SpaceX Starship Thread

Zeedox

Resident Canadian
Dec 1, 2020
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Canada's Ocean Playground

After the abort at T-minus 1 sec yesterday, this was quite the flight today. From what I could see it was landing on only one or two engines vice three.

But the aerial ballet was beautiful to observe, even if they didn't "stick the landing".


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Elon Musk is the greatest ponzi operator since Bernie Madoff. Half the shit he keeps preaching never happens. Hell, I can't recall the last time he ever actually accomplished something he said he would. How people keep hurling money at him is beyond me. Tesla is so fucking far in the hole they'll never, ever get out of it and he's taking out more loans to build even more factories? Fucking scam artist this guy.
 
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That's part of why the market is still booming while 10's of millions are out of work: Debt has somehow become the new asset. Uber, Lyft, Telsa, they're all the same.

If they were presently making a billion dollars profit per year (which none of them are even close to doing) it would take decades for them to pay off all their debt.

And yet they're all valuable beyond comprehension.

I honestly had believed that Tesla would have gone bust a year or two ago, that there was no way they could keep exponentially increasing their debt and stay afloat.

But they've done it and continue to do it. The more debt they rack up, the more valuable they become.

But you are right; the last time I saw something like that was Enron and Bernie Madoff.
 
Well, to be fair, NASA had more blowups than you can shake a stick at. It happens. I just think the entire concept is stupid.
oH, Yea, sure. Blow ups will be blow ups.

It happens. Space is not for the "timid." It's all part of it. And, yes NASA has had plenty of it's launch pad explosions, ejections, miss-firings, even burned up astronauts in capsules if you remember ( remember the fire that killed 3 ). Remember Apollo 13 also.

Von Braun also made a statement and remark one time about this kind of thing, when it happens, he had the most healthiest, productive attitude there was about it, when it occurs. It only means you've just learned something, you've ready to turn a corner and apply your self harder... Something to that effect.

Yea, the landing back down in reverse is a pretty precarious thing. There are a few things that can go wrong. One miscalculation, and "BLAM" tedious.

Or a fuel miscalculation, or the slightest thing off, and you have an imbalance. And, if that thing is "Manned ?" Jesus help you.
 
Here’s the thing:

We can’t keep up with it.

back in the days of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, even into the Shuttle we kept up better with what was going on ( without the Internet etc ) because, NASA communicated very effectively with all age groups about what was happening with the space program, the missions, rockets etc and how it was supposed to work etc.

They made sure of it. It was considered almost a national priority to keep people abreast of their space program! Not only did they want them to know where their tax dollars were going and how it was being spent, but to come and see it happening.

Now, days.... Even with the internet advantage, we don’t know shit when you get right down to it ?

Sure, you get need blurbs of Eon Musk is doing this promotional things or whatever at the last min etc
But, what are you really being told ? NOTHING!!
You don’t know anything about what the plans are, who made what decisions, why?

NASA used to bring in the astronauts, the engineers, scientists, astrophysics people, astronomers, ground control, mission control, rocket designers, rocket scientists, full blown network core, animation specialist, educators, congressman, even legislators, hell..... they even had Werner Von Braun on live set a few times after it had been launched, explaining, what will happen next.

And the American public watched, and they kept up too.

Now, it’s like they have been made not to care. And, they know that their being played with. And, maybe they are indeed.

I still try to follow no matter what. But, even I’ve gotten a bit cynical over all these years.
 
Out of curiosity.

The landing part?
The re-use suitability?
The multi-mission suitability?
Or that it's private?

Or all of it?
All of it.

First off, a ship that huge is going to require more fuel to land than it does to take off. It's not realistically feasible. Even if it were it would be more wasteful than building multiple smaller rockets.

Secondly, a ship that has that many people on it, even IF you make it work (which you never will) is never, ever, ever going to make it. You can't possibly find that many people that can stay together in confinement for a year. It's simply not possible.

You'd be lucky to find 4 people that could do it without killing each other. It's simply never, ever going to happen.

It's already some 10 years behind schedule and it just keeps getting pushed further and further back. They're still saying they plan to go around the moon and back by 2023 (which was already supposed to have happened by now). It's not going to happen.

The whole thing is a publicity stunt and a pipe dream. If anybody is ever going to Mars it's going to be 2 people, 4 people tops, and it'll be NASA or China that pulls it off.

Frankly, the entire thing is a waste of effort. Mars is a dead planet. It always will be. If we're going to make a realistic jump to save humanity, it's going to be to the outer rim; a moon of Jupiter, Saturn or something of that nature.

And we can get plenty of practice for that on the moon that's much closer, much cheaper, and actually useable.
 
The whole idea of going to the moon was also a "stupid" concept in peoples minds in the early 60's. The whole idea of space itself was just too mind blowing.

And yet, it wasn't to dozens of engineers, scientists, and workers at one place called NASA.
 
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Not a fair comparison. Going to the moon was a race of technology for world superiority. Whoever won that race would ultimately control the world.

We won it and look what happened.

All things being equal though, Elon Musk's Mars ambitions are simply stupid. We have only around a 60% success rate going to Mars with probes, but Elon Musk comes along, says he's going to build a pregnant, reusable rocket that will carry 20 people to Mars and back in 10 years time?

Stupid on so many different levels it's laughable. (Which they actually did at NASA.) The whole thing is a huge publicity stunt. It's a large part of why his stock is so ridiculously overvalued. People want to believe it can happen so he takes advantage of that.

Fact is, if it weren't for all the NASA oversight on SpaceX, he would never have gotten off the ground to begin with.
 
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