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Johanno ,

Another one.

I mean I am not against rocket research, but isn’t there another way without destroying several millions worth if equipment?

pipe01 ,

There is, you can be billions over budget and years behind schedule like NASA

Hydra_Fk ,

Keep licking them boots.

masterspace ,

My god, the fucking dumbasses on here.

“Oh my god, Elon Musk’s companies make electric cars, therefore electric cars must be bad”.

Great logic man! Yep, hardware rich development programs and fixed price government contracting must also be bad because SpaceX has used them to lower launch costs for NASA by orders of magnitude.

Jesus fucking christ, the dumbass blind hate for SpaceX is fucking mind numbing.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

Indeed, I'm surprised this dumb clickbait title didn't literally include Elon Musk's name like so many other "Elon Musk's <Company Name> Does <Thing That's Actually Normal But Sounds Bad>!" headlines.

Yes, Elon Musk has some awful views and does some awful things. Doesn't mean everything he does is therefore bad. Henry Ford was a colossal antisemite, as another example, and did some really weird and awful things to his employees. Unfortunately some of the same personal characteristics that can lead people to be innovative industrialists can often also lead to them being assholes.

alcoholicorn ,

So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.

If only there was an alternative.

masterspace ,

So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.

What are you talking about?

NASA spends a fixed amount of money for launch contracts to put stuff into space.

NASA’s traditional method of contracting, where they would design something, and then having Boeing on retainer to keep asking for more money to build it, and then have congress step in at every step and tell them to use X contractor because it’s in their district, and then not actually get to build or test anything for decades, and then discovering problems and paying Boeing a fuck ton more money to “fix” those problems later, led to massive cost overruns and subpar performance on literally every single launch program they’ve had for the past several decades.

Now NASA is spending that fixed amount of money to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. and gets a) orders of magnitude more stuff into space and b) does it with no risk of cost overruns since they’re all fixed price contracts.

Competitive bidding on fixed price contracts, is literally the alternative model that the government should have been using this whole time instead of subsidizing their traditional contractors with cost+ contracts.

alcoholicorn ,

The alternatives are setting up SoEs to build your rockets, or putting people responsible to the state and not the shareholders on the board to ensure the CEO is similarly minded.

There is a core conflict of interest in that every dollar of profit these companies make is a dollar that isn’t going into building the rocket or lowering the cost.

sharkfucker420 ,
@sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml avatar

Or like the military…

Noodle07 ,

Earth gravity is a bitch

WHYAREWEALLCAPS ,

Gravity and Inertia are harsh mistresses.

astrsk ,
@astrsk@fedia.io avatar

This was last year during the first IFT.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Another one what? Did you only read the headline…?

masterspace ,

This is *literally *the first one. There’s only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.

And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything.

Design it, build it, test it, and get it immediate feedback on, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, and it’s a lot cheaper to do it upfront.

iAvicenna , (edited )
@iAvicenna@lemmy.world avatar

I mean to be fair I think they are probably the first (and maybe still the only?) company that tries to build rockets that can land back and be reused.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

There's others that are trying, Blue Origin has their New Shepherd rocket that is able to land, but it's a suborbital tourism vehicle that's basically just a toy. They're working on a partly-reusable orbital launcher that's like a souped up Falcon 9 but it's still in development. Several other smaller startups are working on smaller Falcon-9-like launchers with expendable second stages, and China is building a straight up carbon-copy of the Falcon 9 and Starship. But SpaceX is the leader in this field and currently the only one who's actually successful. Everyone is following in their wake at the moment.

Diplomjodler3 ,

There is. The SLS. That is much more economical, right?

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

Indeed. And Boeing is the main contractor for it so you can be sure it won't suffer any mishaps.

walter_wiggles ,

Click bait. From an article last year:

These effects may be troublesome, but they are short-lived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up again.

earthsky.org/…/spacex-launch-punches-a-hole-in-th…

Wxfisch ,
@Wxfisch@lemmy.world avatar

The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).

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