It’s getting more efficient by the day. They used to have to launch it into the air before it had blow up. This way it saves time
It’s not a big deal when you’re blowing up someone else’s money with no real accountability.
I mean… its a big deal if you’re anywhere near the launchpad. Or, in or around South Padre Island.
Also can’t help but notice that Starbase, Texas is practically hugging the US/Mexico border. Almost as though Abbott didn’t want this shit landing in his own backyard when it failed.
It also helps to be as far south as possible. You get to use more momentum to help get orbit, if I understand it correctly.
IIRC, that’s why NASA launches from Florida. That and the coast making launch failures safer.
(But I am not a physicist.)
Proximity to the equator and high elevation make for ideal launch sites. Then eastward facing, because you want to run counter to the earth’s spin as you launch and be out over open water if something fucks up. One reason why Kenya, Brazil, and Indonesia were floated as a high efficiency international spaceports decades ago, when efficiency was considered more important than inflating a billionaire’s ego.
I mean, SpaceX is a private company owned by Musk…
…That takes money from the tax payers in the forms of grants and contracts (that it has not fulfilled).
And?
“Look at what I can do” -Elon musk while throwing a Nazi salute
i thought Nazis were at least competent at making rockets.
Only Nazis from the Nazi region of Germany, any other kind of Nazi is just a sparkling asshole
i sometimes suffer from sparkling asshole, usually due to eating too much beans
German Nazis. Not South African immigrant nazis.
so European nazis are better than African immigrant nazis?
did we just create a new layer of racism?
I think we did. But when it comes to Elon musk, he deserves a special kind of racism.
I’m racist against billionaires.
you might say being a billionaire isn’t a race, but given that race science is 100% bs, I say why not?
that’s how we know Musk isn’t a Nazi, Nazis could make rockets.
/s
(he is a nazi, just an incompetent one)
The next explosion will occur on the assembly line. Now I call that progress!
We can’t even handle being a multi-country species, maybe Elon should dial back the sci-fi “multi-planet” miniseries playing in his head…
Surely they will blame on immigrants too…
Putting the Bang back in Big Bang!
Whoop whoop! I hope it caused a lot of damage.
a lot of tax payer money just give byebye, mostly, part of it went straight into Musk’s pocket
Yup. And hopefully they will see it is pointless and cut funding to spacex, instead of keep on throwing away money.
is this normal i don’t know anything about housing cocks
I miss Reddit so some musky can tell me about how blowing up your spaceships is part of the engineering process and how this is good.
they were funny
Hold on let me remove most of my brain.
This is so much more efficient than the shuttle program. You see when we made the space shuttle it cost the American taxpayer billions and in the end we owned and could operate the shuttle for the common good.
This way spacex spends billions of dollars (that the government gives them) and in the end they own and operate the spaceship for profit and can charge the American taxpayer anything they want to access space.
Musk is Tony stark!
Sorry I couldn’t get stupid enough to make this authentic.
🤮
i hate even tax payers pay to develop something, but a private company gets all the intellectual property and profits.
same thing happend when the COVID vaccine.
NASA should partner with Honda.
How much taxpayer money was tossed at the fucking bottle rocket failure?
I’ve been wondering why they don’t blow up more regularly. I imagine a few long range sniper shots would make them explode easily. They should be relatively easy to hit, seeing how big they are.
MAYBE if we Cut the FAA and OTHER Regulatory agencies it’ll not Explode next Time?
Musk is going to be PISSED when he finds out there is no bureau of physics he can subsume or destroy from within. I believe one Rush Stockton came to a similar conclusion, if he indeed had time for that conclusion to even form before perishing.
SpaceGateX
Can’t wait for the documentary
Elon should really pilot the next starship himself. Just put a small 1 person capsule on top (or maybe even 5 people so he can take some of his billionaire friends along) and connect a playstation controller to the engines. Stockton did it, and he made several succesful trips. What you do yourself, you do better!!
People really put the faith of the entire American space program on Elon. It would be funny if it wasn’t so stupid.
It’s less that people are putting faith in Elon (sure, some fanatics might be), but it’s that everyone else is somehow even worse.
SpaceX is actually getting stuff to space, despite their prototypes blowing up. Hell, even if this Starship thing is a complete failure and never works, their existing rocket, the Falcon, is still far beyond any of the competition.
The SLS: $10 Billion and a decade late to develop a ship that recycles old Space shuttle parts, then costs $2-3 Billion per launch, and maybe can only launch one every 2 years.
ULA Vulcan: currently years late, still finding problems, and even after all that gets worked out, it can maybe do 6 launches a year?
SpaceX: 1-2 launches per week.
That’s not faith, that’s just facts. I would absolutely love to have somebody else step up and take SpaceX’s crown, but… there really isn’t anybody. Bezos’s Blue Origin may have the biggest chance, but they are more likely to act like ULA than SpaceX.
Let my try and distill that. SpaceX is capable of doing some good work, when Elon leaves them alone.
Remember, Starship is Elon’s napkin drawing idea of making a big cheap steel tube. Bigger and bader than everyone else! For a mission that doesn’t exist, which it’s not even designed properly for. Starship is 100% Elon’s blunder and he’s made so many insane promises for it that it’s dragging SpaceX down.
Starship is SpaceX’s Cybertruck.
Bezos seems pretty happy with space tourism he doesn’t wanna work for the government. Gotta kinda be sick to want to in the first place.
Falcon 9 has launched over 500 mission with a very high success rate. Of course the bulk of advancement should be coming from NASA and we need to spend more there, but SpaceX is putting up big numbers in successful payload lifts.
Boeing and someone else are trying too. Way behind Space X. So no, not “entire space program”…
Fuck all commercial dependency. Fully fund NASA, and let them like what they did back in the 60s, which no company could have done.
Stop relying on corporations to lead our space programs. It’s too important to leave to grifters and corner cutters.
NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.
That’s the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.
The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).
NASA ran the projects. They have specifications to contractors for manufacturing. That’s a far cry from farming out the entire process and renting space on a commercial rocket.
NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It’s still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.
But ultimately it’s still just contracting.
Really interesting— I don’t follow this nearly enough, so thanks
If Starship wasn’t constantly exploding you might have a point. Seems as though that the reality is that they’re all pretty much at the same spot but Elon wants to pretend that they aren’t.
