I wonder if elon has been testing all these rockets in a desperate attempt to escape the planet with a bunch of other billionaires now that global warming is on track to destroy us. It would help me understand why the wealthy all seem so hell bent on accelerating the destruction.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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IDK. They will certainly be fine here, on earth. Even if everything else goes to shit, they will continue living in luxury.
On a spaceship / station / Mars colony though? As much as I love sci-fi, living there will be ROUGH, regardless of how rich you are.
I think it's more an ego thing: "I want to go down in history as the first human on another planet, lest I be forgotten" combined with an unhealthy dose of not giving a fuck about other people, which is kinda a prerequisite to being a billionaire in the first place.
Fair points! Elon is already likely to go down in history, but not for good reasons.
He's a modern day Edison. Loved by some, hated by others. Takes credit for other's work and has sketchy morals. More a businessman than an engineer. History will ebb and flow on if he's celebrated or destined, one decade he's a hero, the next he's a villain; and opinion will continue to switch.
But remember to pee in the shower itt use a bike
Damn, the absolute collapse of the European space industry...
All those launches being subsidized and facilitated with US tax dollars while he used it to put telecom satellites up.
Most of the Falcon 9 launches are for Starlink and are paid for by SpaceX themselves. How is that "the government subsidizing them"? If you want to argue that they're using money they got from NASA to fund those launches, is your plumber feeding their family from you subsidizing their life?
US buys launches at the same rate as everyone else. NASA chipped in a few million to get falcon 9 off the ground, but they haven't been subsidizing for years.
Thats weird because Musk claims to be operating with "federal agency activity" for Space Force in his bid to appeal the decision in California to take away his launch license. The purpose of the planned increase in launches to 50 and 100 in the next two years? To launch the newer version of Starlink and do a small amount of testing on in-space refueling.
Yeah, space Force bought the launches? With star shield, the DOD bought space on starlink sats.
I'm a Rocket Lab fan. Tons of innovation, slower progress due to not having the richest man behind, but on track to launch a reusable medium rocket, FULLY reusable and with a sensible guy at the helm.
You taking neutron? That still has a disposable upper stage.
I wish rocket lab the best and hope that one day they can have a competing heavy lift/human certified spacecraft.
However, it's nigh impossible to ignore how much SpaceX alone has reshaped the space industry and is basically forcing everybody else to step up.
Agree, say what you want but spaceX is in a league of their own currently. Especially with the recent starship heavy booster catch, the biggest rocket ever launched caught mid air! They're on track for a human space landing.
The best thing for humanity now would be for multiple people to develop reusable spacecraft. For greater chance that someone will land on a new innovation.
In the meantime Arianespace divided by 3 their number of rocket launches
The chart says companies/space agency, so I am assuming that NASA stopped launching rockets? It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
Kind of the opposite - instead of the one rocket program NASA could have done, we have ULA, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. There’s multiple baskets now
Indeed, NASA stopped launching rockets with the space shuttle. But that was the single best decision that NASA ever made. The space shuttle was an extremely expensive death trap. (It was damn cool, but a terrible way to get to space)
It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
You can blame the trump administration for that, with their commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. But the truth is, NASA has always heavily relied upon private companies, it's just that in the past they were all defense contractors (Boeing, Northrop, lockheed, rocketdyne, ULA). The other annoying truth, these commercial programs have actually been wildly successful (except in the case of Boeing's participation).
But it's been wildly successful in a few respects, one of which is that nasa has been able to focus on exploration again. Without having to support the huge costs of the shuttle program, they've been able to put a lot of their money into landers, interplanetary probes and space telescopes. I think we have more ongoing exploration missions than ever before. The Europa clipper mission launched just yesterday (on a SpaceX Rocket coincidentally). https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/
I wonder if NASA would ever bring back the space plane idea they had before the space shuttle plan got co-opted by a bunch of interest groups and turned into the boondoggle that it became.
Yeah, it certainly could have been better. I believe the original plans were for both the booster and orbiter to essentially be planes able to land on a runway. It's really a pretty awesome design, I mean can you imagine if we had a fully reusable launch vehicle in the 90s?
But the truth is, the shuttle was never really reusable, it was more like... refurbishable. It took a lot of maintenance for the heat shield and the engines after every launch. It was also amazingly complex, there were so many possible failure states, and in many of those scenarios there was just no hope for the crew. With a shuttle and with the future starship, we'll be seriously missing the launch escape system seen in traditional crew capsules. On some level, the last thing I would want would be to lose a whole shuttle crew and two booster pilots. (Though admittedly, these days the booster would certainly be unscrewed). I do also wonder, how much potential payload mass they'd lose by adding all the additional parts they would need to make the booster a landable aircraft.
Anyway, it is possible NASA could do that again, but it would be a serious investment to get that working, and right now I think they just aren't set up to take on a project of that complexity. Also, it would definitely distract and redirect funds from their ongoing science missions.
So yeah, they could, it would be cool, but I don't think it's a good idea.
It's cool that spaceX has rockets can come back and be reused.
China just fires unregulated rockets that in danger people, wild life etc. from toxic and debrid
China rocket crashes after 'accidental' launch
Chinese rocket debris seen falling over village after launch
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I watched the recent test of catching the returning second stage booster in the chopsticks, and had a lump in my throat. Absolutely fucking amazing, nobody is in the same league as that crew.
SpaceX launched about 429,125 kg of spacecraft upmass in Q1, followed by CASC with about 29,426 kg
Smaller satellites (<1,200 kg) represented 96% of spacecraft launched in Q1, 76% of total upmass
So the way I'm personally reading this is 2/3 of this is starlink launches
And launching space junk and making viewing the stars less and less clear at an historic rate.
People pay good money for that ‘junk’. A quality internet connection basically anywhere in the world, including at sea and in very remote areas, is far from junk.
Yeah I'm going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I've had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.
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Out of curiosity - how many megatons of carbon has that produced, and how many billionaires will all the starships carry when they've exploited the earth's resources and left all it's living creatures to die and escape to mars?
The carbon is not the problem.
SpaceX launches in 2023 were about 0.02 megatons of CO2 directly. I don't know how fugitive emissions from fueling and defueling, especially on starship with methane.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-falcon-9-co2-emissions
200,000kg/launch, 100 launches.
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