Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.
There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry!
It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed getting out, shuts the door and it goes back up the ramp.
OK. That's it! I draw the line at Guy Fieri slander!
That's not fakery. That's every classic car owner's dream. You get to show off the hot rod and not put miles on it. I am sure he does plenty of joyriding in that thing. Guy is anything but phony. He is actually one of thee more wholesome dudes on television ATM. We need more Guy Fieri's.
There have been so many seemingly respectable celebrities that we've gotten to know only to find out they're not really so great. I feel like Guy Fieri is the exact opposite - when I first saw him on TV I just knew this guy sucked. The car, the attitude, the hair - something just rubbed me the wrong way. But the more I've learned about him - his advocacy for gay marriage, his relief for restaurant workers during the pandemic, etc...I have to admit he seems like a good guy.
What if his market research found that his viewers have a positive association with gay marriage and with restaurant workers and they could increase ratings by x-percent by making a public statement on these issues?
For example the Nike corporation. Some groups have heaped praise on them for supporting Kaepernick and related social justice protests. But was it altruism? Of course not. Their market research simply showed that their customers tended to feel passionately about that issue. So they did the math and calculated that the revenue they’d lose by taking a public position was more than made up for with what they’d lose, and better than if they’d remain neutral too - as their founder said “It doesn’t matter how many people hate your brand as long as enough people love it.”. Consider too that Nike now sells a majority of their product overseas to a very American-skeptic market.
Heh. He’s probably a nice guy... and his example is just the one that came first to mind.
It irks me people like Branson are blasé about faking something they don’t have to fake. He’s probably dedicated to the environment even if his activities and businesses aren’t friendly to the environment.
But just faking it like he really did it, he carried on with the ruse during his little speech too. Like, why?
Because he's a professional narcissist, and everything narcissists do is attention-seeking and fake.
There are a number of books about Branson, and they all underline that he's "not a detail person." As in, he literally doesn't understand what he's doing a lot of the time.
He's good at surrounding himself with competent people who make things happen. He's also good at sales - talking a good game, being charming and optimistic in front of the cameras, and getting people to put up money.
But after some early successes - especially the record company and recording studios - his record of delivery is mediocre, with not a few expensive failures.
With Branson everything is a front and not as solid as it appears to be, and he has a long list of former associates, clients, and partners who are not as impressed as they were initially.
That's not ideal for a conventional business. But when you're dealing with experimental aircraft full of rich people having a very risky adventure, the potential for disaster is spectacular.
People have already died on this project, and it looks as if it's only a matter of time before it literally blows up in someone's face in an extremely expensive way.
Bransons ‘businesses’ are anything but conventional…
Mostly setup and then portions sold off, with Virgin licensing their name to the business.
Even before Covid, Virgin Atlantic is a real shit show financially with virtually everything (planes, landing slots etc) pledged as security for debt to some lender
> He's good at surrounding himself with competent people who make things happen. He's also good at sales - talking a good game, being charming and optimistic in front of the cameras, and getting people to put up money.
Sorry, I don't have anything substantial to add to this. But I just had to react with a smiley :-).
Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!
I hate those shows with a burning passion my wife cant get enough of them.
I have however gotten her to watch "This Old House" which actually shows real remodeling and home repair as opposed to sledgehammer porn fallowed by contrived drama between the hosts finishing with a walk through of a staged house where they advertise tacky furniture and overpriced appliances.
Wait until people hear about the person I know who was a contestant on "The Bachelor", who is in fact already happily married. Reality TV is fake? The ocean is wet! Sewage is smelly! and other shocking news, film at 11.
I think it was the reverse-gender version of the show? With many male contenders and one woman. The person who is a friend-of-a-friend is a happily married man with two kids, but was "single" for the purpose of the show.
I was on people court as one of the audience members that they interview after the case. I never saw the court case, they just grabbed random people off the street and gave them scenario of the case and asked for their opinion.
Oh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!
“… The segment was shot in July and it documents Ms. Larsen traversing the Island with her friend and realtor Roxanne Briggs as they tour three Shelter Island homes on the market in the $650,000 to $850,000 range.
Spoiler alert: Ms. Larsen actually bought her Longview home back in 2015, a full year before the show was taped, so the outcome was a foregone conclusion by the time the “Island Life” crew came to town…”
It still amazes me that anyone still believes that the pictures they see on TV are in any way real.
100% of content on TV is fake. I used to say except the news, but now I'm not even able to trust that. If it's a commercial, definitely fake. If it's a TV show, 100% fake. Games shows shoot 5 episodes in a day, so when they say "last week's winner" it was last hour's.
Talk Shows are the worst for this. Many of them have a rehearsal with the guests. It's no surprise that all of the guests have amazingly funny or interesting stories about every topic the host brings up. Once you know this is how they work, it's impossible to unsee it when you're watching them. I'm sorry I ruined talk shows for anyone here who may like them.
Whether it is the preshow pre-interview or the post editing decisions, interviews are hard to trust as well now.
I say this as someone that has been involved in all of it. However, the pre-interview is actually less about necessarily leading the interview but about helping the interview avoiding the dead air, blank stares, um, uhs, wells, type of stuff. Also, it is a great way to calm the nerves of those being interviewed if they are not normally in front of a camera which can be very intimidating to people telling a story they may already be nervous about. Trust me, you should be thankful for them.
It's the post editing decisions that you can really get yourself into trouble. You can totally make a sane person sound insane, or totally change the interview. Anything that is not live must be questioned in how much you trust the producers to actually allow the interview to go out as it was rather than chopped up to fit the producer's agenda. If I was to be interviewed, I would make part of my conditions to the interview being that I would be allowed to have my own camera/audio that could record uninterrupted to be able to counter any shenanigans in the edit bay.
Yes, I actually don't mind the pre-interview. It is a sensible thing to do for a variety of reasons. The thing that makes me cringe is more the late night talk shows (not all of them mind you) where the guest provides the questions to the host because they (or their PR people) have written some anecdotes for those questions/topics.
Except Graham Norton Show, due to the amazing host. They willingly admit (even during the show) that they discuss whether a topic is fine with the guest beforehand, but Graham still brings out the best in people. And since there are several people on the show, he just lets them interact, unscripted.
You honestly believe that the NBA has never had officials go soft on calls for their star players, or not call the rules for how many steps without putting the ball on the floor, or the whole under the ball carrying or whatever the rules are they decide not to call?
You think no officials of any sport did or didn't make a call because of some bet somewhere? You think a sports player didn't make a catch? You think sports players aren't using performance enhancing drugs so that you might be entertained while they get rewards?
Some people just really want to believe that television is real. It's just not healthy to have this much faith in TV.
Unless you're claiming it happens every single game, you're applying the wrong number.
Or are you backing your claim down to "100% of content on TV has some faked element in some episode eventually"? Because that's not a very useful claim.
TV is entertainment, and any faith in the images coming from it is undeserved. Is 100% hyperbole, yes, of course. Is the majority of content on TV fake and over produced, yes, of course it is. It used to be that the label news meant something, but the definitions have been blurred so that opinion shows are now touted as news. After the news label, anything else appearing on the boobtube is meant for entertainment. Believing that the "unscripted" "reality" programming is real is farsical to me. I've worked in production for so long that maybe I'm jaded, but I've worked for religious programming, sports programming, drama/comedy production, live interviews, etc. Everything is touched up in some form or fashion. Education channels exist, but depending on what camp you're in, even those are faking/pushing agendas.
I'm not sure if this comparison really works at all. Virgin risks real human lives every flight. Guy risks maybe a little weight gain for his fans. Shows aren't rocket launches and have little in common.
Guy plays a sort of reality tv fictional persona which is a vamped up version of his own personality. His show is entertainment and not a documentary. Of course, he's not driving through the continental USA constantly to get to restaurants. He's a normal middle-aged man who needs rest and vacation and time off. He sleeps in decent hotels with his staff and they fly to their next destination. Workers deserve, at least, basic amenities and asking people to live a real life cartoony character is a bit silly. He's not hotrodding around everywhere (which would be risky to him and put a lot of miles on a classic car). His production is probably two dozen people. Its a business and should be respected as one from a worker's perspective. All 'reality' tv shows are heavily scripted. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
The Guy Fieri comparison seems like a weird one, since the actual subject of the show (that is, the restaurants) isn't faked. The hot rod and whatever goofy stuff comes with Fieri's persona is just a framing device around the actual establishments.
You don't think the bicycling, Branson's persona, and the speech where he mentioned the bicycling are just framing devices around an engineering team pulling off a passeneger spaceflight?
I'd be surprised if he even came up with the idea. They probably had a speech written for him, he got busy (or just felt out of it) and didn't bicycle there as planned, so they found some footage to release so they wouldn't have to change the speech.
It's identical. In this thread, Guy Fieri fans jump out to declare his persona actually true and good; on another message board, Branson fans are doing the same thing, explaining how he's nothing like Fieri.
Biking to the spaceport was in the promotional video released a few days before the flight (where they announced "astronauts"), obviously it couldn't be filmed on the flight day.
They didn't say "oops, you're right, sorry". They said they "regret the error", as though they didn't intend to mislead people. And it's not like Guy Fieri; as far as I'm aware, he doesn't generally pretend it's live.
In fairness I don’t think anyone really thinks that Guy Fieri drives from city to city, and the car is a little bit if flair, not really germane to the content of the show.
Better than driving on a real road whilst talking to a camera off to the side, no? Every car scene in every movie and TV show is "fake" too, just so you know.
That's an awesome chase. Of course it's one of the top chase scenes with the orig. Gone in 60 S. What I like a bout Bullit is it documents some of the city from the 60s. The freeways were new, the embarcadero freeway monstrosity is up and the chase skips from Bernal to The Marina and back to the San Bruno Mountains in minutes! It's also kind of realistic. The peelouts and tire burnouts are realistic even the explosion at the end are not too over the top. Today's chases are like Star Wars pyrotechnics, little of it remotely believable.
Apparently they had to do major repairs on the cars every night, because the jumps were so brutal. In one shot, you can see a large plume of oil appear as the car hits the ground and its oil pan is destroyed. :-O
We used to have smart guys in competition. Edison vs. Tesla.
Not we have rich business savy guys with not much of a science background holding the cards.
I have met very few wealthy men, young or old, who had great ideas. It's almost like the money dulls their brains? And their vanity projects are usually way out of their wheelhouse.
It's the same with Writers. I have read very few wealthy guys shop could write. They certainly have the time to write, but it's dribble. They are only read because they have money.
Apparently Edison was much more of a businessman than his legacy suggests - which was intentional on his part. Similar to Bill Gates, they both started as engineers but made their money organizing people.
That's because Edison vs. Tesla was really mostly theoretical with some funds for engineering (and marketing). The space race is really mostly engineering which requires lots of money.
I can't think of anyone powerful enough who isn't also rich. Although "rich" is a vaguely defined term. There still to me seems to be a direct relationship between money and power - billionaires can push the world further than millionaires, than the upper class, etc.
Money and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you.
The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways of doing this are perfectly legal). Conversely, political power - the kind mediated by legal systems or explicit threats of violence - is directly convertible to money.
(There's also a special variant of the latter - power wielded by organized religions. The power to browbeat others into doing almost any arbitrary work. Of course, that one too is trivially convertible to both money and political power, and vice versa. That's why fully separating business, church and state is fundamentally impossible. They're different facets of the same thing. An Unholy Trinity.)
A managing partner of a $1B fund is more powerful than a person worth $10B on paper whose wealth is all tied up in a minority position in a company they are unable to sell the shares of.
Or consider the power of Biden vs his personal net worth.
Huge difference. Deviating from a flight plan, even majorly, is orders of magnitude less dangerous than glancing at your phone on the highway. Airspace is really big, and flying into area outside their flight path is so unlikely to hurt anyone as to be laughable.
The ballsy part that deserves respect is pushing the envelope on safety, executing perfectly, and playing it off like it's nothing.
> Deviating from a flight plan, even majorly, is orders of magnitude less dangerous than glancing at your phone on the highway.
No. These safety margins are expensive and they are there for a reason. Airliners don't expect a f-ing rocket to shoot by and just the air disturbances caused by it can seriously hurt or kill people.
> The ballsy part that deserves respect is pushing the envelope on safety, executing perfectly, and playing it off like it's nothing.
It does not deserve respect because it risked the safety of other people. I'd agree fully if all they risked was their live, but this way, it's exactly like going 250 km/h on a limited freeway - you're putting the lives of other people at risk and that's not cool.
>These safety margins are expensive and they are there for a reason.
Maybe I missed it in the article but did they elaborate on exactly where they strayed?
The White Sands Missile Range is really quite large, even for restricted military airspace standards. I would assume they would have to really go off course in order to appreciably put people at risk, the irresponsibility notwithstanding.
Edit: This was an honest question, and I was hoping for an answer that would help me to understand. It's a shame that this is getting downvoted rather than someone enlightening me.
The rules I'm referring to are the ones that say "if this light goes red, abort the mission instead of potentially crashing into other people or killing everyone aboard".
The pilots' willingness to risk their lives for an historic flight. It's a bit of a machismo thing, but it takes guts to do that, and a certain amount of comfort around risk.
I also don't think people realize how close to the earth these people still were. Take a globe, hold your finger as close as you can to it without touching, and that's about as high as Bezos and Branson went. As you said, orbital is what matters, and a suborbital flight around the Karman line doesn't mean much.
Orbit can occur at any distance from Earth if you are the right speed I guess -- although below a handful of fingers you'll get significant drag from the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere doesn't just suddenly cut off at some point, it is a matter of degrees. But for example, the ISS orbits around 400km and needs to be boosted a 'few times a year.'
(The Karman line is around 100km, so if we want to use 500ish km as the threshold for reasonable orbits, we really are in the ballpark of a hand's worth of fingers).
The altitude isn't really the point, so much as the trajectory -- if they miss the ground at least once I say we give them a round of applause.
Bit of a bad comparison of accomplishment. Low Earth Orbit isn't that much higher. But it is much much faster (which is what's hard). Getting into orbit is about going fast enough that the centripetal force from your velocity keeps you aloft. To get into a stable orbit at a precise target altitude requires accurate timings and controls, and lots more energy. The engineering challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult.
> the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man.
So much energy invested in a dick measuring contest. I hope humanity reaches a point in which the incentive structure would stimulate a more meaningful investment of human labor. Not to say I'm not part of the problem...
I would unpack "gutsy" with its overtones of grudging admiration, into a lot harsher terms related to toxic narcissism and what amounts to a pissing contest between competitive men.
I suspect there is a natural evolutionary curb on the somewhat sociopathic qualities at work, whereby bravado is kept in some check by self-culling being commonplace.
All for the best marketing position for the near-space tourism business that Virgin (and, in competition, Blue Origin) is launching and each promoting with the media frenzy around their respective founder-on-board demo launch.
It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day.
If I have to choose between this and nuclear-armed superpowers intimidating each other with super-accurate rockets - I'll take the billionaires.
To be honest I think it's awesome. We need people who are able and willing to push for something beyond the everyday, and it doesn't really matter why they're doing it.
I disagree with that. Why they are doing what they are doing is very important.
Elon is a set of flaws walking on two legs but his plans make sense: Humanity has all their eggs in one basket by being a single planet species. To change that we need to make space travel much, much cheaper than it was. To do that we need reusable and economical spacecrafts. He works alongside this plan.
Branson made people build him the adult version of a coin operated mall kiddie ride. You give it money and it shakes you around and later you can tell people that you are now an astronaut.
Two people, both have a ton of money and both used some of their wealth to assemble a team to build a spacecraft. The difference between them is the “why” they did this.
One if suceeds has changed the history of humankind. If he fails at the grand goal misserably he still made a vastly succesfull space company.
The other if he succeeds has a funfair ride with bragging rights. Meh.
The why is all that matters, because it affects the how and the what fundamentally.
> It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day.
No, you're overgeneralizing.
As counter-examples:
- fitness goals
- financial freedom goals (eg the FIRE communities)
- altruistic goals
- romantic goals (impress a potential partner)
are all proof that humans can be motivated by health/desire for physical well-being, kindness, compassion and personal comfort to progress to goals beyond the day-to-day.
Competition motivates some progress, but there are other sources of motivation as well :)
Altruism is borderline, given how much of "altruistic" activity is really about social signaling and competitive status games through conspicuous giving. Even if subconsciously.
All the above are day-to-day goals though, except perhaps altruism. By not day-to-day I mean something beyond satisfying the desires of your physical body to feel good, fuck, eat well, be safe, be admired, etc. Goals about species, deep time, eternal questions, the fate of the environment or the planet.
