Comments on: Apollo F-1 engines recovered from Atlantic ocean floor by Bezos Expeditions

By: hybrnM

hybrnM — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:28:00 +0000

psst. Xeni… I’m flattered that you replied to me. You are one of my heroes. Stay strong.

By: hybrnM

hybrnM — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:25:00 +0000

It takes deep pockets to develop ROV technology. The sorts of uses that are not secret involve things like oil drilling. The sorts that *are* secret may or may not be in line with your suggestion in the comment above.

Another use is salvage operations. You know, things like millions in gold bullion from old shipwrecks… but big Mr. Schilling likes to joke: you make sure those guys pay upfront.

By: willi0000000

willi0000000 — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:24:00 +0000

a remarkable achievement but i would rather he recovered the engineering expertise required to build an F1 engine.

By: SomeGuyNamedMark

SomeGuyNamedMark — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:53:00 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssal_plain

By: Tyler Hibbard

Tyler Hibbard — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:19:00 +0000

Actually we do chisel out footprints and send them to museums; I’ve seen many myself. 100 years from now, humans will still not have developed gills or incredibly strong skin, so that they may visit this sea floor location, so the intact site of some of the key remnants of humanity’s first voyage* (FTFY) will still be useless to humans at large. Thus, Jeff Bezos has done us a great service by rendering to us a restored original artifact in an easily-visitable place, rather than letting it sit, possibly forgotten and lost, in a spot where less than one percent of one percent of all humans have the ability to visit.

By: Stoli89

Stoli89 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:36:00 +0000

I suppose we now know who to call the next time the US Air Force loses a nuclear weapon over the Atlantic. Apparently, the National Command Authority is replacing the terms “Broken Arrow” & “Empty Quiver” with Jeff Bezos’ phone number.

By: SpaceBeers

SpaceBeers — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:31:00 +0000

That is still 10 out of 10 Batman’s on the billionaire awesomeness scale.

By: Stoli89

Stoli89 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:27:00 +0000

Actually, his motivations were not selfless. In fact, Jeff wants to use these engines in his F1 car.

By: Stoli89

Stoli89 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:26:00 +0000

It’s a hoax…you can buy the F1 engines on Amazon!

By: Stoli89

Stoli89 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:24:00 +0000

There was a movie made about this called “The Arrival” (1996). Unfortunately, it was based on the premise that aliens (also illegal) wanted to terraform OUR planet!

By: Stoli89

Stoli89 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:21:00 +0000

Planet Killing Asteroids?!? I suspect we’d be better served by simply developing exercises that made us all nimble enough to bend over and kiss our @$$e$ goodbye.

By: Stoli89

Stoli89 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:19:00 +0000

Yes…people are becoming redundant. We even don’t need pilots to drop bombs on people anymore!

By: Stoli89

Stoli89 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:14:00 +0000

It is true that R&D in pursuit of military goals has yielded great achievements. However, it’s not a perfect picture. For instance, the path our government chose as a result of the naval nuclear power program (i.e. light water reactor) caused the nuclear industry to stymie pursuit of much safer, more efficient, less costly, much less wasteful technologies such as the Molten Salt Reactor. Spend a few moments researching the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor to better understand that an R&D effort completely dominated by the military industrial complex (“MIC”) is not always a good thing. I’m not saying developments like the USS Nautilus were not incredible achievements. I’m simply saying that with hindsight, we also missed some incredible opportunities as a result of our MIC blinders.

By: factbased

factbased — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:33:00 +0000

I didn’t see anyone pretending the past didn’t happen. And nothing in your comment contradicts the idea that more progress in space could be made by redirecting military spending. Sure, it’s a theoretical, idealistic idea, but the political obstacles you describe don’t change what *could* be.

By: Byron

Byron — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:14:00 +0000

Human history is not mountain climbing. We don’t dig it because it’s there. When a site is excavated, it is destroyed. If we did not have 9 or 10 F-1 engines already on display in Museums across the country, then there could be a small justification for excavation. Imagine a site in Africa where we had evidence of the first human footprints. The site is worth more to humanity intact. We would not chisel out individual footprints and send them to museums. 100 years from now, the intact site of humanity’s first steps into space would have been worth more than some billionaires stupid publicity stunt.

By: Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:14:00 +0000

Awesome.

By: Hal O'Brien

Hal O'Brien — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:55:00 +0000

The thing of it is, while $1 trillion sounds like a lot, in the US’s $15 trillion economy it’s about three weeks’ income. (This also the problem with the Stimulus – it was about the size of a Christmas bonus check.)

By: Hal O'Brien

Hal O'Brien — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:49:00 +0000

Agreed. “Our Germans are better than their Germans.” – Tom Lehrer

By: hybrnM

hybrnM — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:22:00 +0000

I am a machinist for the company that made that ROV that appears in the video. I am straight beaming with pride right now.

There are not an awful lot of those things. Odds are high that I made parts of that very one.

It is my firm belief, and not only for my obvious self-interest, that exploring the oceans is more important than exploring space. We have barely scratched the surface of what there is to find down there.

It is three in the morning. I just ended my shift at work manufacturing the swivel pieces that connect the TMS(tether management system) to the ship out of 13” bars of 5″ titanium round stock. I have made nearly every component of the Titan arm that is holding the vacuum in the video. I love my job. Tonight I sleep with a smile.

By: Tyler Hibbard

Tyler Hibbard — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:33:00 +0000

Sorry, how is this wrecking anything? It IS one of the most significant archaeological sites in human history already, and Jeff Bezos is excavating it so that the artifacts can be restored and viewed in a museum. Or do you think museums shouldn’t exist? Because your current argument suggests you think all museum artifacts should still be resting in the earth where they were found.

By: Tyler Hibbard

Tyler Hibbard — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:29:00 +0000

We have the technology today to send hundreds of CFC-producing mini-factories to Mars, which can then start pumping those CFCs into the atmosphere, increasing the temperature and pressure such that humans wouldn’t freeze to death or have to muster all their strength just to inhale. This process would take approximately 100 years. Hopefully we will have found a way to speed up the process before we receive such dire news as a life-ending meteoroid heading toward Terra.

Personally, I think there’s no reason that we can’t have a semi-permanent human presence on Luna/Mars by 2025, based on the rate the private sector is going.

By: Photo Booth Minneapolis MN

Photo Booth Minneapolis MN — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:59:00 +0000

Big ol’ rockets for the win!

By: bewlaybrother

bewlaybrother — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:31:00 +0000

Nah it means a lot, actually.

By: Louis_the_S

Louis_the_S — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 03:23:00 +0000

I hate war as much as anybody, but it’s silly, at best, to pretend that the past didn’t happen the way it did.

Who was putting up rockets for “exploration”, before the military decided they wanted to put up rockets for other reasons? Who was trying to build a nuclear reactor, before the military decided to fund its creation? Who was paying for computers? Or jet engines?

A lot of inventions like these share some interesting properties. First, that they take a *lot* of time, money, and people to develop. Second, that they’re not immediately profitable in the commercial sector, but do immediately have significant military uses. Third, that they’re risky: the modern incarnation looks obvious in hindsight (or in a textbook), but at the time when they were invented, all of these were just one of many possible strategies being tried.

Sure, we can say we’d rather pay $25B (the Manhattan Project cost in today’s dollar) for peaceful nuclear research, but when the project started, success of nuclear power was anything but certain. No investor would ever put up $25B for something so risky (if one investment group even had that kind of money to invest). It’s only when you’re facing such a horror as a world-wide war on several fronts, and when you have the resources of one of the world’s largest governments, that this combination of factors combines to allow these kinds of inventions.

For example, I think everybody agrees that a stable fusion reactor would be an incredible milestone, yet even though we’ve poured way more than $25B into the problem, nobody has done it. The experts seem to think we’re still at least 50 years away. Will money help? Time? Certainly if the Manhattan Project hadn’t taken all of the stupid risks they did (manual critical mass experiments!?) they wouldn’t have been able to work as quickly.

There are peaceful governments who have never waged war in recent history. They are welcome to spend tax money on research and development, and often do. In practice, they tend to export their brightest minds to America to do R&D there.

By: robuluz

robuluz — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:53:00 +0000

Which, one way or another, there will be.

By: Archimedes

Archimedes — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:52:00 +0000

The future is dim for the human species perhaps, the earth however will still be here for a very long time.

By: Archimedes

Archimedes — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:46:00 +0000

A plain is the opposite of what a waterless ocean would look like.

By: bt

bt — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:18:00 +0000

Which doesn’t mean a damn thing. We could have even more progress in space if we stopped wasting a 1 Trillion+ per year on guns and spent it on education, research, and exploration.

By: Joel Emmett

Joel Emmett — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:53:00 +0000

Drain the ocean, you say? To more easily recover the riches left behind?

The Chinese already have that technology! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPc8DUUKdR4

By: Joel Emmett

Joel Emmett — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:50:00 +0000

NASA: “Oh, gee, uh, thanks, guys. Wow. Thanks. Those are really big. And heavy. And, boy they sure took a beating, didn’t they? That’s neat you found that, um, stuff. Why don’t you just put that over there… Right, next to that pile of scrap. Or, oh! You know what? Instead of unloading it, if you could just keep on hauling that down to the county dump, that’d be great. Congratulations on your ‘find.’ Thanks again!”