cstross

What I want is Banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism.

(You can quote me on that. I hate what tech has turned into.)

No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became the opening of the novel published in 2005.

I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.

And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.

I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console) in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully installed setup. If I remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing limit).

I expect if astronauts aboard HLS lose their altimeter they'd have to abort the landing immediately -- to proceed without it would be the height of recklessness. But Odysseus had no abort-to-orbit capability so was committed to landing.

But I also note that Odysseus cost NASA a little over $100M on a fixed price contract, per Ars Technica.

By way of comparison, the Indian government's Chandrayaan-3 mission, the lander of which touched down in 2023, cost roughly $90M.

So private space isn't automatically cheaper than 100% government agency-run missions: it just depends on the agency.

With E-VTOL, which is presumably aiming for local-to-local flights, you have the added problem that if you get your innovation wrong, potentially bystanders on the ground die when your flying car falls on them.

It's absolutely not impossible to do it right (i.e. with nobody dying). But if you do that you need to hit existing aerospace engineering safety standards for stuff like multiply redundant flight control systems, traffic routing that avoids extensive flight over densely populated areas, and so on.

And then you discover you're competing with an unexpected combination like, say, robo-taxis feeding a high speed rail station with 220mph trains running every 15 minutes and your business model turns out to be the new Zeppelin, not the DC-3.

Scotland isn't really a market for short distance electric flights unless you're thinking of the Highlands and Islands, where less than 10% of the population is scattered across crinkle-cut fjords.

France/Netherlands to Sint Maarten/St. Martin is, IIRC, served by wide-body airliners because it's both legally part of France itself (at least the St. Martin half of the island) and it's a significant tourist resort.

And if you think the EU and UK have laxer safety/regulatory standards than the FAA, you might want to re-think your position ...