Exactly. If NASA had full control over how and where SLS money got spent, I can guarantee you the thing would've been a success a decade ago or more, and we'd have American boots on lunar ground full-time by now.
And how does that relate to this particular issue? Had they been playing political games for the sake of funding, they would've immediately jumped as soon as Musk and Trump barked, right?
Instead they carefully and patiently explained all the issues, and what is going on.
And yet, still, "ah yes, it's NASA that is lying for political clout, not the very public very shameless very serial liars"
NASA announced last August that the Starliner crew would return on SpaceX Crew-9 in Feb 2025.[1] This was discussed on Hacker News at the time.[2] Crew-9 was launched in September 2024.[3] Crew-9's return was delayed waiting for the launch of Crew-10, originally scheduled for Feb 2025, but pushed back to March. [4] Anyone repeating the claim that Trump and/or Musk "decided" to return the Starliner crew is spreading lies, deliberately or unwittingly.
The return vessel was docked in September. The return was always planned to be around today, not in September.
Trump and Musk are lying about the astronauts being forgotten. They're lying when they claim Biden abandoned them.
As far as I can tell, NASA didn't delay for political reasons. Nor did they allow the return journey today for political reasons. This was the plan all along (well, once the initial plans had to be scrapped for technical reasons).
Probably cherry picking their c-span interview on March 4:
> Asked about the claims of political motivations for their extended stay, Wilmore said that Musk and Trump may have information “that we are not privy to.”
But then he says:
> But, he said, “from my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all. From our standpoint, I think that they would agree, we came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short.”
(Note: I don't know anything about the X account. It was just the first result I found.)
Edit: Also it sucks that I can't ask a genuine question on this website without getting downvoted to oblivion. Whatever the answer, it would be nice to get it without being judged.
The astronauts in that clip say they have no information on who said what to whom, so it takes the wind out of the sails of the statement that everything Musk says is factual.
> Also it sucks that I can't ask a genuine question on this website without getting downvoted to oblivion
You asked a question in a confrontational manner, and which had the same misrepresentation as various political operatives have been using. I think you got caught up in looking like you knew the answer but were hoping that readers did not, which is common enough that many people try to discourage it here.
You (and others apparently) applied an incorrect emotion to my unemotional comment. Typical text only communication. The whole point of the "genuinely asking" part was to show I wasn't trying to "gotcha" anyone.
I have barely followed the issue but had heard the astronauts confirmed Musk's side. How else was I supposed to ask about that? What magical wording could I use so that all of you don't try to put me in a belief box?
> Wilmore: I can tell you at the outset, all of us have the utmost respect for Mr. Musk, and obviously, respect and admiration for our president of the United States, Donald Trump. We appreciate them. We appreciate all that they do for us, for human space flight, for our nation. The words they said, politics, I mean, that's part of life. We understand that. And there's an important reason why we have a political system, a political system that we do have, and we're behind it 100 percent. We know what we've lived up here, the ins and outs, and the specifics that they may not be privy to. And I'm sure that they have some issues that they are dealing with, information that they have, that we are not privy to. So when I think about your question, that's part of life, we are on board with it.
> Wilmore: From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all. From our standpoint, I think that they would agree, we came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short. That's what we do in human spaceflight.
> Wilmore: I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual. We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went. That's information that we simply don't have. So I believe him. I don't know all those details, and I don't think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for.
To be honest "what he says, is absolutely factual. We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went" should register quite highly on anyone's political bullshit meter because "absolutely factual" is a statement that makes a claim that they then say they don't have any facts about.
Anyone who reports those quotes as "comfirming Musk's version" should lose a lot of trust.
And keep in mind that the people saying these things - while doubtless busy for the last three months - have not been locked in isolation. Even the barest hint of recent news would make it clear to them that negative comments about Mr. Trump & Mr. Musk could destroy their own careers, and threaten the programs they have worked on and the lives and careers of their co-workers.
no idea. However the above comment is easily verifiable. Here is a link saying that the return would be around February 2025 [1]. There seems no reason to believe either trump or Elon forced some sort of rush, or Biden and his administration ignored or caused some sort of slowdown. It looks like a schedule was planned and followed.
I can’t believe anyone took these claims seriously for even a moment.
Musk was a bullshitter even at his best, and he has fallen far from that peak in the past couple of years. Just go to his Twitter feed and see an unending stream of absolute nonsense.
Trump shows no indication that he even understands the concept of truth.
And yet somehow people manage to say, “NASA says X, Musk and Trump say Y, who knows who’s right?”
In a situation where everyone has an incentive to lie, there's no reason to believe anyone.
Musk and Trump have a history of exaggarating, to say it lightly, but NASA, like most of the government entities, hasn't been transparent with their internal processes either.
Imagine you have two friends. Both are known to be the kind of people who eat off of other people’s plates.
You go to dinner with both of them. And while you’re distracted, some food fries disappear from your plate.
At this point, it’s similar. Since both friends steal food, it could be either.
Except, you’ve actually been to dinner many times with both. And you actually know a little more. You know that friend A always takes some of your fries. And friend B has always preferred snatching the croutons from your salad. But right now, you’ve got some missing fries. So… most likely the fry snatcher is at it again.
Coming back to the real world of liars. We’ve observed that trump and and musk stretch the truth to gain the trust/confidence/adoration of others. Braggart style behavior. NASA is less than transparent when it comes to motives behind various pork barrel things. But when it comes to “why’d something not work” they actually have a record of being mind numbing thorough and verbose.
So I personally have no problem pinning the less than desirable behavior around this on Trump and Musk.
It's more like, while you're distracted, your entire plate disappears and friend A tells you that friend C took it. Friend A is known to hate C and frequently makes up completely fabricated accusations about C's behavior. Friend A also frequently fabricates nonsense stories about all sorts of other things. Friend B is known for stealing croutons.
Honestly, the best evidence that Biden did not block a rescue mission is Trump and Musk saying that he did.
I don’t see much incentive for NASA to lie. Or rather, the incentive goes the other way. The “who cares about the truth” approach would be to curry favor with the new administration by agreeing with their claims.
There’s also a world of difference between “not transparent” and the Musk/Trump approach to the truth where you’re more likely to be correct if you just assume everything they say is false.
- They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.
- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September
- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats
- Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025
The advent of Trump and Musk into government seems not to have changed that plan one whit, which makes absolutely no sense if they're telling the truth.
Berger wrote two books on SpaceX in a very positive light generally, portraying Musk as extraordinarily driven and capable though not passing over less admirable traits. Berger is not a hater.
Yeah, instead of evaluating a journalist by looking at over a decade of high-quality work he has done writing about this space, let’s pull up a joke from one article and judge that.
Do you realize that you’re the one behaving like a low-quality Redditor here.
Basically any online article site like ars comes across as a Redditor with reddit-tier takes and a mixture of ChatGPT. If you graduate to something like the NYT then you sound like a lobbyist.
Just noting 'throne of lies' is a subheading and not in the body of the article. I don't know how Ars Technica does things, but in some news outlets a separate editor have control over titles and subheading rather than the author of the article.
IIRC Ars has stated that the story author is the ones that writes the headers/subheaders, but they write multiple and A/B testing picks the one to show.
Eric Berger used to be a major standout from them, and has traditionally never delved into the partisan nonsense. I've recommended him, on this account alone, countless times. He was a diamond surrounded by a pile of crap.
It's extremely out of character and the writing on this exact topic is somewhat contradicted by other articles he himself wrote on it, like this [1] one. I have a suspicion he's being pressured to increase engagement/subscriptions, and it's trivial to do that in the age of such extreme political derangement.
“For what it is worth, all of the reporting done by Ars over the last nine months suggests the decision to return Wilmore and Williams this spring was driven by technical reasons and NASA's needs on board the International Space Station, rather than because of politics.”
Read the article I linked above, also written by Eric Berger! Butch confirmed Elon's claim that he made an offer to bring them home last year was accurate. So we know that that offer was made, and must have been rejected. What we don't know is why.
But the real thing here is that Eric Berger has written extensively about the political games NASA plays or (depending on one's perspective) is compelled to play. They support a lot of fundamentally flawed programs that are either a complete waste of money or will never go anywhere, like SLS/Artemis. The reason they do this is because, in NASA's case, their funding depends on it and, in the astronauts' case, because they'll never fly again if they don't play ball.
So you don't simply take things NASA says at face value - again something he has written about ad nauseum. His understanding of the industry, and the games surrounding it, are part of what made (and hopefully in the future continues to make) him such an excellent reporter. But this latest article just dumps all of that and is written with all the insight and worldview of somebody on /r/politics.
This is the main quote from the Willmore interview you linked, that seems most relevant:
"I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual. We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went. That's information that we simply don't have. So I believe him. I don't know all those details, and I don't think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for."
That has to be a nominee for doublespeak quote of the year -- and that's not a low bar this year.
I think the most likely scenario is that a message made its way up the grapevine to him along the lines of 'We're working with Elon to look at getting you guys brought back home on a Dragon.', nothing more, nothing less. NASA awarded a ~$270k contract to SpaceX on July 14th called "Special Study for Emergency Response." NASA claimed that study had nothing to do with Starliner, but that was probably a typical administrative lie of the sort Eric Berger has regularly pointed out (until this article...):
"NASA said this study was not directly related to Starliner's problems, but two sources told Ars it really was. Although the study entailed work on flying more than four crew members home on Crew Dragon—a scenario related to Frank Rubio and the Soyuz MS-22 leaks—it also allowed SpaceX to study flying Dragon home with six passengers, a regular crew complement in addition to Wilmore and Williams."
Nobody knows the details of exactly what was offered, or why it was rejected, besides Elon and whoever he was talking to in the previous administration. But at this point I think one cannot reasonable argue that no offer was made. And we know because of what happened that it was rejected. So the only question remaining is why.
That interview doesn't really say much. It is mostly an carefully worded, polite but empty statement made after earlier extemporaneous comments by Suni and Butch seemingly contradicted Musk. The headline claim is basically just Butch saying he has no insight into the decision process but he trusts Musk is telling the truth.
In contrast other articles Eric wrote talking to people who where involved in the decision of how and when to return Butch and Suni, those officials clearly state that the decision was made for technical and programmatic reasons, not political pressure.
I 100% agree he's phrasing things 'politically', but think about how you might also be reading what you want to read. For instance the section where you [reasonably] claim he's contradicting Musk (by claiming the decision was not political) was also not only phrased politically, but even came with a sort of disclaimer starting with "From my standpoint." There were no such disclaimers when stating that Musk made some sort of an offer to return the astronauts.
And again something you can't discount here is that Eric himself has written extensively about NASA frequently carrying out/endorsing poor decisions (SLS/Artemis being the low hanging fruit there) owing much more to political pressure than pragmatic decisions about the best direction for progress. Here [1] is one example, including an interview with a former high level NASA insider (30 years experience, up to deputy administrator) openly and casually talking about such.
It's not a secret whatsoever that NASA is under constant and significant political pressure. It's just a part of the game. And in this case you had a situation where the guy, who had basically become public enemy #2 (from the previous administration's POV), was going to be spearheading a high visibility rescue of a launch that should never have been approved in the first place - undoubtedly while blasting it all to his tens of millions of followers. To imagine this would not have provoked some behind the scenes 'management' just seems unthinkable to me.
> And again something you can't discount here is that Eric himself has written extensively about NASA frequently carrying out/endorsing poor decisions (SLS/Artemis being the low hanging fruit there) owing much more to political pressure than pragmatic decisions about the best direction for progress.
The reason he was able to write about this was that he had sources within NASA that would tell him the inside story behind the decisions, and how much politics influenced them. Now his sources are telling him that this decision was not political. I don't have any reason to trust his previous sources but not his current ones (especially when many are the same).
No it wasn't. It's based on visible logic, as everybody knows this, well at least everybody within the 'space domain.' People outside of the 'space domain' don't realize how absurdly dysfunctional things like the SLS or Artemis are, and generally have a completely erroneous impression of NASA.
If you want to see this in action search for pretty much any article on SLS or Artemis by him. The one I offered with the former NASA administrator was to clarify to people who might want to claim he was just speculating or whatever. NASA is the posterboy for making bad decisions under political pressure, and not just in contemporary times...
How are you possibly parsing "We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went" as "I can confirm that Musk made that offer and it was declined"?
That is a HUGE disclaimer. "no information on that, though, whatsoever" - it doesn't get any bigger than that.
> Read the article I linked above, also written by Eric Berger! Butch confirmed Elon's claim that he made an offer to bring them home last year was accurate. So we know that that offer was made, and must have been rejected. What we don't know is why.
Read his goddamn quote you're citing. The part where he says "We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went".
Which part of "I believe him despite having no information" do you think is "confirming"?
When you have the owner of the company which provides your space flight lying about spaceflight and nasa, calling the commander of the space station an idiot, and the president making total lies up about the entire process, you can't be apolitical.
What is your standard of fairness? This seems eminently fair: Musk lied for political reasons and people who care about that whole objective reality thing are criticizing him for it. He’s arguably the second-most powerful man in the world right now and craves attention like few others, so it seems quite unfair to say he shouldn’t be the subject of public criticism when he certainly doesn’t apply that standard to his own behaviour.
Musk's donations to political parties is public (leaving aside SuperPAC and other funding being hidden).
He has NEVER donated more to the Democrats than the Republicans. Like most billionaires he donates to both parties. Historically, he donates ten times more to the Republicans and the Democrats.
Nothing about Musk has ever seemed "liberal". Just convenient. He smokes weed on shows, but if you work for one of his companies you'll be fired if you don't piss clean. Anti-taxes. Anti-regulation/oversight.
How has he ever been democrat-leaning in any meaningful way?
Do you think it's easy to be "fair" to someone who continually spouts misinformation, falsehoods, and retweets or reply-boosts such things on an almost daily basis?
I think the author probably made a mistake in using that subheading. For those familiar with the meme[1] it's saying that this isn't that important but read straight it says the opposite. I'm all for playful subheadings, I love when The Economist uses them, but they shouldn't radically alter the meaning when a big fraction of the audience won't get any particular subtle reference and I think that makes this a failure of writing.
Let's not forget that right now it seems that only SpaceX is putting in the "monumental efforts" to advance the "pioneeribg industry", being responsible for the vast majority of launches, the only safe crewed spacecraft, as well as pushing the frontier of space travel with ambitious new projects such as Starship.
Just last year NASA launched the largest ever interplanetary space-craft, and hopefully the first craft to approach and conduct scientific studies on Europa. SpaceX is almost entirely focused on getting humans into space - which is great - but NASA's work is not to be discounted.
NASA built the probe, but SpaceX launched it. [1] I don't think you were suggesting otherwise, but somebody who did not know as much would probably misunderstand what you're saying.
The Europa Clipper is really cool. I think the Cassini Huygens that launched in 1997 has greater mass though.
SpaceX isn't entirely focused on getting humans to space since they launch the vast majority of satellites thanks to great innovations in reducing the cost of launches, such as reusable rockets. But there are some competitor launch vehicles coming soon that could be interesting as well.
Doubt it. Musk only owns something like ~15% of Tesla, and owns about 50% of spacex. He knows tesla is overvalued immensely and wants to deeply integrate himself with government to make sure spacex becomes the de facto space org. for the United States (possibly).
What "blatant lies" though? The question hasn't really been answered. The user wrote:
>Exploiting and lying about the monumental efforts of a pioneering industry for cheap political points
I don't know what this means. When someone tells a blatant lie, it would be easy to quote them for a start. What 'monumental effort' was lied about? If it's about Boeing then I have to say I too think the company is doing a terrible job and if anyone is lying about the effort it's them, there have been numerous whistleblowers who came out and talked about the coverups at Boeing.
I didn't personally use the word "blatant", but when I said "lying" I was referring to claims that:
* The Biden administration either forgot about or deliberately chose to leave astronauts in space for political reasons.
* Trump's request accelerated the decision to bring the astronauts home.
"Monumental efforts" was a more general comment about the space industry, including the activities of both NASA and SpaceX. Bringing astronauts home from space when equipment has gone faulty is a challenge I do not envy whatsoever. For Trump to claim credit in the venture is bordering on obscene.
Eh, the whole space race has its origins in a propaganda war with the USSR staffed by ex-Nazi engineers. It's not more deserving of sacred purity than anything else.
On the other hand, the sheer lying about everything is exhaustive and corrosive to the public sphere.
(also while dealing with the villain of the week we've forgotten about the previous villain responsible for this situation, Boeing)
> Eh, the whole space race has its origins in a propaganda war with the USSR staffed by ex-Nazi engineers. It's not more deserving of sacred purity than anything else.
I certainly agree with this, but at the same time I think it's a red herring. So much good tech comes from war, but the nice thing (imho) is that it's "path independent". I'm no more going to scorn the work of Werner von Braun than I would John von Neumann.
I also think that calling von Braun a Nazi isn't necessarily correct. He worked for the Nazi party, but if he didn't it probably wouldn't have worked out very well for him, and I don't think he supported their ideals all that much. He also always wanted to make his rockets, and working at Peenemünde gave him the opportunity to do that, even if it did require PoW labour. Obviously I'm not saying he was a saint, but I don't think he was as "evil" as some people make him out to be, and I don't think many people came out of the war with clean hands. He just really liked making rockets
Don't say that he's hypocritical- say rather that he's apolitical. 'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down - that's not my department' says Werner Von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown. But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude, like the widows and cripples in old London town who owe their large pension to Wernher von Braun
I'm not the downvoter here, but somehow this made me think of an old play on the title of a biographical film about him: 'I aim at the stars! But sometimes I hit London...'
FWIW I didn't mean to make any accusations about von Braun's character. I was taking "ex-Nazi engineer" to mean someone to had been an engineer in the Nazi regime. In fairness though, he was an NSDAP member.
Sorry, I didn't mean it to come off as disagreeing with you, I think you're right, this is just a topic that's been on my mind recently and I wanted to express my own thoughts on it =) And yeah, he's not perfect, he was directly and indirectly responsible for some bad things happening, but a lot of people on the "good" side were too
Firstly, I understand people will disagree with me on this and that's fine – if you disagree please just explain why.
Based on what I've read on this, I can see why Trump and Elon MIGHT feel like the return flight was held back for political reasons... But I'm not really able to take either side of this argument as it stands, so I'll give my thoughts for why that is in the hope someone might be able to convince me one way or the other...
Firstly, the assumption that NASA is apolitical should be questioned. This might just be my ignorance, but I still haven't seen any good reasoning for why NASA would delay the return flight. As others have noted the capsule was already there, but NASA seemingly just decided to randomly keep them up there months longer than necessary? Why?
And while it's not fair to blame the Biden administration for this directly, ultimately the actions of any government agency would be the responsibility of the current administration to some extent, so if there was any suspicion that the return flight was being pushed back for political reasons the Biden administration should have intervened.
I imagine if Elon did push for an earlier return and was denied this without a good reason he might have questioned why, and I could imagine someone in that position might assume a political motive – perhaps reasonably depending on those private conversations had.
I also think there's an argument to be made that if the Biden administration was friendlier with Elon and didn't go out of their way to alienate him that this return flight would have happened earlier too. Perhaps because Elon could have spoke to Biden directly as he did with Trump, or because NASA would have changed their calculation on the PR of the return.
I have tried repeatedly to find a reason why the return flight might have been delayed, but haven't been able to find any good reason for this so I'm on the fence about why this might have happened. If someone can give me a reasonable explanation for why they weren't returned earlier (especially if it's a reason Elon would have been aware of) I'd likely conclude Elon is most likely lying.
Either way the argument, "Elon is wrong because the capsule was up there the whole time so they could have been brought back whenever, but NASA just decided to push it back" is not a convincing explanation that there was no political calculation here.
The normal process is that you always have at least one US and one Russian Vehicle docked to the ISS. In emergencies, each crewmember uses their spacecraft to return to earth.
The normal rotation is that an additional spacecraft arrives at the ISS (so there are now 3 vehicles docked in total) and then the older spacecraft leaves with its crew. So before the single dragon leaves, a new dragon would arrive.
I think the general idea is to always have at least some Russians and Americans on the ISS at all times (although they are doing swapped missions now so even having only one vehicle left would ensure that most of the time) and to always have crew on the ISS, even if one vehicle needs to return early due to technical problems.
The Crew-10 was not a rescue mission because they just rotated with Crew-9 which carried the Starliner Astronauts back. Crew-9 could be called a rescue mission because they took back the Starliner Astronauts. But Rescue makes it sound more urgent and dedicated than it actually is. They would have flown anyways, just with more crew.
That is exactly what it is. That mission has been scheduled for more than 6 months (though the exact date changed a couple of times for technical reasons).
My understanding is that Crew 9 was always scheduled for a 6 month mission and they couldn't come back before Crew 10 arrived (in March 2025) or else the ISS would be shortstaffed.
The two astronauts in question are simply hitching a ride back on this scheduled mission.
> Firstly, the assumption that NASA is apolitical should be questioned. This might just be my ignorance, but I still haven't seen any good reasoning for why NASA would delay the return flight. As others have noted the capsule was already there, but NASA seemingly just decided to randomly keep them up there months longer than necessary? Why?
Why is anybody actually thinking that? The return of Crew-9 is the culmination of a well orchestrated series of missions to cope with the outage of Starliner Calypso. It may have slipped the attention of some, but space missions are not like buying groceries. These assumptions are basically just betraying a lack of understanding how space travel works. Musk, OTOH, should know this.
Furthermore, there is the long-standing policy of having at least one working capsule at the ISS for emergencies. A lifeboat or escape pod, so to speak. Plus, there are only two docking slots for large-enough capsules, such as Starliners or Dragons, on the ISS. So you have to schedule your trips even more than for normal space missions. You have to coordinate and swap crafts in sequence and deal with the launch windows schedule -- which is exactly what has happened. Again, Musk should know this.
> I think there's an argument to be made that if the Biden administration was friendlier with Elon and didn't go out of their way to alienate him that this return flight would have happened earlier too. Perhaps because Elon could have spoke to Biden directly as he did with Trump, or because NASA would have changed their calculation on the PR of the return.
Why would the CEO of a contractor of a US government agency need to speak to the president of the USA to do the job they were hired for? The agency has more capable people to decide on such matters than any White House staff.
It's all a huge charade of grandstanding and chest-thumping. Disappointing.
I think it’s a hugely complex problem but it basically boils down to a few key things.
- could ISS support docking an additional crew dragon for the time it would take to return the starliner crew without adversely disrupting other scheduled spacecraft flow?
- could spacex have delivered an additional crew dragon to the ISS and departed before any other without downstream impact to future crew dragon missions?
- was someone willing to pay for all of this?
- could it have been done safely for all crews and the ISS?
If the answer was yes to all of those questions, then there likely was a political reason behind waiting to return them on crew 9. What that is, I can’t speculate.
If any question gives a “no” then the decision was probably not political but operational in nature.
I think the only question that might be a no is 'was someone willing to pay for all of this.' But I think even that being a 'no' is suggestive of a political motivation, given that the alternative (that "we" ended up going with) was borderline ridiculous in the chaos that it caused. We ended up, for the first time ever, with a Russian cosmonaut was in control of an American spacecraft, and a rookie cosmonaut with only basic training on the Dragon at that.
It also forced NASA to completely change their safety standards. In particular NASA requires there be a 'lifeboat' on on the ISS for all crew in case of an emergency, but because of the Boeing crew (and the lack of a corresponding vessel), NASA approved a new 'configuration' of the Dragon where up to 3 people could strap themselves to the floor of it, where cargo would normally go, in case of the need of a mass escape from the ISS. [2]
There are stories that Musk was willing to foot the bill. Of course thats easy to say after the other decisions have been made, but my guess is my second point was probably the real no—at least not in a timely or safe enough manner to make the overall future mission disruptions worth it from NASA’s POV.
> I still haven't seen any good reasoning for why NASA would delay the return flight
So many comments spread unsourced assertions on the topic on both sides. Let me change that.
On 24 Aug 2024, NASA stated in a conference published on X[0]:
> NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February.
So the decision sounded like it stemmed from NASA, and the plan a year ago was for a return in the time frame that actually occurred.
On 28 Sept 2024, the spacecraft that would bring Ms Williams and Mr Wilmore was launched. They restated the same plan[1]:
> A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon spacecraft will launch Crew-9 to the space station for about a five-month mission. Hague and Gorbunov will join Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who are already aboard the space station, and all will return to Earth as a crew of four in February 2025.
Thus there was no action after Mr Trump took office that changed the plan.
(Note that the SpaceX article we’re commenting on has a mistake, stating that Mr Grebenkin has come down on 18 March, but Mr Grebenkin came down on 25 Oct; it is indeed Gorbunov that came down.)
On 7 March 2025, Ken Bowersox, associate administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, stated[2] on the motivation for this:
> When it comes to adding on missions or bringing a capsule home early: those were always options but we ruled them out pretty quickly just based on how much money we've got in our budget and the importance of keeping crews on the International Space Station.
When asked specifically about a request from Mr Musk to have an earlier return:
> Was anyone outside NASA or the White House involved in the decision not to bring Suni and Butch back sooner? — There may have been some conversations that I wasn't part of. When we made the technical decisions about Starliner […] our leadership at NASA was trying to make sure that we considered everything just at a technical level and that's what we did.
Berger is not a "one note journalist". He literally wrote the book "Liftoff" which is great telling of the story of SpaceX, and has covered space topics in extensive detail for a long time. The article is important because the narrative told by the administration is clearly not true and in bad faith, and it is right to call it out.
My impression is that Berger is well meaning, but out of his element.
By asking "Can space remain nonpartisan?", as if any government agency was even remotely non-partisan to begin with, or as if that was even a theoretical possibility, betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how government functions.
You're effectively tone policing an article for not being kind enough to the current administration that is lying their ass off about everything they do every step of the way.
I'm not tone policing, I'm saying he sounds condescending like the rest of these types of articles... making it sound like noise, adding to the static.
I didn't say he was wrong in what he was saying, I'm just seeing this as an outsider who immediately gets a sour taste in my mouth.
Tone policing is an ad hominem argument focusing on the tone and not the merit to DISCREDIT the information within, i am not intending to discredit him, i don't dispute his factual claims, just noting that he made it harder to see his side of things from my perspective.
That the memory is on a PCB close to the CPU/GPU certainly helps with signal integrity, but it is not by any means relevant here. The Apple platform has high memory bandwidth compared to x86 PCs because the CPU has a wide memory bus. You can get similar memory bandwidth out of high-end Epyc and Xeon CPUs which use standard DIMMs but with many more memory channels than a regular desktop computer.
It's actually not within the chip's package. It's soldered to the board. It's just regular, fairly high spec LPDDR5X IIRC, there are just a TON of memory channels.
It's not in the package? TIL... My misunderstanding seems to be common across the interwebs.
I remember Apple used to show slides depicting the M1 SoC as one unit containing a CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, cache, and DRAM all together. But slides shown at an Apple event definitely qualify for artistic license.
You could call that on-package, but it's not on-package in the same way that GPU HBM is, with that the main die and memory dies are packaged together on the same substrate. That's a much more difficult and expensive process, apparently packaging is the main bottleneck for H100/H200 production.
For that H100 image, how do they get the top surface of all the chips on the same plane? Do they solder them "upside down", so the chips are sitting on a reference plane, and the PCB is allowed to "float"? Or is the soldering controlled enough that they can just heat and be done?
Apples architecture comes with its own trade-offs, it gives them huge capacity and pretty good bandwidth, but not nearly as much as Nvidia's architectures have. The M3 Ultra is 800GB/sec, the RTX 5090 is 1.8TB/sec, and the H200 is 4.8TB/s(!). Huge capacity with middling bandwidth is in vogue because it's a good fit for AI inference, but AI training and most other applications of GPUs need as much bandwidth as they can get.
Well, if you have 16 M3-equivalent chips you can multiply the bandwidth by 16, right? Also, as I understand, ML is basically matrix multiplication and it has O(N³) operations on O(N²) numbers, so bandwidth might be not as important as number of ALUs.
I remember this was the first HDR program I watched on my new OLED TV back in 2019, and the experience felt like all my life I'd been watching TV with foggy sunglasses that had been suddenly removed.
Photoshop, PDF and Excel are all products that were truly much better than their competitors at the time of their introduction.
Every file format accumulates cruft over thirty years, especially when you have hundreds of millions of users and you have to expand the product for use cases the original developers never imagined. But that doesn’t mean the success wasn’t justified.
That’s also because they were not called SPAs for the first 15 years of the web.
The very first technology for building “SPAs” was Java Applets. Corel released a web-based office suite already in 1997, and it was practically an applet for each app.
This was replaced by Flash because Macromedia did an incredible job of getting Flash Player preinstalled on every desktop computer. If you wanted to deliver a rich and seamless app-like web experience in 1999-2004, you used Flash. (It was mostly very primitive as a dev environment, but did a great job at vector motion graphics and video.)
The original progenitors of present-day SPAs are Microsoft Outlook for Web and Google Maps. Outlook invented the ubiquitous XmlHttpRequest object, and Google Maps became so popular that it coined “AJAX.”
Following these examples, people started building DOM-based JavaScript apps that loaded data asynchronously and built up views entirely in code. And that’s when they became modern SPAs.
(There was also Silverlight and some other technologies that vied for the rich web app crown, but JS/DOM carried the day especially when iPhone happened and wouldn’t support anything else.)
Appreciate the history lesson. And yes, I was there for all of that (though not engaged in Web-app development).
One of the first AJAX apps I recall was the original Gmail. That was a revolution in what the browser could do, followed fairly shortly by others (notably Google Earth which launched about the same time).
SPAs simply to deliver relatively static content however seem ... a poor fit. I'll note that HN itself is LLML.
Which leaves my original question: what specifically was the selling point of SPAs, or Flash, or early AJAX? Because despite having live through that the emergence was both sufficiently diverse (a number of different approaches) and gradual that I don't have a sharp recollection of what that was.
Coming from North Europe, I always felt America’s loose definition of identity was its core strength.
No national religion. No national language. No centralized identity registry. Social security numbers that are more like timid suggestions than actual identifiers. Opening a bank account with just two pieces of foreign identity. Enrolling your kids in school by simply showing up and filling some forms.
I grew up in a country where I was assigned at birth with one state religion (out of two), a national language (out of three), and an ironclad digital identity number.
The American approach felt like a breath of fresh air. I — and millions of others — could choose to be someone else than what the computer says.
But the rise of Trumpism disillusioned me. Now I’m back in my home country and happily paying taxes to the state church while my children enjoy free education in four languages. What seemed like an identity straitjacket when I was younger now appears more like a spectrum of cozy options that I know how to navigate. Meanwhile America looks hell-bent on acquiring the straitjacket.
I'm confused. Is the "straitjacket" supposed to be good or bad? You seem to have ultimately happy to have chosen it for yourself but Americans choosing the same somehow disillusioned you?
It "seemed like" a straitjacket when they were younger but now that they recognise the plurality that actually exists around them it no longer seems like one.
I personally believe that the last few decades have shown us that a lack of unifying identity in America is a weakness, not a strength. We no longer have shared values, shared religious beliefs, shared customs, or really shared much of anything any more. And as a result, half the country viscerally hates the other half of the country. People living in cities disdainfully speak about "fly-over country" and how backwards and ignorant people are there. People living in rural areas complain about "big city liberals", and how they think they know everything but have no actual practical knowledge of anything. Both groups try to jerk the steering wheel of government back and forth with every election, and try to give even more power to the federal government so that they can use it to stop the other group from doing things they disapprove of.
In my opinion, this sort of thing greatly weakens us as a nation and will eventually destroy us if we can't figure out how to find common ground again. It should be possible - we've come back from worse (say what you will about modern day US politics, it hasn't come to civil war yet like it did in the past). But I think if we're going to find common ground, part of it will have to involve cultivating a shared national identity like we used to have.
> We no longer have shared values, shared religious beliefs, shared customs, or really shared much of anything any more.
We never had any of these, except for, possibly, just one shared belief: the idea that a constitutional democracy was the best sort of government to live under.
What we did have was a media/cultural environment that glossed over the differences between people, minimized various minority demographics, and worked hard to convince everyone that "we're all Americans and we all believe, do and want the same things". But that wasn't true then, any more than it is true today.
I want our shared national identity to be limited to our belief in our form of government. I don't want to have to know the same songs, go to the same church, drive the same car, watch the same shows as everyone else, and I don't think they should have to do that w.r.t my choices (nor are they likely to want to).
That was the beauty of "American identity", but even the belief in our form of government has been severely eroded. By whom or why ... I'll leave unremarked upon here.
shared religious beliefs, is possibly the biggest lie. As recently as the '60s there were questions about whether people would accept a "papist" president in the form of JFK. at least part of the reason why the separation of church and state existed was because otherwise it would've meant picking one of the many versions of Christianity or otherwise that had sought refuge in the US, which would mean excluding the others. The Quakers, the Puritans, the Pilgrims, the Catholics, the Anglicans, etc. were all very different and had very different opinions of each other.
>that a lack of unifying identity in America is a weakness, not a strength
America's proper and authentic identity always is its pluralism, entailing all the conflict that brings. If America made one unique contribution to the world its that it has shown how identities, plural, can be built from the bottom up and are in constant tension with each other, and that this is a feature, not a bug.
An American government trying to impose identity, by renaming lakes and mountains, mandating language(s) or what have you is so performative it looks more like North Korean state television than culture, it's utterly foreign to Americans and going to fail for that reason. Americans are instinctively allergic to having culture, regardless from what direction, declared on them by fiat.
US currency says "in God we trust" …since the 1950s.
For a lot longer, it’s said “E Pluribus Unum” (“From Many, One”). The phrase has been associated with the USA since its inception. Diversity is a traditional American value.
Yesterday Trump was begging MAGAs to buy Teslas on Truth Social.
He called it an “illegal boycott” that Tesla’s sales are collapsing. At this point nobody’s surprised that the president has no idea about how laws work.
Myself I got a “Happy Teslaversary!” message on their app that turned out to be a survey. I was happy to give them a bit fat zero on NPS. Fraud company selling expensive features that will never work.
Yeah. Calling it an illegal boycott is going too far. It is not even organized for the most part just a natural partisan reaction to extreme partisan behavior by the very prominent/vocal face of the company. This was 100% predictable and has actually been growing since the Twitter takeover.
That's a double whammy for European countries who signed on to spend hundreds of billions on these planes in the belief that they're part of a NATO security umbrella. Now it seems like NATO will soon be in shambles and the planes might not even fly if that one drunk frat guy with Nazi tattoos running the Pentagon says so.
Finland bought F-35's recently, and the Finnish government is saying that nothing should change because America will hopefully be back to normal before the fighters are delivered. I don't think that kind of ostrich strategy is going to pay off.
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