Hacker News: ericcumbee

New comment by ericcumbee in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

ericcumbee — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:05:05 +0000

There are easier cheaper ways of destroying a satellite than sending a space shuttle. We would have only sent a space shuttle to capture it for intelligence purposes.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

ericcumbee — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:13:50 +0000

The D5 has flight heritage to use the industry term.

New comment by ericcumbee in "I'd tell you a UDP joke…"

ericcumbee — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:33:25 +0000

An SQL Query walks into a bar and sees two table....he says "Mind if I join you?"

New comment by ericcumbee in "New Glenn Update"

ericcumbee — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 04:29:28 +0000

I believe that a larger fairing and vertical integration capability for Falcon is in the works as a result of the last round of the National Security Launch Contracts that SpaceX won.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Show HN: ISS in Real Time – 25 Years Aboard the International Space Station"

ericcumbee — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 01:22:41 +0000

hard to believe its been 25 years. I remember watching CSPAN at my grandmothers on a friday night watching the live coverage of STS-88 Mating the Russian Zarya Module to the US Unity node.

New comment by ericcumbee in "SpaceX launches Starship megarocket on 11th test flight"

ericcumbee — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:45:49 +0000

I'm pretty NASA signed the deal knowing full well that they were taking a big risk. The chances of Starship HLS being a Long Poll item for Artemis III were high. They chose Starship HLS knowing that it had a long and risky critical path.

And In fairness to NASA....and I may not have all of these details correct, but they didnt have many choices. the NASA Reauthorization Act required them to select two different landers for HLS, but the budget only funded one and under funded them at that. Starship was all that they could afford. Congress has since gone back and funded a second one.

New comment by ericcumbee in "SpaceX launches Starship megarocket on 11th test flight"

ericcumbee — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 04:43:42 +0000

Or just more people being exposed to the blue marble effect the better.

New comment by ericcumbee in "SpaceX launches Starship megarocket on 11th test flight"

ericcumbee — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 04:33:10 +0000

that goes way back to the early days of spacex. its a jab at ULA that was getting their engines from Russia. and at Russia itself because Musk felt screwed when he tried to buy a couple ICBMS for his original mars idea.

New comment by ericcumbee in "SpaceX launches Starship megarocket on 11th test flight"

ericcumbee — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 04:27:03 +0000

the people that hate musk are going to find something wrong with it "The Ship blew up on landing" and the musk lovers will do the opposite when things actually go wrong.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starship's Eleventh Flight Test"

ericcumbee — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:35:13 +0000

Not an Aerospace Engineer by any measure but I would say that one was pretty much by the numbers.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starship's Eleventh Flight Test"

ericcumbee — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 22:57:38 +0000

Last Flight for Block 1 Booster, Block 2 Ship and Pad A in its current Configuration.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Find SF parking cops"

ericcumbee — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 22:39:28 +0000

Hold for wap-spotter

New comment by ericcumbee in "QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system"

ericcumbee — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:08:05 +0000

I was talking about ArcGIS.

New comment by ericcumbee in "QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system"

ericcumbee — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:39:19 +0000

I played with it some last year. not much has changed since I used it in a GIS class in 2007 in college.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starship's Tenth Flight Test"

ericcumbee — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 21:55:15 +0000

It was said somewhere that one of the previous ditches in the ocean. the booster remained a little too intact and floated into Mexican waters creating a navigational hazard. So the idea was also to make sure it broke up on splashdown.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starship's Tenth Flight Test"

ericcumbee — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 02:12:43 +0000

that was on the landing burn. they had a engine out on the ascent.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starship's Tenth Flight Test"

ericcumbee — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 01:08:39 +0000

Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut down the time to replace a single tile down to minutes instead of the hours it took with the shuttle. The Tiles are also alot more standardized so they can be more mass produced than shuttle tiles.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starship's Tenth Flight Test"

ericcumbee — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:54:06 +0000

It accomplished all the goals for this flight. That’s 100% successful

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starship's Tenth Flight Test"

ericcumbee — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 23:52:43 +0000

The Detail shots of the different parts of the starlink sats during the starlink feature was really interesting.

New comment by ericcumbee in "Starbucks in Korea asks customers to stop bringing in printers/desktop computers"

ericcumbee — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:49:22 +0000

I’ve seen that as well a few times.