Who knows, commercial fusion power might actually be less than 50 years away now. LOL.
Edit: Do keep in mind that this stuff doesn’t have to be the efficiency of the Sun because the Sun is actually quite inefficient and takes millions of years for the heat to get from the core where it is fused out into the galaxy. They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun and more efficient.
They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun
Well they don’t strictly speaking have to but to get fusion you need a combination of pressure and temperature and increasing temperature is way easier than increasing pressure if you don’t happen to have the gravity of the sun to help you out. Compressing things with magnetic fields isn’t exactly easy.
Efficiency in a fusion reactor would be how much of the fusion energy is captured, then how much of it you need to keep the fusion going, everything from plasma heating to cooling down the coils. Fuel costs are very small in comparison to everything else so being a bit wasteful isn’t actually that bad if it doesn’t make the reactor otherwise more expensive.
What’s much more important is to be economical: All the currently-existing reactors are research reactors, they don’t care about operating costs, what the Max Planck people are currently figuring out is exactly that kind of stuff, “do we use a cheap material for the diverters and exchange them regularly, or do we use something fancy and service the reactor less often”: That’s an economical question, one that makes the reactor cheaper to operate so the overall price per kWh is lower. They’re planning on having the first commercial prototype up and running in the early 2030s. If they can achieve per kWh fuel and operating costs lower than gas they’ve won, even though levelised costs (that is, including construction of the plant amortised over time) will definitely still need lowering. Can’t exactly buy superconducting coils off the shelf right now, least of all in those odd shapes that stellerators use.
I just can’t trust innovations and discoveries coming from China, I’m excited, but I’ll hold my breath until it’s been replicated by a less untrustworthy source
In the early days of Starship I was a little bit optimistic. The “move fast and break things” strategy had quickly succeeded when SpaceX was trying to land boosters, so I was hopeful that each exploding Starship was one step closer to a working spacecraft.
But at this point it’s just sad. I don’t see anything resembling progress.
I think the boosters were a “fake it till we make it” thing that luckily worked out. I don’t think Starship will ever make it into space.
True but disingenuous. This statement is often used to mock blue origin for just going 100km straight up into space and then back down, which is very far from reaching orbit. But the flight profile of IFT-3 was so close to orbital velocity, it’s not a significant difference.
It is a significant difference. When it comes to orbit, there is no close enough, either you’re going fast enough or you’re not. They have not shown this thing can do what they say it can.
IFT-3 was completely empty and the tanks were full. Where is the weight of the crew decks, the solar panels and batteries, life support equipment, docking mechanism, food, water, and cargo? These are not trivial things, and they weigh a lot. Proving an empty shell can achieve a suborbital flight and be just barely not be in orbit is not proof of anything useful.
If they had shown there was a significant amount of delta-v left with this empty test article, then that’s one thing. But those tanks had a whisper of fuel left in them. I don’t believe for a second that it would have gotten that close when it was full of over a hundred tons of additional equipment.
I can’t say I know enough about the subject to agree or disagree in general, it seems pretty clear to me that these people are sore about the fact that the billion (trillion?) dollar corporation they pathetically stan for didn’t make it to orbit.
DeltaV is the amount you can change your velocity in space.
To put it another way, if a semi truck company says it’s new truck can haul 20 tons of cargo 500 miles on one tank/charge, and then during the press release with an empty trailer, it has to pull to side of the road at 400 miles driven because it’s out of gas, do you think it can get to 500 miles when it has 20 tons in the back? And the previous 2 press releases had the vehicle spontaneously detonate just after leaving the driveway.
That’s what starship did, it ran out of gas at almost the finish line while completely empty. There’s no way it can get itself + 100 tons to orbit if it can’t even get itself to orbit.
The point is a more accurate analogy would be the truck pulling over after 494 miles, with plenty of charge left in the batteries, because they decided not to continue the test during rush hour.
Sure, technically they didn’t make 500 miles, but they were pretty damn close, encountered nothing preventing it, and chose not to for other reasons. Continuing those few extra miles serves no purpose at this time,and is arguably contrary to successful testing
That’s a bonkers take. It’s the largest and most powerful rocket in history and it’s already made orbit. The raptor engines are the first full flow staged combustion engines to ever be put into a production rocket (This is a holy grail of rocketry). All estimates suggest that it’s also probably much cheaper to build than any of the other heavy lift rockets. And that was accomplished while also building full reusability into the design…
The work they’ve done is nothing short of astounding. Which makes your take come off as either insane, blind, or biased.
The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.
Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven.
Getting something that big off the ground is impressive, but we did it 50 years ago with slide rules and pencils. Getting something off the ground should not be a success for a company that already has an orbital rocket in frequent use. Having 3 vehicles fail to achieve orbit, fail to demonstrate critical features like fuel transfer and engine relight, and fail to re enter the atmosphere while under control, is not a success. I do not buy the SpaceX corporate spin that “everything after clearing the pad is icing on the cake” that’s not good enough for a critical piece of hardware that is supposed to take humans to the moon and land them there.
If ULA can develop a rocket that completes its mission on the first launch, and NASA can do the same, because they take the time to check everything, then why are we giving SpaceX the pass to move fast and break things when it’s clearly not working. They do not have a heavy lift orbital rocket. They have a rocket that can, from all evidence, achieve a suborbital flight while completely empty.
And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing. And now the Government Accountability Office has not even been shown that the Raptor engine is even capable of achieving the mission goals for Artemis. And their test articles are behind schedule and routinely failing in catastrophic ways.
I want to see humans back on the moon in my lifetime. I think we need to go and set up a colony so that we can explore our solar system better and develop technologies for sustaining humanity both off of earth and in the harsh conditions we will face as our climate changes. Anything that threatens the mission of establishing a human presence off of earth needs to be looked at closely and realistically.
Back in the 60’s we knew that the only way to get humans to the moon was to keep the equipment reliable and redundant, anything else was asking for people to die. We seem to have lost that simple insight in recent years, and Starship is the epitome of that hubris. A ridiculously complicated vehicle with a complicated flight plan that has not been shown to work in any capacity. That needs to be pointed out and investigated if for no other reason then it is delaying a major mission.
"Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven. "
Arguing this point makes you seem either uneducated on the launch or just someone shitting on SpaceX because musk. If you were actually familiar with the launch profile you would know starship nearly reached orbital velocities but did not on purpose, so it could reenter the atmosphere and test the heat shield.
So you’d be technically right in your statement, however knowing the full details of the situation makes your take stupid.
And it was a safety measure in case they lost control that would ensure it would burn itself up and not become space junk. This guy is a nut job lmao. SpaceX is badass!
setting all politics and social issues from the CEO aside.
Right but I think that was their point though no? That, for safety reasons, they didn’t make it to orbit. Seems like a pretty cut and dry “no” they didn’t make it to orbit just like that person said. And the reason was that they didn’t know if it would make it. Which kind of supports their point.
I’m not going to claim to know enough either way (besides Elon Musk being an idiot), but they don’t seem wrong there.
It seems like you guys are mad that it didn’t make orbit and get defensive when people point it out.
Because the longer a launch goes the easier it is. Basically there are critical phases of flight and there’s the actual continuous operation of the rocket all the time. Things like clearing the tower, max q, stage separation, engine re-lighting are all insanely complex operations, but once all that’s done and all you need to do is burn the engines for longer it’s pretty easy to just burn more rocket fuel on a flight that has been working the whole time. its something that is much less risky to the mission going on. Things can go wrong, but the chance is much higher during one of those complex things.
An empty vehicle does not have the same performance as one with cargo.
Ignoring this point make you seem either uneducated on space flight or just someone blinded by the tech bro philosophy of “trust me bro it’ll work next time”
¯_(ツ)_/¯ while starship performance is ass compared to what they want they could still have easily put cargo onboard, you are talking about the most successful and likely profitable spaceflight company in history here you know?
SpaceX gets a lot of credit from space fans because they have proved the haters wrong time and time again, people just like you were saying the exact same garbage about falcon 9 and reusing the booster, now that SpaceX succeeded at that they practically own earth’s entire launch industry and will revolutionize it again with starship.
I’m sure we will get lots of “failures” (expected test vehicle losses) along the way for you to doom on, but at the end of the day SpaceX will be the winners like they always have been in history.
You’ve written a whole lot for someone who doesn’t seem to know what they’re talking about.
It has not made orbit.
It has done a suborbital flight.
The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.
These statements are intentionally misleading. The starship was less than 100 dv short of orbit when they decided to cut the engines in order to test another flight regime. It takes at least 8500 dv to make orbit, which means they were already 98.8% of the way there and they still had plenty of propellent to spare. All systems were nominal, they could have continued, but they had already proved their capability to make orbit and were now aiming to accomplish more. The fact is, they did achieve the kind of speed you need to reach orbit, but rockets have been able to reach orbit for a long time, that’s not impressive, but rockets have only just begun to start returning to earth.
And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing.
So far, the SLS has spent 23 billion tax payer dollars. They have built 1 rocket. But saying they “built” the rocket isn’t even fair, as they salvaged the engines from previous space shuttles, expending engines that had previously been reused. What will they do when they run out of pre-built engines? Prices will go up for sure…
Again, the SLS is attempting to use antique engines and essentially develop nothing new, and it has cost the public $23B. The starship is attempting to develop many ground breaking technologies, is so far achieving more of their goals with every launch. And they’ve spent 3 billion doing all of that.
At this point it may also be worth noting that the SLS has been in development for 14 years, the starship has been in real development for 5-7 years.
I remain in the position I started, to deny that SpaceX is doing something truly astonishing is plain bonkers.
Will every reader know that? Will every reader also know the finer nuances of the 3 downward arrows, one of them referring to Stalin’s authoritarianism? I’m not here to score sick comebacks? 🤷♀️
Maybe we can hear directly from them about their views on Stalin:
The Three Arrows were adopted as an official social democrat symbol by the SPD leadership and the Iron Front by June 1932. Iron Front members would carry the symbol on their arm bands. The slogan “neither Stalin’s slaves nor Hitler’s henchmen” was also used by the SPD in connection with the symbol.
Im authentically perplexed as to where we disagree and why you’re in “sick dunk” mode. Do you think I’m simping for Stalin? The 3 arrows appeal to me for the same reasons they do you, seems.
Will every reader also know the finer nuances of the 3 downward arrows, one of them referring to Stalin’s authoritarianism?
Yeah it seemed like you were implying (or actually just saying) that one of the arrows refers to Stalin’s authoritarianism. Which is a bad thing, right? Do we agree on that? And I have it as my profile pic… So I dunno how else I was supposed to take your comment?
And to be clear, again, it is not true that one of the arrows refers to Stalin in any way.
“Down with all forms of authoritarianism” is how i associate with the symbol. We do inded agree fash in any manifestation are a bad thing.
Meanwhile here in the Elon thread, I’d like for folks not to associate Communism with dead bigoted tyrants who usurped the unions-of-unions that were Soviets, while misattributing a quote from a capitalist whose competing to have as much blood on his hands as Stalin did.
I didnt bring stalin up. The comment i was replying to misattributed (or “sounds like”'d, if you prefer) a quote from Zuckerberg to Stalin. That read to me as right-wing rhetoric, pushing red scare, equating Communism, the society which is classes, moneyless, stateless, and flattening that concept into “been-tried-already-Stalin’s-Tyranny”
Which is pretty gross considering the big picture; the extensive harm which not only Zuck/ FB has done, not only by technocratic bro billionaires and corpo-owner social media as a trend, but the overall economic system and specifically imperial-colonial project which it is an extension of (colonizing of minds and thought, of our attention, to advertise to, for quarterly profit and power coupons) – all the while doing their best to promote apathy.
To prefigure a betted society, we must be able to dream. The only thing doomerism does is give the owning class that apathy while they bulldoze over Sudan, Palestine, Rojava
Or at least thats how I see. All of the power and pleasure to all of the people. Hope that clears things up.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Because my comment you replied to said nothing about Stalin or Zuckerberg or any of that shit. I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.
My initial comment in this thread was in response to someone (maskenox?) conflating the two. (Neither of which i am fond of, to be abundantly clear)
Edit: also, yes? When i went and folded all the comments…ig your initial reply was also to the same comment? Even though the voyager app shows them as diff colors…yellow and orange…doesnt make it as obvious and it isnt clear when it indents and when not… 💀
Also this is just an engine test at McGregor. They used to blow them up much more often as they were finding the limits. Nowadays it’s much less common, hence why it’s news when they broke one.
Maybe we could just stop making plastic of all kinds. Reduce Reuse Recycle. Recycling is literally the last resort, we don’t need most of our plastic stuff today.
Good lord, everyone please learn a tiny bit about spacex and the state of the space industry instead of letting your (justified) hatred of Elon do the typing.
You’re right, Elon Musk being associated with a company is negative. And what SpaceX has accomplished despite that association is truly impressive.
I think around here most people agree that billionaires don’t earn their billions, they reach that point having benefited from the efforts of thousands of workers. So why don’t we recognize those people’s work? Somehow, SpaceX has managed to avoid the meddling that we see from Musk in relation to Twitter and Tesla.
Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station. We didn’t have anything that could launch people into orbit.
Before SpaceX we were launching single use rockets built by companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA), which was founded as a joint venture between defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (They’re still around and still for the most part suck)
And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive. NASA didn’t and still doesn’t really build their own rockets, they contract out, and the contracts had been cost-plus, meaning ULA got an agreed on profit plus expenses. So if the schedule slipped on development or development cost more than expected, they actually make more money. There wasn’t much of a private market in space.
With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components, re-established a U.S. sourced crew capsule, and using fixed price contracts they reduced the cost of launch by an order of magnitude. And by publishing fixed prices to get into space, they pretty much by themselves kicked off the private space economy. SpaceX launches more frequently than any other company, and more than any nation.
And they did all that with a better safety record than previous programs! I can’t speak to this particular explosion, but SpaceX has taken an approach where they create new designs quickly, and test them quickly with the potential for explosions, before they put humans at risk on a live launch.
Elon Musk didn’t do all that, the people at SpaceX did. And if anything I’m concerned about the point when he gets tired of fucking up twitter and tesla and turns his attention to SpaceX. I’m hoping the national security aspect of the company will mean responsible adults prevent him from interfering.
And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive.
As opposed to now…
With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components
Nobody had done that before? Wasn’t the promise that they would do few quick checks, refuel, and send it back up same day?
Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station.
Nasa had do use Soyuz because crew dragon was late. SpaceX won the contract then underdelivered a late product. Basically exactly what ULA or Boeing would have done.
Man, this is really downplaying the history that was legitimately made by the incredible people at SpaceX. It actually felt to many of us like we had just gone to the Moon for the first time.
Meaning no disrespect, it’s clear from your response you’re not familiar with space history. And that was my point - a lot of people are jumping in here and making negative comments just because of the Musk association without knowing or caring about the reality.
The space shuttle (the U.S.’ s previous manned “reusable” vehicle) was retired in 2011, and the Crew Dragon was ready in about 2020. NASA was not forced to use Soyuz because of a delay in the Crew Dragon, it was because the Space Shuttle had two previous fatal disasters, was way more expensive than planned, and would be even more expensive to keep running. I didn’t know this until looking at the wikipedia just now, but early safety estimates put the chance of catastrophic failure and death of the crew between 1 in 100 to as low as 1 in 100,000. After those two disasters they re-evaluated and put the risk as high as 1 in 9.
NASA was willing to take a chance on other contracts for commercial vehicles because it had no other options. It awarded contracts both to SpaceX and ULA. The first is doing dozens of uncrewed launches per year and has flown 12 crewed missions. The other is doing like 3 launches per year, has yet to fly Starliner with a crew, and costs more per launch.
The space shuttle vehicle itself was re-usable. The “external tank” was discarded and not re-used. The solid rocket boosters would fall into the ocean, and then would have to be recovered, examined and refurbished. Those tanks/boosters represented a huge portion of the cost. While the space shuttle was slightly more re-usable, other rocket launches would be single use. What SpaceX did that no one else had before was a controlled vertical landing of the booster. In other words, it landed under power and standing up. That’s very difficult, and a game changer since it skipped the recovery step, and they didn’t require the time and cost of examination / refurbishment the way the space shuttle components did.
I like to think that Musks obsession with Twitter saved SpaceX. Thankfully he seems happy to just give them money and do the odd walk around tour during milestones.
They really have turned around our space capabilities.
Elon founded SpaceX in 2002. He said he wanted to build reusable, cost effective space platform where rocket boosters could land themselves and be refurbished with low turn-around times to fly multiple missions.
People laughed at the idea of a rocket that could land itself upright. And after countless tests that resulted in magnificent fiery failures and flops, a private American company is now responsible for launching crew and cargo to the ISS so we don’t have to rely on Russia or ELA alone, and has more recently gone on to develop the largest rocket ever made.
In the 22 years since it’s inception, SpaceX has designed it’s own:
Rockets
Engines
Rocket Propellant
Satellites and base stations
Bespoke robust communications network
Ground support structure (including a moving robotic tower named “Mechanical”)
Crewed mission vehicle platform
The world’s biggest fucking rocket
Say whatever you want about his beliefs, his opinions, his shit takes-- point me to another company that has done even half of that in that amount of time, or had nearly as monumental of an impact on the global space industry and America’s access to space in the last two decades.
And if y’all haven’t yet already, do yourselves a favor and look up NASASpaceflight on YouTube, watch their most viewed videos, which should be some of the SpaceX tests. You’ll come to understand why shit blowing up is normal and a good thing with SpaceX: because they prototype and develop iteratively and rapidly, intentionally testing to failure so they know exactly how far from failure their nominal conditions would be. If they did not do this, the platform would not be safe and they would be getting fucked by a camel wearing another camel’s skin for kicks.
Important to point out that a lot of NASA’s problems are probably caused by Congress: their attempts to “save money” by re-using designs, the risk of NASA losing funding if any rocket they make fails, their insistence on having NASA support government military contractors, etc
This is a lot of what is preventing them from taking the rapid prototyping and iterative approach of SpaceX.
I’ve been against the space industry/NASA/etc’s bullshit love of Elon’s fucked up project ever since the idiot took over. If they can’t see how he has mismanaged every single thing he’s ever touched and pulled out of every single contract with them because of him, they have serious issues.
Maybe now NASA will come to their senses, kick SpaceX to the curb, and work with someone actually competent.
Please see my other comment in this same thread. It’s not like Tesla or Twitter where they’re clearing slipping and releasing bad product. Look at the actual accomplishments!
As much as we on lemmy might look down on consumers of conservative news, I’m really surprised by how similarly reflexive and uninformed a lot of the comments here are.
One only has to read any current news about how mismanaged SpaceX is and how many problems they are having to recant this “we love Elon and can’t imagine not having our dicks all the way up his ass” attitude about SpaceX or anything that incompetent, privileged little shit runs.
So that obliterated launchpad is just normal, then? That empty star ship launch that managed to tumble in space was normal? SpaceX alway cheering and laughing when rockets blow up is normal? SpaceX dominates because they receive our tax dollars. Without that, they’d be dead in the water long time ago
Cry harder. Without SpaceX the US space industry would be worse than Russia right now. SpaceX launches hundreds of rockets per year and saves NASA millions in launch costs, and can actually launch people into space, unlike Boeing
Relying on a company so unpredictable and full of problems and errors is worse than not going to space at all. Your unnatural love for that laughable idiot Musk is going to get astronauts killed.
Uh huh, totally not the drug addicted scammers fault that he made bullshit claim after bullshit claim, pushing engineers to make reckless decisions, totally not the owners fault.
I’ll grant you that SpaceX has, amongst others, a number of smart engineers, though smart is a relative term if you’re working for elon musk
You wouldn’t say this if you were following the industry at all. Please see my other comment in this thread. SpaceX is dominating, for good reason, and seemingly in spite of musk.
I’d have a lot more sympathy for this comment if people would actually do this in reference to Space Billionaires. I’ve had far too many conversations online and elsewhere where the individual shits on NASA for space industry problems and worships Space Billionaires because [some convoluted “government bad rich entrepreneurs good” reason] and their problems aren’t really problems. I’m not saying you’re part of the billionaire sycophant club, but I’m not against musk’s well deserved criticism as he sacrifices people in his rush, and probably work quality suffers alongside them.
Is it ok to shit on NASA for dumping so much money into developing Starship?
Also the SLS doesn’t seem much better. But at least they’ve been around the moon on the SLS.
Personally I’d rather they work on developing spacecraft that can be launch on Falcon 9 or Falcon 9 Heavies, even if it meant multiple launches and assembling things at the ISS before going to the Moon and onwards. Doing this during the Apollo era was difficult because docking operations weren’t all that reliable and there was no ISS back then so giant rockets was the way to go. But things have changed and dumping insane amounts of money into building massive rockets seems like a waste of money and probably isn’t as safe as using proven rocket systems.
Are you joking? The SLS is a pretty major step backward for American spaceflight. If we continue flying the SLS, and make all the launches we plan (spoiler alert, that isn’t going to happen) then the cost per launch could be as low as $2 billion. But more likely we will end the SLS program when it proves to be a never ending money sink, and with so much money put into development, we’ll end up with a per launch cost upwards of $5 billion. Meanwhile, for that price it can only manage to get 95 tons to low Earth orbit.
Compare this to the Saturn V, which could lift more and cost much less, even when adjusted for inflation. The Saturn V cost $185 million, or $1.23 billion adjusting for inflation. And it could put 141 tons into low Earth orbit.
To sum up, this new rocket is much less capable and much more expensive than what we were doing 55 years ago.
You could of course also compare this to what spaceX is doing… Their aim is to make a rocket of similar payload capability 100-150t, but with a per launch cost of about $100 million via reusability. That’s an order of magnitude of improvement, that’s huge.
That’s actually a really good question. The short answer is that we don’t remember how to. A lot of the techniques used to actually make the parts were poorly documented. That was partly on purpose, everything was top secret because we didn’t want the Russians to know how we were doing it all. And now, all the people who did those jobs have gotten old and left the industry.
Their aim is to make a rocket of similar payload capability 100-150t, but with a per launch cost of about $100 million via reusability.
Elon Musk promises a lot of things, but doesn’t have a good track record on delivering.
SLS has at least been around the moon. I agree that it’s a step backwards, but Starship is two steps backwards. Just seems to be a knock-off of the Space Shuttle (which also proved to be a bad idea) that’s being developed by just blowing shit up. I hope I’m wrong about Starship, it would be awesome it it worked. But it’s the same goes fore the Space Shuttle too.
But more likely we will end the SLS program when it proves to be a never ending money sink, and with so much money put into development, we’ll end up with a per launch cost upwards of $5 billion.
SpaceX has already blown through $5 billion and hasn’t launched anything yet. Well yeah I guess they got it into space briefly… spinning out of control until it burnt up. They haven’t even gotten to the part of testing to make see if the heat tiles that we see peeling off the thing will make it go full Columbia on a regular basis. If it ever works it’ll be a long time before that thing gets man rated.
Like I say, SLS sucks but it’s has a successful launch and has gotten around the Moon. Actually successful not SpaceX “successful”.
SpaceX is currently losing the “bad idea space race” to NASA. The only winners in the Space race will be the billionaires that’ll make a lot of money from making giant rockets that go nowhere.
Elon Musk promises a lot of things, but doesn’t have a good track record on delivering.
SpaceX has a fantastic track record of delivering. So I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Just look at the dragon capsule and compare that to Boeing’s Starliner. They got funding to the exact same thing and they started work around the same time. So far dragon has done 10 cargo missions and 13 crew missions without any major problems. The Starliner has done 1 test mission in which there were major problems (including a parachute that didn’t deploy… yikes), and only recently, years later, 1 crew mission.
Is the SLS a failure? I guess not… but it’s not worth the 30 billion we have already put into it for a technological step backward. Calling it a success is like calling the Concord a success, that vehicle flew too.
But the idea that spaceX is losing the space race is just laughable. They’re clearly dominating the space race. They put the Russian commercial launch program completely out of business (the Russian space program actually named SpaceX as the reason they gave up). These days SpaceX launches more rockets than the rest of the world combined. Through the savings they see with reusability they can undercut all their competition and still make a great profit. The starship promises to do that to a much greater extent. They’re on track to be able to produce these for something in the area of 100 million a piece, and then be able to reuse them up to 100 times. This could bring launch costs down immensely. Can you imagine launching 100 tons to orbit for $10 million? Think of all the things that would suddenly be possible.
SpaceX is essentially two companies. One company uses the Falcon 9 launch system, launches from Cape Canaveral and is very successful. The other company is directed by Elon Musk and launches giant fireworks from Boca Chica.
The Boca Chica SpaceX is burning money and does lame brained shit like not building a proper launch pad just chucking whatever up there. This siphons off money from the Falcon SpaceX which takes away from improving the Falcon 9 launch system, and also siphons off money from NASA.
Given that they’re throwing away money at Boca Chica, other competitors will catch up and overtake the Falcon 9.
Kinda like Tesla not improving quality control and doing stupid shit like the Cyber Truck and allowing competitors to catch up in making sensible EVs.
Musk is an idiot but no one can tell him no at his companies. At least SpaceX was smart enough to send him to Boca Chica to play around so he wouldn’t screw up the part of the business that actually works.
Well, basically that whole post is simply incorrect.
SpaceX is definitely 1 company the whole company has the same CEO (Gwynne Shotwell) who oversees the whole operation. And for what it’s worth, the highly successful falcon 9 definitely was one of those “Lame brained” ideas once. “Landing an orbital class rocket is ****impossible” that was the prevailing wisdom, because it had never been done before. SpaceX is experimenting, figuring out what’s actually possible and redesigning a rocket from the ground up. The falcon 9 was the first phase of redesigning, it proved that you can make a rocket cheaper and you can further optimize a staged combustion cycle rocket engine, more than anyone has in the past, and finally it proved that you can land a booster and reuse it. The starship is phase two of that process, (Reusing the whole thing). They’ve switched from kerosene to methane, a change that will make engines much more reliable for extended use. They’ve figured out how to make very large rocket bodies out of sheet metal. And they’ve figured out how to mass produce the first ever reliable full flow staged combustion engines (That’s a very big deal)! In short, nothing about Starship is “Lame brained”.
The Boca Chica SpaceX is burning money … This siphons off money from the Falcon SpaceX which takes away from improving the Falcon 9 launch system,
The boca chica facility is not taking money away from development of falcon 9, there is no development of falcon 9, it’s done, the design set in stone. Ever since they started ferrying astronauts NASA needs them to stick with a set design. They got that design (called block 3) approved for crew use by NASA and from this point on they’re only allowed to make very minor changes to the rocket.
Musk is an idiot but no one can tell him no at his companies.
I actually agree that Musk has some problems and seriously needs some people who can tell him “no”. He needs that in his companies and he needs that at home, I think he’s got some addictions he needs to deal with before they ruin him.
Gwynne Shotwell is not the CEO of SpaceX, she’s the President and COO. Elon Musk it the CEO and chairman of SpaceX.
Yeah… so Presidents are often figureheads, both in corporations and for countries.
Even the CEO can be a figurehead, because what really matters is who’s the majority shareholder. Or do you really think Linda Yaccarino is calling the shots at TwitterX?
But anyway Gwynne Shotwell is COO, so that would involve be overseeing operations of the company. Boca Chica is R&D so it wouldn’t be a thing the COO would have a big hand in.
But the Falcon 9 operations would be something that you’d expect a COO be heavily involved in. So it’s likely Gwynne Shotwell is overseeing operations of that side of things.
You see Elon Musk hanging around Boca Chica sometimes (when he can pry himself away from his insane $44B social media addiction) but doesn’t seem all that involved in the boring routine Falcon 9 launches. Which is kinda the point. SpaceX has a reliable launch system with the Falcon 9, but Elon Musk only cares about big new and shiny things. If he was heavily involved with Falcon 9 he’d be wanting to make all kinds of arbitrary changes which would be problematic in keeping the Falcon 9 human rated, and would likely negatively impact it’s reliability. So give him a few billion dollars and keep him at his little Boca Chica playground where he can’t hurt the core launch business. Well other than taking financial resources away from it of course.
The fact you accept that 98% statistic with total credulity is telling. The Ceaușescu government in Romania also claimed similar levels of support. So does Putin. What’s the one thing they have in common?
A common scam is to attribute medical miracles to stem cells - Similar to the cloning scandal from Korea - Because they know other countries legally CAN’T test the findings to either prove or discredit. They do this to fleece foreign institutions out of money and prestige.
Don’t dismiss it based on that criteria. It’s a particular type of study called a case study where they go more in-depth on a particular case or set of cases. Of course it should be complemented by other types of studies, but that’s just true of science in general. The danger, of course, is when laymen and journalists get excited over something like a case study and start spreading bad advice.
As a type 1 diabetic with a type 2 family member I want to be excited but I cannot for the life of me be suspicious, what are the talking about with the kidney. I mean maybe I’m missing something I only have diabetes idk everything about it
Diabetes can damage the kidneys, so presumably the patient got a kidney transplant. But yeah, looks like the journalist is getting the causation the wrong way round, I can’t think of why a kidney transplant would recover pancreatic islet function.
Something isn’t right with this article. I’m suspect:
Type 1 is where your islet cells die off and you lose insulin production. Type 2 means your insulin production is fine, but your cells are resistant to the insulin. A Type 2 should have plenty of islet cells so adding more doesn’t seem like it would do anything. Your body should regulate those cells to output the same amount of insulin as before.
This same treatment has been done in Type 1s already. It’s not new. The problem is their body eventually kills off the transplanted cells and you have to do it again. Plus, you have to take immune suppressing drugs forever.
“Despite a kidney transplant, his pancreas still doesn’t produce insulin.” - This is just nonsense.
Type 2 can have a reduced insulin production, as well as the insulin resistance. In fact, insulin resistance can put increased demand on production and exhaust the producing islet cells.
Since type 2 is not an immune system disease, in that case there’s no need for immune suppressing drugs!
Question: what the fuck is Starship trying to accomplish over Falcon or Falcon Heavy? It seems like the design is a major regression in every imaginable way and its shimmering body screams another rushed, ugly EM pet project that’s an expensive boondoggle like his ketamine fueled AutoCAD nightmare on wheels.
I think he has somehow managed to leave the CEO of SpaceX alone to do her thing - or likely she has managed him also as she seems incredibly competent.
Making space exploration 1000x cheaper basically. Not kidding, that’s roughly the goal I believe. That’s needed to make it possible to send enough stuff and people to Mars to make us a multi planetary species. It’s a completely crazy goal/idea, but that’s actually been the goal of SpaceX from the start. Getting Starship to work seems incredibly difficult and almost impossible, but so did landing a big booster rocket on a drone ship and today they do that so often it’s almost become boring.
LOX is liquid oxygen, which is not a fuel, but an oxidizer. Starship is fueled by liquid methane. Methane can not be made from just water, you need a source of carbon. On Mars for example methane could be produced from CO2 in the atmosphere and water from ice.
The only fuel you can make from water is hydrogen. The RS-25 engines used on the SLS core stage and the Space Shuttle used liquid hydrogen, as did the J-2 engines on the second and third stage of the Saturn V (but not the first stage, which used RP-1 (kerosene) burning F-1 engine)
Starship’s Raptor engines use liquid methane however. There are a bunch of tradeoffs between the different fuels, but generally liquid hydrogen is more difficult and expensive to deal with. With low cost reusability being one of the primary objectives of Starship, liquid methane was chosen as the best option. The fact that it can also be manufactured on Mars was also considered, since CO2 is abundant in Martian atmosphere.
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