I'm planning on making a very long drive to see this. Is there a viewing area? I realize it's a Big Falcon Rocket and will be probably be heard from anywhere but is there a designated spot? How close can we get?
I watched the first launch from the southern tip of Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island and recommend that (I stood on the jetty). I also had recently watched 2 falcon launches in Florida and Starship is incredibly more powerful and awe-inspiring to witness.
Plan to get to the park entrance at least 30 mins early because it takes time to walk through to the southern end, and there will likely be a large crowd.
Stayed at Isla Grand Hotel and there were a bunch of other people hanging out the night before, have fun!
Very loud, bring ear protection! The crackling of the engines will make your entire body shake. Other than that just comfy clothes you can walk on the sand in. It's a real unique experience, you're in for a treat!
> The crackling of the engines will make your entire body shake.
I've never heard it IRL but I absolutely love this sound, also from back then when the Space Shuttle launched. IDK why, but it is just such a perfect sound to me. As if it were the best indicator of the tremendous amount of energy being released there.
There’s an entire portion of this that’s missing in the audio tracks from any launch I’ve watched on tv, YouTube, etc.
The deep bass notes go soo low and have this wild elastic ringing tonal quality to them. Like someone is playing a huge kit of koto drums or something. You can really start to hear acoustic dispersion effects as well.
I have generally been annoyed by the lengthy take off animations in Starfield, but the one thing I find satisfying every time I see one is that crackle of the engines. I can't think of any other game I played that would have this sound, so it immediately struck me as nice attention to detail.
The crackle of the air moving back and forth during a shuttle launch would be so fast and intense that the friction of the air (near the launch pad) would set the grass on fire.
That was such a delightful fact that I had to source it. Tragically, it is not true.
Gee, K. L., Mathews, L. T., Anderson, M. C., & Hart, G. W. (2022). Saturn-V sound levels: A letter to the Redditor. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(2), 1068-1073.
"While this peak level represents acoustic amplitudes that
would propagate nonlinearly to rapidly form shocks and
result in perception of jet “crackle” (e.g., see Gee et al.,
2016), will it melt concrete or set grass or one’s hair on fire?
It will definitely not."
When I was young I had relatives that lived near Heathrow airport in London. Whenever Concorde would take off, the windows in the whole house would end up shaking.
The total power output of Concorde was around half that of a 747, but for takeoff Concorde needed to use after burners - which I guess is the same mechanism at play here.
Maybe for the kids, but I didn’t use ear protection and I don’t remember noticing anyone around me who did. It’s not dangerously or uncomfortably loud from the park in my experience.
Bring binoculars. You don’t need them to see the rocket on the pad but it flies away pretty fast once it’s going, and they’re useful for watching propellant load and noticing other details. I also bring camping chairs, sunscreen, bug spray, and a bottle of water.
What's the advice to the public about not wondering off the beaten track ? I ask because there's special forces in the swamps, looking for troublemakers/saboteurs.
The island is across the water from the launch site, and SpaceX has its own fences and security for the facilities on their side. There’s also an employees only viewing area on the island. There’s also a protected wetlands but that’s unrelated.
Did you just walk into the park? 30 minutes before launch is cutting it really close if you want to drive in and park. If you’re doing that, try and be there by like 4-5 AM if you can.
You won't be able to park at the park anytime near the launch; it will be full. But you can just walk down the beach to the jetty from anywhere else on the island.
That’s why I try to arrive around 4 AM, yes. The only time I tried to get a hotel it was a 60 minute hike to the park from the hotel so I find it a lot simpler to just drive overnight and park at the park.
Yeah I walked in, honestly a split second decision not to go to Starbucks across the bridge in Port Isabell saved me. I veered to make a u-turn after deciding it would be too close and saw a parking spot right there. Walked from the bridge to southern tip and had minutes to spare until it launched.
Is that really a concern? It may not be super healthy but it's not like you are going to a rocket launch every day. Airports are very unhealthy with the PM 0.1 levels but i haven't heard of anyone not flying because of that.
If it's a concern, I'd check again on Thursday & early Friday. At least around me, this summer, their multi-day forecasts were often pretty inaccurate.
I was planning on making the trip but the earliest I can be there is Sunday. Nasaspaceflight's youtube channel mentions this as the best hotel to watch the launch and where they hang out.
I stayed in Port Isabell a few years ago visiting some of my wife's family in the valley. There's a big freaking bridge there that you can see the pad from. I bet that bridge would be a good place to watch as well.
The biggest scheduling point is that you probably need to get there super early, like at least 8 hours beforehand. Not sure how that's going to work out with the small children you mention in a later comment.
I went to see a launch, it was incredible. But beware, they were scheduled for a Monday but cancelled twice due to weather before ultimately launching on a Friday. Luckily I was in town (LA, pretty close to Vandenberg) all week.
I don’t feel connected to this like I did to NASA ventures. To me it’s like going to watch the launch of a billionaire’s mega yacht. Why would I want to see that?
This isn’t about exploration. It’s about profit. And there’s not an easy way to shine that.
If SpaceX wanted profit, all they need to do is team up with Lockheed/Boeing, jack their prices up 100x fold and start waiting for that sweet taxpayer dollar to come rolling in. Getting prices as low as Starship is going to achieve is not a straight forward path to profit. It's like taking an industry dominated by Geo Metros being sold for high end sportscar prices, and then introducing a car that runs like a high end sports car and selling it for Geo Metro prices.
The only way they start making meaningful profit from what they're doing is basically if the exact opposite scenario of what you're implying comes to pass - that space becomes so completely accessible and utilized that they win by scale. And that's the exact opposite of 'mega yachts.' This is explicitly about exploration, colonization, mining, and more. This is about actually opening space to the human race, beyond relying on multi billion dollar toy expeditions, for the first time ever.
To me it’s the opposite, one mans dream to initiate and achieve space travel is much more romantic than a government space programs which is more about nation building.
That's not one man dream, it's a team of engineers and managers funded by a rich guy who likes what they can do. Some serious backing from the US government is part of it with research work, contracts and grants. The dream is collective
Sure, there are many people who work in the organisation that he built that help him achieve his vision, but none of that would have existed without him challenging the world to an impossible dream ("live on Mars!"). Without Elon Musk, the space industry would still have been focused on SLS-style projects: slow to develop and impossibly expensive, the domain of only one or two governments, and always at the mercy of the next administrations' priorities. Instead, if he succeeds, humanity will be transformed, from a species that barely dips its toes into space, to one that can finally begin to truly explore the solar system. It's as much the start of a new age as was the voyage of Columbus.
Giving Elon Musk credit for this is certainly not misplaced. Denying him that credit because you disagree with him politically (as another poster suggested)... I have no words for that, it's just so ridiculous. This is the pinnacle of human development right here, and you would deny it because the guy votes Republican? You know, like literally half the people in the country?
> You know, like literally half the people in the country?
I have no opinion on Musk or the rest of your comment, but as a simple matter of factual data it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population) and four decades since they had any significant support.
For a good while Republican voters have been less than half the country and were it not for the uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities they would have even less political success than they have seen.
This response seems to be spinning a narrative that Democrats have a significantly broader support in the US than Republicans, but I think that is somewhat misleading. Independents have stronger support than either of the major parties.
I am in no way suggesting that US Democrats have broader support.
I am stating that the US Republicans do not have the support of "half of the US"; either by half of total population, half of eligable voters, or half of registered voters.
US Independents should have stronger support but that's not really going to put much of a dent in what's iteratively evolved to become a two party bicameral political system thanks to the shortcomings of repeated "First past the post" voting.
What was a bright idea hundreds of years ago hasn't scaled well and converged to unrepresentative gerentopoly.
> but as a simple matter of factual data it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population) and four decades since they had any significant support.
That certainly comes across as you suggesting that Democrats have broader support. Intentional or not, I found your comment misleading by not incorporating the substantial size of independents.
In 2022, the nationwide popular vote for the House of Representatives was 54,506,136 for Republicans and 51,477,313 for Democrats. By percentage the Republicans won 50.6% of the vote and Democrats won 47.8%.
Leaving aside the non primary year figures you dug up;
the US Census Bureau estimated that in 2020, 168.3 million people were registered to vote in 2020 .. that 54 million voting Republican falls well short of cracking half the registered voters, let alone eligible voters.
I’m addressing the standard you originally set in your comment:
> it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population)
This is false; the “percentage of entire voting population” that voted for Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2022 was not only a “slight edge” over the percentage voting for Democrats, but an outright majority.
The fact that Republicans won a majority of the popular vote for House seats also means that their control of the House is not, in fact, a product of “uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities” [sic] as you claim. If you apply the percentages of the popular vote to the number of seats in the House, you’d expect Republicans to control 220 seats and Democrats almost 208 seats. In actuality, the Republicans won 222 seats and the Democrats won 213, meaning both parties got “extra” seats (at the expense of independents and third parties) but the Democrats got more. Moreover, it’s not accurate to say the Republicans are unique in benefitting from the gerrymander. In Illinois, Republicans won 43% of the popular vote but less than 18% of the seats thanks to a Democratic gerrymander. Meanwhile in New York, the courts actually threw out an attempted Democratic gerrymander and as a result, the GOP gained three seats and the Dems lost four.
The original comment that I addressed was (paraphrased) "Republican voters are half the country".
I looked only at Presidental elections which have the greatest turnout, these have rarely seen a 50% Republican showing in total active votes in recent decades.
Including the mid term elections we see even lower voter engagement which helps the Republican showing in active votes, sure.
However of all the people that could vote in the US (those eligable), or even of just those people that indicate they'd probably vote (registered), it's still the case that well short of half the country votes Republican.
That the same can be said of US Democrats (although they generally in recent decades have had the edge in total active votes) - but it still remains that well short of "hal the the country" supports the Republican platform - they don't have a popular mandate.
This is missing the point so badly that I don't know where to begin. The point was that Elon Musk's political views are neither extremist, nor rare: they are shared by roughly half of the people in the US. To take that statement and try to refute it on the basis that it is not exactly half of the voting population, but merely a rough approximation, is either a sign of incredibly ill will, or a very bad case of autism.
So, .. only if the system is gamed to favour the affluent that can take a day off and have well serviced voting areas then?
FWiW I'm an outsider of the US election system, it's a hot mess with multiple shortcomings that restrict franchise .. and the US Republicans appear to be more skilled at restricting access to democracy to particular demographics.
That's genuinely a horrible argument and there is no redeeming quality about single day voting. And you're implying electronic machines are being hacked, a claim for which you have no evidence.
The only thing that makes me doubt electronic voting is the relative lack of distributed counting and thus audit-ability.
That said, I rank conspiracy theories on how many people would be involved in carrying it out, and the idea of a malicious voting machine system capable of having votes altered would take too many knowing participants at various levels of the tool chain.
I would welcome learning more or else implementing more "spot audits" of results in order to minimize the likelihood of any changing of votes.
How many people do you think it took for VW to produce fake engine emission results?
The weakness in your ranking mechanism is you think you have an idea of the number of people needed. To paraphrase Feynman: You mustn’t fool yourself and you are the easiest one to fool.
My own heuristic is expect some fraud or error in every system. The more there is an incentive for fraud the more likely there is fraud. It need not be partisan: could be something like the postal worker hiding mail instead of delivering it. Not finding some minor level of fraud is like a “100% voted for Saddam” announcement—not likely true.
I believe it would have happened, with or without Musk. Credit where credit is due, SpaceX seems to be a very well managed operation. I don't believe in providential people, at all. I don't know why my political beliefs are mentioned, I am not even American, I am French living in France.
Starship happens because of
* the current state of manufacturing technology : we can automate a lot of operations that were done by hand in the 70's, we can iterate prototype much faster)
* a lot of essential hardware is now much cheaper, reducing the initial investment cost. Say a servo motor mass produced now vs. a servo motor in 70's made in tiny batches
* the market ie. there's a market to send many tons of hardware into orbit, money can flow into such projects
* it's now possible to test some rocketry ideas in your garage, it's not a closely garden anymore. The pool of very experienced rocketry engineers is increasing
I say he is not a providential man, that it's a team effort, and that it's in line with current industrial needs and capacity. That is not an expression of hate, I think.
I'm no Musk fanboy but I think even if you have the technological capability and demand you still need someone to actually do it. I think if it wasn't Musk it would be someone similarly crazy.
> I believe it would have happened, with or without Musk.
This is a meaningless statement. It would happen, but when? about now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? You keep saying team effort. Do you think Blue Origin or Arianne Group have less talent than SpaceX? Why do they achieve much less?
> I don't believe in providential people, at all.
SpaceX almost went bankrupt in 2008. Without Musk gambling with his finance to rescue the company, SpaceX would have been a footnote in the space history. It wouldn't have survived long enough to have the NASA's money. The team that they’d built would have been spread to who knows what kind of companies.
> the current state of manufacturing technology : we can automate a lot of operations that were done by hand in the 70's, we can iterate prototype much faster)
So why did SLS take that long? Arianne 6? New Glenn? What about a plethora of small launchers that are still not yet widely available?
> a lot of essential hardware is now much cheaper, reducing the initial investment cost
Essential hardware is only a small part of a rocket program. Arianne 6 was supposed to be Europe's answer to Falcon 9, 50% cheaper than Arianne 5. Supposed to debut in 2020, it still has yet to launch. So it costs Europe tax payers est. 5b euros for a rocket that is technologically inferior to Falcon 9, lower cadence, yet more expensive to build and operate. - [1]
> the market ie. there's a market to send many tons of hardware into orbit, money can flow into such projects
That market didn't exist. Looks at the chart in this article about the number of objects (satellites) sent to space - [0]:
The number skyrocketed after 2016, once Falcon 9 has become established. SpaceX has enabled the market, not the other way around. SpaceX just launched 1,000 tonnes of payload in 2023, four times larger than the second place (China the country).
> it's now possible to test some rocketry ideas in your garage, it's not a closely garden anymore. The pool of very experienced rocketry engineers is increasing
SpaceX was built 20 years ago with nothing but a vision of Mars colony. There was no pool of experienced engineers readily available back then. They are now a powerhouse and they can hire whoever they want. The question is, why there hasn’t been another Starship?
Why bring politics into this? You're pushing your own prejudices and opinions on a topic that doesn't need it to make "sides", at your own detriment.
Well established fact that Musk is a figure head, and like any other other figurehead, they matter significantly less to the end result than the giant teams of engineers and supply chain managers do. Of course he is an intelligent, financially sound business man.
But it's very much a fact that the bit's you're romantically idealizing would exist without Elon Musk. Apple was not steve jobs. Ford was not Henry Ford. Toyota was not a single Toyoda.
Did you, by any chance, miss all the political anti-Musk rhetoric in this thread? Why are you singling me out, and not telling all those other people to leave politics out of it?
As for your "facts": without Musk, there would be no SpaceX, no giant teams of engineers, and no supply chain managers. Same as without Steve Jobs (do you hate him so much that you can't even capitalize his name?): without him there would be no Apple, no Mac, no iPhone. You seem to believe that companies and products spring fully formed from the ground, that nobody has to take the initiative to create them. Giant teams of engineers and supply chain managers don't just decide to come together to spend years and millions (if not billions) of their own time and money to build a car, or a computer, or a rocket. Can you point to even a single example where such a thing happened?
How would the 'bits' have come to exist without Elon Musk? Who would have taken the initiative, who would have paid for it? If you're right, why is SpaceX the only game in town? Surely there are plenty of other engineers and supply chain managers that would be up for building the worlds largest reusable launcher in their own time, with their own money?
That's not what we were talking about, and you know it. Elon Musk transformed the space industry with his cheap, reusable launchers, something that nobody before him has done, that was in fact considered to be impossible since launchers were widely considered to be multi-billion dollar, one-shot vehicles.
That transformation can be credited ENTIRELY to Elon Musk, and nobody else, and without him, it might never have happened, as neither governments, nor government contractors have any reason to not choose the well-trodden path, and to not pork-barrel the hell out of any project of this type. It took a person who had both a vision and a hell of a lot of money to make it happen, and there aren't so many of those around.
Video and audio evidence says otherwise. Unless you can produce sources where Elon claims sole credit for SpaceX milestones.
I've been following SpaceX's progress since 2005 on Kimbal's blogspot (yes that blogspot) updates [1]. Elon has always credited his team of engineers, ops and support staff.
But also himself. He suggests he taught himself rocket science and that he's personally involved in designing these rockets and cars. I have some doubts about that, although his influence on Starship and the Cybertruck seems to be larger than on previous models.
A tweet without any context doesn't exactly prove much. No idea who is wrong about what there.
I also never claimed any sources, I'm just giving my impression of him, which is that he's a bullshitter. But I can list a couple of things we do know about him:
At Tesla, despite not being a founder of the company, he contractually established that he was allowed to call himself a founder. And then pushed the actual founders out.
Online, we see him pick stupid internet fights, and post irresponsible tweets that got him slapped for stock manipulation.
At Twitter, we've all seen his bizarre mismanagement, despite his original background in software development.
We've recently heard that the Cybertruck was a bad decision that he personally pushed through at Tesla.
So given all of that, of course it's still possible that his rocket engineering creds at SpaceX are real, but you really can't blame people for having some doubts about that.
I don't expect anyone employed at SpaceX to spill the beans, but there's plenty of anonymous rumours on the internet about his actual role:
> Elon is indeed very involved in the design. The way they explained it is they give him a list of options to choose from and he picks the one he likes. Usually, it's the one the lead engineer wants, but sometimes it isn't, and Elon gets what he wants.
That's reasonable enough for a CEO in a flat organisation, but it doesn't sound like he's doing the actual engineering, just picking from the options the engineers give him.
I've also seen a (claimed, not verified) SpaceX employee say that SpaceX has people who's job it is to keep Elon happy and feel involved, because a happy Elon gives them the freedom to make the right decisions.
He got this Tony Stark image in the media, and I think he's been leaning a bit too hard into it, and started to believe the image that he could do everything. And the history of Tesla shows that he's not above overstating his own role.
Don't get me wrong: I love much of what he's done at Tesla and SpaceX; EVs wouldn't be where they are now without him, and rocketry in the US might well be dead without SpaceX. But he certainly has his share of character flaws as well.
> A tweet without any context doesn't exactly prove much. No idea who is wrong about what there.
The tweet was a response to the same claims you're making, the parent tweet is clearly there. It seems that you don't even know who Tom Mueller is. I linked Tom's Wikipedia bio for context, maybe you should take the time to read it.
"Thomas John Mueller is an American aerospace engineer and rocket engine designer. He *was* a *founding* employee of SpaceX, an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California, and the founder and CEO of Impulse Space"
> I don't expect anyone employed at SpaceX to spill the beans, but there's plenty of anonymous rumours on the internet about his actual role:
Tom was already retired when he posted those tweets. So again, your claims are just patently false. Let's see...Your source is from an "anonymous rumour" and is more credible than a former/founding SpaceX employee? I have no words...
> At Tesla, despite not being a founder of the company, he contractually established that he was allowed to call himself a founder. And then pushed the actual founders out.
The Tesla Board of Directors did that, not Elon. But you knew that right? It's dishonest to attribute the success of the Tesla Roadster, Model S/X, and Model 3 ramp-up, as well as Tesla's current achievements, to Eberhard and Tarpenning.
> But he certainly has his share of character flaws as well.
Don't we all? Not a single person on this planet is flawless, and it's sanctimonious to think otherwise.
It is not clear how to navigate to the parent tweet. Take it up with the owner of the site, I guess.
I know who Tom Mueller is, and I've addressed why that doesn't make him impartial.
> Tom was already retired when he posted those tweets.
According to your Wikipedia link "he retired from SpaceX on November 30, 2020". One of those tweets is from 2019, so your claims are patently false.
> The Tesla Board of Directors did that, not Elon.
And who was the chairman of that board of directors? Please.
> It's dishonest to attribute the success of the Tesla Roadster, Model S/X, and Model 3 ramp-up, as well as Tesla's current achievements, to Eberhard and Tarpenning.
And I did nothing of the sort. I gave Musk credit for that. I'm only pointing out he wanted to be credited for something he wasn't.
It's hard to understand how SpaceX can be such a success while Cybertruck and Twitter are such a shit show. (Let's ignore Hyperloop because he admitted that was always an anti-rail spoiler.)
Based on his Tweet history, he comes across as astoundingly immature, thin-skinned, and easily distracted.
He has: accused someone completely innocent of paedophilia for random reasons that are hard to fathom; denied that Covid was a problem; tweeted like a teenager about womens' boobs and limited math skills; lost at least 75% on his purchase of Twitter; suggested a literal dick measuring contest with Zuckerberg; claimed he was going to sell 10% of his Tesla stock to alleviate poverty and then awarded to it to a trust he owns; cynically hyped Dogecoin and (arguably) Tesla...
And so on.
I suppose someone like that might also be a genius rocket engineer. But if he is, it's quite a niche talent that doesn't seem to have transferred to his other projects.
His speciality seems to be leading companies that solve tangible measurable hardware problems like "cheaply launch orbital rockets" and "make commercially viable long range fast electric car" (making cheap underground car tunnels is impossible so it doesnt really matter how good a hardware guy he is).
I don't know why you'd think being good at a domain would transfer to other very different domains. There's no reason to think an amazing singer would be a good mathematician, why should a hardware production line maker have good taste in truck aesthetics?
I'm really tired of this claim. Every single time its made its entirely a figment of the writer's imagination, because there is no quote you can find of Elon attributing the success to himself. In fact when people attribute SpaceX's success to him in interviews he almost universally immediately deflects that praise to the people at SpaceX. I've seen that personally in numerous interviews over the last decade and a half I've been following SpaceX.
Musk's title is chief engineer, he has stated many times in interviews, and has been corroborated by other spacex engineers, that all engineering decisions go through him.
Making space-based human habitation profitable is the only way we will ever reach the scale of millions of people living & working in space. It's ludicrous to imagine that we would ever send more than a few explorers to space if each person's time there is unprofitable, meaning literally losing money.
If you're interested in exciting hard sci-fi about mining the asteroids and the moon, check out Daniel Suarez's compelling novel Delta-V and its recent sequel Critical Mass.
Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity. Yes, the idea of this only being available to the super-rich (at first) is nauseating to me too, but if it provides the source of funding to establish sustainable moon bases, that would be incredible, and other industries could follow afterwards, including e.g. new sports leagues such as low-gravity basketball and soccer.
Eventually, enough people would be living on the moon as helpers for the wealthy folks and athletes that eventually there would be so many working-class people on the moon that secondary and tertiary industries would spring up to provide products and services for the working-class people. Soon enough it would become profitable to farm crops on the moon (for lunar consumption), build products on the moon (for lunar consumption), and more.
We'd eventually get to the point where a lunar nation could have positive GDP and be economically self-sustaining. It would be a trade partner with the terrestrial nations, and be the first new nation to step beyond Earth. Generations of people will get married and be born there, and humanity would be a step closer to settling the cosmos.
I don't think people realize the scale of what Starship stands to achieve here. This is not an incremental leap forward, this is revolutionary. Sending a 16oz bottle of water up to space on the Space Shuttle cost around $25,000. [1] Falcon Heavy brought that down to $700. Starship stands to bring that price down to as low as $5!
That's what makes this all so stupefyingly difficult to even begin to try to predict what will happen. We're not going through the usual window of exclusivity. We're going from [nobody can afford this, except governments - and even then only for toy missions] to ['everybody' can afford this for anything], instantly. So there's no reason that e.g. a nursing home, or anything else, on the Moon would be restricted to the super wealthy, besides demand. Obviously these industries will be being built from the ground up, and demand will likely dramatically outpace supply for the foreseeable future. But that cost imbalance would not be because of fundamental costs.
Also you left out the most fun. Who isn't going to want to go have sex in space? Either with a partner or catching some Moon Poon at a brothel? That's going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions, and shouldn't really require that much to get the initial infrastructure erected.
> Sending a 16oz bottle of water up to space on the Space Shuttle cost around $25,000. [1] Falcon Heavy brought that down to $700. Starship stands to bring that price down to as low as $5!
Wow, that's insane; as you said, I didn't even realize this leap is this vast! $5 for delivery of a bottle of water is barely more expensive than DoorDash or Postmates on Earth!!
Well that's because you're paying a person and a motor vehicle's worth of fuel just to move a bottle of water. If you filled your vehicle full of water, and upgraded to a semi-trailer full of water, then its a lot less than $5 for a bottle of water.
If you launched a Starship with just a single bottle of water it'd become way more than $25,000. Similarly you could make your doordash/postmates bottle of water a lot more expensive if you moved it with a semi-trailer and a team of movers.
> catching some Moon Poon at a brothel [is] going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions
I don’t know what laws apply on the Moon, but thanks to ITAR, Starship probably won’t be able to launch from outside the United States, which means any actual moon travel is going to be governed by US and Florida and/or Texas law. Neither of those states have legal prostitution, and while I’m not a legal expert, I suspect knowingly ferrying prostitutes to the moon might be considered a form of human trafficking. They shut down
Backpage for less.
France and Japan also have laws against prostitution and sex trafficking. Japan seems to have more loopholes than France but probably not enough to fly prostitutes to the moon.
Once we are able to send a Starship to Psyche 16, and start building new Starships, humanity is in for a huge leap. And this isn't even unrealistic - it could be that in 5 - 10 years the next major rush for humanity is to establish a permanent industrial presence on Psyche 16 and start making things...
Why would that be your first idea? Why not something simpler like building a moon orbiter with an aluminium and liquid oxygen hybrid engine? The goal is to find the hydrogen on the moon, which is far more valuable than some asteroid.
Meh. Gaining accesses to the resources available on Psyche 16 would be absolutely a civilization-changing event if we were able to harness them somehow. Imagine if gold was more common to the human species than aluminum?
Old folks living "fuller lives" on the Moon, hundreds of thousands of miles away from their grandkids and everybody else they know? Have you ever been to an old folks home? Wishing people visited them more often is most of what most of them talk about.
A sad few with no remaining attachments to the rest of Earth might benefit from a reduced risk of hip fracture, but that hardly seems like a good economic basis for a Moon base.
> Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity.
That's what SR Hadden did in Contact ;) as always, Carl Sagan is still teaching us to this day
This is the most advanced rocket ever built, far superior to anything any government has ever created. It’s a technological marvel and represents progress for the entire species.
You’re depriving yourself of the opportunity to appreciate a once in a lifetime event because some news outlet told you you should dislike the guy who built it.
Tesla is making the world a better place by pushing EV adoption around the world. Have you done anything better for the world today, yet alone for its future? Starlink is pretty neat as well, he could fail going to Mars and all that and he still would be remembered for what he has done for the world today.
I have great internet connectivity because of Starlink, before that was available we were treated like garbage by traditional internet companies and we had basically no options. Now my family can enjoy the awesome benefits of the internet: Youtube, gaming, help with school. It's a direct positive for me and my entire community, and I personally appreciate it all the time. I'm not simping, it's just awesome.
The ancient Egyptians had a fairly sophisticated state with a permanent bureaucracy. That’s how they had the capacity to organize the construction of the pyramids in the first place.
Yes but if the Pharaoh decided he wanted a golden chariot made out of the state treasury, would someone complain that's the state's gold, not the Pharaoh's gold?
Incumbents like Lockheed, Boeing, and ULA often face problems such as fraud, waste, and fund misappropriation. Additionally, NASA's progress is hindered by bureaucracy and red tape.
Given these circumstances, depending solely on NASA for space advancement or asteroid deflection may not be the most effective strategy. Those acquainted with federal programs can confirm these issues. Thus, your comment appears uninformed and overlooks the wider impact on American taxpayers.
It’s hard to believe you’re being objective if you think the SLS, costing over $2 billion per launch, is superior and not profit-driven, compared to Starship's estimated $40 million launch cost.
This is much more about exploration than whatever technologically obsolete moribund project NASA is able to push through porkbarrelling process at the expense of a dozen more worthy ones.
Perhaps because this is the creation from the hard work of thousands of gifted and committed people. When SpaceX started I can assure you there was no billionaire involved. Just a guy with a few million he was willing to invest to make space travel a reality for many more people.
Secondly, if you don't think NASA was about profit, you don't understand NASA. Who do you think built all the Apollo rockets? Private contractors working for profit.
Besides, what is wrong with profit? Profit is what makes things sustainable and allows reinvestment to continually improve.
The tech here is way beyond what governments have been able to do so far. It promises to be quite a show. Might blow up again, but they'll learn and build another one.
For the record, I find Musk to be a menace, but the team he put together at SpaceX is phenomenal.
Starship is funded by NASA and built by a for-profit corporation, like SLS is and like the Space Shuttle was. The difference between SpaceX and the contractors that built the Shuttle and SLS is that those contractors kept their CEOs' names out of the news, and gouged like crazy.
That's not true. Starship was funded and started independently of NASA. NASA is just the first customer that is paying to develop a Moon-landing version of Starship that will be used for its Moon landing mission.
Starship has partial funding from NASA, but its only "after delivery" funding. SpaceX has explicitly talked about how they've needed to raise additional private funding to support Starship development because they're developing it simultaneously with Starlink.
I'll also note that NASA's funding for Starship was for a lunar lander, not a launch vehicle, and SpaceX was the cheapest of all the competitors despite developing a launch vehicle as well while the competitors were only developing a lander and planned to use an existing launch vehicle.
There are many valid reasons why sending humans to Mars (at this time) would be bad for science, bad for Mars, and bad for space exploration.
https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
“The technology program required to close this gap would be remarkably circular, with no benefits outside the field of applied zero gravity zookeeping. The web of Rube Goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold[49] and there is little appetite for it here on Earth, where plants do a better job for free.”
Ha. This rambling is entertaining but has little depth or vision.
These are not ‘valid reasons’ these are ‘arguably valid reasons made by cynical ramblers’ :)
That's a terrible rant, not really a good argument about Mars exploration by humans. It's sad such poor articles are liked by HN, shows how poor understanding of spaceflight is common here.
Just look at the first footnote, the guy does not understand what is relevant comparison nowadays or how the programs he talks about work/ed.
I'm curious to hear the counter perspective because I used to be extremely pro-Mars and recently some discussions by that article's author on HN have convinced me otherwise.
What benefits are there to sending humans to Mars? What do we hope to accomplish that couldn't be done better by a barrage of super advanced robots? Even NASA can't articulate a good reason.
It is estimated to cost $1-1.5 trillion to send 9 people on Mars, and upwards of $2 trillion for a minimally staffed base on an uninhabitable planet. That's just for keeping humans alive there, not even for doing serious science. NASA's budget is $25-33 billion per year. We'd be blowing the next 50 years of space dollars to get cool videos instead of sending countless probes to every planet in the solar system.
My main point is, wouldn't it be better to focus that amount of money and effort on developing technologies that allow humans to live on Earth sustainably? Where is the cult-like public support for spending unlimited amounts of money on preventing mass extinction on Earth, the only habitable planet in our solar system?
> What benefits are there to sending humans to Mars? What do we hope to accomplish that couldn't be done better by a barrage of super advanced robots?
Well robots work very well, and if research is your only goal then those might be the best forever. But even those run into issues and can be very complex and expensive, see Mars Sample Return. When you scale systems up, it is possible that at some level redundancies and pre-planning for every contingency will get too expensive. So much that sending monkeys with duct tapes that can handle and fix all kinds of issues might be actually less expensive. Will we get to such scale with research only? Probably not.
But there are other goals, like space industry, and related mining, which require much bigger scale. And unless we want to declare all planets out there as a natural reserve with absolutely no Earth contamination possible (yea there's a treaty, we will see how long it survives), people will want go there.
And good luck trying to stop China from establishing Mars research base. Sure it might take them 40+ years, but I wouldn't bet on them not getting there. Or them adhering to any kinds of international treaty.
> It is estimated to cost $1-1.5 trillion to send 9 people on Mars, and upwards of $2 trillion for a minimally staffed base on an uninhabitable planet.
Random numbers pulled out of nowhere. Don't listen to such garbage. Even talking about "minimally staffed base" and it's costs is kinda silly when the main (and so far only) proposed system (Starship) for achieving that is still in its infancy. It might not hit its projected costs. It also might achieve them and then such cost estimates about Mars base will look as silly as IBM estimates of how many computers the world needs.
> My main point is, wouldn't it be better to focus that amount of money and effort on developing technologies that allow humans to live on Earth sustainably? Where is the cult-like public support for spending unlimited amounts of money on preventing mass extinction on Earth, the only habitable planet in our solar system?
You know that there are proposals like space based solar power, space mirrors in Sun-Earth L1, space industry utilizing resources from asteroids . . . Sure they are still mostly in the sci-fi stage. But some of them might turn into reality, and then many of our issues on earth will be solved merely as a side-effect. It's too early to talk about "better" spending, when related technologies are still not even close to being mature and stable. F9 landed not even 9 years ago!
> Maybe after we accomplish that we could think about making Mars a sustainable and habitable planet too?
Honestly that's just bad logic, don't you really see obvious arguments against? It's fine as an opinion, but trying to convince other people without strong arguments does not seem like it will have much chance.
EDIT: if you truly care about not wasting money on stupid stuff, argue for cancelling SLS. THAT is one big waste of money, regardless of whether Starship succeeds or not.
How is it not about exploration? And how is it about profit? Who do you think benefits most from having cheaper access to space? Society as a whole benefits way more than old musky.
A billionaire's mega yacht is for his exclusive use. Starship is definitely not that. Starship's purpose has nothing to do with any personal transportation plans for Musk himself.
Being able to do things like this is one of the things that makes me want to emigrate to the US. Healthcare is a huge showstopper though. But if it turns out that private costs more or less what I pay in taxes in Europe then maybe I'll reconsider.
If you’re earning 5 times median wages it might work out - America looks after it’s rich.
If you’re on less then not likely
But remember it’s not just your bank balance. Do you really want to live in a society where your neighbour can’t afford treatment for cancer? Or where your nephew gets weekly “active shooter” drills? Where you get two weeks a year holiday if you’re lucky?
Would just > 100k (adjust by CoL depending on area) and decent employer provided insurance be enough? Healthcare is usually ~10% in Europe or less (if your income is high) in countries with privatized systems but most of that is clawed back with higher income taxes (unless you’re in Switzerland). In US you can still get semi-decent healthcare coverage as long as you’re employed and pay quite a bit less in taxes.
All the other things you listed heavily depend on where you live and the company you work at?
The best insurance I've ever had, by far, was when i was poor. NY states insurance covered everything for me and all my kids completely free (free for me, not the taxpayer). Now i get insurance through my well paying job and am paying ~$500/month (which is actually quite reasonable for 5 people) for far worse insurance coverage with an HSA i need to fund.
> Do you really want to live in a society where your neighbour can’t afford treatment for cancer?
Maybe? I would like to live in a society where there's no hard ceiling on what you can achieve if you have the competency and some luck. Do you think it's easier to become a millionaire in the EU or the US? It feels like there's very little social mobility in Europe compared to the US.
> I would like to live in a society where there's no hard ceiling on what you can achieve if you have the competency and some luck
Then EU > US. In the EU most people have a shot at this, with free education and possibilities. In the US your chances are mostly tied to your parents' status.
> It feels like there's very little social mobility in Europe compared to the US
Maybe from middle class -> very rich. But from poor -> middle class Europe is absolutely better.
> Then EU > US. In the EU most people have a shot at this, with free education and possibilities.
Not with very low salaries and even more unaffordable real estate than in the US. Yes jumping from “lower” to “middle” class seems to be generally easier in Europe but the likelihood that you’ll just get stuck there is much higher.
> In the US your chances are mostly tied to your parents' status
Inherited wealth is as if not more important in Europe. Because while yes free education etc. give you more possibilities the ceiling of how high can you go up on your own is also generally much lower.
Define “worse” - in the eu they work less, have more vacation, better social safety net, great food transit, less crime less rape less murder, better healrhcare outcomes, and I think rank higher on happiness
In the us they might have more money (to then spend on healrhcare etc)
There is not less crime across the board, the food has little diversity in individual countries and is completely subpar in certain countries (looking at UK).
The transit is trash anywhere that you can actually afford to own property. The healthcare outcomes you mentioned are going to need a citation because the middle class in the US generally has OK insurance.
For happiness, that’s vague and will need a citation. Putting the entire US on a comparison with individual EU countries is dumb, but that’s how it’s sliced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report where the US is beat by many EU countries and beats others (e.g. Spain and Italy).
Mainly low income and unaffordable real estate (compared to the US)? I mean it depends, depending on where you live and where you go to crime is not necessarily such a big issue in the US. Healthcare outcomes are also heavily variable and depend a lot of income (and I’ not talking about the “1%”) but can be just as good or better in the US.
If you’re below the average (income/wealth wise) and have other disadvantages you might certainly be better off in Europe. Otherwise (inherited wealth aside) US might be a better place to be depending on your personal preferences and priorities.
>Then EU > US. In the EU most people have a shot at this, with free education and possibilities.
This comparison only works at birth, or maybe up to teens. We are, most likely, working professionals here. With a degree and fairly established position. Becoming a millionaire is still a monumental task. However at this baseline US is much easier.
Pretty easy really. But what does being a millionaire actually mean in terms of what you can do with your life?
Is your goal really “become a millionaire”? Not “have the ability to see the world” or “live in a nice house with kids an a dog”, just “have 7 figure on a spreadsheet of what I have managed to accumulate”
>just “have 7 figure on a spreadsheet of what I have managed to accumulate”
7 figure on a spreadsheet enables a lot.
An unregistered savings account in one of Canadian banks (just a point of reference, not sure if US has better) currently offers 4% yearly. That's 40k a year off the million. Enough to retire with kids in a LCOL country or travel year round as a nomad with a base in LCOL country.
Build a little bit more wealth and all those LCOL options turn into MCOL. E.g. northern Italy.
All while just being a working professional. It'd be unheard of in Europe to have this kind of options after just a couple years of work.
There’s a lot more to social mobility than an individual’s ability to become a millionaire.
You’d have to decide whether you agree with the methodology, but European nations feature highest in the ‘Global Social Mobility Index’ [0] while the US is 27th.
Merely saying the US is 27th doesn't actually mean much without knowing more about the distribution. There's still a shortest NBA player, after all.
And I did look at the table. There's a difference of ~15 index points between 1st (85) and 27th (70). That still doesn't actually say much without knowing how they're calculated.
> It feels like there's very little social mobility in Europe compared to the US.
What told you that? The median American is significantly less wealthy than the median Brit, despite similar homeowning rates and Americans having way more income. Most of Europe (plus the Anglo offshoots) have higher social mobility.
Social mobility is much higher in the EU than in the US [0]. Being a millionaire in the US still doesn't guarantee that you won't go bankrupt due to a cancer treatment.
Yes it does...what bizarre takes. Lack of health insurance affects a gap of people that don't qualify for public programs and can't afford private insurance. Many people with way less than a million dollars buy private health insurance.
In Europe many cancer treatments are simply not paid for by social health care, because it's too expensive or experimental.
Rich people still go to private health care providers for more niche treatments, or simply for shorter waiting lists.
What you have in Europe is - long wait lists, for everyone, and fewer numbers of actual treatments (plus many things not covered by social health care, e.g. dentists)
What you have in US is - no wait lists, healthcare that's probably 2-3x as expensive, but you actually can get the best of the best treatment if you pay for it
Clearly for poorer layers of society the US system is bad. But for society as a whole I would question which system is actually better. They both have bad and good parts.
To be honest if the US actually implemented a real market system for health care, and prices would drop a bit (with the kind of stuff Mark Cuban is building), the US health system would be FAR superior than Europe, even if its not free.
In Denmark, the law clearly states that there cannot be longer than 2 weeks from suspicion to initial examination, and if you indeed to have cancer, at most 2 weeks more for treatment. If the public healthcare cannot honor those deadlines you will have the equivalent examination/treatment at a private, and public healthcare pays. This includes some very advanced treatments for advanced cancers.
> Rich people still go to private health care providers for more niche treatments, or simply for shorter waiting lists.
You say rich, but private healthcare is a pretty normal benefit for people working in professional jobs. I'm on my third tech job and I've never not had some level of private insurance benefit.
So, this actually reinforces my point, many many people in Europe have private health insurance despite having free healthcare supposedely.
If european healthcare was so amazing AND free, why would people do this? It makes no sense. Of course it does when you realise the cost of free healthcare, which is that it just isn't that great in terms of quality, or you have insane waiting lists, even if it is free.
You're missing the cost of people not seeing a professional until it's very late into their illness and have to either undergo expensive procedures, end up disabled or die. Which is exactly what is happening in the US and is reflected by life expectancy. Private healthcare is just too expensive to the society as a whole. And you keep saying insane waiting lists, but critical procedures are prioritised accordingly and you don't have to wait long if you have a heart disease or cancer. Just to be clear, all healthcare systems have their own problems and not one is perfect, but the one in US is absurdly bad.
Blaming short life expectancy on the US healthcare system is pointing to a tree in a forest.
There are A LOT of reasons for this. For example fentanyl probably took quite a bit off it, considering over 200,000 people are dead at this point from it.
So does the obesity crisis.
Now - I think we are probably more in agreement than not, I think there are huge issues with the US healthcare system, the entire fentanyl crises WAS created by the healthcare system, but still - I don't think the root issue, or problem to be solved is private vs public. Switching to public would just mean another set of problems.
For the record, I'm not from the US, and I mostly use private healthcare, despite there being so called free healthcare available in my country. It's just terrible. So it's almost the same as the US - rich people get healthcare, poor don't.
At least in Poland private healthcare is great when it comes to simple procedures, but as soon as you have serious health issues you end up in a public hospital.
People in the us visit healthcare providers about just as much, maybe a little less, it’s just that they pay 5x per visit compared to other countries in Europe due to massive regulatory capture and the behemoth of bureaucracy.
When your friends, family, kids, are sick and unable to afford treatment or go bankrupt because of medical bills you may be singing a different tune unless you are either so totally selfish to ignore their plight or rich beyond millions to pay
Another PITA is that even if you have insurance you have to go to in network providers. I’m insured and went to the local CVS to get a flu and COVID shot but they said I was out of network, so insurance wouldn’t cover it. Out of pocket was $63 for Flu and $198 for COVID. I still haven’t got my shots.
It's odd to me when people generalize the whole of Europe when it comes to healthcare. The quality of welfare/healthcare in Eastern Europe for example is very different than what Nordic countries like Sweden and Norway offer (they are typically considered the highest quality of living in Europe), or Spain or France.
Likewise, the same can be said of the United States. Quality of private healthcare is going to depend greatly where you are. Remote areas and smaller towns and cities are not going to have access to top-quality physicians like larger cities will have. But, top-quality physicians will have very long waiting lists. I'm currently on the waiting list for a top-national orthopedic surgeon in the Bay Area and my total appointment wait is 5 months.
No idea what you're referring to here. I've visited the US several times and have lived in Europe most of my life. I've needed to be hospitalized a few times in my life and I didn't need to pay anything, anything.
In the US you pay an annual deductible of like $2k for a good health insurance plan. Just take that off of your salary that is $50k greater than your European counter part and you’re good to go.
Like GP said, the Internet is very misleading about this. Healthcare is OK for the middle class and that’s why there isn’t enough pressure to change it.
This is not even remotely correct. In the US, you usually pay a monthly premium which is only a portion of the actual cost, and the remainder is paid by your employer. On top of that, yes, you pay your deductible. A $2,000 deductible could be considered a low deductible--it could be double that or more with lower premiums.
After that, you have the "out-of-pocket" maximum. You pay 20% of costs until you hit the "out-of-pocket" maximum, which is typically thousands of dollars per year.
Beyond that, there are actually two different deductibles and two different out-of-pocket maximums. One for in-network services, and one for out-of-network services. You can go to an in-network facility and see out-of-network providers without notice.
And even beyond that, while it has been curbed with some recent legislation, if your insurance provider decides to pay less than the provider believes they are owed, the provider can bill you independently for the remainder.
So NO, it is definitely not $2k per year for a good health insurance plan in the US. FAR from it.
How much is this monthly premium? We are talking about 50USD, 500USD, more?
You say out of pocket is in thousands per year - so I assume <10k?
I wonder what is upper bound of yearly cost for having same or better level of healthcare as in Europe.
If that's like 15k a year, than I would assume, at least for SWEs, it still makes a lot of sense to go to US - pay difference is huge. I would not be surprised that even you you would count 50k a year for medical it could still make a lot of sense to move to US if you are good - I don't hear that much about 300k, 400k or more TC per year in EU
>How much is this monthly premium? We are talking about 50USD, 500USD, more?
Depends on who you are, where you are, who you're employed by, the ability of your employer to negotiate a deal, the willingness of your employer to provide "Cadillac" coverage to their workforce, and how much secret data broker information the insurance cartel has specifically on you and your prior medical conditions.
The thing about healthcare in America is that everything is unregulated and completely opaque. Prices are impossible to find at time of use, impossible to negotiate, and for most customers facing a medical catastrophe they will be both "unconscious" and "out of network". If you have a serious out of network emergency that your dodgy insurance doesn't cover you could be up for anywhere between $50k and several million dollars and filing for bankruptcy the day you leave the hospital.
If I had a very serious car crash with a helicopter evacuation and a lengthy hospital stay due to a spinal injury, a million might not cover it.
Untrue. There are maximum amounts for everything, co pays, and premiums. Did you forget all those?
I have had to redo my teeth due to a medical issue. My insurance paid for the medical issue. My teeth though? This year alone I've spent 13k out of pocket after maxing out my dental insurance. Next year will be the same. and the year after. And I'm paying for insurance while paying all of this.
Even if you just look at healthcare, consider that in the US even the well insured can only afford to be ill once. After that, your insurance becomes expensive, and you're usually not covered for a whole set of potentially related things.
In the last 53 years, there have been 2,057 shooting fatalities in K-12 schools in the US [0]. That's an average of 38 per year. As of 2020, there were 56,282,248 K-12 enrolled students [1]. So there's a .000067% chance that any given one of those students will be shot and killed in any given year.
That's what you're worried about? A .000067% chance? You must live a life of crippling fear then, the number of things more deadly to your kids than .000067% is staggering. I assume you never let them enter a vehicle of any kind, for example.
By the way, of that 38 per year number, less than 10% happens inside a classroom [0]. The most likely location is outside in the school parking lot, a violent dispute between students, and not a "mass shooting" scenario. So if you were mostly concerned about "mass shootings", the odds of death are over 10 times less than .000067%.
This is a sadly all too-common approach to analysing risk and reflecting back the "absurdity" of people's fears (and TBH, I used to do it myself).
Psychological experience of risk (fear) has a large component related to the degree to which a person has control over their exposure, combined with the worst possible (rather than typical) outcome.
So for example, statistically speaking very few black Americans will ever be assaulted by the police but no black American can feel remotely in control of whether or not this may happen to them. And the outcome may include death as a possibility.
Statistically speaking, very few women will be assaulted walking down the street (even at night) but essentially no women can feel that they have any control over whether this happens or not. And the outcome may include death as a possibility.
And so it is with school shootings: yes, statistically speaking it is a vanishingly small chance. But neither parents nor students (nor teachers) have any level of control over whether such an incident will take place in their school, and the worst case scenario is death.
When people feel they lack the agency to control whether or not a bad outcome is more or less likely in their lives, the actual statistics of the outcome tend to fade into dramatically lower significance.
Finally, I can’t wait until they start loading these with starlink satellites and launching once a month. I’d love to make the trip to see one in person once the timing is more predictable. Seeing the progress on Starship is one of the few things that gives me hope for the future.
Starlink satellites are designed to not cause this problem, and are on a low enough orbit that the problem would solve itself naturally in a few years anyway.
How? If they're in a low orbit how can they get higher to pose a threat? If they collide with something that is en route to a higher orbit, then the collision takes place in this low orbit, and any debris will also be in that low orbit?
> generally when two satellites collide some debris can be shot at a higher orbit which will take forever (or will not) reenter atmosphere.
The lowest point of the new orbit (perigee) is guaranteed to be no higher than the point of collision. Fragments after the collision have no further propulsion, so their new orbit must initially include the point of collision, and can only decay from there. This can also be seen on your scatterplot.
Moreover, the time to decay is most strongly influenced by the perigee, as the atmosphere is the strongest there. If a satellite on an low orbit (decay in decades) explodes, those fragments that "reach a higher orbit" will still (due to the low perigee) decay back to a near-circular orbit in decades.
A collision can increase the lifetime for some of its fragments, but not by multiple orders of magnitude (unlike a circular higher orbit).
Your video link also nicely shows that fragments with a low perigee will decay quickly, no matter how high their apogee is.
Yes, this is true, but for this to not be a problem, it also has to suppose that those higher-flying bits of debris don't subsequently collide with other higher-flying satellites.
The Chinese test also happened around 350km higher then Starlink satellites (850km). The natural deorbit time at that altitude is already over 100 years vs under 5 years at 500km.
Also it was literally the worst possible collision being an intentional head on collision. Satellites accidentally hitting each other on orbit are very unlikely to hit each other head on as it is very uneconomical to put satellites in a reverse orbit that low (there is a reason why we do rocket launches towards east if possible)
Debris orbits like anything else. Regardless of the orbits of the colliding objects, the orbit of any debris is only really constrained to intersect the point of collision. For some debris, the point of collision could be the lowest point in its new orbit, meaning it could take longer to reenter and could collide with other stuff higher up until then. On the other extreme, some debris could essentially fall straight down to earth immediately.
No collision of 2 surfboards is going to loft debris high enough to be in a stable orbit. If the common point of orbit is 500km, all of that debris will de-orbit. The only propellent on those things is krypton, so if they collide it is only going to be mechanical effects on the debris. In my search I have not found a single reputable source claiming starlink could contribute to kessler syndrome, only clickbait articles.
The debris orbits from an initial collision don't have to be stable to allow a chain reaction that produces debris in more stable orbits. Debris from even a single low altitude collision/disintegration could collide/disintegrate later at a higher altitude, producing debris with a higher periapsis than any of the original bodies.
There are many factors in whether this matters practically, so I'm not passing judgement on that. None of this is specific to Starlink.
As long as the satellites are under 600km or so they will deorbit on their own in under 5 years. So in the worst case scenario caused by Starlink we would not be able to access space for 5 years which while not great is not the end of the world either.
The time to deorbit is not linear. So this 500km orbit is fine while 700km orbit would get us ~25 year deorbit time. 800km over 80 years and so on.
> Except for choosing an orbit that degrades relatively quickly.
You answered your own question.
More specifically, a Kessler syndrome is the problem that occurs when satellites collide and shatter into clouds of sand-sized particles, and then the sand-sized particles impact more satellites and shatter them, leading to a cascade that clears the whole orbit. Because small things deorbit faster than large things (square-cube scaling), this simply cannot happen at orbits that are low enough, at the Starlink deployment orbits if there was a catastrophic collision, most of the material would be out of orbit in a matter of days. At the even lower orbits of V2 constellation, most of the material will be out of orbit in a matter of hours.
The reason Kessler syndrome gets mentioned with Starlink is that the original system design had the early sats at 1100km and most of the constellation at ~800km. This would have been really bad, because that's about the worst possible orbit for collisions, as it's just high enough not to be swept clean by the atmosphere, but low enough that orbital velocities are very high and collisions are more likely. After the concerns were raised, SpaceX modified their design to be not dangerous.
To augment: sand-sized particles have a massive area/mass ratio, which is the main determinant in how quickly things deorbit. An unpowered Starlink satellite will deorbit naturally in 5 years. A sand sized particle in a Starlink orbit will deorbit naturally within a single orbit (90 minutes).
And more augmentation: sand size particles aren't the concern anyways. Satellites get hit by sand size meteors regularly. The space station is protected by Whipple shields. Satellites aren't, so sometimes they are partially or fully disabled by a sand size particle, but they never disintegrate because of one.
Particles under 1cm in size don't cause Kessler because they're too small. Particles over 1cm in size don't cause Kessler because they are big enough to be tracked and actively avoided.
The satellites are equipped so that they can not only correct their orbit themselves, but also deorbit whenever SpaceX decides that it is their end of life, rather than just be abandoned.
what a laughable sentence, there have been at least 2 near misses last year between starlink satellites and Tiangong. Also, if there's a collision, the smaller parts and debris would remain in orbit far longer than expected (hence causing more incidents).
It is not laughable, Starlink satellites are in a low enough orbit that they will automatically deorbit due to air drag. They will not contribute to Kessler Syndrome.
>SpaceX said that a large part of Starlink satellites are launched at a lower altitude of 550 km (340 mi) to achieve lower latency (versus 1,150 km (710 mi) as originally planned), and failed satellites or debris are thus expected to deorbit within five years even without propulsion, due to atmospheric drag.
Absolutely insane amount of coordination and individual mission operations for each one simultaneously. I don't think enough gets said about SpaceX's launch integration systems.
“From a field near the village of Serooskerke, five V-2s were launched on 15 and 16 September, with one more successful and one failed launch on the 18th“
That must mean they launched at least 3 on either the 15th or the 16th.
That page also says “Beginning in September 1944, more than 3,000 V-2s were launched” and “The final two rockets exploded on 27 March 1945”, so that’s over 3,000 in at most 208 days, so there must have been days there were at least 14 “launches in a single day by the same entity”. I suspect the actual top number is a lot higher.
If you think that’s borderline “a single entity”, there’s “After the US Army captured the Ludendorff Bridge during the Battle of Remagen on 7 March 1945, the Germans were desperate to destroy it. On 17 March 1945, they fired eleven V-2 missiles at the bridge”
If I understand things correctly, this launch won’t (try to) complete an orbit, either. It will make a water landing after less than one time around the earth.
To be pedantic, this launch will have orbital velocity; if it was circular it would be orbital. IOW, it's an orbit that intersects the Earth. So it is orbital by some definitions but not by others.
Since October, Israel has launched at least 7,400 into Gaza.
Between June 1944 and March 1945 the Germans hurled 10,500 V-1s at Great Britain. Most of the missiles never reached their targets.
I couldn't easily find the # of rockets from the allies, though I'd guess it's a much smaller number, since they were delayed compared to Germany.
I couldn't find an easy # for the Ukrainian and Russian war.
So unless this latest disaster in Gaza ends soon, I'm betting they will handily beat the V-1 rockets.
Note: I'm not trying to side either way in this comment between any of the countries involved, All of the conflicts are a mess and I'm definitely not qualified to have an informed opinion.
A rocket that flies 50 km, or even 500 km, while reaching 2-3M and carrying 200 kg of payload, is a much, much simpler machine than a rocket that makes it to LEO and reaches about 26M while carrying several tons of payload. (And then deorbits and lands!)
The V-1 was not a rocket; it was a “flying bomb” powered by a jet engine, what we would today call a “cruise missile”, except cruise missiles tend to have guidance systems. The V-2 was the rocket.
If you’re going to count the rockets in the Gaza conflict (which are predominantly fired by Hamas and PIJ against Israel) or the rockets being used in Ukraine, those aren’t nearly as sophisticated as even the V-2. Those systems are more analogous to the Soviet “Katyusha”. There were different Katyusha variants, but one of the most common was the BM-13, which could fire a salvo of 24 rockets from a truck before being reloaded. Thousands of Katyushas were produced, so I’m pretty sure they account for hundreds of thousands of rockets overall. Very similar to the Katyusha rocket (in fact, basically the exact same rocket for the Soviets at the time) are the rockets fired by airplanes and later helicopters at ground targets, so you could add those in as well.
And if you want to get downright pedantic and count every type of rocket, there are also various shoulder launched rocket launchers like the RPG which are extremely common. Guided missiles are also technically rockets. So the actual numbers are much, much, much higher than you think.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already revolutionized the space industry with their reusable first stage boosters and rocket engines. This advance in rocket design has resulted in the cost to launch one kilogram of payload to orbit from approximately $15,000 in the pre-SpaceX era, to around $1,400 with the Falcon Heavy.
This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
I saw Marques Brownlee's video on solar roof tiles and it seems to solar roof tiles are a real thing -- though not sure about the SolarCity relation.
I think it wouldn't hurt to view Elon as a parroter of information in this case, there's absolutely no incentive to lie and launches get canceled all the time due to weather, your expectations should already be tempered.
Is it? The solar roof tiles where unveiled in 2016 as a finished product and Tesla took 1000$ deposits, 2 years later they where still figuring out if the tiles they had where durable enough as roof tile. In 2019 he claimed that autonomous robo taxis would be ready 'next year' they are still working on that.
Won't this also be presented to pilots on their small info screen, the one which prints them out weather and flight info? (ACARS [0]) Here's another example [1]
I'm just waiting for someone to post a picture of this message showing on a glowing green display somewhere.
edit: https://i.imgur.com/Avn6Cnm.png; that's just the output of curl, there's a bit of html above and below the message but it's a really straightforward page.
SPACE X STARSHIP SUPER HEAVY FLT 2 BOCA CHICA, TX
PRIMARY: 11/17/23 1300Z-1720Z
BACKUP: 11/18/23 1300Z-1720Z
11/19/23 1300Z-1720Z
That's 8:00 AM Eastern, 5AM pacific.
Previous: am I missing something? This says 11/14/2023, aka tomorrow. Starting 11:30Z (6:30AM Eastern, 3:30AM Pacific)... like, 9 hours from now? And it seems to be landing somewhere in SFO area? There's a bunch of checks for SFO... [ed: there are also Starlink launches listed: 6-28 and 7-7 (whatever that means)].
As I understand it, they can't do launches over the weekend, as that requires closing the beach, which they don't have permission to do.
... Which makes the two backup dates very confusing. A very quick Google didn't turn up the actual rules on Starbase launches over the weekend, though, so I might be crazy.
There are a lot of comments skeptical of space exploration, future colonization goals and such. A podcast you might appreciate is Econtalk’s “Zach Weinersmith on Space Settlement and A City on Mars.”
Loss of taste for most foods, vision problems, loss of muscle mass and bone density. In light of these and the many unpleasant our outright dangerous effects of space travel on human physiology, science writer and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith wonders: When it comes to the dream of space expansion, what exactly do we hope to gain? Listen as he and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss his new book (co-authored with Kelly Weinersmith) A City on Mars, which offers a hard-nosed yet humorous look at the sobering and lesser-discussed challenges involved in building space settlements. Topics include the particular problems posed by the moon and Mars's atmospheres; the potential difficulty of reproducing in zero gravity; and the dangerous tendency to overlook a key factor in whether space settlement is a good idea: the fact that people are people, wherever they may be.
the Raptor engine series is an extremely high barrier to entry. I would bet 30% of Spacex's innovation lies in that one engine. Its combination of thrust, efficiency, and small size are beyond anything else. The size blows me away, if you took the nozzle off it's about the size of a car engine.
Without the engineering breakthroughs to produce something like the Raptor engine launches at this scale just aren't possible. There's other engines with thrust to match Raptor but not the efficiency nor size. For example, there's just no way you can put 33 RS25s under an airframe.
from the link below
"The SpaceX Raptor 3 was recently test fired and reached 18% more thrust than a Raptor 2. The Raptor 2 had 25% more thrust than the Raptor 1 and it was 20% lighter."
it's just crazy what that propulsion team is doing...simply crazy
> I would bet 30% of Spacex's innovation lies in that one engine.
Musk often points out that the stage 0 work is harder (and I suspect more innovative) than the rocket (and engine) design. He also often mentions that fabrication is even harder. I.e., all the processes, tools, machines, etc. used to build all those engines and rockets is harder still than stage 0 -- one might even call it stage -1. It's possible that Raptor is not even closed to "30% of Spacex's innovation" :)
SpaceX is by far the best organization in terms of rocket engine design, rocket design and rocket operations. Nobody else in the world comes even remotely close.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are already better by a long distance then any other rocket in the world. All other organizations world wide are trying to catch up to that.
You only really need huge rockets like this if you are launching some truly massive amount of stuff. This just wasn't a thing until today. The biggest ever was during the moon race, US Saturn V and Soviets N1. However the Saturn V was expensive and NASA wanted to have a reusable Shuttle instead, so they dropped it. The Soviets did the N1 but when they lost the moon race (and a few failures) they didn't want to pay for it anymore.
So really since the moon race, rockets of this scale just were not necessary. If you can't reuse the rocket, a rocket of this scale is just to expensive to be practical.
It took SpaceX making re-usability real and mega constellations to make it worth considering a rocket like Starship.
Just for reference, this thing is far more powerful then the Saturn V or N1. It has almost double the liftoff thrust. So really humanity has never operated this scale of rocket before.
I thing the talent is there, I mean the incredible scientific and engineering accomplishments made by government research bodies make that point clear. The problem is governments are filled to the brim with committees and competing priorities. Frankly, to most people and therefore governments, Starship/Superheavy just isn't that important or at the very least, there's a thousand other things of equal importance competing for talent/money/attention.
Also, the risk of failure is so high. Musk was literally laughed out of the room when he proposed re-usable orbital boosters. I'm sure he was laughed at again when he proposed a full-flow staged combustion engine (Raptor). And again when he said they were going to put 33 engines beneath a stainless steel water tower.
Governments can't weather the ire of public opinion the way a private company can.
edit: after all that typing i just realized i'm basically saying "i agree" to your comment hah. The risk of failure is just too high for governments to stomach.
From what I understand about space exploration, this is an opposite-world position. Can you expand on what you mean?
Governments ("gov organizations") have been defining the term "space exploration" since 1944. First object in outer space, first object in orbit, first human in outer space, first space station, first interstellar space flight, first human on the moon, first man-made objects on mars, venus, all by "gov organizations."
I'm super confused why you think the comparatively young private space industry, which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit, is somehow more capable?
At insanely massive expense. Note that this isn't a bad thing, R&D is expensive and humanity has benefitted from this. The problem here is just the government doing it never leads to cost decreases. The lack of cheap orbital access has crippled the expansion of space industry.
Industry tends to be exceptionally capable in producing assembly line style production. Up until this point rockets have been much more custom productions, use once and throw away. There was pretty much zero headway in the government achieving this scale of production. SpaceX in two decades has dramatically decreased the cost to orbit. And with their new rocket will drop costs by order of magnitude or more. This will lead to far more government R&D expenditure in space.
>which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit
And by that you mean "has accomplished in putting more satellites than all other governments/entities added together into space". I don't know, you tell me.
A key advantage of the assembly line production of these things is fast iterative development. At first, in a 'move fast and break things' way, when doing tests. But just as significantly, by learning about non-fatal flaws in a working design so you can improve it.
The 100th rocket you build and attempt to fly will be much more optimized than the 5th. So by ramping production you can develop much quicker.
Another related point is tolerance of failure. A failed test for a government program will immediately see pressure to cancel the program by it's political opponents. Any detractors for a company will have a much harder time exerting influence.
I mean ISRO is a government organization and it's been provided pretty cheap services. I don't know enough about rockets to comment further. Just wanted to say that govt does not always mean expensive
> I'm super confused why you think the comparatively young private space industry, which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit, is somehow more capable?
i would say the appetite for risk and prioritization in the private space industry makes them more capable. Don't forget the Apollo program and the space race was in response to a real existential threat. Once the threat lessoned the appetite for risk went down and other priorities took center stage.
The private space industry has taken all that innovation, adding to it, and moving forward where the governments don't because they have other fish to fry. To mangle a quote, "If [private space industry] have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants [government science/engineering]". I think the private space industry is further validation the public investment in space is worth it.
> Don't forget the Apollo program and the space race was in response to a real existential threat. Once the threat lessoned the appetite for risk went down and other priorities took center stage.
Yes, there are various motives and pressures at play, but that doesn't change for private industry. And I worry about the core motive of the private industry: Profit. If a launch won't be profitable, why would it happen, no matter how much it benefits humanity?
I worry about the profitiziation of space. I don't think profitization has done good things to the internet, media, and technology in general.
Profit is exactly how we make sure individual and societal interests are aligned. Otherwise, how do we know what "benefits humanity"? Who decides? One says "let's feed the poor". Another "let's explore space". Yet another "let's build an AI". Who decides the allocation?
During Cold War, everything USSR did here in the Eastern Block was "for the benefit of all mankind". We all know what a crock of BS that was...
> Profit is exactly how we make sure individual and societal interests are aligned.
That's interesting, I disagree, but I'm curious why you think so? Slavery is extremely profitable, the only reason it doesn't happen is because it is illegal - a distinctly unprofitable decision made and enforced by a government for the sole purpose of it's better for mankind. Arguably all regulation under capitalism fulfills this purpose, outside of those designed to form regulatory capture. If what you say is true, wouldn't we be able to just remove all law and let the divine will of profit determine our every action? Or, where do you see the line?
> Otherwise, how do we know what "benefits humanity"? Who decides? One says "let's feed the poor". Another "let's explore space". Yet another "let's build an AI". Who decides the allocation?
You genuinely feel that profit motive will allocate this better than the normal way of "who decides," that being debates and appeals to rationality and ethics? What profit is there to be gained from feeding the poor? The most profitable thing to do is to collude to ensure there is a class of people who are one paycheck from a missed meal or missed rent, therefore you can pay them as little as possible and they have to accept that because they can't afford to spend the time to look for a new job. I just don't see how profit could possibly align with actual human ethics. Sometimes, certainly, but rarely.
> During Cold War, everything USSR did here in the Eastern Block was "for the benefit of all mankind".
What do you mean? Where does that statement come from? I'm searching for uses by USSR fokls but the most definitive historical usage I can find is from a US navy officer saying of the nuclear weapons, "We are testing these bombs for the good of mankind." Hm, I agree, that is a crock, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the USSR or why you brought it up. The USSR was a state capitalist nation, it suffered similar issues with profit motive, though exacerbated by a centrally planned economy. Hence the holomdor: caused partially by the purging of wheat fields in Ukraine so as to plant cash crops instead to fund Stalin's feverish mega-projects. That's the heart of my argument: profit almost never puts the needs of humans first.
Edit: IIRC "for all mankind" is also inscribed... yes, on the moon, by the USA lol. "We came in peace for all mankind."
Because human nature is inherently selfish. The great majority of people generally tend to do stuff that benefits them and their close ones. Capitalism recognizes that and realizes that the great majority of value created by self-interested people is captured by the society in form of innovation, creation of products and services, jobs and taxes.
Societies that reject this truth (communism) tend to starve since nobody does anything anymore and everybody tries to steal from the State.
> Slavery is extremely profitable
This is false at a society level. In the USA for example slavery was abolished when the industrialized North won the war thanks to its better industrial and economic performance. Turns out a society of self-interested free individuals is much more profitable and successful than reluctant slaves in chains. As soon as countries realized it - they abolished slavery.
> where do you see the line?
Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build) and finally some are frivolous and should be avoided at all costs (EU's USBC charging ports come to mind).
> You genuinely feel that profit motive will allocate this better
Absolutely. Read up on how markets work and how they they are only mechanism we know for solving the pricing (valuation) and resource allocation problem.
> rationality and ethics?
The wallet always hits above. No starving person is ethical. During my life under communism I saw the worst human abuse imaginable all from people who in theory had no profit motive. Human nature is human nature.
> What profit is there to be gained from feeding the poor?
Are you kidding? Why do you think all those food companies exist if not for profit? In capitalism there is a glut of choice to the end that obesity is a big problem. In communism we kept looking hungry at empty shelves.
> I just don't see how profit could possibly align with actual human ethics.
This is getting too much to explain for me. I recommend reading up on free markets. Watch Milton Friedman's series, it's free on YouTube and it explains things extremely logical and much better than I ever could.
Who knows? They had to pretend some higher purpose to cover the fact that we were cold and staving. We knew how much better things were under capitalism so instead of denying it they went for heroics. No food but the state built ICBMs? It was "for world peace". No heating or A/C but with a space program? "For the betterment of all mankind". All kinds of pharaonic projects, monstruous brutalist monuments dedicated to our leaders were justified that way. We didn't believe them of course, but they just had to lie.
Watch some Cold War era movies or documentaries if you want to understand how it really was. I am sure you can find a bunch on YouTube. I can't recommend any, the memories are too painful for me.
> USSR was a state capitalist nation
So "war is peace, freedom is slavery" then. Communists always had this funny habit of trying to rename things, to pretend they were somethin else, trying to muddle the waters. Orwell saw right through them. Us that lived their horrors too. But I am not interested in discussing dialectics. The end result of all communist experiments was starvation, no matter how you want to call them.
> This is getting too much to explain for me. I recommend reading up on free markets.
I didn't mean to tire you, I have read a great many things on this subject over the decades, it's how I got to be how I am now (I wasn't always a dirty anticapitalist). At this point I'm less interested in debating the pillars of ideologies and more interested in individuals and why they believe what they do, and conversation around that.
Thanks for the video recommendation, I'll check it out. Please don't feel the need to continue, I'm just going to go through your post and make some notes mostly for myself, it helps me organize my thoughts and consider my own ideas.
> Because human nature is inherently selfish
I heard this all the time but my every life experience speaks against this. Have you ever been in a natural disaster? If our nature is selfishness, why then are we our most selfless when everything but our nature is stripped away? Others have noticed this, I recommend "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit.
> The great majority of people generally tend to do stuff that benefits them and their close ones. Capitalism recognizes that and realizes that the great majority of value created by self-interested people is captured by the society in form of innovation, creation of products and services, jobs and taxes.
Is that truly what capitalism does? Is there a possibility that a capitalist society instead repeatedly tells people to fear their selfish neighbor, and "get yours" before they do? In particular, does it really disperse selfish behavior to the benefit of all? I'm particularly skeptical of this point because while I agree that capitalism rewards selfish behavior, the very existence of billionaires seems to indicate that the "great majority of value" is not "captured by society" at all. If it were, I feel we would have fed our hungry children before we had launched a tesla car into space. At the very minimum, capitalism is a poor allocator of this great majority of value.
> Societies that reject this truth (communism) tend to starve since nobody does anything anymore and everybody tries to steal from the State.
Some semi-socialists states didn't starve, and one of them (Cuba) has better healthcare outcomes than the most powerful capitalist state on earth (the USA), though there are many other issues with its society of course. Furthermore, I can point you to many inherently anarchistic, share-and-share alike communities that aren't starving. In my experience this is because people love doing things for many reasons, and profit is often the very last reason. It's not just me saying this, I was taught this time and time again from my sales leaders: there's a reason a sales contest prize is a car and not a cash prize. Money is just not a good motivator for most people.
> This is false at a society level. In the USA for example slavery was abolished when the industrialized North won the war thanks to its better industrial and economic performance.
Well it certainly had better industrial performance, but even afterwards near-equivalent slavery was maintained in the South for quite some time. Where they couldn't pay no wages, they paid almost none. Then there was the industrial era upgrade in the form of Company Towns. Why did those go away? Because they also weren't profitable?
> Turns out a society of self-interested free individuals is much more profitable and successful than reluctant slaves in chains.
I argue that the chains haven't really been cast off. Though slavery was made illegal, black americans still worked fields at penny wages, and their cheap labor class was maintained through racist law. Even today the Americans maintain a slave labor pool in their prisons. So the richest country on earth still seems to think it's quite profitable.
> Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build)
> Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build)
This is interesting to me because one of the largest issues I've found with modern capitalist society is that these laws ostensibly maintain "rule of law" but in practice seem to maintain class boundaries. A great example is in most capitalist nations, wage theft in the form of stolen time, missed paychecks, etc, outstrips retail theft losses by orders of magnitude. And yet the society spends a great deal of money and time on police and judiciary efforts to prosecute one and not the other. I don't see how these "essential" laws are doing anything useful.
> Absolutely. Read up on how markets work and how they they are only mechanism we know for solving the pricing (valuation) and resource allocation problem.
Hmm, I have read quite a bit on the subject, but I'm always open to more suggestions. Regarding resource allocation, I mean, I can allocate resources from farm to table for my home without ever considering "value" or "price." Perhaps I've exchanged the calorie for the dollar, though!
> The wallet always hits above. No starving person is ethical. During my life under communism I saw the worst human abuse imaginable all from people who in theory had no profit motive. Human nature is human nature.
I'd like to learn more about this if you're willing to share. Where were you living, and what sort of things did you see?
> Are you kidding? Why do you think all those food companies exist if not for profit?
But... the poor can't pay for food lol.
> In capitalism there is a glut of choice to the end that obesity is a big problem.
I believe a lot of the obesity issues in America in particular are also due to food deserts and malnutrition. However, doesn't this just further demonstrate that profit is poorly determining what is good for people? It seems there's more money to be made by showing people commercials for food that's mostly just corn (one of the cheapest vegetables to grow) in various forms, getting them addicted from a young age, and continuing to feed them corn throughout their lives as they grow obese from malnutrition.
> In communism we kept looking hungry at empty shelves.
If you mean the USSR I do still hold to the theory that this was less an issue with the idea of resource allocation without profit at the heart and more an issue with a centrally planned economy. I don't support the idea of communist centrally planned economies, the failure modes are too obvious.
> Orwell saw right through them
Orwell is a great man, and I think it's good you bring him up, because he's an example of a marxist who was disgusted with general communist approval of a monster like Stalin. His quote: "One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten." I know it's common to doubt his leftist tendencies, but I feel it's undeniable: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it."
I wasn't trying to be cute with my state capitalist comment, and I don't want to dredge up painful memories, I was merely stating what I believe to be the generally agreed upon understanding of the USSR economy. Communism may not be a popular idea but it is relatively well defined by its theorists: no state, no currency, no class, and workers owning the means of production. It sounds that you witnessed first hand that of course none of this was true in the USSR. I would in fact be quite happy to call the "no state, no currency, no class, and workers owning the means of production" ideology something other than communism at this point, too much dialectic debate has been fought around both that word and "socialism."
The litmus test for all these funny ideas about human nature, societies and economy is the reality. Remember: communist countries during the Cold War had machine guns on the border turned inwards so people couldn’t leave. We were trying to vote with our feet, to escape the “utopia” being pushed down our throats…
Do you know of a communists society that works? Go ahead, live there for a while and tell us how it is. There are a few “experiments” running in the world right now. Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, even China. What I know is that when I was in Cuba people were asking me how we got rid of communism. They were still trying to swim/float to the USA instead of appreciating their excellent healthcare. When my country (Eastern Europe, not USSR) made the switch to capitalism we got the “privilege” to experience the difference live and it was night and day: we (slowly) transitioned from fear, cold and starvation to full shelves, city breaks and fat people.
I am not aware of any successful communist society but feel free to provide examples.
Simply not accurate. NASA budget today is actually about the same as the avg during Apollo. The problem is how the money is spent. And the 'risk aversion' isn't really the problem either.
So what? Governments are clearly capable of achieving these things, they've done it before. Private industry, remains to be seen. Worth nothing that it has to be profitable for it to work for private industry - possibly not what we actually want for space exploration. Would private industry have kept the voyager probes going this long?
There are two parts to profitability. Revenue and costs. I don't want space exploration for unlocking massive new revenues, but reduced costs would be amazing. Not just for opportunities that get unlocked, but also for freeing up resources for other things.
China official reusable rocket are even further away.
And in fact its not that China is closing the gap, its actually that SpaceX is INCREASING the gap. SpaceX is not standing still, going from landing to doing it 100+ times successful and 20+ times with a single rocket.
And in addition SpaceX is already moving on to Raptor engines and Starship, further increasing the gap.
So lets be clear about the fact, China is not closing the gap, they are falling further behind.
Small correction here - the leading Falcon 9 first stage has done 18 missions. Which is still the stuff of Sci-fi, but I checked when you said 20+ as I wasn't sure of that and it is actually 18. (B1058)
I think you're letting your hatred of China blind you to the fact that they are definitely chasing SpaceX's coat-tails - but don't forget that this answer was in response to "is anyone else doing anything like SpaceX in the world today?", and the answer is an emphatic YES: China is watching SpaceX' progress and it is making its own progress, just as SpaceX did 10 years ago, in building reusable rocket systems. Nobody else is catching up as quickly as China, in the new space race.
Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place. Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..
How exactly do you know I 'hate' China? Because I actually don't. I'm Swiss very natural, China is just another evil empire like the US.
> and the answer is an emphatic YES: China is watching SpaceX and it is making its own progress
Ok, but I am watching SpaceX too. And so do many other people and agencies. Watching is meaningless.
In terms of progress, there are many others that are doing as much. RocketLab and Relativity space are working on things more advanced then anything China is currently working on. Even BlueOrigin is building a more advanced rocket.
The iSpace vehicle is barley more advanced then European tests that will launch in the next few years. And that is not much more advanced then what NASA did in the 90s. The rocket the iSpace demonstrator was supposed to be for is already canceled by the way, because the company knew they wouldn't have a market. iSpace also had issues with its smaller launch vehicle.
> Nobody else is catching up as quickly as China, in the new space race.
Again, everybody is falling further behind. That was my whole point. SpaceX is innovating faster then anybody else is catching up.
What I recommend to you is to actually look at what China is actually doing rather then just assuming they are great and fantastic.
Because while China is launching a fair amount most of their rockets are not very advanced, mostly copies of former Soviet rocket. The same goes for their human space flight. The rocket engines they are using aren't very advanced.
Non of the private space companies in China are particularly advanced either and its not clear they have much of a market. I would say all of them are behind the major US companies, Firefly, Relativity, ABL, RocketLab.
Neither US, Europe, Korea, Japan or India wants to launch on rockets from China. Even if these companies had launch capacity.
Its a real question if China has enough commercial launches as the state still uses its own rockets for the most part.
> Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place.
Well, SpaceX will commercialize it first. And maybe years or decades later others will copy it.
Sure eventually these technology will be commodities.
But you are moving the goal post. That wasn't the argument I object to. I object to the idea that China was hot on SpaceX heels and catching up fast. And that's simply not the case.
> Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..
Maybe, but designs on paper are a small part of what it takes to actually build many rocket.
SpaceX is not using lots of part you can just buy. Its pretty much all costume designs by SpaceX all the way down. Up to SpaceX having their own materials. And the suppliers SpaceX does have are American suppliers that China can't easly buy from.
So if China steals everything they still have to reverse engineer everything and then also reverse engineer the manufacturing.
And the other thing is, China has its own existing Aerospace industry and government. These people are proud of their own things and NIH is very, very real. The idea that they would just throw away 60 years of China history to copy an US company and spend billions trying to reverse engineer the exact same rocket just isn't gone happen.
And of course given that SpaceX is a huge supplier to the US military, such an act could be a huge international relations crisis and the US could retaliate in many way. So China would have to hid the fact that it did so in some way.
Therein lies the crux of why we can't have (as a species), nice things.
Too bad about that. But on the flip-side it means that when China finally overtakes rocket flight (like its done with manned space station missions), it'll give the US military a reason to exist.
as far as i can tell the launch license hasn't been issued. Is 11/17 only the current NET date? It's moved a couple times now. I saw this story and thought the launch license has been issued but I don't believe it has.
SpaceX themselves[1] seem to corroborate what you're saying. "The second flight test of a fully integrated Starship could launch as early as Friday, November 17, pending final regulatory approval." and the FAA page[2] for the approval still doesn't have any updates.
As another data point (possibly useful), we were at the La Quinta that is midway up the island but located on the beach. There's a pier just down from there that has a decent view (through binoculars or a small telescope).
Even there, when it went up, the door to the beach (which we had open to see if we could hear it) was rattling, as well as the windows in the room.
Obviously there is something to be said for being at the park, but I suspect there is something to be said for being a bit further north - particularly if you want to avoid the worst of the crowds leaving afterwards.
Do plan to spend some time on the island afterwards - as the main route back is a longish two lane bridge that will back up significantly for a couple hours as the early birds try to rush out.
This is the second integrated flight test. Even if this flight fully meets all of its goals, it won't /really/ be a successful launch by standard measures.
Starship (the top part) has successfully completed several suborbital hops, including a "bellyflop". So in that sense, yes.
This upcoming test involves launches with both Starship and the Super Heavy Booster. Succeeding the current mission goals would be the booster soft(ish) landing in the ocean near the launch site, and the Starship obtaining a parabolic arc before surviving reentry to crash into the ocean near Hawaii.
To really have a "success" by standard measures under their belt, SpaceX will need to target having Starship actually orbiting with a test payload (probably Starlinks). After that "success", they're likely to still have secondary mission failures with landing the booster, and deorbiting and landing Starship.
Best case, they get to test the new sound dampening, armored pad, armored pad cooling, igniting all the engines on the pad, booster launch, staging, booster fly back, booster descent, booster landing (though not on anything solid). If that works they have a booster floating in the Gulf of Mexico they need to clean up.
For Starship they get to test staging, engine in vacuum, bellyflop control from very high altitude to sea level. Apparently all the way to sea level. They do not appear to be planning the reignition and flip. They may set the record for "most powerful bellyflop".
All the excitement is in the first 9 minutes of the flight. A little over an hour later the Starship's "orbit" will intersect too much atmosphere and will re-enter for about 12 minutes.
As for why not to try landing the Starship on water, I think they'll play with all their available fuel mass in vacuum. Those engines haven't operated there yet.
I'd be surprised if they haven't tested at least one engine in vacuum. You can build a test apparatus for that. Only learned how when I saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrLyzpTV7GU
The planned nominal trajectory for the first flight (and, I presume, this one as well) set Starship up for re-entry without a deorbit burn, so they're not planning to properly enter orbit at all. This is to avoid the prospect of an uncontrolled re-entry after orbital decay if something went wrong while it was in orbit, or worse if it got up there and the tanks exploded. Elon doesn't ordinarily choose to be cautious like this, so it probably wasn't entirely his choice.
(They'll be putting out enough energy to demonstrate that it could enter orbit, but the trajectory that they'll be putting it into is an "orbit" that intersects the atmosphere.)
Starship will crash into the ocean at terminal velocity off Hawaii (with no belly flop maneuver to stop descent right above the ocean), there may be some floating bits but not recoverable in any significant sense. The booster will do a landing burn, they will most likely sink it in the gulf and not attempt to tow it back to port.
Naturally, any milestone beyond what they've attained previously is a sign of forward progress, no? This isn't a one-and-done rocket like SLS where everything needs to work on mission day, these are test articles we're talking about
I just did a short search for the SLS test launches, but couldn't find anything. Is this SpaceX fail fast approach to test incrementally, and SLS was just launched the first time with payload, or did I just miss the test launches of that system?
NASA with SLS spent a much longer time and much more money to build ONE rocket, which HAD to succeed. It uses well-established technology and pushes few boundaries.
SpaceX philosophy is to build fast, launch, and iterate on unproven, innovative ideas.
The Artemis 1 launch was the first (and only) test launch of the SLS. It was successful, and yes, they launched it with expensive payload, the Orion capsule, which was also tested successfully. On the other hand, the SLS development was and is probably a lot more expensive than for Starship, while being much less technologically advanced.
The new era of dirt cheap space launch costs starts when SpaceX successfully launches 100 tons to LEO on a previously used booster and starship, then lands them again. Given how few flights are scheduled from Boca Chica it's fair to assume it will be at least a year before that, possibly longer.
However, in so far as the raptor engines have flown, the belly flop maneuver has been validated, and the full stack has flown, once they're landing the booster and starship following successful payload deliver we could say that the new era started when raptor first flew.
Generally it kept the pointy end pointed toward space long enough to not kill anyone. Pad was fubar'd, which was a source of much drama.
It's hard to answer the whole success question though. SpaceX has a very bend it and send it approach to R&D, they've had a hard time with starship and the powers that be, mostly because of the scale of the whole operation.
They got some useful data, but, they didn't get to do all the things they wanted/planned to do, so, failure, but, a useful one. If you remember, they smashed a few falcon 9's into the ground before they landed one. That model might not be tenable with something the size of starship, but, only because the powers that be would much rather you not blow up moon capable rockets as a habit.
Are they right, are they wrong, not really an important question for regual saps like us to be concerned with. All the spaceX fans in the world have no chance of moving the needle there any more than the spaceX haters do.
I think at least most can agree, however, rockets are cool, and, watching them fly or not in 4k on youtube for free is a good thing.
Having the test achieve its goals would be good but this is still a prototype and just one in a series that will be tested to destruction. The big deal is that the process of developing this launch system is moving again.
Starship without Booster has had many successful suborbital tests, but with Booster only 1 attempt. Much of that attempt was successful but it did have critical issues and they had to remotely blow it up, which also initially failed.
If this gets to orbit or close enough, that will be considered the first successful real launch.
The biggest failure was the delay in the flight termination system working. If it had sailed towards the town they might not have been able to terminate it in time.
I would probably add the damage to the launch pad to the list. That seemed to add unnecessary delay to the next launch though I don’t know if it was the long pole or not.
That was part of it, but the engine failures that immediately caused a loss of trajectory (it was visibly off even before it cleared the pad) were most likely the worst problem.
The engine failures didn’t cause the rocket to deviate significantly from its planned trajectory. The biggest failure was a fire causing the flight control system to lose communications with the engines, at which point the rocket was out of control.
Not entirely. It reached about 70 km where the booster had to detach, and it failed to detach. Also, there were several apparent engine failures which did not crash the booster, but very certainly were not nominal operation.
> Also, there were several apparent engine failures
It's pretty clear they were expecting this, as the status graphic had the capability to show on telemetry which of the engines had flamed out in real time.
No, it failed almost immediately off the launch pad when the engines started malfunctioning and it started out on a wrong trajectory even off the launch pad. The detachment was never attempted, and the decision not to attempt detaching was taken as soon as the safe trajectory was missed.
Additionally, the self-destruct mechanism also failed, though thankfully it produced enough damage to allow the rocket to naturally explode later.
>according to the expectations set before the launch
None of those were set expectations for a successful test. Why are people this resistant to understanding it was the very first test of a completely new and revolutionary rocket.
Well we can say clearly it has not reached orbit, if we want a clear criteria to talk about. Obviously the first launch had many successes, but orbit was not one of them.
I get the trend (and need) to personalize a company, to give it a "face", but SpaceX is not Elon, Tesla is not Elon, even Twitter is not Elon.
There are thousands of people doing the heavy lifting every day which ultimately determine success or failure.
Yes Elon takes a driving interest in one or the other (currently X) from time to time, and yes, because the media likes personalities, and cultivating personalities, you are encouraged to think of those companies as "Elon" - but in truth his daily impact is minimal. (Sure, he can fire half the staff, load it up with debt, kill an iconic brand, and do other ceo stuff, all with predictable impacts, but ultimately he doesn't actually do the work that is required.)
SpaceX is a bit different because there's people like Gwen Shotwell there to keep Elon's worst tendencies in check. They also have to convince the FAA they're not doing anything stupid.
Love the all-caps in this flight plan or whatever this document is. Some very ancient computer must be involved somewhere in the loop, and apparently - still doing important stuff.
You don't need to be at the place to see it,
every interested eyes in the world will be glued to the live stream on youtube
we always share breakthrough together
I wouldn't expect it to survive the re-entry regime, as there are a lot of tiles missing, but honestly, if it makes it to atmospheric entry on target, it'll be a wild success.
The nominal reentry and water landing is targeting the area off of Hawaii.
I believe it has to do with risk analysis of not re-entering over populated areas. The open ocean around Hawaii doesn't have people, so if it re-enters and breaks apart, there's no risk. Also, I suspect there are good military radar installations on the islands that might be able to provide additional information.
Once they get this working, the quantity of cargo they can put in space will be ridiculous. We could actually plausibly begin planning for an offworld base.
The financing of an offworld base is still very much unknown.
Even with a high volume and relatively low cost launch vehicle, the actual offworld base will be hugely expensive, and no commercial enterprise can realistically expect to make a return for their investors.
A government needs to step up with the rationale that it will eventually form a tax-producing colony - but a huge investment will need to be put in till it gets there.
We've had an in-orbit base for over 20 years without any claim of future tax revenue or commercial viability. On Earth, we have a long history of establishing research bases in places where there is no potential for a viable colony (e.g. Antarctica).
All we need is the political will and we can fund a Mars base as a purely government funded research program.
2. Another stepping stone to exploring further interesting/important space goals, like gathering resources from the asteroid belt/moons of jupiter/etc, discovering life on Europa, and so on
Money is just a medium for the exchange of goods or services. What would the colony export in order to generate the revenue required to produce said taxes?
The only sensible thing that would produce Earth based revenues would be some kind of intellectual property, but I don't know what is both sustainable enough and valuable enough to fund a colony.
EDIT: this is also made worse by the fact that the first few colonists should be farmers, mechanics and doctors (aka human mechanics), since all the intellectual work can be done on earth.
I expect that when we have a colony on Mars, exports will be found. Either mineral deposits which are rare on earth, or manufacturing processes which are easier with lower gravity.
A human being able to lift 3x as much without machines already opens up possibilities for greater productivity.
Stuff that must happen in the cold is cheaper to do too...
Think of Vegas - no economic output at all, tourist destination alone. Mars could do the same.
It only takes one thing - there is no need for a mixed economy.
I'm skeptical of that. Mars may indeed have some small advantages over Earth in certain niches of mining or manufacturing, but it's hard to imagine how those advantages wouldn't be greatly outweighed by the added difficulty of doing... just about anything on an uninhabitable planet, and expense of shipping the final product back to earth.
My skepticism comes from a different direction. Assume there's something that can be done at lowest cost on Mars — is it cheaper to send humans to do it (with all the necessary life support, radiation protection, and the inevitable black swans because we've never done anything like this before), or to figure out how to fully automate it and send robots?
If it takes 10,000 people to make $thing, then even at Musk's target price of $100k/person, the cost to develop and ship the automation[0] only has to come in less than a billion dollars to win.
[0] I guess the TCO would be more complex to determine, as the human side includes not just paying the humans (and presumably shipping good from Earth), but also figuring out how to do low-gravity and zero-gravity healthcare and surgery (on this scale there will be emergencies requiring surgery during transit), and planning for the colonists' desire to start families and retire.
The amount of money that a sizable and well funded group of people spend to get away from literally every other human on the planet and away from the government would easily fill a few rockets.
2. Martian Water.
Imagine all the disenfranchised homeopathics now have another woo-woo cure to turn to and will pay out the wazoo for. Make up a claim like "the purest water, untouched by human industry or nuclear tests, powered by billions of years of energy from sun, unfiltered by ozone and untouched by magnetism."
3. Tourism.
Vegas is basically a Martian tourist destination with an entire city built to support it. There's no other reason for Vegas to exist. If the accommodations were nicer, people would go to Antarctica as well. Rich people want to take their selfies with Olympus Mons in the background.
4. Low-G sports
Earth sports probably won't work the same, so entire new sports and leagues will form and provide entirely new season pass resell opportunities for streaming video providers. There's no way to simulate the low-gravity on Earth.
Also rich people sports like golf might take on an entire new ultra elite form when your par-4 hole 8 is 4500m long and you need a satellite to spot your ball.
5. Low-G food products
For similar reasons as the Martian water. Insert any combination of differences in nutrition/taste/look and it'll find it's way onto the plates of a three star Michelin restaurant or as supplements sold at a health store or something.
That's off the top of my head and could easily be a multiple billions of dollars per year of sustained economic output from Mars, mostly built on simple vices, novelty, entertainment, and pure human gullibility.
One way interstellar colonies could finance themselves, including no-faster-than-light financial systems is explored in Charles Stross' Saturn's Children books.
I expect it will be profitable in the future as it scales up. But there is probably only about 2x more scaling at the current price point (launching new countries, selling to people who aren't yet aware of it).
Besides just selling more normal Starlink subs, they also have revenue opportunities from selling their LTE cell phone product to carriers, as well as dedicated networks like the in-progress "StarShield" for the US DoD.
We could park religous fanatics and prisoners offworld? Or just drop self replecating machinery to create value. Which is the actual crux. Even for labor.. Remote or ai operated drones are cheaper.
There is a spin on the same idea when working with data (maths/stats/comp/ML) and having to skirt around the curse of dimensionality. Suppose I have a 5-dimensional observation and I'm wondering if it's really only 4 dimensions there. One way I check is - do a PCA, then look at the size of the remaining variance along the axis that is the smallest component (the one at the tail end, when sorting the PCA components by size). If the remaining variance is 0 - that's easy, I can say: well, it was only ever a 4-dimensional observation that I had after all. However, in the real world it's never going to be exactly 0. What if it is 1e-10? 1e-1? 0.1? At what size does the variance along that smallest PCA axis count as an additional dimension in my data? The thresholds are domain dependent - I can for sure say that enough quantity in the extra dimension gives a rise to that new dimension, adds a new quality. Obversely - diminishing the (variance) quantity in the extra dimension removes that dimension eventually (and with total certainty at the limit of 0). I can extend the logic from this simplest case of linear dependency (where PCA suffices) all the way to to the most general case where I have a general program (instead of PCA) and the criterion is predicting the values in the extra dimension (with the associated error having the role of the variance in the PCA case). At some error quantity >0 I have to admit I have a new dimension (quality).
Not safe to say at all, no. It is such an obvious thing to say, and such an easy observation, many people have said something of this nature for a very long time independent of each other. The is basically another phrasing of the question: “how many grains of sand makes a pile?”
I’m not impressed by a cheap observation like this, even when phrased in a clever sounding way. I am impressed when people make new observations when this applies, such as when they are able to model a specific macro system that behaves very differently when the number of inputs is increased by a lot, and show how that is useful for our understanding of nature (including human nature).
As I understand it, Stalin said, "Quantity is its own kind of quality." But I don't have the original Russian (someone here no doubt does) where he was referring to the USSR's ability to produce arms faster than their opponents even though the quality was lower.
Certainly that dialectic principle is broadly known. But it's specifically (mis)attributed to Stalin with the reference to wartime production/conscription and you won't find that in his works, recorded speeches or memoirs of contemporaries.
This goes in fact for most of his grand quotes. Whatever deep sounding passage are attributed to him and can't be traced back to Marxism tenets, are typically adaptations from the Bible, reflecting his education as a priest.
Imagine a Pepsi-sponsored replacement of the Kardashev scale: how big is the biggest Pepsi logo? Size of a person / building / city /continent / planet / galaxy / universe. Has consumerism truly run its course until a Pepsi logo has been carved into the CMBR?
"First there was the dream, now there is reality. Here in the untainted cradle of the heavens will be created a new super race, a race of perfect physical specimens. You have been selected as its progenitors. Like gods, your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. You have all served in public capacties in my terrestrial empire. Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created. From their first day on Earth they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens."
An offworld base would need the financial backing of nation states. But from a purely business side of things, does this open up any new possibilities?
I'm guessing Starlink will get less expensive to operate - but will it be to the point it'll displace cell towers?
Earth observations satellites would be cheaper to put up... so maybe we'll get a few more than before. But are there any real game changers?
The previous limiting factors for launching stuff off-world were weight and size. Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore).
With Starship, most of this goes away. It becomes possible to launch bigger, heavier (that is, cheaper) stuff to space. Still high-tech stuff, for sure, but engineers will be able to make more tradeoffs, because there won't be a need to optimize everything to be small and light.
Okay, I get the margins get more cushy. But one could see it being something like space launch getting 10x cheaper and that maybe translates into 3x demand for satellites. The first earth observatory was worth an astronomical amount of money, but the hundredth or thousandth is far down the tail of diminishing returns.
I just really wonder how much money can they make off of all of this even in the best case scenario. There isn't an infinite demand for putting things up into space.
There are demand inflection points. If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap. If Starlinks starts making all telecom providers obsolete then that'd also present something radically different and a huge amount of revenue. But I don't think they're able to do that either
I feel the primary reason people stopped caring about space after Apollo is because there are simply insufficient economic incentives.
The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining
> If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap
Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.
That will never work. You'll spend more time traveling to and from the remote launch facilities than you would flying conventionally from a nearby international airport. Destinations would also be severely limited by technology export laws; maybe it could be arranged for a handful of friendly nations / strategies allies like Japan or Australia, but most of the world would be scratched off the list.
When Shotwell and Musk talk about stuff like that or Mars colonies, they're hyping the company to attract more talent. If you loom at what they're actually building, it's all satellite launchers.
I don't know, Dallas to Sydney is a 17 hour flight now. If it takes 30 minutes on a rocket from Texas you have 16 hours to do everything else and you'll still get there faster.
If that was just intended to forecast costs, then it’s a good analogy. But I thought SpaceX went further than that. This Adam Something video provides some amusing coverage of the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI
> The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining
The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly.
The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.
I'm no expert but I think Rome was always growing but never achieved ultimate profitability. Yesterday I was considering how the Italian renaissance was fueled by the materials left over from Roman overbuilding. The price Rome originally paid in labor was an enormous savings to the renaissance builders.
I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.
Mostly on the idea that as the Roman Empire expanded its currency was devalued by precious metal content. That sort of pattern signifies to me decline. I understand that the currency may have been just keeping pace with the efficiency of trade. It seems to me that if trade was as efficient as Rome was hoping it would not have collapsed.
Another way to look at it is that the empire ran into a labor shortage and contracted back to a sustainable size.
There's always an element of time to money, so your argument and the parent's don't contradict in that the romans might have not been profitable in the near term yet what they created was very profitable in the long term
> Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore).
Another good example is JWST, which required an elaborate (and therefore risky) "unfolding" process. The costs of such approaches seem somewhat self-reinforcing: a failure would be very costly, so it's worth spending more on validation and testing; that extra expense would make a failure even more costly, justifying even more spending on testing! (In that sense it's similar to the tyranny of the rocket equation: having to carry more propellant in order to propel that extra propellant!)
If you want to build spaceships to fly around the solar system, being light still matters a lot and inflatable modules are a great idea.
That’s because your constraint is delta-V which is expressed in terms of the mass you are moving around. More mass requires more propellant and energy… which means more mass requires more mass.
If they use Starship to bootstrap mining, refining, and manufacturing in space, then this ceases to become a problem. At that point we're talking about how much cargo Starship can move, not how much infrastructure.
There are manufacturing processes that benefit from microgravity (e.g. growing protein crystals for the pharma industry, producing semiconductors, etc).
Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.
Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:
> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude
For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).
I do somewhat doubt that the economics would work out. Silicon wafers are expensive, but I'm not sure if the price is currently higher than that of launching a bunch of sand to low earth orbit.
What fraction of machine time is currently spent pumping wafers down to molecular-beam vacuum? What fraction of machine mass is dedicated to holding that vacuum? Vibration isolation would also be much easier. Not sure if these are enough to matter, let alone enough to justify a rocket, but maybe the math can be made to work.
> An offworld base would need the financial backing of nation states.
It really depends on what we mean by "offworld base". There is extensive literature on how this might be done "on a shoestring budget". Start here: https://www.marssociety.org/concepts/mars-direct/
I don't want to be rude, but I'd say if you fall for that then you're a sucker.
Tell me which of Elon's companies would exist today without heavy government subsidies or largesse?
He is a modern day Ross Perot. No more, no less. Maybe he wants to make the world a better place - but only if he can get extravagantly wealthy on US taxpayer dollars doing it.
He's obsessed with Mars because it represents the fattest international government contract that ever existed.
I believe an idea that circulated early on in the media in regards to SpaceX, whether rumour or real, is that Musk was planning to basically do a reality TV-like show - and be able to fund the colony on Mars through that; who on Earth wouldn't want to watch the first humans land on Mars, live on Mars - and what "influencers" might volunteer to be some of the first to "report on" the experience, as entertainment - for better or worse?
He's also more recently said the revenues from Starlink, aiming to be at least $5+ billion monthly recurring revenue, will fund his Mars colony.
The reality is though he's now tapped into accessing the full abundance of the universe, and he's at least 1-2 decades ahead of everyone else, in part due to the synergy of his various projects: Starlink, Boring Company, Tesla, etc - all are technology that he'll need for Mars - so he can funnel revenues/sales back into those companies]; and Musk understands exponentials of scaled paths, and so him being 1-2 decades ahead, with the synergy of the multiple companies he owns/controls, every year he has the chance to leapfrog ahead another decade of any other competition.
I do wonder with the cost reduction, weight limit increase and turnaround time reduction if we could now skip a lot of "planning".
Can we get to a point where every kg doesn't need to be maliciously thought about and optimised, maybe we could just yeet any potentially useful thing in to orbit and sort it out later.
I'd actually hope that it leads to fewer, larger satellites that it's practical to go up and repair. At least with a bit of regulatory oversight and some international treaties once this model suddenly becomes feasible with Starship.
In the lower orbits, everything will burn up in the atmosphere within five years or so. Orbital decay is very strong under some 400 km.
Also, space is pretty big. Even with a million destroyed satellites out there, the total density of debris would be very low. Imagine spreading debris of a million destroyed cars all over the planet - including the oceans - then walking around and trying to spot a piece. How often would you even see one, much less happen to walk directly over it (=equivalent of a collision)?
The thing is, in orbit you don’t really need to walk around to see the pieces of debris because they come blasting at you from all directions at 7km/s.
Nevertheless, they are still in one place at one time. If anything, my comparison overstates the danger, because Earth's surface is 2D and in space, many of those pieces will fly over or under you.
Starship has a slightly larger internal volume than the ISS, so yeah, a single starship is directly comparable to the current largest space station we've got
Oh the whole tube is way bigger. Just the pressuriseable payload space is bigger than the internal volume of the space station. Here's a view of what Starship docked to the ISS would look like. Or is it the other way around?
In fact Starship may make space stations obsolete, for the same reason we don't have anchored floating research stations out on the sea that we go back and forth to using little boats. We use research ships instead.
Plus if you wanted to, you could send up a slightly customized Starship to serve as the crew portion of the station and then send up a Starship-shaped “equipment pod” with redundant life support systems, fold-out solar panels, etc and dock it to the crew quarters. Just like that, you have a rough equivalent to the ISS in two launches.
That process could be repeated N times to quickly build a station that’d dwarf the ISS.
If we’re talking science fiction, then sure, you could do anything.
You’re talking about metal tube that never reached the orbit. You thing you just need “slight” customization to make it a space station?
That thing doesn’t fly yet, is not human rated, has no life support capabilities, has unknown lifetime in space, has no propulsion system that would keep it in orbit for long period of time and bazillions of other things.
It’s just a metal tube at this point. I know it’s cool to fantasize what it could be, but so far its metal tube that doesn’t even fly and is hugely behind schedule.
And it’s built by guy, who’s known for overhyping.
You mean the company that's been launching one rocket every 3.5 days this year?
I mean when you have a company that's shipped nothing and they are saying big things, that's one thing. But when you have a company that's actively launching and reusing more rockets than everyone else combined, that's another.
All the things you've listed are previously solved problems that have existing solutions. SpaceX isn't even inventing anything new here.
>That thing doesn’t fly yet
Starship has flown and landed in low altitude flights. It's the booster+starship that's in testing now.
Basically what I mean is - if it can do what it's meant to do - go to Mars - then it's also an easy space station replacement.
You can argue if it will get to Mars of you want. But silly to argue that anything that can get to Mars with human occupants won't be able to also orbit the earth with human occupants
At the same time it's much more likely that a company that makes rockets that do one thing would also make rockets that do another thing much more easily and faster than a company that does not make rockets at all.
Starship and Superheavy have missed their aspirational timelines, but that’s largely moot when there’s nothing else with remotely similar capabilities in development. Even if it doesn’t fly until 2030 (which I think is unlikely) it’d still be lightyears ahead of the competition thanks to the larger industry deciding it didn’t particularly care to meaningfully advance past late 70s technology until very recently.
But that doesn't mean it's a viable replacement for space stations.
Those are 2 totally different topics and it boggles my mind how people can write whole science fiction story around and argue that it's basically a fact.
It’s just casual spitballing of possibilities with oversimplification for the sake of brevity. The main point is that any number of things can be set atop Superheavy as long as it has the general shape of Starship and some kind of attached propulsion, and there’s a lot that can be done with that level of lift capacity paired with a volume that large.
I belive anything that can survive a 3 month trip to Mars for more people than even the biggest station we got so far is a hell of a lot more than a metal tube!
Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out? This is like the crabs in a bucket thing. There’s no need to solve every social issue before progressing to high tech things.
We would do well to ignore the cynical and misanthropic who contribute nothing but complaints about how the capable people should serve their personal interests first.
Well there is one argument that, in my opinion, is a reasonable one.
We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity. Otherwise we might suffer a replication crisis, where cultural and societal advancements are not shared by all.
For example, many dystopian media in the past few decades has focused on images of what a hyper capitalistic society could look like in space. Where you may have to pay for every breath, pay for literally existing in a space. A society where every day of your life must be profitable and servicing the corporations you have sworn fealty, a world where the only purpose for the foreseeable future is growth and commerce.
Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered. One where the purpose of society is to nurture and spread life to where complex life does not exist. A society where the primary driver isn't growth for growth's sake.
The argument is that if we ignore our cultural and philosophical short comings, we could replicate them. Why is replicating them bad? Because the stakes are so much higher when you have a space fairing race. Do you know what a small crew of technically literate people could do with the tech a society building a mar colony would require? Capture and redirect an asteroid, and if they were half intelligent they would know that the best way for it to go undetected would be to play the long game and give it a long trajectory out of the solar plane where most of the solar systems mass is. Or they could just as easily purposefully seed a planet's orbit with debris to create an intentional Kessler's syndrome. And you might say that these are outlandish, but any society that lives in space or on an non-terraformed would be a society where the base competency would be vastly higher due to survival pressures.
So, yes we should keep advancing tech but I think it's an obvious deficiency with our silicon valley minded leaders. We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society because these newage business men have been indoctrinated into the ideology that technology is the one and only savior. It's important, but you can't build a society or a building with only one pillar.
> We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society
We spend untold billions and trillions on these things. You will never solve every problem for every person. Utopia does not exist. You see, a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas on what the fundamental problems of our society are. Some people think it's because people have abandoned traditional values and religion. Other people think it's because of that. You can't solve all the problem for all the people. You can't care for everyone because you just end up caring for no one.
> Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered.
Your vision, to my judgement, sounds self centered though. It's saying "take care of me first instead of fulfilling your ambitions". There can't be a single "community". It's just not possible or realistic. It will always be plural because to be quite frank, many groups of people do not like each other, will not change for each other, and don't want to waste their lives trying to be accepted by other groups. And that's OK.
> We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity.
This is saying we should paralyze ourselves until an arbitrary group of people say everything is good now. Again, why would we do that?
Exactly. While I strongly support efforts to improve life for the masses and solve problems on Earth, I also think that there will always be problems. As such, if we wait for Earth’s problems to be solved before venturing into space, we’ll simply never venture into space, and eventually something will happen to cause humanity to forget how to build and launch rockets, potentially for the remainder of the species’ existence.
It’s better to use the capability while we know we have it and have the chance to etch that knowledge into our very existence by way of living all throughout the solar system.
> Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out?
I reject that interpretation of the the song completely—theoretically, a nation represents a single community. The issue is that the nation in question (the United States) doesn't seem to give a shit about its own needs outside those of its dominant (i.e. rich and ruling) class. Keep in mind that—although the song in question does present it as a racial matter, because race and class are so deeply intertwined in this country—that the focus on economic dominance over all other concerns leaves the poor in this country behind regardless of race.
And the implication that the poor (especially poor black folks) in this country are poor because they "can't seem to figure it out" is so asinine I'm not going to bother addressing it.
I think it is much more likely that Musk is going to cause a kepler syndrome collapse with starlink well before spacex is actually going to consider creating a moon base.
It looks like SpaceX says 5 years for passive deorbit in their FCC filing. If a satellite were pulverized, I would expect the small pieces to have higher A/m and deorbit even faster.
It's been said countless times that starlink will not cause Kepler syndrome. They are in too low an orbit and atmospheric drag would bring down any debris relatively quickly.
Yes, they lost the technology. The last Apollo mission was over 50 years ago, the people who achieved it are retired or dead, and engineering drawings alone are not enough to build a new Saturn V (or the landers, suits, etc). Not to mention all of that is outdated technology by now.
NASA is now building the SLS, a modern(ish) heavy lift rocket meant for moon missions, among other things. But for a couple decades in between there was this obsession with the Space Shuttle as the primary launch platform, and the Space Shuttle wasn't of much use beyond low earth orbit. And with the Soviets focusing on space stations after the Apollo landings there wasn't any competitive aspect to going further either.
There were obviously lots of unmanned missions to the moon and other places in the solar system, but manned activity was limited to low-earth orbit for the last 50 years, so the capability to go further withered.
It's more like we've lost the engineering. The technology is all still there but now greatly improved. From welding techniques to computer components the whole exercise in in manufacturing would be a huge undertaking to rebuild because we aren't manufacturing any of those old technologies anymore so that would be a problem. Or you have the problem of re-engineering the whole rocket with modern components and manufacturing techniques.
We can build medieval castles all day long with concrete and steel, but if you want an actual stone medieval castle, we don't know how to do it.
The Saturn V rockets were very risky, NASA got extremely lucky with them the first time but no longer have the same tolerance for risk. Even if they still had Saturn V rockets ready to fly today in their inventory, it would not be an acceptable option today.
I don't even think we've lost the engineering. We've lost the risk tolerance. Apollo was a risky program, people dying was considered acceptable. The US just doesn't work like that any more.
No, we don’t. Let me introduce you to OSHA and their buddy worker’s comp insurance.
I ran an industrial facility that had been in operation since the 40’s, safety used to not even be a concern. If it operated in 2000 the way it did in 1950’s, or even in the early 80’s, they’d be out of business.
According to that article the astronauts would go to orbit in an SLS then get into the Starship lander in orbit. Is that just for political reasons so there's some point to the SLS?
Yes, on Falcon 9/Dragon. That differs from Starship w.r.t. human-rating in a few ways:
- Dragon can do an emergency abort, by (a) accelerating away from the booster and (b) parachuting down to a soft-landing. Starship's upper stage is so massive that such acceleration and soft-landing seem out of reach (ideally an emergency-fallback-everything-has-gone-wrong mode shouldn't rely on tricky maneuvers like their landing flip!). There may be ways around that, e.g. using an ejectable module, but it would all need designing, building, testing, validating, etc.
- Falcon 9 needed to prove its reliability by performing many successful uncrewed missions. Starship will need to take the same approach, but hasn't managed any yet ;)
- SpaceX had to stop making changes/improvements to Falcon 9, since NASA would reset the successful-mission-count back to zero after major changes. SpaceX was willing to do that, since they had another rocket to focus on (Starship). Also, it helped that Falcon 9 had already exceeded their expectations by the "Block 5" design (which is why Falcon Heavy hasn't seen much use; Falcon 9 is very capable on its own!). Even when Starship is reliably launching, it will likely undergo design changes for a while.
- Getting Starship to the Moon will need in-orbit refuelling. That's untested, and more dangerous than docking and crew transfer (which is now routine), so it makes sense to launch the crew separately and transfer them to an already-refuelled Starship. This doesn't add much complexity, since refuelling requires multiple launches, orbital rendezvous and docking anyway. The choice of crew launcher is then arbitrary: SLS, Falcon 9, Soyuz, Starship, etc.
(Earth) launch and landing will be the hardest parts to get crew-rated, if they ever are. Perhaps the only human-rated approaches will be smaller, safer systems like Soyuz (or some modern replacement on that scale), with immediate transfer to a Starship or space station once orbital. Given its cargo lifting capacity, and station-sized living space, that would still be a great improvement over today (although maybe not enough to pay back SpaceX's costs)
And spacesuits, NASA has been impressively ineffective at getting any kind of new spacesuit designs going, they're still just cycling between the leftovers from the shuttle.
Apparently, they can't do their lunar spacesuits until they do their lander
> What's more, delays to Starship have knock-on effects because the spacesuit contractor needs to know how the suits will interface with the spacecraft, and simulators need to be built for astronauts to learn its systems.
Ironically, Starship has the same problem Shuttle has, basically limiting it on its own to LEO. The payload stage is too big and heavy.
The solution to get Starship and Shuttle beyond LEO is the same: either use up the fuel required for landing and expending the vehicle or orbital refueling.
The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
There is another thing sets apart Starship from other launch systems: relatively wide availability/manufacturability of its fuel outside of Earth. You won't find kerosene or hypergols on Mars or Ganymedes, but methane can be produced fairly straightforwardly there.
Not easier to handle, though. Keeping methane in a tank or moving it across some distance is fairly straightforward, as the problems regarding natural gas storage and transportation were solved a long time ago.
Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to even keep in one place, much less pipe across some distance.
> The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
But that's exactly what people believed about the space shuttle before it launched as well. Let's wait to see Starship actually work before predicting it will be enormously cheap. As it stands, that cheapness is entirely predicated on a completely unrealistic level of reusability (multiple launches per day with the same rocket, when even Falcon 9 requires weeks or months between launches of the same rocket).
You don't have to take Elon's word to know that it'll be cheap. It's being built in the open air under dozens of cameras streaming 24/7 on Youtube. Calculating the time & materials cost for Starship is straightforward.
The problem is not the same...Shuttle's main engines were dead in orbit after jettisoning the main tank. Only OMS thrusters were working and it landed unpowered, gliding to the surface (more like a controlled crash). It would never make it to orbit with the main tank attached. There was no possible way to fuel it, no engines and OMS was not usable beyond LEO.
You have full powered engines in orbit on Starship, "just" need to fuel them :)
> If it used a more advanced technology, it should have been able to at least fly to the Moon
That's erroneous reasoning. More advanced technology does not imply more advanced capabilities in every respect. The shuttle was not designed to go to the Moon, it was designed for other purposes. It doesn't have the delta-v to reach the Moon, nor would it have any way of landing on it, nor any way of returning even if it could land.
Think of it this way; much of the technology on a modern container ship is more advanced than that on a dreadnaught battleship. That doesn't mean a container ship is any good at blasting other ships out of the water; they aren't built for that.
Why even would they want to send the Shuttle to the Moon? That sort of mission is just a political stunt, the scientific research done there isn't worth the expense.
If the country with the most reasons to call "FAKE!" during the Cold War didn't accuse NASA of faking the launch... why are you? The government lies all the time but this is a ridiculous hill to die on.
The descent phase wasn't very long, and the astronauts were kind of busy during that time. That left just automated cameras, which tended to be lower quality (NTSC or worse). So, yeah, we have few photos of the descent, just video of lousy quality, and it's perfectly understandable why.
The fact that they're 50 years old? It's really hard to keep stuff maintained, and manufacturing methods have completely changed. The last people who could build that particular lander are retired or dead.
And they haven't made a new one.
So no, NASA hasn't had a human rated lunar lander for a very long time.
> You don't see 50 years old weapon systems stop working.
You mean simple firearms, that were carefully cleaned, prep'ed, and packed for long-term storage? Or something at least vaguely comparable to a moon rocket in size and complexity, like a B-52?
Talk to an old Air Force guy, who knows the maintenance routines for the older warbirds, and how many issues they have with "manufacturer went out of business" spare parts, etc.
If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
It's not like NASA is missing fuel, or that hull is damaged, or that engine is not working. At least, these things shouldn't happen if they put half effort into maintaining it.
Your "can maintain" for those old submarines amounts to "can maintain something which was originally designed to last for several decades, with a high-trained full-time crew, regular major maintenance, and a supply chain for spare parts...and all the billions of dollars which those non-trivial details cost".
Vs. those old rockets were designed to be one-shot expendable stuff. Plenty of them are on public display at museums - you could ask the museum staff about how many $$$/year they have available in their budgets, to keep the rockets in operational condition. (Hint: $0.)
Or, you might want to check out the YouTube channel for the USS New Jersey (historic WWII battleship, now a museum) -
- where their curator often talks in gritty detail about vast differences between "operational warship" and "keep afloat and open as a museum". Note that the something-million dollars which they are currently trying to fundraise - for some bare-minimum drydock maintenance - is small potatoes compared to the cost of a single new F-35 fighter.
You realize that submarine was only meant to last 20 years and instead they spent 3 years rebuilding it to serve a different role? It is also closer to 40 years than 50 and is decades younger than the rockets in question. I'd also hazard that the lifetime maintenance costs of that submarine far dwarf it's initial construction costs.
Part of the reason why the SLS took so long and cost so much is because they DID try to re-use all the old resources and technology rather than building from scratch.
> If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
Can? Sure you can. Absolutely.
Did they? No. There was no mandate, no requirement, no project, no budget.
Put that Ohio submarine into a dry dock, send everyone home. Tell them to find something new to do because the project has ended. Do you think you will be able to re-launch submarine in a year later if you changed your mind? How about ten years later? How about 51 years later? I wouldn't hold my breath.
The best way to maintain a capability is by regularly exercising it. The Ohio did that every year constantly, the Apollo program did not.
NASA would have to pull out the Saturn V blueprints and rebuild the manufacturing process from scratch. They would have to start hiring from 0 and reacquire all the institutional knowledge they lost over the past 50 years. They would have a real problem with supply chains: those are all gone, the tooling scrapped, the workers retired, and the business sectors offshored. They would have to redo all the testing so the process could reliably produce a working rocket from the designs. And the designs themselves are based on obsolete techniques, materials, and components.
Even if it was possible, there would be no point: the blueprints weren't the hard part, and the world has changed since they were drawn up.
The USA has lost the technology for putting people on the moon.
Records were not kept, knowledge died with the engineers who built it. Materials are no longer available, some of the technology has not been built in 50 years. In the end, redeveloping the stack is much cheaper than using the old rockets. Which is exactly what they are doing - and with every new development comes the risk you are chasing the wrong rabbit and won't, in the end, end up at your target.
Sorry, but it is hard for me to accept that explanation. You don't simply "lose" such technology or don't make a plan B in case it fails to work for some strange reason.
More plausable explanation, however, is that it simply did not exist at all and they faked everything.
Ofcourse we could make it in theory, but practically that's not the case. You don't just build a Saturn rocket and moonlander in your own factory (inhouse) one day. There is a massive supply chain. The development cost percentage points of US GDP. There were thousands of people involved. There also wasn't the internet. x factory responsibile for making component y, would call their supplier and buy an off the shelf component. Those suppliers no longer manufacture those components, why? No demand, probably obsolete etc. It's like trying to go buy a vacuum tube now when you could simply use a transistor. Imagine the cost of setting up a factory just to manufacturer vacuum tubes that have no other use. There's plenty suppliers that wouldn't have documented their manufacturing processes either, with the knowledge being handed down to whoever is doing the job.
Orchestrating a plan to keep millions in the dark and ensuring thousands, upon thousands of people keep a secret to their deathbeds is a lot less plausible.
"You don't just build a Saturn rocket and moonlander in your own factory (inhouse) one day. There is a massive supply chain"
You miss the point. They used those rockets multiple times to go to the Moon, it's not like it was "do once and forget" situation.
How could they simply forget things after doing it for so many times? You need extreme reliability and know-how to do those things consistantly over the span of a decade.
There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering. If not, then the whole thing is not really believable. Sorry.
>There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering.
You've never heard of the situation where no one knows how a business critical piece of software works? "Bob wrote it 20 years ago but he died last year".
This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. If no one is paying for that knowledge and supply chain to be maintained it will atrophy and dissapear. That's why the US army is still buying tanks even though they have thousands in storage, they need a company to maintain the supply chain and institutional knowledge to build tanks.
Are you imagining generations of engineers being tasked with knowing how to build a rocket with 1960's technology with parts from suppliers that no longer exist despite no one having any intention to ever buy such a rocket again and no one paying for the maintenance of that ability?
Yes, lots of those design top documents still exist. But not every supplier and sub-sub-sub supplier did the same thing. Most of those companies don't exist anymore or were bought and bought again.
NASA never wanted to build a Saturn V again. So they archived all the plans.
You seem to believe that they put some kind of plan in place to keep the Saturn V so they could bust them out again. This is simply not the case. As far as they were concern Saturn V was over and Shuttle was the future. Archiving everything was the only thing they did.
Of course we could do a huge effort and recreate the Saturn V program. And the lots of documentation that exist would help. But anybody who has recreated old things, knows that plans are not perfect. Doing something like that would simply not be worth.
I'm sure that NASA has all the blueprints filed away somewhere, but the reason we don't have a Saturn V factory running today is not because NASA forgot how to make them. Instead, it's because of cost. Between the Apollo 13 disaster, the Vietnam War, and maybe some other factors, public interest and approval of continued Moon exploration wanted, and Congress revoked the planned funding for Apollo 18 through 20, opting instead to focus on programs like the Space Shuttle.
Interestingly enough, the leftover Saturn V hardware was put to good use by launching Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, both of which turned out to be valuable steps in the US space program. So as much as it pains me to say, it may have been a good thing that the last three moon missions were canceled.
The last moon landing was 1972. That's 51 years ago. They were all part of the same Saturn programme, production actually ceased 4 years earlier in 1968. At the time it was the most complex machine ever built.
It's a completely acceptable explanation. Much more so than "it didn't exist at all" which requires enemies with thousands of nukes pointed at each other to conspire for 50+ years.
The issues are pretty straightforward, when the SaturnV and lunar lander were being built, almost all of the design was done by hand, all of the parts were made by hand and the engineers made all sorts of little undocumented adjustments to the designs in the process.
On top of that, the flight computers of the era were extremely primitive, large and heavy, and the design was done with this in mind.
Finally, NASA's safety standards were much more lax at the time. Saturn V would be considered way too dangerous to fly crew on nowadays.
Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship.
"Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship."
I'm all for it, and root for SpaceX and Musk to make it happen.
What I'm saying all this time on this thread is following:
"Man never went to the Moon before. Artemis will hopefully be the first. If man has been to the Moon multiple times using the same aging technology over 50 years ago, then it shouldn't be an issue to go there now. In fact, it should be much easier and cheaper, as the computers are 1000x more powerful nowadays, and we still have fuel/energy sources that were used then."
Astronomers today measure the distance between Earth and the Moon by shining a laser beam towards it and measuring the time it takes to come back.
Now, guess why the beam actually comes back instead of getting absorbed by the lunar surface? Because Apollo 11 left a mirror there half a century ago, it still works
There are people alive, today, that can prove to you that we went to the moon just by shooting a laser beam in the sky, so yes, we did go to the moon.
I used to think that if it were only slightly off, the return beam might end up intersecting the Earth at somewhere inconvenient, or even missing it entirely. Even more impressively, it took only five minutes to deploy, which is faster than most bathroom mirrors are installed :)
The reason why this isn't a problem is that the device wasn't 'just' a mirror, but rather a retroreflector. This reflects any light back at its source, regardless of which direction the light came from.
If you were really lost in deep space, perhaps you could flash a very bright light (not a laser) momentarily, then look for the return flash from the retroreflector moments later - or at least, hopefully that soon, otherwise you are very far away indeed! A few strategically-placed retroreflectors around the solar system could make an effective triangulation-based location tracker. I wonder if this already exists in some form.
Resorting to a conspiracy to explain facts you miss the opportunity to construct more precise mental model of engineering. And of economy of these big achievements.
It works this way with any conspiracy. It is you mental model, it is your decision, but it is little sad to watch people choosing ignorance over knowledge.
Again, you've glossed over the fact that if the US had never gone to the Moon, the Soviets would've been making it very clear. They obviously had good reason to closely monitor the landings so they could catch the US in any lies and embarrass them. The landings being faked requires a conspiracy to have lasted all this time, without ever being written down, between countries that were one serious misunderstanding away from ending human civilization.
As for cost and 'easier', the Artemis lander programs are cheaper than what Apollo cost, and they have far higher requirements than just being the bare minimum to keep 3 carefully selected specimens of humanity alive for a few days. Hell, Starship is supposed to have an entire infirmary. That is to say that it would indeed be a lot easier if we were just aiming to land a few people in a can for a few days and were completely willing to risk their potential inability to return. We've made the requirements much harder, so the project is appropriately harder.
You lose people, expertise and organizational structure. Those are more important than the "plans of the rocket". Not to mention, would nowadays engineers be able to work from the methods of back then? A lot of stuff would be faster to redesign from scratch (all the software and electronics for sure).
NASA a radically changed it's focus an functions since the space race. Suppliers have changed too.
They could do it again with enough funds and time, but it will take many years.
Kinda like America's WWII battleships didn't really exist - it was all faked - because the U.S. no longer has the industrial capacity to actually build battleships?
Neither destroyers, frigates or aircraft carriers do what a battleship did - delivering projectiles the size of a human some 15 kilometres away in a ballistic arch with some precision.
We do have rocketry that is a lot more advanced than the Saturn V ever was - but it simply cannot, and does not do what the Saturn V did.
I could argue details - but notice that, after battleships were no longer so important, it remained a critical priority for the U.S. Navy to be the "Reigning Superpower" on the world's oceans:
Vs. how interested was the U.S. Gov't in retaining "can go to the moon" capabilities after Apollo 17 (in Dec'72)? Can you name any post-Apollo, pre-2000 manned-moon-mission NASA programs which received serious funding?
Do you think we could built an exact replica of the Model T and its manufacturing line? We could build something kind of like it, but it would require a lot of engineering.
The type of plastic and cloth used is likely not manufactured anymore. The processes used and tools used don't exist anymore in the exact same way they did then. And the people trained to build those tools and operate them don't exist anymore.
The idea that all technology once built can just be recreated without any issue is just complete nonsense.
Do you not know anything about how technology works?
technology and knowledge quickly deteriorate if they aren't actively kept alive. Remember, that this knowledge must be in human minds, and be in the forefront of those minds continually, for the technology to be up to speed enough for it to be collaborated on and to progress or to be employed.
no group of people today, outside of a few enthusiast amateurs (very few), know much about how the Apollo program worked in enough detail to resurrect that technology and infrastructure.
We can't return to the moon today. That's why we're building up a new moon program. We can't just pick up where we left off.
NASA still can make those rockets, but I believe those were pretty inefficient. While it was “justified” during the Space Race, nowadays they would be deemed too costly IMO.
Why not? The Chinese Moon exploration programme is called "Chang'e" after their Moon goddess (who flew to the Moon). And Mao said that "Women hold up half the sky". And Xi Jinping has been pushing for female independence and leadership in science.
And the Chinese would get to beat the Americans at the American's own stated goal. America's programme is called the Artemis Program - Artemis being Apollo's sister - and the programme's first goal is to put a female and a person of colour on the Moon ASAP.
It would be a clear-cut victory for China over the USA, all the while being perfectly in keeping with China's socialist beliefs and past activities.
And China has several competent female astronauts (Wang Yaping and Liu Yang are experienced).
The moonshot was a technical achievement with a political goal. Putting a person on the moon in the next decade will also be a (different) technical achievement with a political goal.
70% of the US is either female, POC, or both. Enticing that mind bogglingly huge demographic into STEM has massive utility for this country. Evidence shows that people aspire more easily to be like people they resemble, and the moonshot that inspired "Whitey On The Moon" didn't do that job well.
What would you pay to add 10 million more engineers and scientists to the trajectory of this nation over the next couple decades?
The US is I guess 51% women, maybe 20–30% Hispanic, maybe 15% African-American, and so on. Then you just need to put one of every identity on the Moon in the next decade.
Because surely you didn’t think that the average person of a sociological minority identify themselves as “not a white [straight] male”.
Lots of vote thrash but no replies. I invite you to examine whether you are reacting to keywords or to concepts, and if the latter, to chime in with what you’ve found, I’m legitimately interested.
What you're missing is scientific reason for that. From scientific point of view we already sent the woman to space (just to test if there are any unexpected effects).
Sending a woman (or a person of color for that matter) to the moon has no scientific benefits unless the mission is framed as building a long-term colony there (where both men and women could participate) for example.
You enumerated several political reasons but no scientific ones as I understand. Hence my question.
Maybe political is not the correct word. The US did it to prevent existential threat from Russians (this is my understanding) and I don't see one here.
Putting humans into space is a roundabout way of letting people know you can put anything you want into space. That is, it's a demonstration of superior technology, which usually means superior military capabilities. In the context of the Cold War, it is reasonable to assume that both the USA and USSR feared that the other might become overconfident, underestimate their potential enemy's defence and make a first strike.
Therefore, the logic goes, each side needed to frequently show off their advanced technology whilst avoiding showing any secrets: ostensibly civilian space exploration serves that purpose rather well.
Possibly it did: the Russians might have thought that they were sufficiently ahead of the USA to start a war and survive it. Perhaps, in a flare-up of nationalistic sentiment combined with a bit of political instability at home, the risk of mutually assured destruction wouldn't have seemed too high. In this hypothetical scenario, seeing pictures of American spacecraft landing on the moon, astronauts doing spacewalks before making safe re-entry at supersonic speeds might have made the notion of surviving a war seem untenable, and would have put the Russians off the idea of a first-strike.
I've read a similar argument for spying - that countries begrudgingly want a certain amount of espionage to take place in peacetime. This is because it's better for everyone to know the extent of each other's military capabilities than to accidentally start an arms race out of a misplaced belief that their rivals are suddenly increasing development of weapons.
I was born in the post-USSR world, and am also British rather than American, so perhaps take my perception of the Cold War with a pinch of salt. :)
The idea that seeing the effects of a nuclear weapon wouldn't be enough to deter a war but seeing a man walking on the moon would is absurd. Is there any evidence for it?
I don't have any evidence, unfortunately. The Wikipedia page for the Space Race mentions that it was considered critical for the national security of the USA, but again there's no citation as far as I can tell for this claim.
The general US population considered Sputnik to be an existential threat. The original space race had all the impetus of a (cold) war effort.
China putting a woman on the moon would be a little embarrassing to the US, but people would forget about it in a week or two. It wouldn't prove China's technological superiority, just some vague sense of moral superiority. And there are a lot cheaper ways to send that message.
What significant difference does it make if we put a woman (or woman of color) on the moon first vs putting another white man on the moon. [with modern technology].
I could think of a few positive reasons to do this, but it shouldn't be the main driving force of competition.
No scientific difference. It's political. A president can trumpet it as a great achievement for humanity. Helps with getting funding & public support, yada yada.
It feels like the value in political virtue signaling is quite past its peak, in fact I think there's something of a negative value to it in a lot of important circles.
The only scientific reason for sending humans to space is to develop better technology for life support on longer missions. At this point automated probes can accomplish most other scientific purposes better. So yes, you send people with different physiological characteristics to further that mission. If you’re sending people for non-scientific reasons than you do it to be first.
Tereshkova was one of the first people in space in the time when nothing was clear about long-term effects on human body. The decision to send a female cosmonaut came from Vladimir Yazdovsky, the pioneer of biomedicine in spaceflight, not from the party cogs or someone else.
While this would be great to start space exploration, there is no military incentive for this, and they're always the only ones with a blank check. Not sure that tourism is the option, maybe mining.
Mass orbital surveilance, live detection of all rocket launches or other orbitally visible weapons.
Military comms over Starlink, or a US Space Force equivelant.
Countering the ability for competitors to launch the capability's both you and I mentioned.
A moon base would let any party who controls it have the high ground in any global conflict. Quite literally, they'll have the ability to control the globe.
The moon's too far away. It would take a missile a few days to get to Earth, and you need to waste energy getting off the moon in the first place. Plus putting it there. There's just no point.
On the inverse though, it takes a few days for missiles to get to you and far more energy to do so. Which would make their launch far more noticeable.
Hypothetically a battery of missiles on the moon could be launched without being noticed by anyone on earth. With modern radar absorbing/scattering designs their transit could also be unnoticed. By the time they arrived at Earth they would be moving far faster then any ICBM could ever hope to achieve. Which puts them well outside the envelope of any existing/soon to exist missile defense system. You would also not have nearly enough time to launch a meaningful counterattack, and any that you did launch would be much easier for our moon based overlords to spot and counter.
Basically putting nukes on the moon breaks MAD pretty thoroughly for the foreseeable future.
My hope would of course be that opening space up would provide humans with sufficient rocks that we would stop trying to blow ourselves up over this rock. I don't expect that will be the case, would be nice though.
Small edit: Double checked the published reentry speeds of some modern ICBMs, ~8 km/s, it's a lot closer to the moon to earth reentry speed of ~10 km/s then I thought. Should point out though that the first is a ceiling and the latter is the floor. So my point still stands, it just means that the moon nazis will have to push a little harder to kill us all.
>Hypothetically a battery of missiles on the moon could be launched without being noticed by anyone on earth.
If your opponent puts missiles on the moon, put observation satellites in lunar orbit.
Surely stealth nuke satellites in earth orbit would be better than fixed positions on the moon? But even nuke satellites are way worse than land based missiles.
A co-ordinated satelite strike from ow orbit means all you satellites need to go over your target at the same time. In an emergency unless you happen to have a bunch of sates by chance over your target, on average it actually takes longer to wait until a given satelite is over a target before you can launch, compared to using ground based missiles. You can compensate by having about 20x as many missile sats as you actually need, so there's always enough over your targets. In theory that gives a small advantage over land based missiles, but that's hugely wasteful.
Putting any of that on the moon just means your enemy has 3 days to figure out what you're doing, or means if you need an emergency response it will arrive in 3 days time.
I don't know that we can detect ICBMs on re-entry at all. Don't existing systems only see them in the boost phase? Your scheme still hides that, I think it might work.
The only saving grace here is that if the US government contracted Elon Musk to secretly haul nukes to the moon, there'd be a smarmy tweet about it that same day.
As against launching the thousands of nukes you already have right here on Earth, and hitting your targets within minutes. I suppose if you want to wipe out your opponents 100x over veeeery slowly rather than just 10x over in lunch time.
Did you forget that you need four refueling launches and a depot launch and then the actual launch of the lunar vehicle (HLS I think) just to get to the moon? The SLS went to the moon in a single launch.
That is a lot of launches for a rocket that doesn't work.
First 3 Falcon launches failed. Now Falcon launches at an annualized rate of roughly 100 times per year and is the most reliable launch vehicle ever made in terms of numbers of consecutive successful launches. Let’s see how Starship’s 4th launch goes.
A SLS launch costs about 2 billion dollars. A Starship launch is estimated to cost around 40 million. It'll probably end up costing more than that, but it would need to cost a whole lot more to make the SLS a better option
You're not technically wrong, but that's like complaining about the bad gas mileage a semi truck gets when driving it to Starbucks for a coffee. Yes, the gas mileage would be better with your Prius. But no, that's not the real use-case for this thing.
This is quite the pessimistic take. If you could wave the old magic wand, what would you do? I feel like you'd start by shutting down the Starship program completely and putting the money/effort elsewhere.
I really wish people would stop making these claims with only a passing knowledge of the issue. SpaceX’s Starlink in particular has done a good job of addressing these problems because they chose to deploy their constellation at very low altitudes (400-600km) where failures (or debris from collisions, to some extent) quickly deorbit due to atmospheric drag. Their original competitor OneWeb chose a higher orbit, 1000-1200km, to get by with fewer satellites. At those altitudes, the satellites stay in orbit for centuries unless actively deorbited.
Kessler Syndrome is a real risk at higher orbits like 1000km and above. But not at the lower altitudes. Kessler Syndrome is an exponential effect, so if the losses (due to atmospheric drag) are higher than the gain (debris generation due to collisions), then you do not get the exponentially growing debris problem. It’s not even possible.
Although it should be pointed that even at higher orbits and even if you’re technically in the exponentially growing regime, this growth would occur very slowly, not minutes or hours. Think months or years. And it’d take something like an active war with mass deployment of anti-satellite weaponry to trigger that kind of thing.
In fact, most debris problems nowadays ARE caused by debris from anti satellite tests (as well as collisions with old Russian derelict satellites or explosions of upper stages not properly deorbited).
But we also have demonstration missions for deorbiting derelict satellites to prevent the production of additional debris even at these higher orbits.
But sorry to say, none of these problems are due to Elon Musk.
The same brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today, is also the brain that was pig-headed enough to think he could fund an EV and a Rocket company at the same time, when he had experience of none, during a recession.
If he was reasonable minded, he would have realised the whole EV and Rocket thing is a stupid risk not worth taking and he would have invested his paypal money into something safe like all his fellow paypal mafia members who started VCs, and today we would never had heard of him except in esoteric terms, and he would have been sipping mai tai or whatever it is that VCs do when they are lazing around in their 3rd yatch.
Like acc to his bio (mentioned somewhere in his 1st bio by ashlee vance) the man literally had an intervention with fellow rich white buddies that he's gonna go bankrupt, that's how stupid the idea was.
to speak in explicit 4chan terms, that autist brain of his what created/funded this, and his stupid tweets are frankly a cheap price to pay for it (at least for me, I'm not american ;p)
A thousand times this. All humans are fallible. If you presume someone isn’t you just don’t know them very well.
Unforgivable offences should not be forgiven. Beyond that - celebrate wins, cherish humanity, embrace humility and tolerance. Don’t have to like anyone, but need to tolerate and respect.
The dude plays footsie with white supremacists. https://www.mediaite.com/tech/elon-musk-skewered-for-posting.... One of his first act upon taking over Twitter was to reinstate white supremacists. I don't know if he is a full white supremacist, but he really seems to like them. And that type of person is getting none of my respect or money.
In a way the melting of the statue can be viewed as a continuation of the northern purges of southern institutions.
Twitter/X is crap for nuanced discussion, but a facet of the US history is the tendency of the east coast to crusade over the sensibilities of the other states in a form perceived (rightly or not) as puritan zeal.
And as I understand it, not all of the cases are hardly as obvious as the abolishment of slavery.
I’m not from US so I might be completely off base though! I don’t follow the white supremacist scene so this might very well be a dog whistle from all I know.
@lettergram, it's not that nuanced. The culture you speak of that you would love to protect literally revolves around the dehumanization of other races
The only reason the frame the war as a matter of Southern morality is to distract from its actual stated purpose and to shame a conquered people into silence via revisionist moral smokescreen.
The North invaded the South to "preserve the union", and only emancipated the slaves as a "lever" toward that end.[0] The South fought back because it was invaded by a foreign power--one which sought subjugate the South and force its inclusion in the American Empire, contrary to the will of the southern people. This is simply a matter of fact. The men who fought off the invader will always be Southern heroes, and rightfully so. The pretense that it is immoral to defend a revolution while also engaging in slavery is, coming from the land which claims Washington and Jefferson as its greatest heroes, so utterly hypocritical that it's hard to consider it to be a good faith argument. Because it's not. It's moral blackmail.
[0]Abe admitted as much in a letter: "My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done. Freedom has given us the control of 200,000 able bodied men, born & raised on southern soil. It will give us more yet... My enemies condemn my emancipation policy. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it."
Bahahahaha. The South seceded explcitly so they could keep black humans as slaves. Full stop. Any defense saying otherwise is playing into a bullshit narrative spun over years by southern apologists and the KKK.
The South fought to maintain black humans as slaves. The South fought to preserve white supremacy.
Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot or a white supremacist trying to hide it.
> The South seceded explcitly so they could keep black humans as slaves. Full stop. Any defense saying otherwise is playing into a bullshit narrative spun over years by southern apologists and the KKK.
Did you read the comment you're responding to? It doesn't say otherwise.
> The South fought to maintain black humans as slaves. The South fought to preserve white supremacy.
Here's where you become confused. The south seceded to maintain black humans as slaves. The south started a country to preserve white supremacy. The south fought because it was invaded.
> Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot or a white supremacist trying to hide it.
Anyone who claims that an invaded country 'fought for' their moral failings as opposed to fighting against invasion is high on the invader's propaganda. Anyway, now that you know how to spell 'secede', consider continuing your education so as to prevent further embarrassment. Read 'Battle Cry of Freedom' by James McPherson--it's a good start.
Regarding Abe’s motivations - Abe was one super-canny player (lawyer who read Euclid for fun and spiritual sustenance). I would read anything he wrote as a piece intended to persuade an audience. My point is an audience reading a single quote from a letter from him should not take it at face value.
I don’t argue your points as such.
In the moral calculus of history slavery needed to end. But there were other motives involved for sure.
Abe was definitely a crafty guy and had a tremendous gift for rhetoric, so it is certainly possible that he was playing a double-game. That leaves two possible readings of the quote, but IMO the "double-game" reading is only 'better', from a moral standpoint, for Lincoln himself. It doesn't provide any more moral cover for the Union as a whole.
If we take Abe at face value, he is admitting that emancipation is, as declared in the Emancipation Proclamation, merely a war measure, i.e. a lever which aids his goal of sectional domination. This is neither a good look for Union nor for Lincoln, as it undermines any moral impetus for the war.
The alternative is that we're reading Abe the moral operator, who is merely telling the people what they want to hear, so as to gain their support for his moral mission. While this is a better look for Abe, it is no better for the Union as a whole, as it still implies that the Union was broadly against emancipation (for most of the war, anyway), which forced him to defend it as a necessary war measure.
So either A) the North invaded to subjugate the South, and only freed the slaves as a war aim, or B) the North invaded to subjugate the south, and thought that they had to free the slaves as a war aim, when in actuality they were duped into doing so by the super-canny Abe Lincoln. In either case, the nation as a whole is driven forward by imperialist motives, and the moral outcome of emancipation was, at best, incidental for all concerned, except perhaps for Abe Lincoln.
This is a bit of a narrow point, but I think it's worth making, as it underpins my original point--The idea that the South was "unnuanced evil" is utter, a-historical nonsense, spread by goobers who don't read history. The Southerners were a people who suffered the most common moral failing of their time. When they were invaded (for the sin of believing that governments powers are derived from the consent of the governed, rather than military might) they were not immoral, let alone evil, for fighting back. Their posterity is not immoral for celebrating their ancestors' valiant defense of their country.
Regarding ”Fighting for your country as a virtue” - yup.
Regarding motivations of the north-”more imperialistic rather than abolitionist” - yup.
The point remains though - the southern system even post-civil war was so vile and dehumanizing with jim-crowe and all that nazis used it as a template for the ostracism of the jews.
So in my books it’s a system that does not deserve to survive.
I acknowledge the sacrifice of sourhern soldiers was honorable as individuals but they defended a system built on a deep evil.
Similarly as nazi germany was a political entity that needed to lose the south was a political entity that needed to lose. Regardless of the ’true political motivations’ of the time.
But military victories are hardly tools of building better societies.
What alternatives are there to strategies of borderline genocide then? Is there any version of history where the slaver-components of the southern cultural heritage can be isolated from the non-slaver parts?
The post-apartheid South Africa handled the heritage of the afrikaaners pretty well IMO. No purges, no melting of statues. Just huge effort to make everyone understand - including the truth commission - what the new rules are, and what is now acceptable.
Germany post-ww2 was rebuilt and the nazi elements eradicated.
Both of these examples had a country with a long history before the super oppressive systems took place.
South otoh was built by slavers with slaver institutions from the early beginning. I honestly don’t know how much there is of non-slaver stuff to fall back to.
That does not make genocide right, nor does it explain away the trauma of cultural eradication. I hope there would be some method of healing but I guess close to two centuries no one has come up with one. I’m not convinced melting statues helps at all.
You are completely off base. Everything you said is a smokescreen and a retroactive narrative built by the KKK and white supremacists between the 1920s and 1960s.
The case is very simple: the South fought to keep Black people as slaves. The leaders of the confederacy lead the movement to keep black humans as enslaved property. They lost. The South put up statues of them during reconstruction and Jim crow as part of a system of legalized white supremacy to subjugate Black Americans through systematic terrorism, rape, torture, and brutality. Monuments to these leaders are celebrations of the rape, torture, and enslavement of Black people.
+1 for it being nuanced, after moving to the south it really was not clear how much this is true. The statue was the embodiment of a heritage / culture. There were bad parts of that culture, but so is there in every culture. However, rarely do we support obliterating other cultures.
I'm going to walk through the logic of the people I've met in the south (not necessarily my own opinions).
The south was under military occupation for years after the civil war. The north sent teachers from the north to "re-educate" the south. Many of the farms were destroyed and unmaintainable due to the war, deaths, famines, and removal of slaves. Many southerners were not allowed to hold office until there was a pardon issued.
Part of the compromise on the 1877 disputed election was that they removed "reconstruction".
In many ways, the south felt a genocide was committed. Their culture, society, wealth, etc was taken from them. We can argue it was justice due to them holding slaves or rebelling, but they left the union peacefully in their minds and wanted to be left alone.
Fast forward to today -- the US government has consistently regulated every primary export of the south (intentionally or otherwise). Cotton, alcohol, tobacco, coal, oil, etc have all been systematically regulated. I've witnessed first hand the large swaths of the south that had their communities destroyed by these regulations (most of them). Further, their state governments constantly derided for the last 150 years.
Opioids and obesity are also much more impactful (imo unrelated to the government) in the south the opioid epidemic (which is still raging) completely decimated the communities. The dispensary rates are also WAY higher in former confederate states than anywhere else.
When you combine massive regulation, loss of jobs, obesity, etc it's clear why many southerners look to their heritage when they once had pride in their community, state, country, etc.
At the end of the day, the people of the south have slowly seen their culture collapse over the decades and the melting of the statue was kind of the death of it. The burning of their institutions, melting of their statues, and erasure from the history books.
It seems a little crass to say "it felt like a genocide" considering the horrors of slavery. Similar thoughts regarding erasure from history, given the amount of controversy around whether or not schools should be able to discuss the horrors of slavery.
Is there anything more constant in American history than the impulse to cloak American wrongdoing in the moral failures of their victims?
> It seems a little crass to say "it felt like a genocide"
It seems more than a little crass to nitpick whether or not the word "genocide" is appropriate in reference to an invasion that killed 25% of southern fighting age men. The Yankees burned homes and granaries as a matter of policy, for the express purpose of starving civilians, which is a war crime. Genocide is a fitting word.
”Genocide” does not mean simply killing, the full definition is broader that.
The definition includes
”genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
…
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;”
I.e. just eradicating a national identity from a group of people suffices. This is the main reason Ukraine can be considered a genocidal war, for example, to eradicate the Ukrainan state and identity.
Similarly it’s not implausible to view the reconstruction period as an attempt to do some culture- and state eradication in the slaver states.
Nobody is defending the horrors of slavery. But, state institutions were demolished, a specific cultural identity was attempted to be eradicated. I’ve never visited US south of Colorado but just by reading about it the feeling of genocide comes strong.
World is not black or white.
Was eradicating the institution of slavery right? Hell yes. Was it right to attempt a bit of genocide on the side? I have personally no frigging clue. I do know it took to 1960’s to complete the process of allowing full citizenship rights with civil rights movement so clearly some things had to settle for over a century.
To maintain rule based order we must be committed to view events via the same objective interpretation.
The same north-led US was pretty good in genociding the native american nations decades the civil war ended.
Just achieving one good thing (ending slavery) does not give a state free pass on all the other things.
We (as the western world) try to improve by admitting our failures and trying to do better. This requires first admitting fallibility, and naming things correctly.
The current zeitgeist tries to view the world via the infantile manichean lens of victimhood (of pure goodness) and oppression (pure evil).
This is a very narrow ethical model, and seldom applicable towars any beneficial goal.
Things are complicated. The same state that fought and bled to end slavery also committed multiple genocides during the same historical period.
Was reconstruction period an actual genocide? Probably not. Did it use the same methods one would use to implement change that can be categorized as genocide? I’m pretty sure, yes.
A point I would like to be argued: I guess it' fair to say that
From point of eradicating culture, melting Lee's statue would be comparable to melting a statue of Sitting Bull. Both are representatives of hostile nations towards US, both of which were eradicated.
But are there any arguments against this point of view?
I think one still needs to acknowledge that cultural eradication is painfull to those whose culture is eradicated.
If this is necessary, then the basic courtesy would be to acknowledge the pain with empathy. ”Your ancestors were all fucking slavers so we are going to grind their memory to dust” is not really it.
Cultural eradication is always traumatic. You can’t heal the wounds by just saying to the victims ”your culture was evil anyway”.
Regardless if the culture objectively speaking was based on evil. The trauma will still be caused.
The question is not ”who is right and who is wrong” but how we view and analyze actions.
In general ”the end justifies the means so we really don’t care about civilian collateral” thinking is not considered anymore healthy way to do politics.
As far as I can tell he hasn't personally done much worse than say things on twitter that at least a third of people agree with, broken SEC rules and run companies his way.
As far as evil goes he isn't even going to be the evillest person in a room of 10 random people.
That said, the echo chamber effects will continue to get worse as the media continues to pile on him.
I'd respect Elon critics more if they frequently noted that they grade Elon more harshly due to his high level of influence, but I rarely see them do that.
Ultimately in a democracy, everyone is entitled to their opinion. There are lots of people who think the way Elon does, but most of them aren't as prominent about it as Elon is. Seems to me that in a healthy democracy, we shouldn't be particularly upset if an opinion that's common among the general population also has some representation among the elites. https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/explore/public_figur...
Indeed, if this weren't the case, and elites had wildly different opinions than common people (and also more influence), you could make the case that we were living in a plutocracy or an oligarchy, not a democracy. So Elon's willingness to say aloud what many common people think privately is pushing us away from that plutocracy/oligarchy failure mode.
I think Elon has made major mistakes -- funding of OpenAI being the biggest, from the point of view of humanity's survival. But the hate he gets rarely seems well-justified or rational. Here's my theory for what's going on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38046411
No idea about the others, I do grade Elon as harsh as I'd grade everyone else who does the same things. I only know about his attics the other peoples because of his public profile.
The danger I see, because already happened more than once, is that once certain opinions are publicly acceptable, those opinions risk becoming policy. And once those policies get enacted, as history showed, a lot of inncent people suffer.
And with Musks outsized crowd of fanboys, he is even more dangerous than he would be simply controlling Twitter.
>The danger I see, because already happened more than once, is that once certain opinions are publicly acceptable, those opinions risk becoming policy. And once those policies get enacted, as history showed, a lot of inncent people suffer.
This sort of reasoning doesn't help us identify correct opinions or good policies. I could just as easily say: "If critics are silenced, the people silencing critics may be allowed to dictate policy. And once the people who silence critics get their policies enacted, as history showed, a lot of innocent people suffer."
In a theocracy, the dictator can make arguing for atheism a crime, on the grounds that: "Arguing for atheism causes people to go to hell. A lot of innocent people will suffer. Therefore, we throw atheists in jail, in order to save innocents."
My basic position is: If your ideas are strong, you should be competent to argue with those who disagree. If your ideas are weak, you should not bully others into submission so you can enforce weak ideas.
Insimply explained why I argue against right wing opinions everywhere I encounter them. And I am all for having those arguements. Not being American, I see the reasoning behind certain limits of free speech, advocating for hate and violence for example. It should be up to the courts to act on those limits, censorship of opinions has to be avoided. I have zero issue with opinions having consequences so.
And yes, we have seen time and again that, as soon as othering people becomes policy, really bad things happen. That othering starts with words, and the political right are those using those words, and ideologies, far more often than the political left. And it is the right who does that othering on things like ethnicity, sexe, religion, skin color... The left tends to other based on opinion, which while still bad, is a far cry from actually argueing for interning said others in camps, excluding them from voting, access to health care...
I think it's worth noting how the right sees things:
Many on the right would say the left others people based on ethnicity, orientation and sex (primarily against straight white men).
They would also say that leftists have far higher levels of support for using violence in response to words ("punch a nazi").
They also see a symmetry in banning support for "hate and violence" and banning support for abortion. "Surely saying "transwomen aren't women!" isn't worse than advocating for the murder of hundreds of millions of babies?!"
-----
In general it is extremely hard to come up with rules for what you can and can't say without already presupposing a particular political viewpoint is the right one. Which is putting the cart before the horse really.
Historically speaking, it is common to argue that a group of people is super privileged in order to create the justification for atrocities. Just look at 20th century totalitarian leaders.
I prefer the liberal-democratic approach of ensuring rights for all instead of making decisions based on who is most privileged. There's no way to calculate privilege objectively, and the idea is inevitably wielded for political purposes.
Fully agree on the liberal-democratic approach. Hell, if you extent, just to pick a really controversial topic, adoption and full marriage rights to gay couples, rights I have myself, you are not taking anything away from me.
The important difference is so between calling a group priviledged and a geoup being priviledged. And men held power for most of human history, white men in particular since European colonialism became a thing. Women' right to vote is a fairly recent thing, the 1970s in Switzerland for example. Or bot requiring the husbands approval to take a job in Germany. The list goes on and on. White men habe been, and still are but less so, priviledged. Some men have a problem with loosing some of those priviledges so, a sentiment easily abused by demagogoes and populists (I put Musk in the latter group, more of an industrial / capitalist populist but a populist none the less).
In a sense the youngen falling into right wing extremism and islamistic extrimism have a lot in common, more than either of those groups like. But we digress, I think.
Regarding Starship, good for them to launch again. Good on the FAA to insist on high standards. Now we'll see how the launch on Friday goes.
> calling a group priviledged and a geoup being priviledged.
Group based reasoning is ambiguous in English.
When you say a group is privileged are you talking about the mean? The median? The peak? Every member?
Because you could easily have a situation where every person in power is a member of X group while the median member of X group has less power than the population as a whole.
There's also proportion of the total population to consider. If there were a group that only has 1% of the positions of power but every single member is in a position of power then is this group privileged or not? They can't control policy...
And there's also to what extent people in power actually push for the interests of the groups they are supposedly members of as opposed to the interests of the subgroup they're part of.
I'm not trying to "win", I'm trying to introduce readers to a useful tool to add to their toolkit for reasoning. A reminder that there's a class of potentially important ambiguities around groups in our language.
If it matters, this tool is also pretty useful for dismantling racism.
By most metrics Jews are more privileged (wealth, income, education, rate of murder, representation in positions in power) than white people in the West. And yet there is also genuine discrimination and hatred towards them.
(Also, you are somewhat out of date, e.g. white British boys currently have worse educational outcomes than girls or immigrants)
Anyway, you're very much missing the point by focusing on one example.
OP stated that many of the rigjt see discrimination, based in race and sexe, against white men. As I ahve yet to call those same people out discrimination against anyone else, I started with "Exclusively...".
>The left tends to other based on opinion, which while still bad, is a far cry from actually argueing for interning said others in camps, excluding them from voting, access to health care...
An editor for Huffington Post South Africa defended a post she published arguing that white men shouldn't be allowed to vote, saying: "[The] underlying analysis about the uneven distribution of wealth and power in the world is pretty standard for feminist theory". https://qz.com/africa/966763/huffington-post-south-africa-ed... What does that tell you about feminist theory?
In any case, the most important point is: I've never seen Elon Musk argue for interning others in camps, excluding people from voting, or excluding people from access to health care. In my eyes, your argument makes about as much sense as me saying that you should be banned from Hacker News because you sound vaguely communist, and Joseph Stalin killed a lot of people.
I never argued for banning Musks opinion, and I wont. Regarding the radical feminist in South Africa, call.me again when she has a realistic shot at becoming President there
Sure, Musk didn' propose camps as far as I can tell. He is, squarely by his own words, in the right leaning political camp in the US. Amd the current front runner for the presidencial candidacy of that camp called for all of those things, publicly, during a rally on Veterans Day.
Also, one opinion piece regarding the rescriction of voting, which is just a nut job idea, is quite different from gerryandering, reducing poling places and planning to impeach judges wjo said they don'z like gerrymandering (which actually is a thing, multiple courts in the US threw out district maps because of it). Actions weigh heavier than words, always.
Funny that you think I'm leaning communist, were I live my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center but a far cry from the left extreme of the political spectrum. No surprise so, it just shows the difference between the US and Europe.
>He is, squarely by his own words, in the right leaning political camp in the US.
I remember him tweeting a meme to the effect of: "My political opinions have stayed the same while the left has gotten more and more radical"
>Amd the current front runner for the presidencial candidacy of that camp called for all of those things, publicly, during a rally on Veterans Day.
Has Musk ever endorsed Trump?
>Also, one opinion piece regarding the rescriction of voting, which is just a nut job idea, is quite different from gerryandering, reducing poling places and planning to impeach judges wjo said they don'z like gerrymandering (which actually is a thing, multiple courts in the US threw out district maps because of it). Actions weigh heavier than words, always.
I'm against these illiberal ideas in the same way that I'm against illiberal ideas from the left. I haven't seen Elon Musk show any support for them either.
>Funny that you think I'm leaning communist, were I live my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center but a far cry from the left extreme of the political spectrum. No surprise so, it just shows the difference between the US and Europe.
I don't think you're a communist. From my perspective, the mistake you're making is akin to the mistake of blaming social democrats for the actions of communists. I was trying to explain that to you in a way that you'd understand.
After all, squarely by your own words, "my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center". Need I say more? :-)
Nobody is harmed by people thinking Einstein or Mother Teresa were great and not worthy people. Same for Gandi and MLK, if you choose which aspects to value and respect.
It is useful to have examples of people who made a positive impact on the world.
Look I am from a 3rd world country, and I have been observing online discourse on primarily US-based websites for decades, and the amount of kittens Americans have for their 1# richest member is amazing. I remember the days when Bill Gates was the Borg, then it was Bezos, now Musk.
If we were to plot a chart of misery caused in the average American's life, per million dollar of wealth, I doubt these three or other of their group would top the charts. They would be there definitely, but their wealth exaggerates their effect, imho.
I think the average American faces more misery resulting from the collective action of the thousands of non-famous multi-millionaires and low-billionaires.
These people have the wealth (usually inherited) and the capacity to cause a lot of misery while still flying below the public radar, and there are just so many of them in the US that it's impossible to collectively sum them up and point at.
They are from all walks of life, all race/gender/ethnicities, and yet their wealth allow them to a lot of things, either directly, or by donating to political action, indirectly, that would go unnoticed because we wouldn't even know where to look.
I am not saying that you shouldn't keep an eye out for Elon's wealth and spending, but to treat him as the spawn of satan is a bit much.
Today it's his turn, in some time, some other nincumpoop will be 1#, it's OK, look at BillGates, he was a weirdo but he turned out.... well mostly OK I guess.
We should use the pressure on the rich to bend them towards good causes, NOT to alienate them, all it does is give them a free leash to get into mischief. Keep the pressure on but keep them looped in.
I think you might be missing the conspiracy. Yes politicians are the ones causing the damage, yes they ultimately bear the responsibility. But you have to see how the interests of the rich are given a priority in any political system. Without the rich asserting their influence into politics, by persuading and demanding their interests in public policy, the politician is but a boring bureaucrat, neither making harm nor good. However with the rich conspiring with the politicians, the harm they do to the common people is ultimate.
I will not admire anyone who’s interests are looked after, compensated, subsidized, and payed for by our politicians. They are nothing but bastards, they deserve no praise for having been put in their place of privilege by circumstance and conspiracy.
IMO in terms of achievement and impact Musk is an Einstein-caliber historical figure, and we have to treat what he says and does very carefully. That's why anyone who follows him must always remember that road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Apologies, I didn't mean to target any race, I was simply sharing an observation of mine. I have past the HN editing time limit or I would have removed the offending remark, no offense was meant.
Nope, it doesn't go both way. Racism and classism only go one way, which is towards the poorer or more vulnerable part.
Pick on the weaker is a sign of cowardice. Do the same on the stronger is well-accepted, and rightfully so. Always punch upwards.
Yeah, just like western industrialized countries polluted for a literal century, accumulating wealth from it, and now that things are getting really screwed, everybody must not pollute.
I'm not saying it is "right" to fuck with the World pollution or to hate someone and beat them because their skin is white. But in a certain way, they "earned" that right.
Can we please get some "vulnerable" people into the NBA? You know, the ones who aren't represented there? Definitely seems like the stronger people seem to dominate there, and it's really unfair to the weak.
NBA like in the National Basketball Association? You mean like the many European players that rock the NBA that are totally not Afro-American?
Maybe the issue is in how the selection is done in American colleges.
But I'm pretty sure the Afro-American population would gladly swap 50% of black NBA players to have 50% of them in the middle-class.
A couple famous chilled dudes prescribed to not punch at all. The ones I'm thinking of were referring to Romans and British colonisers, but I suspect they'd have applied it to white rich buddies as well.
(Please note that I didn't write what I think of it, I'm only fuelling the debate)
Pacific resistance doesn't mean at all you are not punching/criticizing upwards! Also the imaginary guy from Nazareth had very harsh words for the merchants in the temple... (he even (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
Even though I mostly take a "white X" as a metaphor for a lack of diversity (of opinions and mindsets), I don't think most people do. These people aren't assholes because they are "white X", they are assholes because they are bourgeois stuck in their echo chamber.
And they are bourgeois because they are white. Or put in another manner, with the same brain and willpower but another skin color (which usually means being of another economic class as well) it would have been much much much more complicated for them to be some snob bourgeois.
> (which usually means being of another economic class as well)
Class seems to be the determining factor, really. Europeans had a couple environmental advantages early on [0] that allowed them to monopolise the world's resources, which were never fairly redistributed.
The current bourgeois are bourgeois mostly because their parents were, much less because they had the advantage of being white when building their wealth. There are of course outliers and ethnicity does have an impact, but overall there is very little social mobility anyway.
Exactly, European (aka "the whites", but I don't want to enter into what's white in the US vs rest of the world) had some advantage, they used it, gained more power and as everybody with power does, hold on to it by all their means. And even if rich families or dynasties come and go, the accrued wealth tends to not move too much. And it moves through generations, as you pointed out.
> brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today
I see the risk that someone who has been consistently so stubborn and capable of making reality match his absurd aspirations, might even succeed in making $Conspiracy come true before he changes his mind :)
Plot twist, the story is still running, we are yet to see how the plot ends.
after all, a few years ago every one was saying Bezos was the bad guy, there still time for some one else to pop up. Have faith, reality is weirder than fiction :)
> The same brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today, is also the brain that was pig-headed enough to think he could fund an EV and a Rocket company at the same time, when he had experience of none, during a recession.
A lot of the innovation that went into Tesla and SpaceX occurred before he decided to transform himself into a complete tit.
Because I believe he was always like this, we either didn't know or didn't care about it, or worse, just assumed that because he liked/disliked X, Y, Z, then must also like/dislike A, B, C.
You can definitely pick and choose, mind you, you don't have to accept a personality whole, you can like some parts while disliking others, but you can't just eliminate parts of him, and his stupid tweets are a part of his mentality, whether we like it or not.
So, if at some point he starts funding military spaceships that can shoot illegal migrants from space, do we still take the good with the bad, or do we denounce his behaviour?
we can cross that hypothetical bridge, if it ever exists and gets crossed, no use in raising hypotheticals.
right now it's just stupid tweets, I ignore them and live my life, after all, my life has never been in danger from any of his tweets, but it HAS been from actual american drones doing actual bombing. I survived that, I will survive his tweets.
I am not from your part of the world; application of Godwin's law in online discourse always amuses me, since I damn care about hitler or what he and his ilk did, my part of the world had other boogie men.
In deed they did. After the elections in 1933, free and fair elections prior to the Nazis taking power in the staged elections later that year during which the Nazis used their party apparatus as a shafow administration and blunt and brutal force and violence, the conservative establishment picked Hitler and the NSDAP for exactly that rwason: The needed someone to lead a coalition government against the left, they choose Hitler because they didn't take him really serious and thought they could easily manipulate him. We all know well that turned out.
Firstly, that would be illegal, and government(s) could step in.
Secondly, there are quite a few steps between having enough of woke twitter and buying it, which I'm pretty sure 20-30%, maybe even 40% of the population agrees with, and shooting illegal immigrants.
I know the media try their best to portray these two as equivalents, but they're just not. Also keep in mind the biggest loser from the twitter acquisition is probably the establishment journalists, so they do have an axe to grind. Their views are not going to be objective on musk.
Elon Musk isn't just "denouncing woke twitter". He is actively, politically involved in Mexico border crossing debates, meeting with politicians and border patrols, etc.
No. OP was suggesting we shouldn't denounce the bad things he's doing, because of the good things he's doing. My point is, should we wait for the bad to outweigh the good, and who will be the judge of that?
Or people can stop acting crazy when seeing someone who disagrees with them. I'm glad he broke the Twitter echo chamber, so now people have to confront the fact that regardless of whatever direction you lean, around half the country leans the other way. Maybe the polarization problem that's been happening since ~2012 can finally go away.
That does not mean he himself is a white supremacist. For example, defence lawyers and civil rights orgs often find themselves defending or supporting some awful scoundrels.
I might be friends with a communist and have supported him in the past without being a communist or agreeing with communism myself.
it’s only been getting worse because half the country believes freedom and women’s rights, and marriage equality shouldnt exist, and that we dont need fair elections, so i dont think twitter has really improved anything.
Just as inaccurate as saying half the country thinks that massacring Jews is an "act of liberation", though there are obviously quite a few people who believe that and those are located on the left.
Yes, there are people on the fringes that believe those things...and both of these fringes are very dangerous. I happen to share the belief that the fringes on the right are more dangerous, and certainly presented the more immediate threat when Trump was in power. However, I understand those who believe that the left fringes are more dangerous, and they do have a case. Both fringes present an existential threat to our liberal democracies, as they both have repudiated those values, so maybe those differences are not really meaningful.
Left and right are not the problem. The fringes are. Both of them. And they feed off each other, so they can only be defeated together.
If you want to defeat the right fringe, you must defeat the left fringe. If you want to defeat the left fringe, you must defeat the right fringe.
It's not even a fringe though, a large group voted for Trump as a long term goal to ban abortion, and most of them believe the "election was stolen"
The left fringe mostly seems to think gendered public toilets should be converted to single cubicles that anyone can use, similar to the toilet in your own home
Equating "wants to ban abortion" with "thinks women's rights shouldn't exist" is a pretty textbook example of one of the problems with political discourse. Noncentral fallacy, conflation between "all of" and "exists" and presupposing in the definitions used that their side of the political argument is the correct one.
That's a lot of heat and zero light you're contributing to this conversation.
"But my political opponents are actually bad and believe bad things" is no novel insight, every single person here will have read something like it a hundred times before.
We believe that babies' lives should have rights after birth, too, and if you look at infant mortality rates in states that whose politicians are against abortion, you see that obviously a fetus's right to live ends at birth.
Now you're just unproductively shouting at each other the exact same slogans that have been shouted for decades. It is not new or interesting to anyone.
None of those statements are even remotely true so. Gun control advocates specifically want to get guns out of criminals (I see domestic violence as a crime, some people, sadly, don't). "They" are currently prosecuting the former president and his croneys for trying to steel the election in Washington and Georgia (the latter already resulted in multiple guilzy pleads), and they advocate for better social security and health care which specifically benefits babies and mothers, especially in poorer families. Birth control, incl. abortions, are a central corner stone in that. And nobody is argueing for killing babies, there are term limits everywhere abortion is legal (as it should be, legal and, pun intended, well regulated).
There is one side so that argues for arming the, mostly right wing, mob, using government to punish political opponents, build what basically amounts to concentration camps for yet to be specified people, deport millions...
That also do real work. I don't think it's fair to say what Elon does isn't real work or isn't important. I don't think many people would say SpaceX would be where it is today without him.
The real answer is to simply accept that real people are not one dimensional characters. They have good points and bad points. You are perfectly free to appreciate the good points while disapproving of the bad ones. Maybe there's a limit for really bad people (Hitler etc.) where you just don't want them involved in society at all, but that clearly doesn't apply to Musk. Nothing he has done is outright evil.
True, but that level of nuance likely isn’t going to make contact with those that have staunch political views - it’s worth the reminder that any company is not the CEO.
Pretty much everybody knows that a company is not the CEO, and only people with staunch political views seem to think that everybody but themselves is so stupid as to not be capable of nuance and be in need of reminding.
But people also know that CEOs tend to have a huge influence in the success or failure of a company, and founders have a not entirely negligible influence in the company existing in the first place.
> that level of nuance likely isn’t going to make contact with those that have staunch political views
Interesting; you appear to suggest that an interest in politics makes someone more stupid - in that they become incapable of appreciating a nuanced view of a topic. Is this what you mean?
On the broader topic, the “it’s the workers that do the work not the CEO, man” point you made is often irrelevant to the argument it appears in, and amusingly (given it’s often levelled against him) is weakest in Musk’s case. When a CEO is just an interchangeable face at the top of an established company hierarchy, who has limited influence on the company for their tenure, it’s well taken. But in the case of SpaceX (definitely) and Tesla (probably) those companies likely wouldn’t exist at all (or wouldn’t exist in their current form) without the direct hands-on work and direction from Musk himself. Yes, he doesn’t construct or weld things himself, but that’s already obvious to any rational observer of the world; he employs many thousands for those and other roles, because that’s just how companies scale and operate.
> Interesting; you appear to suggest that an interest in politics makes someone more stupid - in that they become incapable of appreciating a nuanced view of a topic. Is this what you mean?
Not who you're replying to, but I think there's very strong selection effe ts in play where those more likely to speak up with passion in public places like this are more likely to lack nuance in their political views.
So it's mostly not that those with an interest in politics (even a strong interest) are less nuanced (though they probably are somewhat, as being bad at nuance makes political radicalization more likely), but that those with an interest but nuanced views will have a harder time actually bashing out a comment on the subject and will think it less likely they will be able to convince anyone (because its not a simple matter).
Also worth noting that one can be strongly interested in politics (e.g. political scientist) and hold neutral policy views.
So the comment was aimed at the poster with strong enough political views that they felt the need to post in this forum that their support for the launch was affected by it - where as most folks would not.
In this case, it’s less about interest and more about behavior.
Staunch means "steadfast in loyalty or principle". Someone who doesn't change their mind and has unwavering political opinions is kinda by definition less likely to appreciate nuanced viewpoints.
I'm not sure how you made the leap to "interest in politics = more stupid".
You’re overthinking it. The comment was aimed at OP (and personas like it) suggesting difficulty supporting the launch due to Musks politics.
And yes, folks leaning toward hard edges of a political spectrum reliably demonstrate lack of nuanced thinking in my experience because it involves compromise, something you see less of as you approach the aforementioned edges.
Yeah I mean when you let him directly get involved with something, we get the Cybertruck, which I believe is going to be a huge failure (but we'll see).
To me it seems like he's just hyping up things that are never going to happen while a lot of the engineers and designers actually focus on the things that make money.
> the Cybertruck, which I believe is going to be a huge failure (but we'll see).
I'd probably take that bet, although of course it depends how we define success vs. failure.
I suspect short-to-medium term, it will be a big success, as there's a lot of pent-up desire for one: hardcore Tesla fans, Tesla fans who want a pickup, people that like to be first-movers, people that like how it looks, people that want a pickup and appreciate the benefits that Tesla still brings (efficiency, supercharger network, etc.), and so on. The billion-dollar question, of course, is how it will fare in the market once that initial demand has been satisfied.
--
Aside from this, the interesting thing about the Cybertruck is that originally, the odd looks and build style (i.e. the flat sheets of stainless steel) were meant to be engineering-driven: the concept discussed on stage when it was first announced was that it was an exoskeleton, or a stressed-skin design, meaning that in theory it wouldn't need a traditional chassis, and would have weight-savings over a traditional pickup (or car) design. IIRC there was talk of a Model 2 (i.e. a smaller hatchback than the M3) being built using the same approach.
Then, somewhere along the line, this was lost (too difficult? or always just a pipedream?) and it was ultimately built using a very similar approach to Tesla's other cars, without the benefits originally discussed. I'm interested whether we'll learn what happened with this, one day.
Why don’t we hear the same about Bezos and his Wapo or the dozens of tech CEOs and Hollywood stars and influencers that share the same views? Because people don’t want Elon to be neutral, they want him to be fully mainstream left or fully silent.
Yeah. I used to be pretty excited about SpaceX stuff (remember those first re-usable booster landings?? amazing). But now it's impossible to separate that work from their CEO's bonkers conspiracy theory mongering and anti-trans, anti-democracy, and white supremacist views. So I mostly just ignore SpaceX news items now. It sucks.
I hope SpaceX is able to dump him soon so they can get back to just being a cool company doing cool things.
yeah I find all of this pretty strange, because Musk was very much adored by the left leaning people before he started his cultural war. Around 2016-2017 he was still the cool guy even on Reddit. I find this whole political circus slightly unnecessary and I believe he got himself few doors closed by this.
It's probably the single most high-profile example of the dangers of social media addiction in history. Guy fell in a deep social media hole around that time and in a few short years it's completely destroyed his reputation and seems to be affecting his personal mental health pretty massively.
Why? Is it just negative associations and emotions preventing you from enjoying it?
> bonkers conspiracy theory mongering and anti-trans, anti-democracy, and white supremacist views
That's a supremely uncharitable description.
Particularly the "white supremacist" bit. Just because I am friends with a communist and support/defend them and agree with some of their views (that aren't "communism is the best socioeconomic system") does not mean I am a communist.
If it helps, he doesn't want to hurt your trans friends, it isn't a terminal value. If you could convince him that trans people and potentially-trans people will be better off with people respecting trans pronouns and teaching about transness in schools then he would change his behavior.
That would go about as well as trying to convince him of the benefits of Scientology. Most people, once they recognize a harmful ideology masquerading as a benign one, aren't likely to be convinced otherwise.
I KNOW you voted for far left wingers, who all voted against gay marriage at one point, so tell me cold pie in minnesota, how do you possibly support those that actively voted against your beliefs? Explain that. How do you reconcile that?
What exactly is anti-democracy? It sounds like to me you are actively trying to supress viewpoints you disagree with, and by extension decrease their voice and reach leading to suppressing their vote which is anti-democracy, no?
I'm convinced this numb minded narrow viewed narrative is such a minority that it's proponents have a zeel to spew their misinformation every chance they can get.
He promotes and supports the US politicians who architected and supported the January 6th attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and who are continuing that work today to end democracy in the US.
I can and do. And as a result of him getting mixed up in this politics junk, we're having this stupid conversation instead of celebrating the cool stuff SpaceX is doing. Boo :(
>>Within the context of American politics, Musk has said he supported George W. Bush in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020.
So neocon, neolib, neolib, neolib - all warmongers, all boogie man Russia (lol), all proven beyond doubt to skim off the government. All crony capitalists, need I go on? All at one point against marriage for all - on record. Facts.
These are the people you support? Better take a look in the mirror bud.
Stop believing the narrative! Wake up folks!
-I'm not the one with cognitive dissonance letting a little bs politics get in the way of forming an opinion about a company.
How anyone can possibly not see the amount of undercover feds on the ground that day stirring the pot or the fact Speaker of the House didn't allow a major National police presence that was requested by the administration has serious blinders on and needs to check their view of reality.
I'm mean grandma didn't even go outside of the velvet ropes. Seriously. Check yourself. Disgusting.
I don't care about his stance on politics or anything, but I do consider his twitter crap a waste of his time at the cost of humanity as a whole. If he would focus on spacex (I don't care too much about tesla) and its spin-offs, the world would get better, faster. Even better would be more people like him, then it doesn't matter; we just don't have many for some reason.
So I guess Tesla will collect all kinds of information from the streets, Starlink will collect (earth and space) information using satellites, and X will collect real-time information about what people are currently talking about.
I think OpenAI may not be the biggest player in AI soon.
> and X will collect real-time information about what people are currently talking about
I really well hope this won't happen. I don't want any observations or conclusions from the environment that is predominantly shitposting, thirst trapping and provoking.
We need more players, but if you want and weird edgy lying polarised AI, then I suggest you train it on Twitter/X in realtime. I cannot see how it will not be completely unhinged like that. But let's see; we need more players to push boundaries and push prices down. Not sure if Musk is that, but who knows.
Doubtful that they could move faster with him taking a more active role. Starship could have launched months before, but they have been waiting for FAA approval. It is not Elon's lack of attention holding them back.
FAA approval took a long time because of how reckless he was with the first launch. He didn't want to bother with a flame suppression system but knew it was a risk.
Back story as explained by Elon in an interview with Lex Friedman:
The government's environmental assessment was bonkers. They were required to do things like assess the risk of a booster landing on a shark or whale in the middle of the ocean. They were also required to assess if the sound of the rocket would harm the breeding behavior of the seal population. To do this they had to chase down a seal, strap it down to a board with headphones and study if the sound of rocket engine were emotionally distressing to the animal.
Private space is basically SpaceX launches for governments and space agencies, the "private" stuff comes from in-house demand for Starlink. In case of EVs, he had to sue to get the title of founder at Tesla. And for OpenAI, wasn't he just an early investor? Or do we assume he wrote ChatGPT code himself now?
If you're referring to futurists and visionaries, we do have many I'm sure, but most weren't lucky enough to stumble across a pile of cash they could convert into an infinite pile of cash.
Musk still has a fairly problematic views on sustainability, I'd rather have more powerful people who are convinced that public transports, healthcare and education are essential to our prosperity.
People like Elon can carry the flag of what many of us have been warning about when we point out that our systems often have single points of failures: often one man with, for example, the ability to literally end the world, and no actual safeguards to prevent it. Or, one man with billions of dollars of assets at his disposal, money which could be making people's lives better but is instead being used by that man to do things like buy his favorite website and ruin it. Or, the fact that that website is one of three or four which represent the backbone of our species' communicative ability, and that man can control which of our species' communications are seen.
Whether it's a good or bad person at the helm, this is not how our systems should be designed or function. The more horrible the person, the more obvious this is.
> Or, the fact that that website is one of three or four which represent the backbone of our species' communicative ability, and that man can control which of our species' communications are seen.
The problem here is the lack of properly open (and FOSS based!) popular communication channels. A committee or safety team can be even worse than one man.
Despite all the things HN dislikes about Elon (FSD, Twitter etc.), SpaceX has always been a darling. And it will remain so. I like how HN does a healthy compartmentalisation of concerns.
We take for granted how important spaceX and star link are to Americas political goals, so yes I consider those entities conspiring against them to be treasonous.
I would love to hear more about how spaceX and star link are important enough to America's political goals to justify prosecuting people in regulatory bodies for doing the jobs the people we elected appointed them to do.
Did anyone hear that SpaceX had to strap a seal to a board and play launch sounds over headphones to get permission to launch at Vadenberg? The kicker, they had to do it twice. Source, Lex Fridman interview with Elon Musk.
The seal thing is very old news [1] that is pretty irrelevant other than to show Musk will present any regulation in the most unfavourable light if it affects his schedule. I see the exact same thing with contractors around me complaining about the "red tape" of dealing with in-water permits for construction, needing to install erosion and sediment control to protect waterways from runoff, etc.
He also added a story about getting permission to launch from Texas and some governmental agency was worried the spacecraft might hit a shark. SpaceX wanted the data to calculate the probaibility but the agency would not share the shark data either with SpaceX or with another department in that agency as they did not trust that department. Take from these ancedotes what you will, I know how I feel about them.
The point of my comparison with a local developer is that you're hearing one person's viewpoint, who has a very specific interest in the case - so you hear the one specific worst piece of the review process. That criticism is valid. But if you heard only the other side, you'll hear about unsafe development process launching a rocket with inadequate protection of the flight termination system, resulting in extremely dangerous delay between destruct command and ignition of the device. Both viewpoints have validity. The truth is somewhere in between.
Why word it like that? The concern appears to have been that the launch would be detrimental to the seals and they wanted a study to quantify the impact. Companies that ignore or are hostile to understanding there externalities are terrible and should face regulation. It sounds like a half-assed test was carried out.
I would implore anyone to not listen to a thing Elon says. The man lies as easily as he breathes, and always manages to portray himself as some kind of maligned victim.
Getting too close is dangerous, but they won't let you get close enough to be in danger; the safety perimeter on these things is set quite conservatively. Exploding on the launch pad is very expected and planned for.
Elon mentioned on the JRE podcast the other day that the clearance for FAA, F&W, Coast Guard, etc is so extensive that they even had to try and calculate the likelihood of hitting a shark with debris which is so astronomically small of a chance that its pointless and ridiculous.
So yeah, I think they have the human factor of the safety planning covered.
Because the rocket isn’t a really an explosive like a bomb, it’s a pressurized fuel tank. If the rocket fails during launch and there’s what we’d colloquially call an “explosion” it’s not going to extend too far past the rockets current position, it’s just going to cause a massive fire ball. But the keep out zone is far enough away that there’s absolutely no risk of that fireball reaching you.
Well the FTS failed on the first launch, so if there was a guidance malfunction it could have probably hit something outside of the designated safe area. Fixing it was a prerequisite for the second launch so I assume it's not going to happen again.
I mean, it's potentially dangerous to most people on earth. That's why there's a range safety officer, and a flight termination system (explosives, rigged up to unzip the tanks) on board.
The last launch got them in trouble, because they rocket took too long to explode after the termination system was triggered.
When it comes to distance from an exploding rocket, inverse-square works in your favor. It's relatively straightforward to calculate an upper bound on how big the blast can be based on the amount of energy in the fuel.
(I believe the closest you can get without going into the exclusion zone is about five miles.)
Exactly. When you read about “shrapnel” hitting a “van” it is important to note that the van was not considered to be a bystander and therefore there is no risk to bystanders.
IIRC the van had a camera mounted on it and was in the exclusion zone where no actual human beings were allowed during the launch. In other words someone deliberately risked their property to get a good camera angle.
Considering that the flight termination system failed people were in danger of getting hit by a whole rocket...
I would trust that the FAA has made them fix that issue though... Apart from that issue keep out zones are designed assuming it blows up on the launch pad/at any point in flight, so it's pretty safe.
Being successful at business (and in this case: some of his businesses; I wouldn't call the Boring Company successful and Twitter is too early to call) and being a good person are two very different things.
It's very possible to admire his accomplishments while not liking him as a person.
I understand critique of his personality and personal life, but there are people who try to imply he is dumb and all his successes were luck or somehow invalidated by his dad's emerald mine.
People cling to this belief that to improve the world via your enterprises, you must be a good person. It's a strange form of essentialism, borne out of the hard to accept notion that bad people can be a greater net good to the world than good people who don't make a huge contribution. It's an unsettling notion but a very true one.
I don't really equate making lots of money to doing good for the world either.
Tesla does a bit of good for the environment by putting electric cars on the map, but it's still way better not to drive at all.
SpaceX is nice tech but not really something that makes the world a better place.
But for me looking up to a person is much more based on their personality than their standing in society. I don't really look up to celebrities either.
> The only way the haters could say anything against him with any sway at this point is becoming more successful than him.
Do you believe that financial and business success is the only measure of merit?
By most accounts, Putin and the Saudi royals command even more wealth than Musk does, are they worthy of still more praise?
This is just one person's opinion, but I'm pretty sure we've got a developing Howard Hughes situation on our hands. He's only 52 so it's going to get a lot worse.
Well candidly the Compaq acquisition of Zip2 was absolutely lucking into success. He built something, sure, but most people do not get their startups bought out at the height of a ridiculous Internet bubble for $307 million. If the place or time or circumstances had been slightly different it would not have worked out that way.
Lightning struck a second time with X.com, first with a very fortuitous merger and then with his gigantic golden parachute when the board voted to fire him as CEO in favor of Thiel (it's difficult to credit him for landing that giant eBay exit since he had gotten the boot over 2 years prior).
He deserves credit for taking the gamble on SpaceX and seeing the early potential in Tesla though.
Do you think Tesla would have been as successful without his leadership? Or SpaceX? Of course he "picks" things well but what about his day to day influence? Is that fungible to any CEO who devotes a similar amount of time?
We don't know the counterfactual so that's difficult to answer.
I think the truth is that these two companies were a great fit for Musk's style in particular, not that Musk is necessarily a great leader.
What I mean is that Musk is reportedly overbearing and extremely demanding as a leader, and if you don't deliver he will fire you without hesitation. In most organizations that would quickly lead to morale and staffing quality problems, but SpaceX and Tesla worked on really sexy problems, so people were willing to put up with a lot of bullshit and abuse in exchange for getting to work on those problems.
Based on how Elon seems to be running Twitter, it doesn't seem like he ran SpaceX and Twitter in that fashion with intent because he realized he could get away with demanding so much from his employees. Rather it's just how he operates -- meaning that he got lucky, yet again.
But we'll see, right? Twitter is basically the opposite of a sexy problem, so if he turns that around then maybe he really is a talented leader.
> I think the truth is that these two companies were a great fit for Musk's style in particular, not that Musk is necessarily a great leader.
Tesla was barely more than an idea when he joined and he started SpaceX. You are speaking nonesense. His leadership style obviously finds employees who accept or even thrive in it. The success speaks for itself.
> What I mean is that Musk is reportedly overbearing and extremely demanding as a leader, and if you don't deliver he will fire you without hesitation. In most organizations that would quickly lead to morale and staffing quality problems, but SpaceX and Tesla worked on really sexy problems, so people were willing to put up with a lot of bullshit and abuse in exchange for getting to work on those problems.
All that you have said just as much applies to Jobs. Just because you might find that style of leadership unappealing there is a type of person who seeks it out.
The comparison between Musk and Jobs is kind of absurd.
Jobs' greatest strength was probably his way with people. He was a perfectionist, and if you got his way he was merciless, but he was also deeply charismatic and persuasive, and seemed to have an eye for talent. There are many stories about him personally persuading people to come onboard or stay, here is one:
Isn't blue origin a pretty good counter factual? Started at the same time as SpaceX did, had more funds available for r&d than spacex considering Bezos was richer and Elon used to be a lot more broke than he pretended to be (I'm talking about the 2006-2018 era, where Tesla was a massive money pit and his wealth was mostly built on hype). Yet the results are pretty damning, BO hasn't reached orbit yet.
Musk has done good for the environment, more than what people give him credit for. At least if you consider moving people to electric cars and reusable rockets "good for environment" but I'm sure haters will find reasons to deny him even that.
It seems a bit naive, given his list of business successes, to think that the positive things that happen at these companies under his leadership only happen because his employees overcame him as the obstacle to success.
I can understand not liking his politics or what have you, but logically speaking, what you’re suggesting doesn’t make any sense.
Elon isn't on his A-game recently, but the fact is no other aerospace CEO would have pushed for, or dedicated as much capital to, as ambitious a vision as Starship. They would have chickened out and milked F9s for profit for 40 years.
Obviously Elon attracted a ton of smart hardworking employees to execute on that vision who were critical. But very few other CEOs could have built the culture and given them the opportunity to do so.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but it just feels like they are throwing money into something that will never work at that scale because they have to spend investor and government money to ensure funding continues next year. It's just a musk thing to do.
Well since they are throwing less money than pretty much any space agency before them, what's the problem? They surely aren't wasting or just burning the money considering that they basically have some of the most capable and one of the most reliable launch systems in history. If you actually compare spending and budgets, you'll see how efficient they are.
And what's the issue with government funds? If the government wants to put satellites in space, why wouldn't SpaceX get paid for it? It's a massive advantage for the US government/military to have SpaceX too.
If you are clearly not a rocket scientist and seemingly not really interested in the topic how do you know it 'will never work'. Literally based on what are you making this claim.
SpaceX is by far the most advanced rocket company in the world, its not even close. They 100% believe this vehicle can work.
They have presented this to NASA, and NASA selected it and in their evaluation gave it the highest technical readiness level. NASA is involved and is monitoring and nobody from NASA has come out and said that anything they do is impossible.
Also you don't seem to understand how government funding works for this vehicle. These are FIXED PRICE CONTRACTS BASED ON MILESTONES. SpaceX will receive NO MONEY unless they ACTUALLY COMPETE MILESTONES. So the idea that they just do theater to get more government money just doesn't make sense, its not how it works at all.
There is just no to way about it, arguable the two most experienced space organization on the planet believe this can work but somehow you know better?
You make it sound like a successful launch of spaceship is the initial government contract milestone that SpaceX will get paid for, and they get nothing on failure during launch. Is this the case?
Basically when bidding for contract, SpaceX was able to submit a whole list of milestones. Each milestone is associated with some amount of money. NASA and SpaceX together negotiate these milestones and the associated payments in the contract negotiation.
Since this is a contract for a moon lander, and not a rocket, the launch itself is only a small part of the money. So a successful launch to orbit is very mostly likely to be one of these milestones. Successful reentry is another potential candidate. So if successful it would result in some payment from NASA, but since we are talking about a moon lander, launch will not be the primary milestone.
We don't know the list of milestones, that secret between NASA and SpaceX. But things like doing orbital refueling, landing on the moon are likely the most important milestones.
Its pretty certain that if they don't reach orbit, they will not be able to clear any milestones and thus not receive any payment. Unless they have some milestone for things like stage separation, but that sound unlikely.
No. The falcon 9 succeeded on it's first launch. It has only* failed once, on its nineteenth flight.
* It did suffer engine failures on flights 4, 83, and 108, but compensated flawlessly with the other 8 as designed. They also blew one up on the test stand (which would have been flight 29). Additionally the satellite on flight 47 was supposedly lost due to an issue with the payload adapter (not built by SpaceX), but pretty much all information about the launch is classified.
F9 was a much more conventional rocket. It's first party trick, the Merlin engine was iterated on heavily and destructively independent of the rocket. It's second and main party trick, the landing and reuse of a booster was definitely iterated on destructively many times before they got consistent performance out of it.
They're plan is to mass produce Starship and work towards operating them continuously like a 737 to space. Blowing up the first few generates great data for identifying problems and helps get that production line rolling.
The falcon 1 immediately preceded the falcon 9 and was the only prior orbital spacex rocket, it had 3 failures and then 2 successes...
The falcon 1 was much smaller than the falcon 9 (literally 1/9th the engines on the first stage), and they intended the very first falcon 1 launch to work. I'm not sure that those failures really support the claim that falcon 9 had a similar development model to starship where they are intentionally blowing up starships to develop starship (edit:) and they have already blown up more than 3 starship prototypes.
And yet, problems were constantly found and fixed and improved.
No two falcons were ever built exactly the same until Block 5 or so (and honestly, I'd be surprised if there weren't changes between rockets coming off the line now, but the changes are much smaller and more iterative, I would guess).
It's basically the software development process, just with hardware. Falcon 9 is a mature product at this point, so most of what's happening are maintenance changes.
I always love how people who have never built anything 1/1000s as complex want to tell SpaceX, the most advanced aerospace company in the world of how to do their job.
