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SpaceX via Twitter: the everyday miracle of modern technologies
SpaceX via Twitter: the everyday miracle of modern technologies
(3 days later)
On a Hong Kong bus this week, as I checked my Twitter stream on my mobile phone, a tweet from Nasa, America's space agency, arrived. It reminded me that Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 9 spaceship was about to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Nasa was running a live stream. I tuned in.
On a Hong Kong bus this week, as I checked my Twitter stream on my mobile phone, a tweet from Nasa, America's space agency, arrived. It reminded me that Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 9 spaceship was about to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Nasa was running a live stream. I tuned in.
As the bus neared my downtown destination, I watched as the rocket lifted off and flew safely into orbit. The experience was mind-bending. It was also one of those times when I've been most powerfully aware of the digital revolution's impacts on our world.
As the bus neared my downtown destination, I watched as the rocket lifted off and flew safely into orbit. The experience was mind-bending. It was also one of those times when I've been most powerfully aware of the digital revolution's impacts on our world.
My spirits soared with the ascending rocket. This was a brilliant human achievement. A remarkable team led by Elon Musk is masterfully deploying technology to demonstrate that frontiers once assumed to be the sole province of nation states are also within reach of the private sector.
My spirits soared with the ascending rocket. This was a brilliant human achievement. A remarkable team led by Elon Musk is masterfully deploying technology to demonstrate that frontiers once assumed to be the sole province of nation states are also within reach of the private sector.
Moore's Law and its corollaries – our modern reality of technology that grows ever more powerful, cheaper and miniaturized – are integral to the existence of SpaceX and other emerging enterprises.
Moore's Law and its corollaries – our modern reality of technology that grows ever more powerful, cheaper and miniaturized – are integral to the existence of SpaceX and other emerging enterprises.
Enthralled as I was that Tuesday afternoon by the space shot, which demonstrated America's re-emergence as a nation that values exploration, I was at least as struck by the means with which I'd been able to witness it. An event taking place in Florida had made its way via the internet to a mobile phone halfway around the world via a variety of networks, with high quality and little latency. I'd learned about it via another kind of network, a social kind – the Nasa tweet had actually been forwarded to me, or "retweeted" in Twitter lingo, by someone I follow on the service.
Enthralled as I was that Tuesday afternoon by the space shot, which demonstrated America's re-emergence as a nation that values exploration, I was at least as struck by the means with which I'd been able to witness it. An event taking place in Florida had made its way via the internet to a mobile phone halfway around the world via a variety of networks, with high quality and little latency. I'd learned about it via another kind of network, a social kind – the Nasa tweet had actually been forwarded to me, or "retweeted" in Twitter lingo, by someone I follow on the service.
The technologies at the edges of these networks were also important. Nasa, which was paying SpaceX to do this launch, had trained its high-definition digital video cameras on the launch and then put the images out on the internet in a variety of formats designed to be watchable by virtually any kind of device. As the images from ground cameras grew fainter, the view switched to cameras mounted on the rocket, looking back at the planet and engine flames. My mobile phone had a powerful enough 3G radio and more than good enough screen to give me – and who knows how many others around the planet – a window into this historic day.
The technologies at the edges of these networks were also important. Nasa, which was paying SpaceX to do this launch, had trained its high-definition digital video cameras on the launch and then put the images out on the internet in a variety of formats designed to be watchable by virtually any kind of device. As the images from ground cameras grew fainter, the view switched to cameras mounted on the rocket, looking back at the planet and engine flames. My mobile phone had a powerful enough 3G radio and more than good enough screen to give me – and who knows how many others around the planet – a window into this historic day.
There were no brand new technologies at work. Yet I was struck by the seamlessness of the experience – made possible because the various hardware and software pieces involved worked together via mostly open standards that have emerged in recent decades. Telecommunications continue to be centralized in some important ways, but innovation still has the edge over incumbency. Technology is shrinking our home planet even as it helps us move off it more quickly.
There were no brand new technologies at work. Yet I was struck by the seamlessness of the experience – made possible because the various hardware and software pieces involved worked together via mostly open standards that have emerged in recent decades. Telecommunications continue to be centralized in some important ways, but innovation still has the edge over incumbency. Technology is shrinking our home planet even as it helps us move off it more quickly.
Of course, I was well aware that younger people in the developed world already find such things, well, routine. Assuming humanity (or at least, civilization) survives its self-destructive ways, and that governments and the telecom access providers don't assert absolute control over the bits we send each other, these kinds of communications will only get more seamless and normal. We won't just watch all kinds of events, large and small, wherever we are and whenever we want; we'll contribute what we are seeing to a global mosaic of reality.
Of course, I was well aware that younger people in the developed world already find such things, well, routine. Assuming humanity (or at least, civilization) survives its self-destructive ways, and that governments and the telecom access providers don't assert absolute control over the bits we send each other, these kinds of communications will only get more seamless and normal. We won't just watch all kinds of events, large and small, wherever we are and whenever we want; we'll contribute what we are seeing to a global mosaic of reality.
I'm back in the US as I write this, brought home by another semi-modern miracle that my generation takes for granted: commercial aviation. Plane travel wasn't routine for my parents. But if the Elon Musks of our world continue their work, and if the digital revolution continues at anything like the pace of the recent past, it won't be more than another generation before people head into space as a matter of course.
I'm back in the US as I write this, brought home by another semi-modern miracle that my generation takes for granted: commercial aviation. Plane travel wasn't routine for my parents. But if the Elon Musks of our world continue their work, and if the digital revolution continues at anything like the pace of the recent past, it won't be more than another generation before people head into space as a matter of course.
And they'll tell each other about it via devices that make today's mobile phones look prehistoric, and via social systems that have long since replaced Facebook and Twitter.
And they'll tell each other about it via devices that make today's mobile phones look prehistoric, and via social systems that have long since replaced Facebook and Twitter.
Comments
38 comments, displaying first
25 May 2012 2:35PM
RT @SpaceX via Twitter: the everyday miracle of modern technologies. let the re-tweets begin.
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25 May 2012 2:37PM
^ My above comment was an example of mindless, annoying and irritating re-tweets we often see on twitter.
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25 May 2012 2:43PM
which demonstrated America's re-emergence as a nation that values exploration
Oh of course, that's why they're having to petition for a larger budget isn't it?
But yes, technology is bringing the world together. Making the world a smaller place. And what can I say... I'm extremely grateful that it exists and that it does bring us all closer to each other.
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25 May 2012 2:52PM
SpaceX via Twitter. Rock my world.
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25 May 2012 3:39PM
Oh of course, that's why they're having to petition for a larger budget isn't it?
SpaceX is not NASA, SpaceX was the winner of an Xprize. NASA had built up bureaucracy that escalated the cost of doing anything, to stupid money. So what the government did to in a way, was to privatise it, by offering a large cash prize, for a company that could proved that they could do it commercially, then government contracts would be offered to the proven winner.
This is somewhat different to the UK government with A4e for example, where they were given money to fix a problem that the had no experience of, nor and idea of how to fix. In this case what should have been done was to hire the UK's most successful job agencies in the relevant areas.
This problem is now being repeated with the NHS. Contracts are being offered on the strengths of relationships, not if they can offer an equivalent service at a sustainable lower price.
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25 May 2012 3:48PM
Technology and private enterprise are cool.
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25 May 2012 3:49PM
Modern technology, and indeed the internet, is a miracle.
Twitter - er, not so much.
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25 May 2012 3:59PM
A pity the money, time, and effort put into SpaceX weren't directed toward saving our planet.
Then again, if we don't get serious about saving the Earth, we shall certainly need some means of escape.
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25 May 2012 4:16PM
A pity the money, time, and effort put into SpaceX weren't directed toward saving our planet.
Then again, if we don't get serious about saving the Earth, we shall certainly need some means of escape.
Getting off this rock in the next couple of hundred years is central to the survival of the species. If we can't put our energies into expansion we'll destroy ourselves.
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25 May 2012 4:27PM
During this entirely brilliant experience of technology, was money ever part of it? No. In fact, NASA's budget has been cut, so money actually tries its best to stop this type of wonderful event happening. We as a civilisation need to transcend money, so that everyone on Earth can experience the technological miracles that we take for granted. That's the true final frontier.
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25 May 2012 4:33PM
to demonstrate that frontiers once assumed to be the sole province of nation states are also within reach of the private sector.
The nation state was me and you. We, the people, put Gagarin into orbit and sent Armstrong to the Moon. We sent the Galileo, Pioneer and Voyager probes to explore the solar system and do science for its own sake. Then I could say that space was within my reach. Now it is slowly getting out of my reach and becoming the sole province of private companies, of private individuals with their own private agendas. This is not progress, it is regression.
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25 May 2012 4:47PM
A nice piece of hip hop from Mr Jeru the Damaja sums this piece of journalism up nicely. The lyrics go something like this;
"Scientifical Madness My status is the baddest"
See what I did there? Aye?
Of course you did.
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25 May 2012 4:49PM
It's a real anti-climax when they fail to explode though.
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25 May 2012 4:54PM
Huh?
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25 May 2012 5:01PM
It would be naive to imagine the motives of NASA in its early glory days were so idealistic as to be primarily about space exploration... clearly its existence depended on the huge cash injections borne of national pride and the arms race. Perhaps the new capitalist cloud nation states of Google, Virgin, Paypal and emergent third world wonder-kids such as India and China will continue the effort. I certainly hope so, for despite all my cynicism, this sort of enterprise is the human race at its very best.
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25 May 2012 5:16PM
Neil DeGrasse Tyson makes the best case ever that Space exploration IS hugely inspiring to everyone, just as Dan G says.
(Tyson also shows that this inspiration then leaks into every part of our culture, influencing art, engineering and imagination, creates jobs, innovation and money, and putting the country which does it at the front of global recognition. And he says the NASA budget should be doubled. Now. Stop arguing details and just double it.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLzKjxglNyE&t=6m0s
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25 May 2012 5:29PM
A pity the money, time, and effort put into SpaceX weren't directed toward saving our planet.
Then again, if we don't get serious about saving the Earth, we shall certainly need some means of escape.
Or directed to ending poverty. Or famine. Or polio. Or...something.
Seriously, there will always be some "more important than anything else" issue someone can point at and say any non-utterly-essential expenditure should be put towards it. If they were all taken account on there'd never ever be any space exploration, fundamental science research, public art projects, cookery programs... nothing except the very bare essentials of life.
The only sane option is to put some resources into the non-essential areas; doing so's part of being human, and who knows - some of them may pay off and ultimately make more resources available to the problem areas than if everything had gone into direct problem management.
As far as the specifics of "saving the planet" goes - it doesn't need it. There might be global warming, there might be mass extinctions, there might be the collapse of human civilisation. But the planet itself's in no danger of complete destruction, nor is life on it. We're not that big a threat.
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25 May 2012 5:31PM
Getting off this rock in the next couple of hundred years is central to the survival of the species. If we can't put our energies into expansion we'll destroy ourselves.
That's one of those statements I hope is wrong, but fear is right.
Then again, you've raised some interesting questions:
1. If we're so destructive as a species, do we really deserve to survive?
2. Just in case we can't 'get off this rock', shouldn't we concentrate on trying to preserve it, and ourselves?
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25 May 2012 5:32PM
There might be global warming, there might be mass extinctions, there might be the collapse of human civilisation. But the planet itself's in no danger of complete destruction, nor is life on it. We're not that big a threat.
Not even the Tories?
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25 May 2012 5:39PM
Then again, you've raised some interesting questions:
1. If we're so destructive as a species, do we really deserve to survive?
2. Just in case we can't 'get off this rock', shouldn't we concentrate on trying to preserve it, and ourselves?
Thanks. My tuppence worth is:
1. That's what we need to prove and I think we probably have about fifty years to show we are marginally better than the hominids we evolved from
2. I don't think there's an option - we need to do both. Not least because there are resources in space that we can use rather than tearing them out of our own homeworld.
We can no longer sit back and expect the US to get us out of LEO - Europe and the BRIC countries need to pull their fingers out and ramp up their space programmes, looking at manned stations in the asteroid belt and other places, aimed at eventually getting us out of the solar system.
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25 May 2012 5:40PM
But the planet itself's in no danger of complete destruction, nor is life on it. We're not that big a threat.
No, sooner or later there will be an 'adjustment' that will put an end to humanity's moment in the sun.
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25 May 2012 6:04PM
I agree. Too many people see space exploration vs. saving the planet as a zero sum game, the more we spend on space, the less we have for the earth. This viewpoint is short-sighted. Scientific progress, as Dan Gillmor describes, changes our perceptions about our potentialities. Hundreds of years ago mankind was threatened by plagues and famines. Solving these problems led to massive overpopulation. So now we have new environmental problems. The engine of technology is the only force we have that can solve our problems. I believe that the drive for technological progress is a human instinct that stretches back millions of years. Asking humans to stop exploring is the same as asking us to stop being human.
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25 May 2012 6:06PM
Naaaaah. Barring something absolutely nightmarish, like a passing black hole, we're here to stay. Our intelligence is such that we can survive basically anything; it might just be a thousand of us locked in bunkers for a few years but there's no getting rid of us now.
The main thing to remember is: it's incredibly easy to kill vast numbers of humans, but it's damn near impossible to kill every single one of us.
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25 May 2012 6:16PM
The main thing to remember is: it's incredibly easy to kill vast numbers of humans, but it's damn near impossible to kill every single one of us.
Possibly, but after such an apocalypse, the first generation will be survivalists and labourers, the second will be feral and the third might as well be animals. You can say goodbye to ideas of civilisation, and intelligence will be evolved out in no time. Humans may survive but humanity will be toast.
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25 May 2012 6:35PM
'The main thing to remember is: it's incredibly easy to kill vast numbers of humans, but it's damn near impossible to kill every single one of us.'
I understand where you're coming from but I have to disagree. There's nobody on this planet that could survive without food, oxygen, the right temperatures etc. I presume you're talking about a virus or a small asteroid or something, but bear in mind the possibilities. Look at Venus or Mars - we could easily head in similar directions, and there's not one of us that could survive those conditions.
It would be near impossible to kill every single one of us however if we were spread across multiple planets in different systems. That's got to be the long term aim for humanity really.
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25 May 2012 6:44PM
1. If we're so destructive as a species, do we really deserve to survive?
2. Just in case we can't 'get off this rock', shouldn't we concentrate on trying to preserve it, and ourselves?
in answer : 1. If we survive then we will have deserved it - if we kill ourselves then, no we didn't. 2. Even if we can get off this 'rock' if we dont learn to preserve it we will simply take the same problems elsewhere. New and different limitations might force us to change our habits, but still this would not have been by choice, so at some point destruction will happen again.
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25 May 2012 8:02PM
I get the point you're trying to make down the bottom but feel like I have to point out that the complete destruction of the planet Earth is all but certain. probably won't be any of our or our ancestors' concern by then though.
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25 May 2012 8:23PM
this is specious, anti-intellectual theorising at best
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25 May 2012 9:03PM
Something over sixty million years ago there was a species of intelligent theropod dinosaurs. Due to the paucity of the fossil record we don't know about them. It took them around five million years to evolve as a separate line and there weren't all that many of them for most of that time.
When they learned to farm other species for food their population increased and over a few thousand years they became technologically capable. A few of them flew to the moon. However, before they managed to make self-sustaining extraterrestrial colonies the Big One arrived and wiped them out. Sad.
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25 May 2012 10:33PM
this is specious, anti-intellectual theorising at best
I'll ignore the insult and point out that human behaviour following the collapse of early civilisations is quite well understood, cf Morris 2010.
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25 May 2012 11:21PM
You know the money that gets spent on 'space stuff' doesn't actually disappear into space?
It pays for engineers and scientists who then pay taxes and spend their money and hopefully does its bit to make us all better off.
Also, what has the planet ever done for us? It just sits there being all rocky while we do all the hard work.
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26 May 2012 12:11AM
You can have your Twitter, Space-X, live streaming, space stations and the internet. They don't even come close to that one moment back in '69 when I looked up at the moon through a young boys eyes.
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26 May 2012 2:13AM
"made possible because the various hardware and software pieces involved worked together via mostly open standards that have emerged in recent decades. Telecommunications continue to be centralized in some important ways, but innovation still has the edge over incumbency."
Every single step of the way the product of US ingenuity, enterprise and technology.
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26 May 2012 3:35AM
Well, this is a weak excuse to mention Twitter. The technology here was the rocket and the live feed. Someone simply sent you a reminder using Twitter. So what's really the story? A sort of electronic post-it note for the hard of memory, or the amazing live feed of the first privately-launched payload heading to the space station?
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26 May 2012 3:39AM
Every single step of the way the product of US ingenuity, enterprise and technology.
Very funny! Here's a very good timeline of US inventions (still can't decide whether the greatest was Shredded Wheat or the Teddy Bear. Difficult).
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26 May 2012 4:31AM
Americans are 4% of the world's pop'n. In the last 40 yrs we have won twice as many Nobel prizes as the rest of the world combined. We generate 25% of the world's GDP. US Universities dominate international rankings for academic excellence (typically 8 of the 10 best and 35 of the 50 best). We eliminated smallpox and are close to eliminating polio. A single US philanthropic organization (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) invests more each year in Aids research than any European country. The only people ever to walk on the moon are Americans. We built the internet and made it available to the rest of the world. 40 yrs ago we built the world's Global Positioning System and made it freely available to the rest of the world. For 40 yrs Europe, Russia, China have tried to build their own GP Systems and have all failed. Every step from your keyboard to others' screens is courtesy of US originated hardware (e.g. the transistor - the basis of ALL electronics) and US software. Every single important computer application (Windows, Apple OSX, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, M'Soft Office, email, etc. etc.) is American. An American corporation just launched the first private satellite into space.
Meanwhile Britain languishes as the most violent developed society in the world BY FAR (google "uk violent crime") with a violent crime rate almost 5 times that of the US and an illegitimate birth rate about double that of the US. If the UK was an American state it would rank 48th in terms of prosperity with 55% of the British falling below the US poverty line. We had to bail you guys out in WW1, WW2. The Yugoslav Civil War lasted 9 yrs under incompetent and cowardly EU management (200,000 dead, 2 Mn homeless). The US intervened and ended it in 89 days.
And the best you have is silly statements about Shredded Wheat. You are as trivial as your country.
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26 May 2012 9:03AM
after such an apocalypse, the first generation will be survivalists and labourers, the second will be feral and the third might as well be animals. You can say goodbye to ideas of civilisation, and intelligence will be evolved out in no time. Humans may survive but humanity will be toast.
Hmmmn...see, respectfully, I take a totally different point of view - let's say there's some ghastly pandemic, say, and only 0.1% of humanity survives it - that's still seven million people round the world left alive. And that's a lot.
Slash the survival rate down to 0.01% (and the mind boggles trying to find anything that letal as an event) and that's still 700,000 left alive. Assuming that it doesn't kill more men than women or more young people than old people that's going to leave you with - a totally rough guess - over a quarter of a million humans of breeding age. That's no problem at all, even spread out randomly over the globe.
The first generation left will indeed be survivalists and hunter-gatherers; but I don't see any reason why there will be a huge drop down to feral behaviour. There'll still be vast amounts of technology left over to cannibalise. I think intelligence would continue to be evolved up, not down. The only insurmountable problem will be all the smouldering nuclear plants...
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26 May 2012 9:43AM
The first generation left will indeed be survivalists and hunter-gatherers; but I don't see any reason why there will be a huge drop down to feral behaviour. There'll still be vast amounts of technology left over to cannibalise. I think intelligence would continue to be evolved up, not down.
I hope we never find out. But humans, particularly children adapt to their surroundings. If there's no civilisation, any attempt to educate children about it will fail because it will be abstract. The experience after the Greek Empire crumbled, and in the Dark Ages in Europe (and that was without most of the population being killed) was that all the knowledge and learning was lost by most people within a couple of generations, and took centuries to get back to where they were. We found out recently in Britain that the feral behaviour isn't too far below the surface.
But we're off topic now, so I'll conclude with applause for SpaceX and head off to play FSim Space Shuttle on my iPad.
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Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight centre for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite school of journalism and mass communication. His most recent book is Mediactive (2010), also a blog of the same name, about how people can be empowered as new media users. This series focuses on technological developments, especially as they affect media, and aims to show how people can move from being passive consumers of media to active users. Follow Dan on Twitter @dangillmor
28 Oct 2012: Android's smartphone OS upgrade issues need more than a quick fix | Dan Gillmor
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There's so much we already take for granted about the digital revolution that's rocked our world. But it can still strike awe
On a Hong Kong bus this week, as I checked my Twitter stream on my mobile phone, a tweet from Nasa, America's space agency, arrived. It reminded me that Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 9 spaceship was about to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Nasa was running a live stream. I tuned in.
As the bus neared my downtown destination, I watched as the rocket lifted off and flew safely into orbit. The experience was mind-bending. It was also one of those times when I've been most powerfully aware of the digital revolution's impacts on our world.
My spirits soared with the ascending rocket. This was a brilliant human achievement. A remarkable team led by Elon Musk is masterfully deploying technology to demonstrate that frontiers once assumed to be the sole province of nation states are also within reach of the private sector.
Moore's Law and its corollaries – our modern reality of technology that grows ever more powerful, cheaper and miniaturized – are integral to the existence of SpaceX and other emerging enterprises.
Enthralled as I was that Tuesday afternoon by the space shot, which demonstrated America's re-emergence as a nation that values exploration, I was at least as struck by the means with which I'd been able to witness it. An event taking place in Florida had made its way via the internet to a mobile phone halfway around the world via a variety of networks, with high quality and little latency. I'd learned about it via another kind of network, a social kind – the Nasa tweet had actually been forwarded to me, or "retweeted" in Twitter lingo, by someone I follow on the service.
The technologies at the edges of these networks were also important. Nasa, which was paying SpaceX to do this launch, had trained its high-definition digital video cameras on the launch and then put the images out on the internet in a variety of formats designed to be watchable by virtually any kind of device. As the images from ground cameras grew fainter, the view switched to cameras mounted on the rocket, looking back at the planet and engine flames. My mobile phone had a powerful enough 3G radio and more than good enough screen to give me – and who knows how many others around the planet – a window into this historic day.
There were no brand new technologies at work. Yet I was struck by the seamlessness of the experience – made possible because the various hardware and software pieces involved worked together via mostly open standards that have emerged in recent decades. Telecommunications continue to be centralized in some important ways, but innovation still has the edge over incumbency. Technology is shrinking our home planet even as it helps us move off it more quickly.
Of course, I was well aware that younger people in the developed world already find such things, well, routine. Assuming humanity (or at least, civilization) survives its self-destructive ways, and that governments and the telecom access providers don't assert absolute control over the bits we send each other, these kinds of communications will only get more seamless and normal. We won't just watch all kinds of events, large and small, wherever we are and whenever we want; we'll contribute what we are seeing to a global mosaic of reality.
I'm back in the US as I write this, brought home by another semi-modern miracle that my generation takes for granted: commercial aviation. Plane travel wasn't routine for my parents. But if the Elon Musks of our world continue their work, and if the digital revolution continues at anything like the pace of the recent past, it won't be more than another generation before people head into space as a matter of course.
And they'll tell each other about it via devices that make today's mobile phones look prehistoric, and via social systems that have long since replaced Facebook and Twitter.
