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Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You!
theodp writes "'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."
I'm going to go with yes, Mr. Emissions Police.
Yes. My immediate thought was on the "...the Russians are not as concerned with safety." comment. After 80 years of Stalinism I think I get that.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
The aircraft analogy doesn't work. 100 years ago, the idea that high volume air travel was possible wouldn't be that fantastic given what was happening in 1912. The airplane had gone from a short flight of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the French flying across the English Channel in 1909, a span of only 7 years. And look at what was happening in 1912 according to Wikipedia: you had the founding of major aircraft corporations like Sopwith and Fokker, seaplanes, carrier tests conducted by the U.S. Navy, the first use of aircraft as bombers. On the engineering end of things, they had gone from the Wright Brother's first use of the wind tunnel to the development of Prandtl's lifting-line theory and theories of supersonic flow. In short, in 1912, aircraft were nowhere near a mature technology. Over the past 50 years, however, the pace of change has slowed dramatically. Rockets show the same pattern: an initial rapid rate of change in the technology's capabilities and efficiency, followed by a longer period of much slower change as the technology runs up against basic limits imposed by materials and physics.