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(((Charles Fishman))) Profile picture
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17 Sep, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Here's the thing about @SpaceX …

In publicity terms, they do some things brilliantly.

Cameras mounted on the rockets & inside Dragon give amazing views. Riveting every time.

But complete blackout of @inspiration4x after launch is a bait & switch.

What's happening now?
2/ You don't inspire interest & passion for spaceflight with the walk across the crew access arm.

What's life like *in space* for the 4 ordinary-people crew?

What are their immediate observations?

Zero-G after 4 minutes v. after 12 hours?

How's the view? the food? the toilet?
3/ THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT.

We really never have had a crew like this. This is a verbal, smart, funny group. (Yes, I've watched the Netflix documentary.)

I want to hear their voices in real time.

I don't buy the whole Netflix 'exclusivity' thing.
4/ SpaceX, Isaacman & St. Jude could easily have worked that out w/ Netflix.

Showing us what life is like in snippets of pictures and video doesn't undermine the value of the next Netflix episode — it enhances it.

This is a billionaire / fund-raising mission. That's the truth.
5/ But the way they're handling giving us a taste of the ordinary-person experience, while it's happening—that just increases cynicism & skepticism about the whole enterprise.

Watch watch watch! Oops, sorry, now we can't tell you anything. Or even why we won't tell you anything.

• • •

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More from @cfishman

(((Charles Fishman))) Profile picture
18 Sep
Inspiration4 with a safe splashdown in the Atlantic off Florida.

Series if three pics below.

Great three-day mission of four regular folks to space.

A new era of spaceflight is being born right in front of us… Image
2/ Inspiration 4 returns… Image
3/ Inspiration4 floating safely in Atlantic… Image
Read 5 tweets
(((Charles Fishman))) Profile picture
17 Sep
We've got 4 ordinary people in space on a SpaceX capsule.

I recently re-read slices of 'One Giant Leap' to get ready for a podcast.

Space travel is hard, but it was really hard in 1969.

Amazing what you 'forget' about your own work.

—>
fastcompany.com/90357215/your-…
2/ Tidbit #1: On Apollo 11, Armstrong & Aldrin spent 2-1/2 hours Moon walking.

They ended up so covered in Moon dirt, & found the dirt so irritating, they spent their one night on the Moon sleeping in their helmets & gloves to avoid the regolith (p.xiv).

amazon.com/One-Giant-Leap…
3/ MIT won the contract to design the spaceship computers for Apollo, and then to write the software for them, and supervise their construction.

Apollo's computers were the fastest, most nimble computers ever created.

But MIT itself ran out of computing power to program them.
Read 6 tweets
(((Charles Fishman))) Profile picture
30 Aug
This is absolutely bonkers.

The Mississippi River is 200’ deep at New Orleans, and a half mile wide.

That’s a wall of water as tall as a skyscraper and as wide as a city block, with 2,000 miles of water behind it.

Ida stopped the flow, then briefly reversed it.
2/ When I was a Mississippi River tugboat deckhand, Rule #1 was never fall in the river. Because, we were told, half who fall in don’t emerge alive.

Actually, Rule #1 was wear your life vest at all times on deck.

Rule #2, above.
The Mississippi River has been recorded flowing backwards at least three other times:

• 2012, Hurricane Isaac, for 24 hours bear the mouth

• 2005, for Hurricane Katrina

• 1812, after a series of powerful earthquakes near New Madrid, Missouri.

bbc.com/news/science-e…
Read 4 tweets
(((Charles Fishman))) Profile picture
26 Aug
Yesterday, a federal judge in Michigan did something extraordinary & important.

Yes, she penalized Trump's election attorneys for their conduct filing a lawsuit to have Michigan's 2020 election results thrown out.

But she did something bigger:

Took the suit seriously.

—>
2/ She went through every claim in the original suit, and then she went through every claim they mounted to defend themselves against charges of incompetence & bad lawyering.

And she crushed every single one — with barely restrained fury, but also with meticulous precision.
3/ One small example: Lawyers claimed they 'hadn't received' certain briefs mailed to them by lawyers for the city of Detroit.

They did receive the documents — Lin Wood tweeted mocking them.
Read 28 tweets
(((Charles Fishman))) Profile picture
25 Aug
Delta Airlines becomes the 1st major company to take a big vaccine step:

Charging employees who aren't vaccinated—by raising their health insurance premiums.

The cost to stay unvaccinated: $200 a month (starting Nov. 1).

With good economic reason…

—>
cnbc.com/2021/08/25/del…
2/ Each case of a Delta employee who is hospitalized with COVID has cost the airline an average of $50,000.

And in the last several weeks, Delta's CEO says, every Delta employee hospitalized for COVID has been unvaccinated.

Bullet points from his memo to staff below.
3/ Delta is actually taking a series of steps over weeks to put pressure on staff to vaccinate.

At this moment, 70% of Delta's 91,000 employees are vaccinated.

If you're unvaccinated:

• Must wear mask at work, starting today

• Sept 12: Must test weekly

—>
Read 6 tweets
(((Charles Fishman))) Profile picture
19 Jul
The dumbest part of our national discourse at this moment is:

Oh those crazy space billionaires!

How dumb are Bezos, Musk, Branson—spending $1 billion building rockets to fly themselves to space?

What a silly Gilded Age echo of ego, indulgence, not to mention tone-deafness.
2/ Linked below a recent example of this from @washingtonpost —but this mindless ignorance is everywhere.

You know what Branson, Bezos and Musk have done in the last 20 years?

They've each created original rocket technology that flies humans to space.
washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021…
3/ Bezos & Musk *already* do something NASA & its contractors never have:

They send rockets to space, & re-fly them. Quickly, inexpensively, reliably.

You know, like Southwest 're-uses' its Boeing 737s.

That is an incredible, thrilling breakthrough.

And vital to space travel.
Read 19 tweets

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