I'm a Rocket Lab fan. Tons of innovation, slower progress due to not having the richest man behind, but on track to launch a reusable medium rocket, FULLY reusable and with a sensible guy at the helm.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I wish rocket lab the best and hope that one day they can have a competing heavy lift/human certified spacecraft.
However, it's nigh impossible to ignore how much SpaceX alone has reshaped the space industry and is basically forcing everybody else to step up.
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The best thing for humanity now would be for multiple people to develop reusable spacecraft. For greater chance that someone will land on a new innovation.
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In the meantime Arianespace divided by 3 their number of rocket launches
Out of curiosity - how many megatons of carbon has that produced, and how many billionaires will all the starships carry when they've exploited the earth's resources and left all it's living creatures to die and escape to mars?
SpaceX launches in 2023 were about 0.02 megatons of CO2 directly. I don't know how fugitive emissions from fueling and defueling, especially on starship with methane.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-falcon-9-co2-emissions
200,000kg/launch, 100 launches.
The carbon is not the problem.
Stop supporting Elon.
SpaceX is more than just Elon.
As with X, I'll support it as soon as he's out.
If we stop doing business with SpaceX, we immediately demolish most of our capability to reach space, including the ISS until Starliner quits failing. Perhaps instead of trying to treat this as a matter of the free market we should recognize it as what it is - a matter of supreme economic and military importance - and force the Nazi fucker out.
Sure. As long as he goes, I'll support it all day long.
People really under estimate how important he is to SpaceX.
Reusing f9 1st stage - His initiative
Landing f9 on a barge - His initiative.
Making Starship Stainless Steel - His initiative
Catching Starship booster on chopsticks - His initiative.
The list goes on and on.
Without someone like him pushing for these radical things that everyone else thinks is impossible or a bad idea we wouldn't recognize what SpaceX would be.
Instead we have things like starliner which is a disaster, and blue origin which started before SpaceX and has never reached orbit.
SpaceX would slowly transform back into 'old space' if he was forced out as there are very few people willing to take the risks he takes.
Edit: and it's even very possible that the wrong CEO takes SpaceX public too soon which would make all the risk taking and fail fast development cycle they use impossible. Think of the stock crashing when a test flight fails and the pressure from investors around that.
Are those examples actually his initiative, or him championing someone else's idea?
Reusing f9, landing F9 on barge, and Stainless steel were his initiatives. The SS one was a particularly hard win for him with a lot of internal push back.
Catching Starship on the chopsticks might have been an idea he heard outside of SpaceX, but that he then championed, again to a lot of internal push back, I'm not 100% about it being an external to spacex idea though.
Edit clarity and below
Those are just examples though. And I'm sure there are times as you suggest that people suggest a difficult idea that he then champions as well.
That he can champion these radical things, his idea or not, is still the key point of his leadership that will be lost.
For example, someone must have suggested they use a full-flow staged combustion fuel cycle for raptor. He had to sign off on that. No one had ever designed and flown a engine like this before. The russians came closest making one, but never flew it. The predecessor to this engine in the 60s or whenever, NASA didn't even think it was physically possible to make until the Russians made it.
The main point is, you need a crazy person to have crazy ideas. Even if 95% of his ideas are shot down, the last 5% are still crazy shit nobody else would thought was possible and never bother to seriously pay some engineers to try it if he wasn't in a leadership position.
Without him, there will be much less crazy, but both the good and bad kind. I fear the day SpaceX just becomes another Boeing.
Seriously, just landing rockets was laughed off as a stupid waste of time by all the industry incumbents just 6 years ago. That was a crazy stupid Elon Musk idea even dumber than the cybertruck at the time, and look where we are now.
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Thankfully SpaceX is MORE than just Elon. Unlike Twitter, where he's removed everyone and turned it to slop. He makes no money from it, so why shouldn't he fuck with it?
SpaceX actually makes money. Elon won't fuck it up. (Or he will, but atleast we will have learned an insane amount of things thanks to them.)
I'm sure it makes money and he may not F it up, but that's not the point. The point is that Elon has turned into the douche of the century along with his butt-buddy Trump.
I'm all for giving Nasa the light of day again, but from what I can tell, "Its not in the American interests" to give Nasa a good budget.
Yeah yeah yeah they overspend, are bad at budgeting, and have issues. But im quite stubborn, space science and research is priceless in my book.
So, if SpaceX is owned by a shit bag narcissist, but atleast space research is advancing? Well, that's fine with me. I feel very happy for all the jobs and scientists and aerospace engineers who have a job thanks to SpaceX.
Serious question - is it nasa over spending, or is it congress forcing certain requirements on them making things more complicated that leads to over spending?
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I'll definitely boycott SpaceX now (puts "activist" in bio)
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image licensed under cc by-sa!
edit: wrong! cc by-nd!
~~France X5 and~~ india X3
Big respect to ISRO, but you read France's Arianespace backwards. They were more of an X/5 situation.
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And they're on track for ~130 this year.
It's cool that spaceX has rockets can come back and be reused.
China just fires unregulated rockets that in danger people, wild life etc. from toxic and debrid
China rocket crashes after 'accidental' launch
Chinese rocket debris seen falling over village after launch
SpaceX launched about 429,125 kg of spacecraft upmass in Q1, followed by CASC with about 29,426 kg
Smaller satellites (<1,200 kg) represented 96% of spacecraft launched in Q1, 76% of total upmass
So the way I'm personally reading this is 2/3 of this is starlink launches
And launching space junk and making viewing the stars less and less clear at an historic rate.
People pay good money for that ‘junk’. A quality internet connection basically anywhere in the world, including at sea and in very remote areas, is far from junk.
Yeah I'm going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I've had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.
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I watched the recent test of catching the returning second stage booster in the chopsticks, and had a lump in my throat. Absolutely fucking amazing, nobody is in the same league as that crew.
The chart says companies/space agency, so I am assuming that NASA stopped launching rockets? It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
Indeed, NASA stopped launching rockets with the space shuttle. But that was the single best decision that NASA ever made. The space shuttle was an extremely expensive death trap. (It was damn cool, but a terrible way to get to space)
It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
You can blame the trump administration for that, with their commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. But the truth is, NASA has always heavily relied upon private companies, it's just that in the past they were all defense contractors (Boeing, Northrop, lockheed, rocketdyne, ULA). The other annoying truth, these commercial programs have actually been wildly successful (except in the case of Boeing's participation).
But it's been wildly successful in a few respects, one of which is that nasa has been able to focus on exploration again. Without having to support the huge costs of the shuttle program, they've been able to put a lot of their money into landers, interplanetary probes and space telescopes. I think we have more ongoing exploration missions than ever before. The Europa clipper mission launched just yesterday (on a SpaceX Rocket coincidentally). https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/
I wonder if NASA would ever bring back the space plane idea they had before the space shuttle plan got co-opted by a bunch of interest groups and turned into the boondoggle that it became.
Yeah, it certainly could have been better. I believe the original plans were for both the booster and orbiter to essentially be planes able to land on a runway. It's really a pretty awesome design, I mean can you imagine if we had a fully reusable launch vehicle in the 90s?
But the truth is, the shuttle was never really reusable, it was more like... refurbishable. It took a lot of maintenance for the heat shield and the engines after every launch. It was also amazingly complex, there were so many possible failure states, and in many of those scenarios there was just no hope for the crew. With a shuttle and with the future starship, we'll be seriously missing the launch escape system seen in traditional crew capsules. On some level, the last thing I would want would be to lose a whole shuttle crew and two booster pilots. (Though admittedly, these days the booster would certainly be unscrewed). I do also wonder, how much potential payload mass they'd lose by adding all the additional parts they would need to make the booster a landable aircraft.
Anyway, it is possible NASA could do that again, but it would be a serious investment to get that working, and right now I think they just aren't set up to take on a project of that complexity. Also, it would definitely distract and redirect funds from their ongoing science missions.
So yeah, they could, it would be cool, but I don't think it's a good idea.
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