Starship is awesome. It's the most capable and sophisticated rocket ever built. It's a major asset to the US military and its future capability. It has very significant launch safety issues in its current state. FAA enforcement is generally reasonable; they're professional and competent.
I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.
> I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.
Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon that they would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.
There were several people here on HN screeching that a few lumps of concrete strewn on a beach is an ecological disaster of unfathomable proportions.
Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink affecting their precious telescopes, while ignoring the minor detail that Starship will be able to launch a JWST-sized telescope weekly if they want to get above the atmosphere.
We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.
> would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.
This type of false equivalence and extreme hyperbole is why it polarizes people. The preferred terms of the conversation are so insane as to invite that specific outcome.
> affecting their precious telescopes
You also seem to feel entitled to adopt the position of a rank bully. Where does this entitlement come from? While reflecting on that, you might find a more charitable and honest answer as to the sources of polarization on this topic.
> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.
We'll have the future with or without Space X. This type of angry hype and blind argumentation simply underscore the above points.
Meaningful progress in space exploration and rocketry, prior to SpaceX, was negligible. There was no real motivation to try to lower prices, let alone meaningfully advance technologies, for aerospace companies headed by MBAs and motivated exclusively by profit, all with a defacto monopoly in launches. And there's every reason to think that without SpaceX we would still be on that trajectory.
As for the future... SpaceX has certainly inspired a large number of companies looking to try to emulate it success, but none have really managed to achieve anything comparable to increasingly dated SpaceX tech at this point, let alone where SpaceX is taking us with technologies like the Starship. So with this I think there's also a reasonable fear that without SpaceX we'd relapse back into the past since 1972, in terms of space progress - which is to say near zero.
One really cannot overstate the impact that SpaceX has had on space in the past, is continuing to have on space in the present, and will almost certainly continue to have in the future. That people want SpaceX to fail, and imperil all of this, just because they don't like somebody they don't even know, is such a terrible reflection on the state and motivations of society today.
Space exploration, sending vehicles to asteroids and meteors, Mars...., did just fine without SpaceX. Maybe SpaceX made the launches for those a tad cheaper, but launch costs are far from the most important cost factor for those missions.
Which leaves rockertry. Reusable rockets are quite an achievement, sure. So far the real world impact is limited to satellite internet, which is not available globally yet.
Starship still has to be launched successfully to count as rocketry advancement.
Launch costs are absolutely an important factor that makes everything space-related extremely expensive. When it costs $1B to launch something, you have to make damn sure you're not launching a dud. That, in turn, makes building the thing even more expensive because you need triple and quadruple redundancies on everything, and everything needs to be tested a bazillion times.
When a launch is "only" $50M, you can get away with much fewer redundancies, less testing making the thing you launch much cheaper.
And yeah, the first large-scale change we've seen from it is vastly better / cheaper satellite internet, but there will be others. Axiom space is a good example; a private company sending astronauts on missions.
There's also the issue that the cheaper something gets, the more potential it has for uses that simply didn't exist before. Take airflight. Imagine planes/flights were about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are today. So many things we take for granted in society would simply no longer exist. Air shipping - gone, trans-Atlantic vacations - gone (or spend a month both ways on a ship), even military air forces would probably no longer exist - kind of weird when a new jet starts costing in the ballpark of an aircraft carrier.
Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back.
And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.
Try to take yourself back to 1960. No human has ever once been in orbit. In fact it was only 3 years ago that we put the first object into orbit. Over the next 2 years we'd finally put a man in orbit. 7 years later we'd be walking on the Moon. A year later - 1970, we had the first spacecraft soft-land on another planet. And the planet it landed on was Venus! [1] The voyager probes would be launched in 1977, and eventually make their way outside the solar system after doing a pinball effect of gravity assists around the solar system.
Where do you see society in 50 years?
That state-of-the-art is still sending rovers to Mars and hoping to achieve a fly-by of the Moon is nothing short of a complete and catastrophic failure in space. People often blame the money, that's not it. The Apollo program, in 2022 dollars, cost about $16 billion a year - starting from absolutely 0 knowledge. NASA's had at least that level of annual funding for the past 60 years. The thing, these great futures we all imagine don't create themselves. Without people, the sort of people who rarely emerge in a society, pushing humanity forward in any given direction, the future isn't going to be any better than the present, and there's every reason to think it may even be worse.
>>We'll have the future with or without Space X. This type of angry hype and blind argumentation simply underscore the above points.
It's not hype. The progress made by SpaceX is demonstrable and profound.
Do you want the future of permanent settles on other celestial bodies in 200 years, or within our lifetimes? Because the latter will almost certainly require SpaceX achieving its long-term goals.
The grievances raised against both Musk and SpaceX are petty next to what humanity stands to gain if SpaceX is successful.
Totally true that their progress is demonstrable and profound. It's just that the GP did such a dismal job expressing it. That's where the "angry hype" and "blind argumentation" bit came from.
He has never said anything homophobic or racist, but the left-wing cult does label anyone who doesn't subscribe to all of their ideological tenets as such.
A person trolling is a person with dark humor. I like persons with dark humor. These persons tend to be warm and humane as well. Dark humor comes from experiencing life kicking you in the guts early enough, so that you can start to joke about it. It's all a joke, but make the best out of it.
Dark humor and trolling are a false equivalence; while both are symptoms of coping mechanisms, dark humor alone doesn't inflict damage. Trolling does, by actively wasting the attention of other people. That's it. There is nothing romantic about it.
Anyone who doesn't value the attention of their fellow humans is either underdeveloped or evil.
The difference between dark humor and trolling is that trolling punches down. I still enjoy some dark humor but my taste for trolling has massively decreased since I grew out of being an angsty self-hating teenage boy who thought misanthropy made me smarter.
Yeah, no, trolls don't tend to be warm and humane. Trolling is the opposite of that actually. And it usually stems from cowardice because sincerity makes you vulnerable and that takes courage.
Nope, that's just you redefining dark-humor/trolling in accordance with a left-wing preoccupation—which is to defend less powerful groups and attack more powerful ones.
He's a narcissist who also happens to be a right wing extremist though. And even if it was all a joke, through his position he has a huge influence on politics and a lot of people and it would be extremely irresponsible to make such jokes.
However, no matter how much I dislike the person I do appreciate the achievements at PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX in which he took part.
His trolling is directed at the ideological extremism you exhibit, where you smear anyone who criticizes the left-wing establishment's positions as a "right wing extremist".
This intolerance to dissent was responsible for billions of innocent people being imprisoned in their homes during the COVID pandemic
So sharing right wing fake news articles about Paul pelosi or defending white supremacists running amok doesn't count as right wing extremist anymore? I must've taken the wrong turn somewhere in the past.
No one is perfect nor should be expected to be. By being allowed to share the link, people were able to correct him, and he and the general public, became more knowledgeable as a result.
People being free to share wrong ideas has social value.
And no, sharing a false or premature report is not extremism. Demanding censorship is.
I mean, he deleted the tweet after it was shown that the article it shared was without merit. What else do you want?
> Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon that they would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.
There are good reasons people are anti-Elon, and I don't need to list them here now. Technological advancement is nice, and it can be a good thing that one "eccentric" billionaire puts a lot of money into this. But there are consequences, and it's good that there are people who are critical of this. It's ok that people like Musk are scrutinized. In my opinion, there's way more room for scrutinity by mainstream media instead of them instead of sucking up every word he says.
Is launch capacity the thing that holds back more space-based telescopes, and are those telescopes going to have the same availability to researchers as terrestrial ones?
If either answer is no, then the brag about capacity isn’t really relevant.
> Is launch capacity the thing that holds back more space-based telescopes
Everything holds back more space-based telescopes - launch capacity, manufacturing capacity, research ideas. But the cheaper launching becomes, the more funding can be devoted to other parts (although something like Amdahl's law will apply), and may even trigger a virtuous cycle where cheaper launches mean you can get away with more standardised, less hardened hardware, which in is then lighter and can be launched more easily, and...
> are those telescopes going to have the same availability to researchers as terrestrial ones?
No, of course not, space telescopes are massively oversubscribed and difficult for even superstar researchers to get time on. That's exactly why we want to launch more of them.
Right so basically “we’ll maybe have more space telescopes someday” is not actually relevant to “you are effectively destroying terrestrial telescopes today.”
You managed to get exactly the opposite conclusion from what the parent said. This exchange should be on the wikipedia page for "confirmation bias". Funny af, honestly.
Just for fun: what exactly could the parent have said to change your mind? Because if the answer is "nothing", then you're a rock.
Sure: SpaceX projects are putting up more space-based telescope capacity than they’re removing from terrestrial capacity, with either no variation or a good variation in the types of capacity (i.e. wavelengths).
It’s actually super straightforward.
The response seems “opposite” what was said because if you read between the lines, the whole comment was about hypothetical future improvements to the cost dynamics.
But... cost dynamics are about future movements. And SpaceX is an infrastructure company.
It's perfectly fair to say that constructing a road to a remote community will mean better ... everything ... for that community, but you're blaming them for not also building a hospital and a school at the same time as the road.
I mean, yeah, technically it's possible that we lose current capacity and we never get enough space capacity to make up for it but if you argue for this particular outcome, I think it's rather improbable. The parent made a very good point: cheaper and better lift to orbit means better ... everything. It would mean you have cost and capacity improvements for the whole chain, and yet nobody bothers to use this for JWST successors. That's a very thin line of probability you'd be arguing for.
No, it’s more like while building a road, they tore down a rudimentary hospital and school and told people “don’t worry, the road will hopefully make it cheaper to build a new, better hospital and school some day!”
And no, the condition doesn’t need to be that nobody bothers to use it, it’s that it doesn’t get used at such a scale on a timeframe people care about to replace the infrastructure it destroyed.
Yes? I mean, imagining a hospital in a place without a road, it must be a pretty rough place. Having a road allows for ambulances, drives to a regional center and so on. I'd take the trade. And "tore down" is a bit of an exageration.
When you can design space telescopes to be heavier, and they don't cost as much to launch, then you can design them cheaper. If one fails then you can more easily replace it. Initial designs of the James Webb began in 1996 and it didn't launch until 2021 and cost $10 billion. If they could use more off the shelf parts and didn't have so many design constraints it would have been quicker and cheaper.
None of which is relevant to astronomers who depend on terrestrial telescopes to do their work today, so it’s not really a meaningful response to their complaints.
It's relevant because they wouldn't be relying on terrestrial telescopes in the first place if they had access to space telescopes.
Why do they not have access to space telescopes? because they are currently extremely expensive to build and launch. Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper. It would allow them to iterate the design and send more units of the same models/design and reduce the design/research cost per unit.
> Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper.
This seems very handwavy. It appears space telescopes are actually more expensive because space telescopes are really expensive, not because it’s hard to move them to space.
Yes better/cheaper launches would reduce the risk, but that risk is 100% baked into the design and cost of the launch. There’s nothing the payload can do to mitigate the risk of the rocket failing, so there’s no reason to think x% of the telescope’s cost is actually due to the risk of the launch itself.
When you tell a team of scientist that budget only allows for a single launch in the next three decades, the cost of that telescope will inevitably be higher because they will want to optimize it and put as many instruments as possible. They will try to get as much science per kg as possible and verify a million times that nothing could ever fail. If deep space payload was a "cheap" commodity and the team designing the JWST were told they get to send 15 units instead of one, it would have been a much different situation.
I'm so sick of people acting like Starlink is the end of terrestrial telescopes. Fucking insane. Actually inform yourself. A very low number of terrestrial telescope sometimes lose a slight amount of information. Terrestrial astronomy is fine and will continue to be fine.
How would you recommend informing oneself? From all the searching I’ve done and the conversations I’ve had, it’s basically: space agencies and astronomy groups are saying this project (and similar) will end up destroying billions of dollars of equipment, discourage further investment, create a ton of space debris, etc etc, then on the other side mostly people who get emotional about defending every Musk project and make arguments like “that’s okay because we’ll hopefully put up space telescopes in the future that will somehow satisfy the same demand for telescope time.”
I am not an expert at all but that at first blush that seems like bullshit. I’m 100% open to sources of info I should check out on this though.
Edit: FWIW another more believable argument than hypothetical future capacity satisfying the same demand would be “global internet is more important than terrestrial astronomy.” Not quite ready to say I agree with it but it seems very compelling!
There are presentations about this from astronomers and SpaceX. Where they present their issues and SpaceX presents what they doing about it. These are public and can be found. I don't remember where but they were youtube videos for different conferences. I can try to find a video when I have more time.
I have not heard a single one claim that it will 'destroying billions of dollars of equipment'. And most don't want to stop further space craft.
What they do call for is regulation about these things in general. SpaceX is basically doing them a favor by modifying their sats, there is no legal obligation.
Here’s a single $680MM observatory that looks pretty pissed and is struggling to figure out how they’ll deal with it. Granted probably won’t drive the value to zero, but it probably will devalue the project quite substantially, from my read.
As I said, I was not arguing about regulation being bad. My point was its completely false to say that earth based astronomy is over. A minority of telescopes are not effected or slightly effected. But even small effects now will grow if you imagine sats going exponential.
The very broad survey orient visible telescopes are most effected of course.
Regulation both for visibility and for debris is warranted. But getting their by streaming 'earth astronomy is over and Kessler syndrome' is pretty counter-productive. If we can get away from that kind of language maybe we can actually make reasonable progress on these questions.
Unfortunately I can not find the series of lectures from astronomers and SpaceX. That had really go information. But there is an active working group somewhere that is meeting regularly that can probably be found somewhere.
I don’t think I (or anyone I’ve seen in this thread) has said “earth astronomy is over” or anything similar.
They’ve said: this incurs a huge negative externality on the astronomy community.
The response was: it doesn’t matter because Starship will send up space telescopes at some point hopefully (TBD how long it’ll take, if ever, for them to reach the same availability as extant terrestrial telescopes)
A big part of the high cost of the project is that they know they only get one and they want to get the most bang per kg of payload.
Most of the cost was research, development and testing of new technologies. Building 10x JWST would not cost 10x what we paid for a single telescope. A single launch also means everything has to be perfect, there is no prototype in space, no second try and no learning from mistakes.
The project would also probably have made drastically different design and management decisions if they knew in advance they were sending >5 units instead of one.
Great way to approach the problem. As someone else mentioned, cheaper launches might adjust the overall risk/cost dynamics in the long run but yeah, this data point makes that seem like a stretch.
But the whole point is if you ruin thousands of terrestrial telescopes used (successfully) by thousands of researchers, and in exchange you get a promise of one day maybe having tons of orbital telescopes, you aren’t really addressing the concern.
Come on, you are arguing in such bad faith its ridiculous. Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes.
Even the researches, unless very selfish, should know that ideally you want many more very powerful space based telescopes if you actually want to do research and not just marvel at the stars from your patio.
We obviously want larger launch capacity in the long run. It's not even a question. Falcon 9 is already the most successful rocket ever on almost all stats of usefulness, why shouldn't we have at least SOME faith that spacex will be able to build starship and use it?
> Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes
Real terrestrial telescopes are better than hypothetical space-based ones.
And I didn’t say we don’t want more capacity nor that Falcon 9 isn’t the most successful rocket ever, nor that I don’t have faith in SpaceX’s ability to create Starship, nor that Starship won’t eventually add space-based telescopes.
I said that none of that actually addresses the current concerns of people who currently need to do their work, as GP implied their complaints are totally irrelevant because “someday we’ll launch more.”
Adding capacity at the tippy top of the market, while destroying capacity at the much larger middle/bottom of the market, is very unlikely to be net positive.
- Starlink interferes with terrestrial telescopy much less than the baseline issues such as weather, atmosphere, etc.
- SpaceX has already done great work in ameliorating these issues anyway with better non-reflective coatings and design.
- Telescopes in space are orders of magnitude more useful than terrestrial ones, so it would not be a surprising net positive at all.
- Even if the previous point weren't true, telescopes are not really equivalent to taking kids to school. One is a necessity, the other is a nice to have. The truth is that most of the low-hanging astronomical fruit that can be gleaned from the "middle/bottom of the market" has already been picked anyway. Almost all new/significant astronomical discoveries/research are happening with space-based telescopes for exactly this reason. People aren't unraveling the secrets of the universe with a telescope in their backyard anymore.
- This entire situation has really nothing to do with Starship being a good thing. You can argue that Starlink is a net negative (for all the above reasons this seems hard to justify in practice), but that argument is orthogonal to whether or not Starship is good. This isn't really your fault because the parent comment is the one that initially conflated the two, but I felt this point should be made.
These seem like good points! I personally don’t have a super strong idea of how destructive Starlink is, so totally open to the idea that “the astronomers don’t know what they’re talking about.” Just that’s a very different argument than “astronomers should shut up because some day we hope to put up telescopes they’ll probably never be able to use,” which is basically GP’s argument.
In any case the degree of interference thing isn’t too comforting since I would assume these issues are additive to one another.
Thank you for the good counterpoints! Would love to hear an astronomer’s take on whether the terrestrial-hanging-fruit has been picked, so to speak. It would not surprise me for sure.
Polarization is characterized by people being driven to opposite extremes. That fact that you explain it exclusively in reference to just one of the extremes tells me you occupy the other.
I think this is only complicated because people aren’t able to hold competing thoughts in their heads.
There was a man who was massively effective in getting multiple once-in—a-generation revolutionary companies of the ground by sheer grind and lots of luck (yes..both). We should thank that man of yore.
But that man is now a convenient stooge for the right wing and a pointless edgelord whiling away his money on pointless projects.
Both of these can be true. It’s okay.
Here’s to hoping Tesla, SpaceX and all his other world changing companies succeed inspite of him and let him cement his complicated legacy.
Go Starship Super Heavy!!
PS: Shoutout to Gwynne Shotwell for being a massively effective administrator for this incredible rocketship of a company.
Unfortunately, many times people who do great things turn out to be awful people, or have some really problematic views. Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing with the assembly line, for instance, but was also infamous for being horribly racist and anti-Semitic. Thomas Edison invented or helped facilitate the invention of many things (useful lightbulb with carbon filament, movie projector, etc.), but was generally known as having a lousy personality and suing everyone for IP stuff, resulting in the movie industry moving to California to get away from him.
Can you imagine what things would have been like in Ford's time if he had the internet and Twitter to spread his views?
There's another duality of thought: I want SpaceX and Tesla to succeed. Regardless of my feelings about him, I acknowledge that Elon was instrumental in sparking the shift to EVs. Also, that having a dictator with a vision can allow companies to do audacious things that would normally die in committees (like reusable rockets, etc...)
That said, I have nothing but contempt for the man and am petty enough to have schadenfreude in any of his personal comeuppance.
Watching him be forced to buy Twitter was kinda funny at the time, but it's turned into a huge disappointment. I was really hoping to see the whole site completely implode, and then go out of business, and it hasn't happened yet. The world would be better off without Twitter (now "X"... ugh).
They should be building those things on the far side of the Moon instead. Radio telescopes suffer from interference from terrestrial radio sources, which is why they locate them in the middle of nowhere, West Virginia, but even that doesn't fully isolate them. Putting them on the far side of the Moon would (at least for a while) completely eliminate problems with terrestrial interference, plus give humanity a good reason to back to the Moon and build some serious infrastructure there, and perhaps also distract us from fighting with each other so much. It would also give many engineers something much more important and useful to work on than ad-ware.
Well safety comes first - this let's try it in production and see if it works for software - so a portion of youtube barfs - nobody harmed except missing their favourite cat vidoes.
The same with the FDA - we don't want a repeat of Thalidomide babies do we ???.
Oh those silly ground-based astronomers. Just give 'em a JWST so they stop yapping! Maybe you should tag along with the next Starship so I don't have to read garbage comments like this anymore.
> Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink affecting their precious telescopes, while ignoring the minor detail that Starship will be able to launch a JWST-sized telescope weekly if they want to get above the atmosphere.
Here comes elon zealot just copy and pasting empty claims and ignoring the actual facts we have. The lack of accountability is just staggering. And the only defense is a cave man ad hominem - oh they are just butt hurt anti-elons.
Elon Musk has a long list of bogus claims, outright lies and now currently on trail for fraud. His shtick is to make semi-revolutionary clam in X years, and before people start asking about that claim in near future he is making new claims about something completely new.
Thats why people are calling him out on his BS claims. So lets have a look:
The re-usability claims are all bogus, a make believe at best. For one, Starship is basically an early prototype rocket. Two, falcon 5 - a much simpler design - has current re-usability window at one month (as far as i remember). How do you go into weekly launches...
Empty claims of Elon Musk that they will work out the kinks are akin to Elisabeth Holmes claims. Or self driving tesla Next Year(tm), or underground tunnels, or hypelink, or amazing AI robot buttler all next year (tm).
Not to mention pretty strong evidence for Kessler Syndrome is already happening. And polluting orbit with starlinks are not helping.
global internet being provided by Starlink - you mean a toy for rich. Right? Cuz even tough it somewhat affordable now, for starlink to actually make money need and will cost way more.
Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.
SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:
lmao, it was never "the plan to" fix Earth. Nobody ever claimed it's going to be "transformed to Earth" anytime soon, too.
It's the plan to protect humanity (as in the genus) from extinction level events such as asteroids, mega-volcano eruptions or global wars. As a nice side effect, the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.
> It's the plan to protect humanity (as in the genus) from extinction level events such as asteroids, mega-volcano eruptions or global wars.
That's a nice thought but it's 100% sci-fi, we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain. What if this race for survival is exactly the thing that will cause our end ?
> the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.
Except it's literally the opposite... we need a lot of co2 on mars to make it habitable
>> I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.
> Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon
You know, polarization takes at least two poles. If some people are rabidly anti-Elon, so some people are rabidly pro-Elon.
> Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink
They do not complain about the global internet. They have nothing against the global internet per se. They complain about satellites. There are no fundamental physical laws stating that the global internet comes with littering the sky with thousands of bright satellites. They can be less bright at least, or probably one can use some military expertise on making flying objects undetectable by any means. Then come costs/benefits analysis and the question becomes too difficult for an armchair experts to grasp. So they instead prefer to construct a strawman they feel comfortable to fight.
When you allow yourself to use such a rhetoric devices, you shouldn't be surprised when the other side becomes polarized. They reciprocate and then you feel the right or even an obligation to throw some more shit into your discussion, and then you have no chance for a meaningful discussion.
> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.
Or because he constantly stomps on experienced engineers with stupid ideas and puts the whole thing at risk. Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.
Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk. At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions without having to cater to his ego and make him think the idea was his.
I can literally watch SpaceX fire rockets into space 3-4x a month from my backyard.
Name one other company, person, or even a country that can and is willing to do that. There are none. As long as SpaceX can and no one else can, the future of SpaceX is on a pretty sound footing in my opinion.
I'm all in favour of SpaceX having an engine-rich development cycle that gets things done faster and cheaper than anyone else, this doesn't mean Musk is doing everything right.
I'm sad about the interference that Starlink causes to ground based astronomy, this doesn't mean Musk is ignoring those issues.
And I value government agencies making sure that business interests are balanced against democratic will of the people, that doesn't mean they're funded at the right level for a rapidly growing industry.
You sound like you don't know anything about what actually happened or the SpaceX engineering process in general.
SpaceX knew that the concrete wasn't the final solution, it was always temporary, they had already started building the steel water cooled plate before the first test flight. Based on the data they had available from the series of static fire tests leading up to the test they thought the concrete would ablate and survive one test flight before they took the downtime to replace it. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Elon overruled all the SpaceX engineers on the timing of when to install the steel water cooled plate or are you Literally making things up?
Learning more by moving quickly and taking calculated risks is clearly the better approach, as evidenced by the current dominance of the Falcon 9 and SN 25 and booster 9 sitting on a repaired OLM and being scheduled to make another orbital attempt in less than 2 weeks.
> Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Elon overruled all the SpaceX engineers on the timing of when to install the steel water cooled plate or are you Literally making things up?
Unfortunately, #LiterallyMakingThingsUp seems to be a trend these days.
> Learning more by moving quickly and taking calculated risks is clearly the better approach,
I think most people agree that it's better for SpaceX business, but some don't agree that it's worthwhile for our society with what happens if failed. It's like Tesla's "FSD Beta" situation.
> Or because he constantly stomps on experienced engineers with stupid ideas and puts the whole thing at risk. Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.
Wouldn't that be called working from first principles?
Proving it doesn't work can be quicker in the long run than over-designing something based on what you think won't work.
That is why I hate people working from first principle so much: The intentionally ignore decades and centuries of knowledge and experience in fields they don't understand and refuse to accept the fact the resulting failure is their fault. They are very, very quick to claim success so everytime they get lucky and their hairebrained ideas work (mostly only once).
Cybertruck is a "pickup truck"-ish thing designed from first principles.
Iterative implementation works very well for many kinds of software development projects. When an iteration involves 200 tanker trucks carrying fuel and oxidizer and dozens of rocket engines and results in destroying launch infrastructure and dumping debris into wetlands and inhabited areas, one might conclude "iteration" has made the jump from sound engineering principle to management fad dogma.
You don’t need to work from first principles to understand that the most powerful (by far) rocket built would obliterate whatever concrete you use without an appropriate water deluge system and/or flame trench.
> The upside was they got lots of data to improve the next rocket,
Or they could have done that the first time with a flame trench and a water deluge system that prevented the energy of the rockets from damaging the rockets dooming the first stage and making concrete rain on the neighboring wildlife reserve.
Elon could have verified that hypothesis with a full static fire test AND be able to see the damage to both rockets and pad from an actual launch without destroying a rocket.
This is why SpaceX grew from the start with an immune system to prevent Elon from ruining too much stuff.
SpaceX and Tesla both enjoyed most success despite Musk's continual rank incompetence by isolating him as the figurehead money guy while puffing his ego letting him cosplay a rocket scientist/tech expert for the press. At both companies he's got handlers to limit and manage the damage he causes. At Twitter he had no handlers and his rank incompetence is on full display, as it was in the PayPal days when he was rightly fired for incompetence.
He assembled a team and they learned to use him in the roles he fits best - getting attention and investment money. He is not a brilliant aerospace engineer.
I believe he’s better observed in Twitter, which is a company that didn’t develop an immune system to deal with him.
It seems that while the explosion would have been avoided with a deluge or flame trench, it could have also likely just been mitigated with a thicker concrete pad or a vent system.
You never did any real engineering work, did you? Because there is risk taking, or rather risk management with engineering decisison always being trade offs and such, and taking ahort cuts, cutting corners and taking uncalculated risks in hopes of being lucky. Topped by ignoring advice from others.
>falcon and all of spacex is based on ignoring advice from others, especially “industry experts”
Not in the least. SpaceX hires a lot of rocket scientists who are industry experts. They're more agile than the entrenched players since Boeing/Lockheed legacy space programs weren't efficient but SpaceX has relied upon expert consultation and expert advice from folks in the industry to build their rockets. I don't see them as building from first principles at all, they're building on what's come before standing on the shoulders of the rocket engineers who've come before.
This submission was flagged on HN but it was pointed out.
> In addition to the siting and sizing of the pad, SpaceX does not have a flame trench, nor do they have a water deluge system used to suppress heat and sound energy from any launches, as the Army Corps of Engineering permitting required to add these civil engineering systems is itself a multi-year process.
> No large rocket complex on the planet: not in Russia, nor China, and certainly not in the US, exists that doesn’t contain one or both of these energy suppression systems.
Boca Chica now has a better launch pad with a flame deflector and a water deluge system.[1] They really needed that. The first version just fired the entire output of the booster at a flat concrete slab, which destroyed the pad, sending chunks of concrete into the ocean and around the area.
SpaceX said it was more a question of timing. That the water system would take too long and they were hoping to test before it was fit. The first test involved a subset of all the engines so they hoped the concrete would survive.
Yes and he has often overruled his engineers and was right. Taking calculated risk to shorten development is reasonable. Even if you don't get it always right.
> Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea
They expected it to break but be ok for one launch. Its a reasonable risk to launch sooner.
> Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk.
And yet the he has lead the business for 20+ years and the company has been getting more and more and more successful. I guess that just happens by magic.
> At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions
When SpaceX does good its because Musk wasn't there, when it does bad its because of Musk. Classic.
Because anybody that is actually informed about SpaceX knows that the 'Musk isn't involved, its all Shotwell' is a line that Musk-haters have been using for 10+ years now.
Of course everybody who leaves SpaceX tells a different story. Journalists and others who observe SpaceX tell a different story.
Musk has literally been the leader since the company had 5 people, and he always had control of the companies direction. Shotwell is one important part of the team. But she was recruited by Musk and promoted by Musk into the position she now has.
People also used to say 'Musk has nothing to do with engines its all Tom Mueller' of course then Tom Mueller responded saying that was false. And of course once Mueller left, SpaceX is still doing great things with engines.
So the reason why 'Musk is always throwing into the ring with SpaceX' is simply because its the truth and all Anti-Musk Twitter warriors are not actually informed about the topic they simply have to discredited Musk whenever they can. Often they don't even care about spaceflight, they care about being against Musk.
Because Elon is the product lead (and founder and owner), Shotwell does the business development.
Product is way more interesting in this case than BD, considering it's the most badass rockets ever made. But feel free to praise Shotwell too, that's great too.
Plenty of people with first-hand knowledge and/or their own independently earned reputations have attested to Musk being deeply knowledgeable and deeply involved in engineering at SpaceX. The evidence of his worthiness of the title is so plentiful that — absence some better information not in the public domain — casual doubt is wholly unjustified.
Of course as soon one says this, someone else will misconstrue this as some ridiculous claim that Musk is a singular genius responsible for inventing everything. This is of course silly. He's only one human with a limited schedule. There are surely thousands of things happening every day at SpaceX which he has zero involvement in.
As we often say in computing: ideas are easy, execution is everything. But the biggest successes of SpaceX weren't just about having ideas, they were about having the gumption to fund them, and an ability to recruit the best people so that execution is possible. In fields like rocketry, one might instead say ideas are easy, identifying when an idea should have a billion dollars thrown at it is hard, and execution is damn fucking hard.
Yes. Please read any of the official comments about him by people who have worked with him, or just answers on Quora, or read the new biography. Or watch his actual comments and behavior on everyday astronaut interviews.
If 4 of those data points don’t convince you, you obviously don’t want to be convinced even in the slightest
I didn’t. I still think they have enough of a moat for 5-10 years and beyond especially since they own the vast majority of the now standard NACS charging stations.
Usage is dropping. Down about 15% over the last 10 months. Revenue has dropped 11% compared to last year. It’s expected to keep dropping in 2023 with advertising revenue leaving.
I'm a SpaceX fan and I've been excited to watch Starship's progress over the years, but this comment is a little premature. It might one day be the most capable rocket ever built, but it's not there yet. Starship has yet to reach orbit, the Raptor engines have a long ways to go before they become as reliable as the Merlin, and the recovery of the booster or ship are still a ways out too. There are still a lot of technical and regulatory hurdles Starship needs to cross.
There's also that the whole plan of Starship colonizing Mars is wildly impractical and all the numbers Musk throws out don't work; the second you try to start fitting the supposed 100 passengers in to Starship for example there's just not room even if you halve the NASA recommended space per person. Once you account for keeping them alive once they get there it makes the slave trade ships look luxurious. SpaceX is doing really neat stuff just dragged down by Elon's overhyping sales pitches.
Yeah. Sending 3 is reasonable and would advance Mars science by 100x (10x the first day with a shovel) but dude rants about cities. Nice to have a vision, I guess? But maybe let’s try with 3 first.
Until now, rockets have been produced "by hand", one by one. And you get handcrafted prices for rockets.
To lower pricing, and revolutionize space travel, you need a production line of rockets. What will you do with 100s of rockets of this factory ?
Also, you need a vison to advance things. Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke
> Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke
Viable electric cars were a thing even way back in the late 19th century [1]. The problem was that burning oil was cheaper (as the users had to pay none of the externalities for decades), and so it lost out for a good while despite being more efficient (i.e. energy contained in the fuel vs distance driven) on paper.
On top of that came the massive, decades-long lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry to get rid of public transit.
The electric cars of the late 19th century were extremely slow and limited in their abilities. Of course, gas cars were too, but they advanced quickly, because there's SO much energy stored in gasoline and diesel fuels. Electric cars, I don't think, could ever have progressed that far until recent times, because batteries just didn't have enough energy density to make them practical (in the way that cars of, say, the 1970s-90s were practica), until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.
> The electric cars of the late 19th century were extremely slow and limited in their abilities.
Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.
> until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.
I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
>Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.
1. If that were true, EVs would have been much more successful in America. They haven't been. The Nissan Leaf was around long before Tesla and it never went far, because the range sucks.
2. Back in 1900, 100 miles would have been great. In 2000, it's not sufficient at all for most car-owning Americans.
3. You can't have the same range at higher speeds: energy usage goes up dramatically with speed. So you need much more energy storage, and the battery tech of the time just wasn't sufficient.
>I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
That's a very good point. It would be interesting to see an alternate universe where this was the case.
100 miles is good for commutes but commutes aren't the only use people have for cars. Vacations are something that even if the US doesn't get to take as often as we should people still aspire to them and the further you move up the income ladder the more they happen. 100 miles isn't enough for that, so you'd have to either have a second car that's gasoline powered, a more capable long range vehicle, or rent a car for those trips.
100 miles is not sufficient for commutes in America these days. Many people drive more than 100 miles in a day. Even if they don't do it every day, the drive to/from work plus an extra shopping or social trip in the evening could easily put them over 100 miles.
The problem is that, because of cars, they built everything farther apart, and people willingly chose places to live farther away from work. Just look at a map of the city of Phoenix AZ for instance: 100 miles' range won't cover a trip from one side of the city to the other side and back.
However, for vacations, a rental car is absolutely the right idea. That's what people here in Tokyo do: there's lots of convenient places to rent a car for shopping trips to Costco, or a trip to the mountains, etc., because so many people don't own cars.
The problem isn't purely solvable by the number of rockets we can produce. Mars is wildly inhospitable with the majority of the soil being poisoned by perchlorates, it's a convenient source of oxygen but it also means the soil needs to be processed before we could even start to use it as a substrate for crops.
Fundamentally the issue with long term Mars habitation is that any technology that allows us to live on Mars full time without support from Earth would make even the wildest 'destroyed' Earths livable. The only thing Mars gives you is there's not going to be people beating on the outside of your trillion dollar dome trying to get in.
Electric cars are nice and all but if you want to credit Elon Musk with contributing to the switch from gas to EV, you also have to credit him with killing high-speed rail with spitballing about the vaporware that is building underground vacuum tunnels to shuttle cars around, aka the Hyperloop (before it became a closed-loop underground taxi service with no regard for fire safety).
Also the classic rich guy idea of reinventing buses/trains but worse to "solve traffic" without having to risk sitting next to another person. That's a foible not unique to Elon though.
The first human landing on Mars destroys a large section of Mars science forever, because then we can no longer be sure if life traces we find there are indigenous or not.
Slight nuance. We can most definitely tell if a life source you find there is from mars or not - assuming it has the same dna backbone, sequence comparison can tell exactly when life diverged into the two planets (as it likely did if mars ever had life).
The real danger is that life forms hitchhiking the first humans can totally overwhelm any existing life and completely condemn it.
It's been 12 hours, so rather than an edit to elaborate I'm adding a reply.
I mean very different robots from the rovers we've sent to date. Maybe not even more complex robots but definitely bigger (and smaller too) robots.
Their task not to survey with minimal disruption, but to actively disrupt. To build, to transform materials (lab), to create the base buildings and infrastructure of civilization. So there's somewhere with resources to better support humans.
Just imagine only sending 20 people instead of a theoretical 100 people in a single starship out of an armada of starships to mars. Would it even be worth the trip if we landed only 20 people per ship? That would make actually landing on mars such a failure
Far as weight goes, wouldn't 1-2.5 tons of payload capacity per person be enough? And as far as volume is concerned, I'm pretty sure there's lots of ways to increase that dramatically while you're in space (e.g. inflatable habs). All you really have to do is figure out how to keep them comfortable until the starship is outside the atmosphere and whatever larger spaces have been constructed/inflated.
Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially. If you supply 80% of the energy demand that way, you'd easily half the "proper food" mass that you need to ship.
> Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially.
Has that ever been done for human consumption before? Relying on a novel technology in a setup where, if it breaks, everyone on board dies, seems rather dubious.
That's not even being studied right now so give it 20-25 years before it's even considered as a long term diet. Also we have to keep them sane as well as simply alive and good food is a big part of long term mood maintenance. You're going to be asking people to eat this for at least 7 months if it's a 1 way trip and you have a working food system on the other side.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x feeds nutritional algae, yeast, and a variety of mushrooms ( pearl oyster, blue oyster, elm oyster, coral tooth and enokitake), though the mushrooms were tested with a simulated (I assume this means petrochemically derived, purified, and reconstituted to match the real mixture) analog of the real electrochemical acetate feed, which they tested with the first two organisms.
There were also experiments with "undifferentiated lettuce tissue", using C13-labeled acetate to investigate whether crop plants are able to properly feed off of acetate as their main food source, instead of photosynthesis-based small molecules.
What I'm suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance.
Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor.
Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking.
Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit.
The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation...
[0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.
I love the idea of humanity expanding out into the cosmos, it feels like space exploration is "the Future." But I can't see how SpaceX's Mars colonization plan makes economic sense in the current day. No matter what technical advances they come up with in getting people to Mars, it doesn't change the fact that it is an inhospitable planet. What unique resources are on Mars that makes it more profitable than say, colonizing the Sahara desert?
SpaceX is an impressive accomplishment by any measure, no one should try to take that away. The Falcon 9 brought some much needed innovation to the industry and I'd argue established an accessible commercial industry in space. And while I'm quite optimistic that Starship will eventually be a success, I think it's healthy for people to take a step back and remember that Dragon was delayed for years (yes, so was Starliner but it's not relevant here), Falcon Heavy was delayed for years, and Starship is also delayed by years (and despite the other person's comment to my original, it's not the fault of the FAA). Falcon Heavy never actually achieved reuse/landing for the core stage, and has since abandoned even attempting it. I believe it was Shotwell herself who said Falcon Heavy was a mistake.
> Falcon Heavy never actually achieved reuse/landing for the core stage, and has since abandoned even attempting it.
That’s a weird thing to list as a criticism, the centre core ends up going way higher and faster than a normal booster, they know recovering it is a stretch. One did landed successfully, but was lost on the way to shore due to rough seas. On most flights they expend the core to get additional performance, doing so doubles GTO delivery capacity.
As for ‘delayed for years’ that’s relative to knowingly highly aggressive target timelines. Compared to space industry standards they were still completed at break neck speeds.
Both these criticisms are just attempts to use skewed optics to turn what are actually some of SpaceX’s bigest successes into apparent failures. SpaceX shoots and hits much higher than anyone else. The fact that they aim even higher than that is no sign of failure.
It actually blows my mind how any objective statement of fact which isn't 100% positive or complimentary of the company (sandwiched between me bending over backwards to compliment the company), is met with this kind of comments. I didn't levy any criticism. I stated objective facts and said it was healthy to take a step back sometimes and see the whole picture. I compliment the company multiple times in multiple posts. I did not criticize them and there's no attempt to skew optics. Sigh.
I internally tend to contribute SpaceX's success to Shotwell. Sure, Elon challenges the status quo of space companies and prompts "radical new ideas", but I think she is the force that makes it an actually viable company that isn't just a billionaire dumping money down the drain.
If you don't like Musk, just ignore him, pick the next person in the hierarchy and assign the success to that person. SpaceX was successful before Shotwell was president.
Shotwell is great, but so are lots of other people that work for SpaceX.
Sure but an organisation doesn't just fall out of the sky.
They were once 7 people in a room. If Musk was new CEO that just came in 2 years ago of course he wouldn't get much credit.
But Musk has been leading SpaceX for literally 20+ years. So to just say he has nothing to do with it is stupid, and every single person that worked there and left tells a different story. The same for journalists and other who interact with SpaceX.
If anything people are continually surprised how involved Musk is, when anti-Musk people always stress how he is an absent boss. But then you hear about 5h meetings where Musk and engineering team sit together and go into minute detail and Musk makes decisions in those meetings.
Its really only people from outside who dislike Musk that push this story.
So yes, Shotwell was great. He increased her responsibility over time. And Musk reward that by promoting her. But so were other people that Musk recruited and put into positions, Hans Königsman, Tom Muller, Jim Buzza and so on. But dispite many of them leaving the overall organisation still continues to do well.
So at some point, leadership is something that matters.
No one is saying a company gets anywhere without good leadership, but this:
> every single person that worked there and left tells a different story.
Is just not true. It's okay if that's your experience talking to people that have worked there, but I have also talked to people working there. As much as you chastise people who dislike Musk, these kinds of absolute statements come from people that seem compelled to leap to his defense.
Absolutely, the organization as a whole is succesful, but the exact same people in a different organization might not quite be as succesful. There is something in the DNA of the organization that is just working and that is an effect of how it was set up.
Fair enough, my rocket nomenclature is not very good. "The one Starship piece that flew, bellyflopped, and landed followed by catching fire." :-). SN-15 in May 2021. [1]
I do think Starship will eventually be a success but it's annoying to see people counting it as if it's already working. That said, SpaceX is burning money like a bonfire on that project, so they better hurry.
Yeah, well they're trying but the FAA isn't letting them launch. It's possible the one they want to launch will make orbit, or maybe it will be the next one etc.. The point is it will never achieve anything if it keeps getting delayed by the FAA.
> The point is it will never achieve anything if it keeps getting delayed by the FAA.
If Elon didn't want things to be delayed so bad by the FAA maybe he shouldn't have launched on 4/20 for the lulz without adequate launch site infrastructure for such a launch.
The FAA shouldn't let them launch until SpaceX has proven they've done the work and have done their best to mitigate these issues going forward - both the actual consequences and the decision processes that led to them. From what I remember the FAA basically rubber stamped SpaceX's incident report (or whatever it was called) that the Internet reported as being from the FAA itself.
Yes exactly, sure... if we ignore the fact that the launch on 4/17 was scrubbed and the 4/20 date just happened to be the next window and he made a joke about it.
As for the not adequate launch site infrastructure that had 0 to do with the date, they built the pad long before launch, expecting the fondag to handle the heat/pressure and it didn't work, they didn't suddenly build a pad throw it together and say we're launching cause 4/20 because LOL.
> both the actual consequences and the decision processes that led to them.
Forgive me if I'm not going to click on a Twitter link, but the YouTube video only covers site infrastructure. I see no evidence that Elon won't Elon again. 4/20 blaze it.
Because people hate Musk (understandably so) and since, apparently, we can't hold nuanced opinions anymore, then they must also hate whatever the man has produced.
By the way, I absolutely despise the man and his antics, but I don't want to live in a world where SpaceX fails, just to spite him.
I'm thinking about rebranding SpaceX with Gwynne Shotwell persona - I think she at least spends greater fraction of her time on SpaceX matters than Elon these days.
I normally say Gwynne Shotwell is underappreciated but I am really glad people here mention her. She is definitely the "rock" that holds the leadership team together it seems.
Same i didn't mind him before he went completely nutters, but i can love SpaceX, Tesla and the companies without loving him, it seems other people have decided everyone at tesla and spacex are evil because an idiot owns the company.
Why people hate him? Seems like a lot of “media” hates him and that’s what causes people to hate this guy, not the guy itself but the media. He does have some questionable behaviour for a CEO, but I highly prefer that kind of ceo that talks what he thinks rather than the one that reads from the brochure to make shareholders happy. Positives are far far more outweigh the negatives in this case.
You're talking about the guy suggesting an air cushion inside a vacuum tube. Meanwhile all he built is "Teslas in tunnels" without even demonstrating "full self driving" in this limited environment.
If anything, Elon has the media tamed. I see nothing but credulous praise for him in the mainstream media. But the actual words he says, the way he behaves, his constant lying about what his companies’ tech can do, the Cybertruck, the atrocious way he’s handled Twitter, the abusive way he treats his employees, the absolutely bonkers and counterproductive scam that is the Boring Company, and what he has shown himself to be by the type of content he promotes on Twitter, are all good reasons to dislike him.
He is a trans-phobic (because his daughter came out as LGBTQ and basically told him to screw off because he didn't accept her), he's an antisemitic (see recent X posts and shares), believes in science, but suddenly is anti-vaccinations for no reason, and honestly just seems to be posting things to make the right wing happy lately.
Not drinking _all_ of the trans-culture koolaid doesn't make someone trans-phobic.
I think he's posting a lot of crap, and probably doesn't have much of a filter and is impulsive at times. Clearly he's got some mental problems that lead him to say and retweet stuff on a whim that he probably doesn't actually believe. I think we can all understand these imperfections.
At the end of the day, he's an incredible human being, flaws and all. No one's perfect, and he's cocky and pushy and rude and stuff. But he'll be in history books, and mostly for having done a whole lot of good for humanity, while pissing off a lot of humans.
You’re being overly charitable suggesting he doesn’t believe the things he posts. He has a clear ideological bent and the garbage he posts, antisemitism included, is right in line with it.
- He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
I get a kick out of Elon/Twitter schadenfreude as much as the next person, but I also have to consider that maybe the "growth at all costs" Wall Street mentality has permeated our society and psyches so thoroughly that it triggers a strong kneejerk reaction to anyone going against that grain. Here is a leader who is finally saying, to hell with the investors and the board and kowtowing to the advertisers, I will make the changes I feel are right, and we are rejecting it because it's "mismanagement." Where mismanagement is defined as not playing along with the public market incentives.
I'm sure it's a swing too far in the apologist direction, but you gotta wonder...
Your comment is addressed directly by the great-grandparent comment in that
1) It lacks all nuance because your question implies that if a person provides benefits to [whomever] and it's greater than their antics/demons, then you should like them. And that's simply not how the world works. And
2) The comment even said they wouldn't want to live in a world without SpaceX despite his antics.
People are complicated and so too are the views individuals hold about other people. It's not a spectrum where people eventually just dismiss extremely concerning things because someone made something cool.
> It's not a spectrum where people eventually just dismiss extremely concerning things because someone made something cool.
That's the matter of the question. Elon Musk has some significant achievements which shouldn't be dismissed just because he behaves less than perfect somewhere else.
I understand you're trying to frame the question like that, but as has been pointed out now TWICE, and I will for a third time, it's a flawed question because you haven't left any room for nuance. OP literally said they want SpaceX to exist and that they don't like Musk. It's a nuanced thought out opinion and your question doesn't allow for that. Specifically because your premise is flawed, that by not liking a man you're somehow dismissing his achievements. That's obviously and clearly not the case here at all.
> I understand you're trying to frame the question like that
You don't seem to understand me at all. elteto listed a few things, which can be agreed with, and yet which aren't enough to explain cryptoegorophy's question "Why people hate him". I'm reminding that there's another side of things - people in this discussion generally quite aware of that, and only some focus on a one-sided picture. You don't need to repeat that the question is flawed - you just have to correctly understand the question. That is, it's a reminder of another side, which is necessary for cryptoegorophy's question. It's true that it's a complex question, but you don't understand me if you think I don't leave the room for nuance. Or, in other words, you can just dislike a man - but to explain why people in general have a correlated opinion, you have to look at the whole perspective.
> - He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
Because it is a national priority for the US government to support Ukraine, and SpaceX and Tesla both have significant relationships, directly or indirectly, with the US government. Especially SpaceX.
- He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll,
Have seen this claimed many times but nothing to back it
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
Mismanaging a company is hardly unusual, nor a reason to hate someone unless you are a shareholder or employee
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
Tesla shares are up massively, so this is not a reason to hate him, even if you are a shareholder. It is a reason to hate him if you are a short seller, I guess. He has Tweeted about crypto, but there is no evidence he participated in any pump and dump
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
Can you cite anything for this? I assume it is just more of the same media hysteria about him being some kiind of right wing fascist with no actual backing.
This itself is a childish and naive take. Elon, in my opinion, is an egotistical asshole who still does have humanity's best interests at heart . . . as he sees them. What your statement reveals is that you can't differentiate between humanity's best interests and humanity's best interests as you see them.
For the sake of argument, you may be entirely right and, he may be entirely wrong. But your mode of argument still betrays an inability to understand that your view of humanity's best interests is not necessarily universalizable. Especially the fetish for mass transit. It has a use case, but is not a panacea for several reasons, many of which people who obsess over everyone living in cities choose to ignore.
The infrastructure around them (just one more lane and traffic will get better) is itself unsustainable. Our suburbs designed around cars are not dense enough to economically support them (roads, water, waste, etc) and the taxes required are bankrupting communities already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
To say they have a "fetish for mass transit" is both intentionally inflammatory and unnecessary. Also, it is essential for moving people around. Having personal vehicles sitting idle, worth $5K to easily $70K, for most of the day is a massive waste of resources, income, and more. Elon's imaginary robotaxis will not fix it.
Everyone doesn't need to live in cities but everyone needs to start paying for what they consume instead of taking (from cities) from others (the future generations). We would need several Earth's if everyone lived like Americans.
> We would need several Earth's if everyone lived like Americans.
People keep saying this, yet technology keeps advancing, and the poorest people today live like the kings of centuries ago. Henry VIII didn't have an HDTV or a smartphone.
> His technology encourages single use personal vehicles and does not improve mass transit
This doesn't seem like a very serious criticism.
1. If I understand correctly, most climatologists think that humanity should eventually stop contributing carbon into the atmosphere on net.
2. It's unlikely that we'll completely delete all car dependency any time soon. (Will every person living in a rural area have a personal train?)
3. Electric vehicles already contribute less carbon over their lifetimes than gas vehicles do, and can theoretically be made to be completely carbon neutral.
So electric vehicles seem helpful to me at mitigating risks from climate change. I also don't see why caring about climate change would cause me to care about endangered turtles in Texas
> ... most climatologists think that humanity should eventually stop contributing carbon into the atmosphere on net.
Yes, that makes sense.
> It's unlikely that we'll completely delete all car dependency any time soon.
That is not the goal I am advocating. I would like more transit and less people driving alone in SUVs and living in overly large single family homes.
> Will every person living in a rural area have a personal train?
No, that would not make any sense.
> Electric vehicles already contribute less carbon over their lifetimes than gas
Yes, but expanding highways and stroads is not carbon neutral. Heating individual homes is not carbon neutral. Mining lithium is not carbon neutral and pollutes the environment. His ideas around hyper loops and Tesla tunnels under Las Vegas make no sense when we already have trains.
> I also don't see why caring about climate change would cause me to care about endangered turtles in Texas
Yeah that is my point. There is a link to climate change and habitat destruction. Elon moves to Texas and supports conservatives that do not care about climate change at all. They profess that climate change is not happening at all. Elon recently advocated more natural gas and oil production and drilling. It is all incoherent. I am not saying all of his ideas are bad, but I am saying he does not seem to make coherent sense.
I can literally argue with almost every point here but I don't see the benefits, so I won't. I'm just again puzzled how different people can see the very same facts in different light - omitting inconvenient parts and emphasizing the ones which support their idea.
Elon wants to establish a human colony on Mars. Tesla is not about preventing climate change, it’s about battery tech, which you’ll need when you want to live on mars. The boring company is not about building tunnels on earth, it’s about the tech to build underground habitats on Mars.
He wants to go into the history books as the man who got humanity off earth. He wants to be space Christopher Columbus.
Go on reddit and ask them. They'll tell you that Elon Musk aligned himself with republicans aka 'literally nazis'. This outweighs anything positive he could possibly ever do. Any cred he once earned for himself by trying to popularize electric cars? Completely gone, he's a republican so he hates the environment. Building rockets is perceived to be little more than a cynical cover story for his real plan to ruin wetlands and murder ocelots.
My initial issues with Musk was that he tended to push ideas and time frames WAY beyond what was reasonable.
Tesla / Space X are already amazing in almost ever respect, it doesn't need all the silly hype machine on top of it. Yes, it is neat to think about Mars bases eventually but that should be a stretch goal not pushed as "It is 4 years away!".
Starship is an incredible achievement already and I suspect it will come together quicker than we anticipate (less than a decade, probably in the next 2-3 years) but Musk had always promoted time lines and ambitions that were silly. Like point to point public rocket travel by 2030. The thing cannot land yet and they are already thinking 50 steps ahead with a stated date. That doesn't detract from Space X's achievements but it does cast a shadow over them as a whole.
That over-ambitiousness is a big factor in attracting (and to some degree, keeping) talent I'd bet. It's one of SpaceX's key differentiators compared to incumbents where the overarching attitude seems to be, "well, we'll get back to the moon at some point in the future, maybe, if we're lucky". That's not to knock the brilliant people working for those companies but it's gotta be harder to be excited when it feels like the corporate gears are perpetually gummed up with cold tar.
>Starship is an incredible achievement already and I suspect it will come together quicker than we anticipate (less than a decade, probably in the next 2-3 years)
You do know that the next Artemis mission is in 2024? According to your timeline it would be delayed more than the much hated space launch system which actually went to the moon
Who cares? If he builds the most advanced rocket in the world, nobody will remember he was late. Late is not a meaningful criticism when building things that have never been done before.
I’m of the belief that the reason he has so suddenly become hated in the last few years (because it’s really unjustified, if you look purely at his works) is a direct result of engineering by those who would suffer if he continued his ascent without public opinion against him. None of the public narrative about him (especially the Twitter stuff) or the reasons people generally mock him make much sense, or are very relevant to 99% of the things he is actually spending time and resources on. It’s 100% manufactured.
Starship and access to orbit, as well as Starlink (which cheap access to orbit enabled) are indeed insanely powerful geopolitical tools. Many of the existing geopolitical engineers would hate to see him not be firmly subordinate to themselves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the FAA’s decision is being used as a bargaining chip here. You don’t get to do things like this in the USA unless you play ball 100% with the existing people who control access to orbit.
Nobody is richer or more powerful than the people who presently control the satellite-based weapons and surveillance systems that the US operates. Nobody will be able to be in a position to replace or supplant them without some sort of negotiation with them.
Imagine it: with a working Starship, Musk could replace GPS, Keyhole, and whatever the rods-from-god system is codenamed, in a matter of months (or perhaps weeks, if the payload design work is already underway), for anyone on the Earth who he thinks would benefit his goals. A lot of the leverage that exists against him (and can presently be used to constrain him) would be gone, never to return. It’s already fairly obvious that the geopolitical status quo on Earth is not very important to him.
I think the recent wave of vitriol is mostly associated with his decision to destroy Twitter in the process of attempting to make it a safe space for racists. That and his seeming to align himself with our strategic adversaries on the world stage.
The latter is possibly dismissable as "Well, that's just your opinion, man..." but he gives muscle to his opinion by making business decisions with strategic policy implications (e.g. turn off Ukraine starlink service at strategig moments..)
The twitter vandalism is very clearly "his works".
Genuinely curious what is a Twitter vandalism? I’ve used Twitter for about 10years and for me it hasn’t changed, I still have the same logical timeline with people that I follow and their tweets. What is it that changed that I can’t figure out?
The only noticeable thing that's changed is the old blue check mark brigade isn't dominating what gets preference in the algorithm and subsequently what most often goes viral. This group strongly having been in one ideological group has made those in the same group notice they are no longer given automatic popularity points and they don't like it.
Social media has always been cancer, some people just want it more preferenced to their sort of cancer by a centralized system.
But otherwise I see little evidence it's actually stopped anyone from using it other than people giving heartfelt anecdotes on HN and lots of talk about Mastodon that unsurprisingly died off quick.
Ah, yes, replies are broken, you are right. When I go to one of the big account (ex Elon) then it is impossible to find a good discussion, you have to scroll a lot through blue check marked memes, scams and then you get a chance for something meaningful. Wish it was more like reddit/HN.
> or are very relevant to 99% of the things he is actually spending time and resources on
Twitter is irrelevant; he is doing product (read: design for manufacture) design on electric cars, battery systems, rockets, internet access satellites, brain computer interfaces, solar, humanoid autonomous robots, and tunnel boring machines, in approximately that order.
Twitter is like 20th on the list, but it’s a great target for narrative-based outrage (“the bullied one gets rich and buys the playground” etc). Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that. Freedom
of expression for all is far more important than censoring racists (which doesn’t stop them from being racist or stop the spread of racism anyway).
> the bullied one gets rich and buys the playground
What version of Elon Musk are you thinking of here? Read literally anything he says and it's immediately clear that he's always been the bully. He wasn't some underdog who was bullied and pulled himself up by his bootstraps to prove everyone wrong, he's the son of an apartheid emerald mine owner who made some good business bets and has now figured out how to scale up his bullying to a national scale. The already-rich bully bought the playground so that nobody could stop him from bullying everyone even more.
> Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that
Ah, the old "I'm free to publish racism but you're not free to call me out when I do so". These free-speech "absolutists" always abandon their morals as soon as they get the opportunity to censor someone who is making fun of them for being a douchebag. It's always about wanting a spout-racism-free card, never about the inalienable rights of mankind.
Please fact check the emerald mine thing. From what I understand it is wildly overblown, his estranged dad had a couple shares, that's all. The fact that it has gathered so much steam fits perfectly into a Manufactured Consent style narrative.
And FYI, if your 401k has some index fund exposure you're probably the partial owner of some cobalt mines in Congo that have questionable labor practices.
Elon Musk uses his power to censor people who make fun of him or that he otherwise disagrees with. One of his claims of why he bought Twitter was to restore free-speech on the platform, which really turned out to be allowing hate speech and alt-right propaganda while censoring opposing views. My claim is that everyone who claims to be a free-speech absolutist is secretly the exact same: they want free speech for themselves, to spout whatever hate-speech they are tired of having to contain, but will happily censor anyone else who opposes them or makes fun of them. It's been demonstrated hundreds of times over and I've never seen a counterexample.
People who actually value personal freedoms understand that there are always tradeoffs: you cannot simultaneously have freedom-to-bully and freedom-from-bullying. It's a difficult problem. People who claim it's simple are not actually interested in solving it. The people who say that freedom-to-bully is infinitely more important than freedom-from-bullying (as all "free speech absolutists" are inherently claiming) are, quite obviously, bullies that want to get away with bullying.
I mostly agree. The only thing which I'd learn more about is
> I've never seen a counterexample
Perhaps that Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" was made too much in jest and didn't really correspond to some real events, before or after. Or people like Vaclav Havel, who got to the power from the power's opponents, didn't have opportunity to refrain from silencing a political adversary. I don't know.
The automotive and space industry has been screaming from the hills about him for years now. Tesla and SpaceX are marvels of what you can do if you have billions to burn and the freedom to do so. The CEO of Ford or any other OEM couldn't spend the kind of dough and make the mistakes that Musk has made. Twitter brought his antics to the forefront in techie circles so software people who didn't listen to said people from other industries finally got the message.
> decision to destroy Twitter in the process of attempting to make it a safe space for racists
Can you back that up, with actual data, and not the politically motivated articles from democrat aligned media?
The only specific cases of this I’ve seen was an actual bot network saying the n word a lot when Elon took over, which was obviously a coordinated attack.
Other than that, where is this racist hell hole that twitter has become apparently? Where is the proof?
> turn off Ukraine starlink service at strategig moments
This makes absolutely no sense, yet people keep repeating it
TWZ: Do you trust Elon Musk?
KB: (Laughs) In what sense?
TWZ: There was the discussion over Walter Isaacson’s book excerpt and whether Musk shut off Starlink to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol last year, or whether as he claimed he denied a request to provide it.
KB: Look, [Starlink] is a private property of a private person. Yes we really very widely use his products and services. The whole of the line of contact talks to each other to some extent using his products and services. The only thing I can say here is that without those services and products it would be a catastrophe. But it is true that he did turn off his products and services over Crimea before. But there's another side to that truth. Everybody's been aware of that.
TWZ: So he did turn it off?
KB: This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.
TWZ: But did he ever put it on and then shut it off?
KB: There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.
to me it's clear, if a private business sells a technology service that is being used in a war, the adversary is going to see that action as hostile and use powers within their means to neutralize the threat. I'm not sure you're using the word "conspiracy theory" correctly.
> to me it's clear, if a private business sells a technology service that is being used in a war, the adversary is going to see that action as hostile and use powers within their means to neutralize the threat. I'm not sure you're using the word "conspiracy theory" correctly.
But Ukraine is literally using services from a SAR satellite right now, which is run by a private business.
> They (the Ukrainians) requested that he re-enable it in that area specifically so that mass murder could be conducted with it
Let me see if I have this right. We know that the Russian government spends inordinate time and money intentionally spreading false propaganda on the internet. We know Russia loves Musk because he supports their illegal invasion of Ukraine. We see sneak here talking about how the "existing geopolitical engineers" (unspecified; is this a dog whistle?) hate Musk because he's so strong, and how Ukraine is committing "mass murder" for resisting the illegal invasion of their country. And I get flagged for calling him a Russian propagandist? Are we really doing the Emperor's New Clothes thing? Can we not just call a spade a spade here?
I get "assume good faith" -- it's a good rule -- but does it really have no limits? We really have to assume good faith in those who are claiming that destroying military targets that are being used by Russia in an illegal invasion of your country is tantamount to mass murder?
> We know that the Russian government spends inordinate time and money intentionally spreading false propaganda
And we know that people on the side of Ukraine, including lots of commentators in the west do the reverse. So maybe try to find the facts and use logic.
> We know Russia loves Musk because he supports their illegal invasion of Ukraine.
He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine. That's just such an idiotic believe, its really next level stupid.
Please tell me one other private person literally in the world who has helped Ukraine more then Musk. I'll wait.
He literally gave Ukraine free material when the war started, before most governments had even reacted.
Not enabling Starlink in Crimea makes sense because that would literally enable the Russians to use it. Dynamically enabling and disabling it depending on Ukrainian war needs would be a crazy thing to do.
> I get "assume good faith" -- it's a good rule -- but does it really have no limits?
What you should maybe ask yourself is if "bad faith" assumptions has limits.
> We really have to assume good faith in those who are claiming that destroying military targets that are being used by Russia in an illegal invasion of your country is tantamount to mass murder?
I reject the concept of “just war” in general in all instances and think all war is mass murder, definitionally. “Military targets” is a euphemism designed to diffuse blame for premeditated mass slaughter of human beings. It’s not something anyone wants to do, feel, or think about, so euphemisms like these are practically essential to our ability to cope with the world. There is another conflict happening simultaneously where you can see the exact same labelling-war playing out. The scores of dead children remain dead, the hospital remains in ruins regardless of whether it was a failed terrorist missile or a solemn and justified defense of a victim of illegal invasion. It takes two to tango.
As I said, it’s not popular to be anti-war these days. Humans seem to like retribution and righting of perceived injustice more than they like peace. We still have the death penalty, for instance, a clear violation of our widely agreed-upon standard of human rights.
Furthermore, even in your worldview, an American citizen using nominally American-jurisdiction hardware to enable airstrikes in a war zone that has nothing directly to do with America is an unforced escalation in the proxy war unrelated to “illegal invasion” that invites retaliation against Americans and American space-based assets. It’s a fool’s game even if you subscribe only to Realpolitik and don’t care one whit about the lives of enslaved Russian teenagers.
> We know Russia loves Musk because he supports their illegal invasion of Ukraine.
I have seen precisely nothing to support either of the claims in this sentence. They are speculation, not fact. “If you don’t support me, you de facto support my enemy” is not sound reasoning in war. One may simply be against violence in all forms, which seems much more plausible, given what we know about humans on Earth, especially skeptics like Musk who tend to resist pro-just-war state messaging.
> I reject the concept of “just war” in general in all instances and think all war is mass murder
Okay, fair, there's a self-consistent point there we can work with. I also am extremely dubious of the idea of "just war".
> It takes two to tango.
It really only takes one to start a war. You seem to be under the assumption that Ukraine had a choice about whether it went to war or not. It didn't have that choice. War was forced upon it. Indeed Ukraine is not fighting a "just war" by any stretch.
It sounds like you're saying: it's bad that Russia is invading Ukraine, but it's also bad that Ukraine is trying to defend itself? Obviously we'd all prefer the world where Russia does not invade Ukraine. Given that Russia did invade Ukraine, what is the next best world? For me, 2nd best is that Ukraine defends its sovereignty with as little unnecessary death as possible. For you, it sounds like (and please correct me if I'm wrong) 2nd best is that Ukraine rolls over and lets Russia completely annex its territories, commit genocide on its civilians, reduce its cities to rubble and ash, execute or permanently imprison its current government, and install a puppet government, so that it is better positioned to do the exact same thing to the rest of Eastern Europe. Is that right? I think we'd both like to minimize death and suffering, but my intuition is that your 2nd best scenario has a lot more death and suffering than mine.
And again: the idea that Ukraine defending its sovereignty is "just as bad" as Russia invading it is yet another common Russian propaganda line. It may be complete coincidence that your statements happen to exactly match Russian propaganda lines, but they do. If you talk about how you found some cheap viagra at some link you post, you may feel like you have a legit reason for doing so and that you're not a "true" spammer. But to everyone else, you're just another spammer.
“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.“
I will abstain from attributing the quote in an effort to avoid an appeal to authority, but this neatly sums up my feelings on it.
I am also of the belief that death is preferable to participating in war.
> I reject the concept of “just war” in general in all instances and think all war is mass murder, definitionally.
Then you must be for a swift Ukrainian victory right?, cause anything else just raises tensions in the region and increases the chance of another war in the near future.
> Furthermore, even in your worldview, an American citizen using nominally American-jurisdiction hardware to enable airstrikes in a war zone that has nothing directly to do with America is an unforced escalation in the proxy war unrelated to “illegal invasion” that invites retaliation against Americans and American space-based assets.
The war in Ukraine isn’t a proxy war it’s just a plain old war between Russia and Ukraine with both sides having allies that help supply them, and I’m not sure why “illegal invasion” is in quotation marks that’s exactly what it is.
> One may simply be against violence in all forms, which seems much more plausible, given what we know about humans on Earth, especially skeptics like Musk who tend to resist pro-just-war state messaging.
This is an easy view to have when you live the luxury of being able to choice whether or not to be involved in a war.
Ukrainians had no such choice war was forced upon them by the Russians.
AT&T wouldn't be happy with you pulling their cell tower repeaters into a warzone either. Using shared infrastructure for war purposes exposes it to retaliation.
Humans who subscribe to game theory have gambled against Russia with much higher stakes than these in years past. I would not depend on “nobody can launch satellites” being sufficient deterrent when GTO brinksmanship with the USSR put only Stanislav Petrov between reality and total human extinction.
If you believe, as I do, that Ukraine’s ability to export shale gas to the west is a literal existential crisis for Russia as a state in the long term, then it makes sense that they would go to quite significant extents indeed to ensure that that remains impossible, right up to things that would mostly destroy Russian society in the process, tragically.
If the first were true, I doubt Russia would be spending so much in the way of resources on simple territorial expansion (with the implicit long term expense of huge resources governing the conquered/occupied territory).
The invasion isn’t good ROI for them otherwise, even if it went well, which it does not appear to be.
I think the USSR restoration empire building narrative is overblown.
Also, if what you say about red lines were true, the US would
not be so hesitant to provide lots of advanced aircraft to Ukraine, which they have not done as yet despite this clearly being a full enemy-of-my-enemy proxy war.
Signs point to everyone trying to avoid escalation.
> Also, if what you say about red lines were true, the US would not be so hesitant to provide lots of advanced aircraft to Ukraine, which they have not done as yet despite this clearly being a full enemy-of-my-enemy proxy war.
They are literally starting training on the aircraft next month iirc, and will receive them in 4-6 months after that.
Nothing happened when all of Russias red lines were crossed, the Americans are merely boiling the frog to avoid escalation.
I think Russias red lines are akin to chinas final warning now days, a joke.
Yes, obviously, they are at war with Russia. All combatants in all non-proxy wars are involved in the systematic premeditated murder of as many of the Other Guys as possible.
> They (the Ukrainians) requested that he re-enable it in that area specifically so that mass murder could be conducted with it, and he declined. (This is an example of the geopolitical power he wields, and it will only increase after Starship.) Couching it in “strategic policy decisions” euphemism doesn’t change the fact that they tried to draft him into a conspiracy to slaughter hundreds of teenage Russian conscripts.
A lot of this paragraph is objectively false I don’t think conscripts are the ones that man boats and submarines.
Destroying those Russian missile boats and submarines would have taken out a large amount of the ships that where intentionally targeting Ukrainian civilians with cruise missiles.
I used to be pretty much a Elon fanboy. I don't hate him now, but feel mixed and largely neutral about him. What did that for me is that his communication on Twitter seemed to ignore the fact that having a very large audience brings responsibility. It's different if I mention to some buddies in the pub over beers that I read some research about vaccines that made me wonder if I should get the vaccine than if I tweet the same thing to an audience of many million people. I am just making this vaccine example up in this case because I am too lazy to go back through his history, but he has said a lot of things with wide-reaching implications without doing proper research and due diligence required when communicating to that many people, many of whom see him as a role model. This does very real harm and makes me question his maturity.
Same boat. I think he's been in a place where nobody has said "no" to him in such a long time that he's just lost touch a bit with reality. Also, I really don't think it's fair to make opinions of him unless you also make opinions of the other billionaire's based on what they actually think, not just their PR firm. You're not going to get _any_ off-the-cuff remarks from Bezos, for example.
> Also, I really don't think it's fair to make opinions of him unless you also make opinions of the other billionaire's based on what they actually think, not just their PR firm. You're not going to get _any_ off-the-cuff remarks from Bezos, for example.
That's my point though. I am not judging the content of his opinions. I am concerned about the fact that he is voicing them with little care. Everybody has some weird opinions and half-baked ideas. It's very different to have these thoughts in your head vs sharing them with friends and family or to to voice them to 160 million followers. He can think in private whatever he wants and I wouldn't care or judge him unless it starts to impact other people. I think lots of weird shit, but it just makes my wife roll her eyes. Nobody is gonna die from it.
The various replies in this thread witness that there is a purely irrational response to Elon's "harsh but mildly conservative" leanings that people can't seem to be mature enough to acknowledge that he has ramped up several major international corporations in a wildly entrepreneurial manner, yet these fools are focused on "yes well technically he had subsidies and a ruby mine" as if there's some cheat code he used that no one else like Boeing or Ford had access to.
> people can't seem to be mature enough to acknowledge that he has ramped up several major international corporations in a wildly entrepreneurial manner
Or you know, people acknowledge both but his dumbassery overshadows his genius by a long stretch.
Bezos, Zuck &co at least have the decency to shut the fuck up when they should, which is 99.9% of the time on 99.9% of topics. That's all he would have to do to be more appreciated
No other rocket even in the planning stage comes close to Starship. No other rocket organization builds rockets the way SpaceX does. There just isn't a comparison to what they're doing that justifies criticism that they're unsuccessful or doing it wrong. It's a different process.
I'm not saying that Musk is perfect, or that you're doing this, but people like to fault this wildly ambitious projects for what they haven't achieved. But when they do work they have an outsized impact on the status quo. When Starship succeeds (and I believe it's just a matter of time whereas Tesla FSD is still an "if") it will revolutionize space travel in ways that seem sci-fi today.
State-of-the-art today is building machines that cost billions of dollars and throw them away after using them one time!
> Both my rockets and Starship have reached space the same number of times.
Wouldn't it be more apples-to-apples to compare "all your rockets" to "all of SpaceX's rockets", or "all your superheavy-class rockets" to "all of SpaceX's superheavy-class rockets"?
Nah, I've only focused on super-heavy class in my napkin designs.
I'm just facetiously pointing out that Starship hasn't launched yet. There could be major flaws. Someone else might have a better design brewing but with little to show for it. The irony is that Starship's design looks a lot more like the sci-fi futurism of the 50s - we're returning to it after testing out shuttle-style reusable vehicles.
You are making two assumptions. One explicitly, that Starship will work in anything resembling its current design and promised operational paramters. This is by no means as guaranteed as you make it out to be (it's very much an if, not a when). The promises of rapid reusability are very much up in the air, and the whole many-engine design is also not proven in the slightest yet.
Secondly, you're assuming that reusable rockets are better than one-time use ones. While this may be true for certain kinds of missions, it is not at all clear for many others.
Reusable rockets fundamentally will have lower payload for the same thrust, for the simple reason that they need fuel for the return stage. They will also need to be made from sturdier materials to survive reentry, which again limits their capacity.
> One explicitly, that Starship will work in anything resembling its current design and promised operational paramters.
We have a test flight behind us, which showed many tens of seconds of the stack flight. That's a big achievement validating the rocket architecture and general parameters. Frankly I'd assume we crossed equator in rocket development here, we're in completion stage more than developing.
> This is by no means as guaranteed as you make it out to be (it's very much an if, not a when).
You know, there are no physical laws which prevent Starship from working. SpaceX shows economics on their side. At this point it's not guaranteed that Starship will fly - because it's hard to predict the future - but it's a pretty safe bet that Starship can be made to fly.
> The promises of rapid reusability are very much up in the air, and the whole many-engine design is also not proven in the slightest yet.
There are many successful many-engine rockets. Soyuz has 5 engines but 32 nozzles firing at launch. Falcon Heavy has 27 separate engines. Saturn-I had 8, Falcon 9, Black Arrow 8 - the last one just 4-5 times less engines than Super Heavy. To say it's not proven in the slightest is bending the reality a bit too much.
> Secondly, you're assuming that reusable rockets are better than one-time use ones. While this may be true for certain kinds of missions, it is not at all clear for many others.
It's important however what those cases are. By now we have a good history of Falcon-9 launches, where for a number of years we have a substantial reduction of cost to orbit for a wide variety of payloads. So maybe - maybe - there are many other kinds of missions where reusability is a disadvantage, but those kinds are clearly in substantial minority.
> Reusable rockets fundamentally will have lower payload for the same thrust, for the simple reason that they need fuel for the return stage. They will also need to be made from sturdier materials to survive reentry, which again limits their capacity.
That's technically true, but arguing this is a bit like arguing that a car made for a single travel would be lighter and cheaper that the one made for repeated use. True, but quite irrelevant for most practical cases.
> We have a test flight behind us, which showed many tens of seconds of the stack flight.
As became apparent in the post mortems, the rocket lost its chosen flight path the moment it left the pad, probably due to the engine failures. It flew of course, but it was a failed launch from T+3 or so. The safety systems also failed to self-destruct the rocket on command - they thankfully did enough damage for the atmosphere to take care of the rest.
Basically the launch only proved that the parts hold together and the engines produce enough lift. The engines themselves are still far too prone to failure (apparently this was using an older generation, so maybe that part is already fixed).
> There are many successful many-engine rockets. Soyuz has 5 engines but 32 nozzles firing at launch. Falcon Heavy has 27 separate engines. Saturn-I had 8, Falcon 9, Black Arrow 8 - the last one just 4-5 times less engines than Super Heavy. To say it's not proven in the slightest is bending the reality a bit too much.
You're right, I was exaggerating a bit. Still, my layman's understanding is that there is a fundamental difference between Falcon Heavy's multi booster design with 9 engines per booster, and Super Heavy's 33 engine design on a single booster. Maybe I'm wrong on this.
> So maybe - maybe - there are many other kinds of missions where reusability is a disadvantage, but those kinds are clearly in substantial minority.
As I understand it, the disadvantages start once you want to put large payloads beyond orbit. Starship's main goal is to put a payload on the moon (this is what the NASA funding is for) and for this purpose it is much worse than a traditional single use rocket: instead of a simple trip to the moon, the design is to launch to orbit, then do an additional 6 or so launches to refuel it while in orbit, and only then will it have enough power to fly to the moon.
SpaceX is banking on the launch being so cheap with their hopes of rapid reusability that they can do 7+ launches of Starship for less than the cost of a more traditional mission. Falcon 9 definitely is not that cheap compared to other rockets, but perhaps Starship will indeed be.
Let's focus on the last part, I think it's more interesting.
> As I understand it, the disadvantages start once you want to put large payloads beyond orbit. Starship's main goal is to put a payload on the moon (this is what the NASA funding is for) and for this purpose it is much worse than a traditional single use rocket: instead of a simple trip to the moon, the design is to launch to orbit, then do an additional 6 or so launches to refuel it while in orbit, and only then will it have enough power to fly to the moon.
American plans to go to the Moon in 1960-s included a variant with LEO docking. That would allow using a smaller rocket, as the payload needed to go to the Moon could be assembled on low Earth orbit in several launches. NASA decided to go with one rocket of the size which was very ambitious at the time - about an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest existing one.
The Starship goal is to bring even bigger payload to the Moon. Sure, it could be done by scaling up the Starship. But the fate of big rockets so far - Saturn-V, N-1, Energiya, even Space Shuttle to an extent - is that they suffer from the lack of use. The more they are used, the better and cheaper they get. So, no, the SpaceX goal isn't actually to bring even bigger payload to the Moon - it just happens that this scale, which Starship has, is good to land on the Moon a lot of payload in one launch. So, given that you want to use the Starship which is being created for many different missions, how would you use Starship to fly to the Moon? You'd refuel it on LEO. Noe we can remember the actual SpaceX goal - it's flying a lot of people and cargo to Mars, and SpaceX decided to create the biggest rocket they could reasonably plan, which is still not that large given that Mars wants thousands and thousands tons of stuff, so even this big rocket should be used with refueling on LEO.
Once again - Starship is the biggest rocket SpaceX can build, from technical and economical standpoint (this reminds me the Soviet engineers chain of thoughts when they were planning N-1). It's still small enough for the task (flying to Mars), so LEO refueling is still needed. If it's still needed, it's logical to use it for Moon flights as well.
Yes, instead of one flight (like Saturn-V) Starship needs several, for refueling. In exchange it brings larger payload to the Moon, so since we're planning to go there and stay, it could be justified. So, we're using a universal reusable super-heavy rocket for many different tasks instead of building a system for each task separately. We're losing in time - since we need multiple launches from Earth for single flight to the Moon - but gaining and payload and - crucially - in developing bespoke solutions for different tasks.
The first is a fair, but I'm not assuming that it has to work exactly as claimed. It's so far ahead of current tech that if it even marginally succeeds the stated objectives it will transform the industry.
The second, I disagree, reusable is definitely better in every way. I'm sure there are edge cases where it needs to be proven or a particular mission, but no other machines are as costly and disposable.
Rocket designs haven't evolved much over the last 50 years. Competitors all claim to want reusability but none of the major players are pursuing it seriously. Engine design and manufacturing is hilariously obsolete. NASA has become a jobs program instead of a innovator. I'm just happy to see a radical new approach to design, manufacturing and testing.
Maybe wait until it actually flies more than a few seconds without going off the rails before declaring it the greatest rocket ever built?
Right now they haven't even proven that the many engine design is actually workable, rhier engines failed at a spectacular rate in the single full test launch that they conducted (maybe because of the ill-conceived launch site, maybe for other reasons).
Eh, people were happy to call the N1 the most powerful rocket ever for years even though it mostly qualified as a bomb and not a rocket. Starship's paper capabilities are indeed impressive. If they manage to make it work then great.
> Right now they haven't even proven that the many engine design is actually workable
They don't need to prove it to people who accept as the only proof the demonstration of the fact. Remember you can have proofs in different ways, and professionals are fully aware of this.
Because Elon doesn't realize his childish douchebaggery has that much of an impact on how some people view what are otherwise his very legitimate accomplishments as a businessman.
Twitter/X most certainly not among those accomplishments.
"I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree. "
Because people like Elon and Gwynne have knowingly lied or purposefully mislead the public regarding Space X.
An example is the Point to Point travel, this is not every going to happen. Anyone with a bit of knowledge about rocketry etc. knows this has a zero percent chance of happening alone because of the noise it would case. In their presentation they had Zürich as a destination, Zürich is so small that you would blow out every window in the entire city. Launching starship in Zürich will never ever happen.
Not from Zurich, but from an ocean platform 20km from the coast of every big coastal city. High speed trains (350km/h) will go direct to the airport from every city less than 500km away. I agree landlocked Zurich will have a hard time to get a spaceport.
So I'm not sure regular launches from the lake will be tolerated by the lake shore's inhabitants. This is why Starship launch platforms should be 30km from shore (not 20km as I wrote previously)
It's not like they could put out a public notice for all of the fish and wildlife to attend a planning & zoning meeting for their comment on the situation. Determining the effect of human endeavors on said fish & wildlife is a little more complicated that going door to door and informing them of their plans.
The Apple Newton would have been absolutely mind boggling if it existed in 1990. Even as revealed in 1992 (and released in 1993) it was still quite the technological marvel in many respects.
Its ultimate problem was that it was still ultimately more like a TI-83 graphing calculator than an iPhone. Much as people mocked the handwriting recognition, it was technology which could have been iterated upon. It turns out the key missing ingredient for the Newton was wireless internet access — and of course an internet worth connecting to.
>I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.
A number of reasons, actually.
- Because the entire idea of "the Earth is fucked, so let's go set up camp on Mars" is a train of thought that's only applicable to the ultra-rich, and in the current economic environment that's (pretty understandably) an unpopular idea.
- Because after Starship's failed attempt at landing and highly-destructive launch earlier this year, people who care about the nearby wildlife refuge at Boca Chica are understandably not thrilled about continued ops there.
- Because the man behind SpaceX -- whose past achievements are admittedly impressive, at least in the spaceflight industry -- is increasingly associated with deceptive marketing, poor design choices, and incompetent product management, and when a corporation like SpaceX relies on significant funding from taxpayers that's a troubling combination.
- Personally, for me, coming from startups, "move fast and break things" scales terribly in terms of (for lack of a better word) social responsibility, and with the company's stated ambitions, I don't see this ending well.
SpaceX does a lot of cool shit, but let's not pretend like they're advancing the state of human existence here. They're a commercial entity, even if not publicly traded, but with Musk at the helm that feels like the tradeoff between being purely profit-driven vs having later-years Howard Hughes behind the wheel.
Anyway, it's pretty disingenuous to call Starship in particular "the most capable and sophisticated rocket ever built." So far it's capable of doing a significantly suborbital hop and failing to land. You could argue that it's failed at the one thing a spacefaring vessel should, by definition, not fail at.
I do trust in the FAA's judgement here, but I hope they work closely with Fish & Wildlife. The effects of climate change are increasingly endangering wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico, and having chunks of concrete the size of a living room flying into the water isn't helping.
I'm no fan of Elon Musk. Yet if you downplay the significance of cutting the cost of bringing mass to orbit by a factor of 1000, you really haven't thought through the implications of this enough. The whole "billionaires are going to leave earth behind" thing is as much of a dumb conspiracy theory as much of the stuff Elon is tweeting lately, by the way.
I think many of the issues that SpaceX has had with the Starship/Super Heavy project are due to the poor suitability of the launch/build site. The launch site itself is tiny and directly adjacent to protected wetlands, the only access between the build and launch sites is via a two-lane public road which is the only access to the also-adjacent state park beach, etc.
There were other sites under consideration, and I'm sure they had their reasons for passing on them, but it's hard to see offhand how they could be worse than Boca Chica.
My family owns some land in south Texas and my subjective sense from dealing with that reality and talking to people in the area is that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a protected wetland. In practice, the ubiquity of environmentally delicate tracts of land seems to be used by the state to restrict or permit industrial activities arbitrarily, likely based on political favoritism. If you think this is hyperbole, I suggest you look into the details of the various solar power projects in Texas.
Heard an anecdote from an architect in south Texas: if you have land there, and it rains enough, your land can become a protected wetland. Now you can't build on it.
To be fair, there's also a good case for preventing people from building on land to protect ecosystems. We may not need that many rockets, and it's certainly not the only priority for society.
Our tech circles tend to paint a very one-sided picture of the rules just putting roadblocks in front of us, but there's a lot of good examples both of what unregulated progress can do to natural resources, and of preservation efforts making a real difference.
If I was a professional environmentalist/preservationist, I'd be very frustrated with the total lack of empathy by the tech community and their efforts (often cutting-edge science!) getting described as backwards or in the way of progress almost constantly ...
Exactly. Keeping wetlands intact is very important for climate change, because draining them releases a shit ton of greenhouse gases. Of course, it's also important for biodiversity.
If you were an environmentalist / preservationist, how would you determine where the line is between what’s an appropriate level of resistance versus inappropriate (or what’s fair for spacex vs unfair for the environment)?
I would draw the line at being able to maintain a steady-state ecosystem in perpetuity.
We, uh, have yet to meet that line in most of the world. Pretty much anyone draining an aquifer, or having to import more soil nutrients than are produced by their land year-over-year, is doing something that's unsustainable.
The degree to which we normalize unsustainable industrial activities is impressive.
We're not talking about the heat death of the universe here. Industrial society (especially industrial agriculture) is counting down toward auto-destruct sequence on a time scale of decades, not billions of years. Look at trendlines for soil erosion, aquifer depletion, cadmium soil buildup, land salinification, etc.
It's oddly one-sided how people always ask if sustainable agriculture can replace industrial agriculture. By the very definition of the word "unsustainable," industrial agriculture cannot replace industrial agriculture.
The impact of rockets is a tiny speck by comparison. In this case rockets will effectively preempt the slow encroach from land privatization lobbying and housing development, which would be far (far!) more destructive to the wetlands than the occasional rocket detonation or ten...
Anyone who loves preserving wilderness should love rocket launch sites, as shown by the history of Cape Canaveral vs surrounding land.
Technically by "self-destruct" I mean that the agriculture system destroys itself, by somehow undermining its own mechanisms of support. How much of 'society' gets pulled down with it? That's up to us to decide.
Are you aware that less than 6% of US farmland is irrigated, and only half of irrigated farmland (3% of total) uses groundwater?
97% of our farmland uses no groundwater. None.
If US lost 3% of its agricultural output tomorrow, we'd still be growing more food than we can possibly eat; still be filling our cars with a mix of gasoline and corn liquor as we do today.
Perhaps I should have asked this question instead: Is there any evidence that would cause you to change your belief that society is on the brink of collapse, or is that belief unfalsifiable like religious faith?
What about total amount of viable farmland? How much of that amount do those 6% constitute?
How much of farmland is situated close to cities (main cause of aquifer deterioration)? Would that farmland still have enough water after aquifers are caput?
My takeaway was that 97% of US farmland would be unaffected by aquifer collapse. The 3% that would be affected (and that's assuming every aquifer in the country goes dry, which is not at risk of happening) those farms might become completely nonviable, or they might be able to shift to less water intensive crops and methods. In either case, aquifer collapse is not a significant threat to our food supply.
Nonetheless, it is prudent to preserve those water sources.
re: farms near cities, I think it varies a lot by region. Growing thirsty crops near LA is going to be a lot harder than near Houston.
Soil erosion and other forms of degradation is bound to affect billions of people until 2050 [1].
Groundwater degradation is just as bad of an issue - in the US [2], in Europe [3] and APAC regions [4]. The sole exception is Africa, but if they follow the same pathway as everyone else in exploiting and managing it, it's not going to be sufficient [5].
I am an environmentalist. The line is that SpaceX is operating a fundamentally unsustainable business. The appropriate level of resistance is that which prevents them from conducting any launches at all. Launching rockets is quite literally the last possible thing we need to achieve a sustainable and equitable future for our planet.
Before you call my opinion fringe/extreme, go ahead and speak to some low-income folks at your local dive bar. You'll most likely find that 90+% of them are vehemently opposed to space missions in general, and especially SpaceX given the absurdity of traveling to Mars when we have so many low-hanging problems to fix here on Earth.
It's such a bold statement. Building a colony on Mars, in such a harsh environment, is not possible without extreme sustainability. The entire colony's existence will rely on being sustainable.
You don't have free air; you need to find a way to reuse it, or you'll die.
You can't simply source water from a river; if you don't find a way to reuse the same water multiple times, you'll die.
You can't just eat vegetables and rely on cows that graze on open land; if you don't figure out a way to produce food without using vast expanses of land, you'll perish.
You can't just build a house from a few sticks from the nearest forest or rely on minimal heating from drilled gas or oil. If you don't find a way to protect against radiation and heat your home efficiently, you'll die.
You can't rely solely on oil for energy; if you can't move between structures, sooner or later, you'll die.
Mars represents a global rethinking of our entire way of living, pivoting to a sustainability-only approach.
In many cases, the sustainable approach is also cheaper. After all, reusing resources tends to be more economical. Consider solar energy as an example. It's booming not just because of its environmental benefits, but because it's cost-effective.
And why are we building solar panels? Because NASA needed it before for space exploration.
So when I hear, "Let's not focus on space; let's fix Earth," I can't help but think of a Luddite who's inadvertently advocating for our planet to remain in its current, unsustainable state.
"Lets fix Earth". The issue is the small wee number (what, almost 8 billion) of humans on the Earth and getting them to cooperate. So far, notsomuch, and the beloved economic structure to every Hacker News, capitalism, does not have practical structures to accomodate conservation, environmentalism, restraint, or valuation of nature.
Capitalism essentially is a structure that maximizes resource use. The entire ruling elite was determined by the winners of capitalism, and their psychology is not of rational restraint, respect of the world, respect of others, or even respect for their children.
Capitalism has a side game of converging to maximal sociopathy for the individual (greed is good, selfish is good per microeconomics, that is the definition of a rational consumer) while not overly crashing the whole system, except maybe after the next quarter's earnings report.
Capitalism and the "economics intelligentsia" have no workable theory for transitioning our current economic structure to a different one. The notion of an "externality" (note that the verbiage directly places concerns of environmentalism and long term survival as a phenomenon outside/external to the functioning of economics) has only existed in a widespread fashion in the last decades, and really only begrudgingly to address the impending reality of global warming. Thus, there is no real development of economic (and certainly no practical political ones) to transition to some restrained model.
The current economic plan: let it get so bad that the actual supply/demand curves of markets are "disrupted" enough. This probably means war, famine, displacement of billions, loss of arable and livable land, etc.
The fact the elite have increased their wealth share shows that since the rise of widespread science on sustainability, the power structure has doubled down on sociopathy, selfishness, denialism, and procrastination.
This is not good. The only positive trend is the miraculous fact that EV drivetrains and solar/wind turned out to be cheaper than ICE/fossil fuels once sufficient infrastructure and research had been performed.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, stops habitat destruction, soil erosion, squandering of water resources, pollution, and mass extinctions.
I would also call myself an environmentalist, yet statements like this are the major reason I've been reluctant to identify as such loudly or often. Misguided environmentalists have for a long time been steadfastly opposed to nuclear energy for example, and I have not.
The on-the-ground reality is that concern for and protection of the natural environment are relatively recent practices and must be balanced against the continued technological and sociological progress of humanity. Otherwise, the answer is easily that the best thing for "the environment" is the complete extinction of humans. While some people may want to give that a serious treatment, I've always wondered why those people don't volunteer to go first.
Likewise, poorer societies produce less pollution than wealthier ones, so environmentalists willing to forego any kind of human progress in favor of protecting the environment should at least consider migrating altogether to countries without telecommunications infrastructure.
We don't yet know what all of the benefits and costs will arise from a lower barrier to space exploration. But, humans exist all over this planet right now because exploration is part of our nature. Rejecting space exploration out of hand is to reject our very nature -- a curious argument, from a naturalist.
GPS has generated over $1.4 trillion in value in the US alone since it was opened up to the public in the 80's [1]. Millions of people use satellite TV and radio. Commercial imaging satellites are used for mapping, weather forecasting, wildfire detection, and scientific research. SpaceX's own Starlink system has revolutionized satellite internet for regions too remote or underdeveloped to be served by traditional internet providers. And who knows what we'll be doing in 50 years! Imagine if we are able to use rockets for point-to-point travel on Earth, or we figure out how to mine asteroids, or if the economics of space-based manufacturing work out.
Also, abusing environmental regulation to set space policy is just straight up a bad idea. It's fine if you think we shouldn't be investing in space, but don't try and force that belief on the rest of us in an undemocratic manner. It's very NIMBY-esque
NIMBYism has no answer for the department of defense.
SpaceX and the super heavy payloads are a massive massive massive strategic advantage for the defense department. Imagine:
You want a functionally operational combined arms battalion deployed within two hours to the middle of Siberia? And then regularly supplied? Forget about having expensive foreign bases. You can deploy boots on the ground forces within hours.
Starship is a cheap platform for 100-150 tons of ... whatever ... deployed ... whereever ... whenever. To say nothing of orbital battle platforms or other stuff, simply the rapid deployment alone makes SpaceX absolutely critical to US "defense".
I can imagine the US DoD taking renewed interest in those midwestern remote ICBM sites as ready launch sites for rapid deployment forces. That's right, launch from Kansas, land whereever in hours. Australia? Africa? Antarctica? Sure.
Imagine fighting a conventional war and local general thinks they have a US affiliated fighting force pinned down. Suddenly, a combined arms battalion appears right behind his lines. The mobility Starship would provide the US military at very palatable costs is a battlefield revolution.
I don't buy it, for several reasons. In no particular order:
1) 100-150 tons is the estimated payload to LEO, not back down to the ground. For Starship to land (on Earth) it will need to be mostly if not entirely empty.
2) Even if Starship could get that much payload down to the ground, how do you unload vehicles from an upright Starship? A built in crane maybe, but it sounds like a recipe for disaster.
3) Once you land a Starship somewhere remote, how do you get it back? It can't fly back (from Earth). It's too big to realistically airlift unless maybe you have a very large runway nearby for something like a supped up Super Guppy / Airbus Beluga. Do you plan on just leaving this cutting edge hardware in Siberia?
4) Missile defense systems could easily shoot down a Starship landing near enemy territory.
5) Why is this needed? Wars tend to have weeks of warning, at least for those who need to plan them. This is plenty of time for military planners to get their assets prepared to be deployed from nearby military bases or navy ships, both of which America has in spades around the world. American military logistics are already so excellent, there doesn't seem to be much margin for improvement.
Nah, that's never going to happen. Rockets are inherently dangerous. Loading tons of people onto one is gambling with a 1 in 20 chance (possibly higher) that all of them die. Even if nothing goes wrong with the rocket per se, how do you land it somewhere where you don't already have infrastructure, or worse still, in a hot zone? On the best days landing a rocket is a delicate and error-prone procedure, can you imagine if there's someone actively trying to stop you?
>Suddenly, a combined arms battalion appears right behind his lines.
That "suddenly" is pretty funny. Can you imagine trying to sneak up on someone from aboard the loudest vehicle in the world as you're trying to gently guide it to the ground to avoid exploding? If the enemy has SAMs or artillery, your rocket and everyone in it is toast. Even if you successfully land, you better hope you've used all your fuel before the enemy has a chance to start shooting small arms. Even if a mostly empty rocket can't explode, it can still easily be engulfed in flames.
> Before you call my opinion fringe/extreme, go ahead and speak to some low-income folks at your local dive bar.
Sorry, I don't mean to be gatekeepery here, but "low income folk at my local bar" is the last demographic I would seek the opinion of on anything scientific or of broader scope than car maintenance.
Anecdotally, my experience is that many of these people love conspiracy theories, and applying "common sense" to global problems like climate change. For example, I've heard these people say that because we got snow in October climate change is a hoax.
Whatever you think of other people's technical opinions, their opinions on the use of common resources, including land, environment, and money, are as valid as yours.
It's easy to rationalize writing off others - for politics, education, etc. - but I find they have insights that I lack, and I learn a lot by listening (and do bad things when I ignore them). Also, they don't go away, and then you're shocked and outraged when the vote doesn't go your way.
> Whatever you think of other people's technical opinions, their opinions on the use of common resources, including land, environment, and money, are as valid as yours.
The government treats them as being equally valid for the purposes of elections (as it should), but that doesn't mean "people at your local dive bar agree with me, therefore I'm right" is a compelling argument
Good job making environmentalism sounds like nonsense. Sometimes I wonder if takes like these are planted by the coal industry so that real environmental concerns are taken less seriously. But that's enough conspiracy theories for today
What is the goal of environmentalism? Avoiding short term harm or fostering sustainability in the long term?
You don't think reaching out further into the universe will give more people the pale blue dot viewpoint and could cause more people to care more about earth when they realize how fragile and insignificant it is?
What about moving industry off the earth in the distant future? Wouldn't that be good for earth in the long run?
100% of people at dive bar's would hop on a rocket if a civilization ending asteroid was headed for the planet. Asteroids are also bad for the environment.
Western environmentalists live blessed lives even as they seek to kick down the ladder for the people of the future in order to promote fiction over reality.
You’ll also find that 90+% don’t care about research into basic science at all, art preservation, art creation, environmental preservation, or even obscure medical research.
It’s a bad signal because it’s from a bunch of reactionary people.
But Elon needs to shake his willy around in public ... why would you seek to oppose that with your vague assertions about the hopes and dreams of ordinary folk here on earth?
Elon founded SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin and offered him the role of Chief Engineer but he declined. Griffin instead went to Washington to steer NASA funding to SpaceX, before they ever launched any rockets.
Griffin was Chief Architect of the Brilliant Pebbles 'missile defense using weapons in space' program and has been advocating for it his whole life. After NASA, Griffin started the Space Development Agency--what that article is talking about--and gave contracts to SpaceX. When Biden came in he deweaponized everything, and then the lines were clearly drawn between him and Musk.
It has plenty of flaws and would be net destabilizing. "Iron dome in Space" doesn't work when it comes to nuclear weapons. Heck even Iron Dome can't protect against large barrage of small rockets from Gaza. It would just make first-use of nukes more likely.
There's a balance: If you have enough defense to give you first-strike capability (i.e., you could nuke the other side and could destroy their reponse), then it's destabilizing. Other nuclear powers will be very alarmed thinking that you could destroy them at any time.
But you also want to be able to destroy a few rogue missiles, such as from North Korea. If NK nukes Los Angeles, the argument that 'we must adhere 100% to the principle of no missile defense' would be unconvincing.
There are plenty of ground-based missile defense solutions for NK (aircraft and drones near NK are also an option if boost-phase interception is considered critical when their program advances).
The problem with space-based orbital missile defense is it necessarily threatens the entire planet while being predictable and easy to shoot down with relatively small missiles. Those anti-satellites attacks, which are justified by threatened countries, lead to a cascade of space debris, that leaves an unusable space environment for centuries and may in itself trigger nuclear conflict.
Not everything has a technological solution. Staging weapons in space is not a path to world peace, it just heightens the stakes and shortens the escalation. As Israel learned, you can try to seal off your border and your sky, but there are always holes. There are many ways NK or Russia can deliver nukes besides ICBMs. Dreaming of a shield in space is a false promise. Building bridges rather than walls is the only path to peace.
If the U.S. can be a model for the world, it is not it's military might to emulate, but the idea that people of all nationalities and backgrounds can come and live together and resolve their differences. It is possible!
I agree. I temporarily forgot what the topic was and was thinking of missile defense in general and not space-based particularly. My mistake.
> Not everything has a technological solution. ...
> If the U.S. can be a model for the world, it is not it's military might to emulate, but the idea that people of all nationalities and backgrounds can come and live together and resolve their differences. It is possible!
Here I abolutely agree. Even warfare ends with political solutions. It is possible, especially today. It's not the 19th century any more. It just needs us. Thank you for posting that; people need to hear it much more!
They break MAD, and there's a lot of people that justify the existence of XY,000 nuclear weapons with a yield of ~4,000 MT as 'It's fine, they'll never be used, they prevent war because of MAD.'
If MAD was what was preventing them from being used, and MAD is no longer a thing, it's no longer fine that we have them. Anybody pushing to destabilize that balance of terror is going to need a damn good and through review of that question.
And others would interpret it as "We could safely fire our nuclear weapons." And I'm not counting on the guys responsible for building the weapons to decide the more altruistic interpretation.
> I was a professional environmentalist/preservationist, I'd be very frustrated with the total lack of empathy by the tech community and their efforts (often cutting-edge science!) getting described as backwards or in the way of progress almost constantly ...
Please list out all of the other wetlands being destroyed by space exploration. Then list them as a percentage of global wetlands or list out what would be endangered by this one location being used as a launch site.
there was (yes was) lots of protected wetland near me, but the right politicians friends wanted it for warehousing now its no longer there... apparently it's ok to remove it for some projects just not others? who you know kinda thing in my experience
yes but regulation in the power of the corrupted is worse loose/no regulation . I've not seen a solution to the corruption problem, and I've seen even the nicest most altruistic get into politics later in their careers and become corrupted. regulation can hurt more than it helps in practice even if it seems in theory it is only a tool of good
It's actually kind of disgusting how transparently the EPA has been playing their hand to maximize exploitable/monetizable authority and jurisdictional area without regard for real environmental concerns, development impact, or indeed their own legal mandate.
There's absolutely an element of that organization that doesn't care either way what happens to the environment or community, they just want infinite authority under the guise of environmental protection so that you to have a reason to bribe them.
Of course, Texas is notoriously pro conservation and definitely not full of people who would complain about any sort of environmental protection given the chance.
A swamp near seashore is not going to help to provide water for people or agriculture. The whole seashore is covered with swamps like this that do not have any particularly interesting ecosystems.
But then, Texas politics is Texas politics, so I wouldn't be surprised if there indeed turned out to be significant abuse of protections laws for political gain...
It depends on your conception of what it means to own land. We don’t generally view land ownership as absolute in the way we would for say a coffee mug. In some sense all land is partly owned by society, the deed owner has many rights, but not absolute ownership.
Nope! At least, not really. Not evidence that I would find persuasive, anyway. I can only tell you that I know of a few stories from individuals who tried to get things built on their own property and hit impenetrable walls of bureaucracy at every juncture, while the next patch of land over is suddenly being developed into a $2 billion industrial plant of some kind by GloboOil.
The hypothesis that "money talks" is usually enough to explain stuff like this. Perhaps instead of political favoritism I should have simply said corporate power is always able to find a way around such obstacles and the little guy never is.
I think one could make the case that the government must compensate landowners for putative environmental restrictions. After all, if it's really that important, surely the taxpayers would be willing to pay for it, right? Why make the landowner foot the bill for something that benefits everyone else?
The right logic is the other way around. Why should the public compensate the land owner for something that also benefits the land owner?
By your logic, restaurant owners should also be compensated for not being allowed to serve spoiled food, and bosses should be compensated for not beating their employees.
If someone buys a piece of land, how does it benefit them if that land is then made unusable? If it's for public benefit, and restrictions for public benefit, then it should be owned by the public. Taking what cost a mans life savings doesn't seem the right way to go to make that happen.
> I think one could make the case that the government must compensate landowners for putative environmental restrictions. After all, if it's really that important, surely the taxpayers would be willing to pay for it, right? Why make the landowner foot the bill for something that benefits everyone else?
If you listen really close, you can hear Henry George spinning in his grave from the existence of this comment.
I don't think the world is run for anyone. Because that implies a level of conscious, intentional, consistent, a and long lasting decision making that simply doesn't exist at the global level.
It's easy to fantasize about some sort of global illuminati, since it's hard and scary to admit that even folks much smarter, more competent, with much more resources, discipline, etc..., than themselves can barely give a nudge to the rudder of mankind's future.
After all, that would mean the median conspiracy theorists has roughly zero chance whatsoever of doing anything meaningful, that can't just be nudged back in the future.
It would be a useful way to balance the costs vs benefits. If the gov't would put a price on it, I could violate the law here but compensate 100x as much elsewhere.
My town has a law where if a tree is over 10" in diameter, there's a fine of 5k if you cut it down. But actually, it's worse, because if they find out you plan to do this, or did it intentionally, they can continue to fine you arbitrarily and force you to re-plant a tree!
So you may own some land and have approval to build human habitation on it... but the tree prevents you, and you simply cannot do it via any legal means.
Otoh if I could... pay the town 5k, and also permanent preserve say 100 trees elsewhere... I could use my own land. I love trees as much as the next one, but it's just a huge risk to allow them to grow on my land cause once they pass that threshold, I irrevocably lose control of land I've paid for and continue to pay a lot of tax on.
It's also funny that if your enemy owns land, and you "help" his trees grow that thick without him knowing, property he planned to use as say an ultimate frisbee field will be permanently unusable for him, with no way out (except begging the city council, etc. and other behavior which is indistinguishable from bribery (money or psychologically))
My city also has a similar law for trees and I think it is the wrong approach. I think it incentivizes people not to grow trees since you might not be able to take them out later if needed. Instead we should have some sort of property tax discount per large tree or something.
Similarly, if you discover some endangered species on your property, current law encourages you to bulldoze it immediately before anyone else finds out.
Indeed. Best to destroy old buildings and pave over natural ecosystems, just in case. This is the way of perverse incentives.
Oh, and when building new buildings, make them as unremarkable and boring as possible, so they won't become historic in the future. Why take the chance? Indeed, make them ugly so the government might decide to pay you to get rid of them.
Depends on if they find the circumstances... suspicious.
I am not sure how much surveillance they do - in reality for large lots this restriction may not hold, since trees can disappear at night, be chipped up, etc. But for people in the suburbs, to cut one you need to get a crew in, and there are probably reporting requirements. Also the neighbors love to get involved.
But I do wonder if a tree imperceptibly had branches die, be removed, and then just gradually shrunk over time?
A lot of these laws don't cause much harm in a pre-surveillance world. But once there are full cameras on everything, seeing how they apply at 100% enforcement can be scary. But by that point there are defenders for each one, so they hardly change.
Some jurisdictions seem to be attempting to counter this sort of thing, and an aspect is: if you can't do it properly, we will, and send you the bill at our chosen rates. And we are going to check.
They already benefit from it though? Eg. Wetlands ease flooding during hurricanes, and quality of life improvements by being close to nature without pollution
I could see a one time payment when the restriction is first added, but once it's there, that's priced into the value of the property, and influences who will buy it
Why should tax payers foot the bill for somebody who wants land by the wetlands because they're an avid birder?
I too could get behind a one time payment. That would hopefully prevent landowners deliberately destroying the environment just to prevent it becoming protected.
It might even start a new class of landowner who buy uninteresting land, then cultivate lots of nature and wildlife, then make a profit when the government designates it a nature reserve.
I was just reading about a converse case that involved public land that was effectively "landlocked" by private land. The private landowners had assumed exclusive access to the public land. The case was made that their private land value should be adjusted commensurate with the additional public land value, since they were the only ones with access.
With a «right to roam» law this isn’t a problem. Most land around me is private, but with the right to roam I can move over private land as long as it is not farmland or someone’s house property (garden, parking lot etc). You can also move over grazing land as long as you remember to close the gate and you can move over farmland in winter time. You can also walk through people’s garden if needed to access trails etc. usually land owners have no problem with this and works together with local groups to maintain trails and access to trails. Granted, there’s not very much good farm land here, mostly mountains.
This is the crux of environmental misalignment in our system. There is not actual tradeable value for environment.
Most importantly, how to set a price for a view?
In some cases we have comparison for a tourist economy where we value the benifit of a view, but intrinsically we have no way to measure the value of a:
Pristine forest
Beautiful view
Clean lake
Healthy aquifer
Free space for camping, etc.
Future worth?
A carbon tax would put a price on one aspect, no? Same with various EPA fines. It seems like we have mechanisms to do so, it just comes down to whether we leverage them.
That entire category of laws are commonly used to apply selective leverage. NIMBYs love this one trick. They can be selectively waived too. In fact earlier this month the Biden administration waived 26 laws in South Texas to allow border wall construction.
The state of Texas is about three times the size of your country, and as a result, it contains several different ecological systems. There can simultaneously be a hurricane on one side of the state and a drought on the other.
The distance between Houston and Amarillo, both in Texas, is comparable to the distance between London and Berlin. I have driven at highway speeds for 10 hours without leaving Texas before when crossing it east to West.
The vast majority of the Mexican Gulf coast of the US is relatively swampy. Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida all have extensive areas of swampy wetlands.
If I correctly recall, Houston has frequent issues with flooding because so much of it is built on basically paved over wetlands.
If you look at Texas on Google maps or earth.google.com you'll see the west half is very dry and has little vegetation, but the east half is actually quite wet and verdant.
Humans using the land for recreation are far more destructive to wetlands than occasional rocket launches. Canaveral and Vandenburg have become de-facto protected wildlife refuges because humans with guns keep other humans away from them.
I know that if I was a turtle at Boca Chica I would rather deal with the occasional rocket launch than the ATV's that also use the beach.
More generally, if our goal is to help a certain type of environment, let's do that.
Let Musk buy up land a few miles away, convert it to more wetlands w/government help, permanently endow & protect it. The gov't could get 10x as much land protected as before - in exchange for giving up the few small acres near the launch facility.
It seems like everyone wins this way! Musk & SpaceX can do their work, environmental protection of land for the future & birds etc. has improved locally and nationally on net. The only ones who don't win are the bureaucrats who have approval over other people's productive work. So... this type of deal rarely ever happens.
Boca Chica is a test facility. SpaceX is only allowed 5 launches of the StarShip second stage, and 5 launches of the full stack each year (page 17 in [1]). More frequent launches will require a new environmental review. They plan production launches to occur out of Florida, and have already begun permitting and building of a launch site there.
They've built Starbase there, with all the rocket assembly facilities and the new expansions. Unless they're planning on shipping all the rockets via barge, I think it's safe to assume they'll send them to Florida by launching from Boca Chica.
They're building factories at Cape Canaveral too, the Starbase facilities have been designated as prototyping facilities. Any changes to production would be made , tested and optimized there first, then brought over to other production facilities like Cape Canaveral. Although initially they might still have to transport boosters and ships via barge to the cape.
The facilities at Starbase are far more than prototyping facilities. If that were the case, they wouldn't have needed a Megabay and be almost completely finished building a second. They would have just stood pat with the High Bay etc. Same with the new buildings replacing the temporary tents. Starbase will be cranking out LOTS of boosters and Starships.
When I say prototyping facilities, I mean as prototyping for the other factories. As Musk has previously said, since they want to mass produce Starships and boosters, the challenge is to design "the machine that builds the machine". That's why I mentioned changes to production being tested and optimized there rather than changes to the vehicles specifically.
Has Musk, Shotwell or anyone at SpaceX ever said that this was the case? I haven't seen any sign of this at all. And again, if Starbase was just for prototyping workflows, there's no need for two Megabays.
I could've sworn that Musk mentioned that Starbase would be mainly relegated to prototyping after the FAA limited them to 5 launches/year out of there. I think it was in the presentation where they announced the plans to work with T-Mobile? I'll see if I can dig it up later.
Why not ship by barge? It'll be far cheaper than the fees, costs and labour costs associated with a rocket launch. Both Brownsville and Cape Canaveral are well set up for barge shipping.
Also, they're expanding their factory in Florida, so they could be built on site.
There's that protected-from-open-ocean barge lane (I forget what it's called?) that I think runs right from Brownsville to Cape Canaveral, or close enough, I think they plan on using that.
Sure you could ship by barge. It's just that SpaceX has never said that's the plan. Looking at the expanding factory footprint at Boca Chica, it's obvious that this isn't just a test facility, but a production facility. My hunch is that the current limits of 5 per year will be expanded once they prove it "safe" to launch from the site. They'll boil that frog slowly.
While you maybe be right, I just want to note that SpaceX isn't just expanding factory footprint at Boca Chica. They will be manufacturing Starship in Florida as well and have already started expanding there too.
They've pretty much scrapped their initial plans to use old oil platforms for launches, and the size of a barge needed to launch (and retrieve the first stage) would be tremendous. That idea is a complete non-starter.
They did scrap their initial plans, because they won’t need that capability until they’re launching like 1000 times per year. That might not be until one or two decades from now. Would it make sense to try to maintain that capability starting now and then just let it rest for two decades.
They have mentioned recently that they do still plan to go to barge launching when they get to 1000 flights per year.
The idea is not crazy, at least not any more than anything else related to Starship. But it is not needed right now.
Methane is gas, liquified methane spills evaporate and go to atmosphere. Not perfect, but no land poisoning either.
SpaceX does use hydrazine-related components in Dragon and Crew Dragon, but they don't launch from Boca Chica (and rather small by mass) - AFAIK Starship is planned to be 100% methane-oxygen vehicle, justification for Mars flight.
It depends on the fuel, and the number of leaks (the latter usually being relatively high). Some fuels such as hydrazine and red fuming nitric acid are indeed quite dangerous, but Starship mostly uses methane and oxygen.
1) Fuel spills happen as a regular part of working with fuels (leaking pipes, loose fittings, safety purges, general clumsiness, etc) not just rocket explosions.
2) Even if a rocket explodes in the air it is unlikely all of its propellant will completely burn up (fuels aren't mixed, the ratios are optimized for a specific combustion conditions, and there are multiple tanks, etc), and there are many failure modes besides "massive explosion"
3) Just because the main component of a fuel will boil off eventually doesn't mean chemicals added to the propellant or produced in side reactions will
4) Hypergolic just means chemicals spontaneously combust on contact with one another; it has nothing to do with environmental risk.
> 3) Just because the main component of a fuel will boil off eventually doesn't mean chemicals added to the propellant or produced in side reactions will
What do you have in mind that exists in quantities large enough to make things "extremely toxic"?
> 4) Hypergolic just means chemicals spontaneously combust on contact with one another; it has nothing to do with environmental risk.
Nothing except if you look at the actual list of rocket fuels that get used.
> What do you have in mind that exists in quantities large enough to make things "extremely toxic"?
I don't know where you are quoting "extremely toxic" from but even small quantities of toxic chemicals can be cause for concern.
> Nothing except if you look at the actual list of rocket fuels that get used.
Just because a square's a rectangle doesn't make a rectangle a square. Hypergolics are toxic does not equal non-hypergolics are non-toxic. For example, hydrazine monopropellant.
> I don't know where you are quoting "extremely toxic" from but even small quantities of toxic chemicals can be cause for concern.
Look up a couple comments in the thread. "I was under the impression that regular use of rocket fuel made a lot of land extremely toxic."
And we can't just assume there are harmful additives in meaningful quantities.
> Just because a square's a rectangle doesn't make a rectangle a square. Hypergolics are toxic does not equal non-hypergolics are non-toxic. For example, hydrazine monopropellant.
Okay, technically it spontaneously decomposes upon contact with a catalyst. That's so close to the definition of hypergolic.
Also it was pretty clear what they were saying. You can nitpick the wording, but their underlying point is still valid. SpaceX isn't using toxic fuels.
> And we can't just assume there are harmful additives in meaningful quantities.
No one's assuming there are, but the onus is to prove that there aren't.
> Okay, technically it spontaneously decomposes upon contact with a catalyst. That's so close to the definition of hypergolic.
But that's not WHY it is toxic. A substance can be not only non-hypergolic, it could be completely non-flammable and still be toxic, like say Carbon Tetrachloride, which is why the parent comment that I was replying to saying "since it's not hypergolic, it's therefore not toxic" is wrong, which was the thing I was trying to correct. SpaceX isn't using toxic fuels, but not because they are not using hypergolic fuels.
> No one's assuming there are, but the onus is to prove that there aren't.
For an environmental assessment, yes. For someone casually arguing against the area becoming "extremely toxic" then we should need a reason to suspect large amounts of very bad additives.
> But that's not WHY it is toxic.
Yeah but nobody said that.
The post was giving reasons the area isn't being made toxic, and one of those reasons is because out of the list of normal rocket fuels only the hypergolic ones are terrible, and they're not using those fuels.
It's fine to point out that it's not directly because of hypergolic or not (though there are strong correlations based on how reactive things are), but it doesn't affect the actual point they were making. You made it sound like a rebuttal when it's not a rebuttal. At worst they worded it badly.
> 4) Hypergolic just means chemicals spontaneously combust on contact with one another; it has nothing to do with environmental risk.
Lmao, what are some hypergolic propellants that aren't toxic? They're insanely reactive by their very nature, that means they will react and fuck with anything that's alive. They're intrinsically incredibly toxic.
"Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don’t mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole."
Isaac Asimov, from the leading words to John D. Clark's "Ignition!"
While technically true, in rocketry - where the term was born - "hypergolic" mostly mean "of hydrazine family", which are (almost all extremely) toxic.
So it's a moot point to talk about the fine print. What was meant is that SpaceX doesn't pollute the land with poisonous fuel of the Starship, and the one argument is that the fuel isn't poisonous to begin with.
(And I'd really like to know what kind of additive would be in liquid methane - medium cryogenic - which Musk hopes to keep adding on Mars and which is toxic.)
Just because hypergolics are toxic doesn't mean non-hypergolics are non-toxic, which was my point.
That being said, there are plenty of propellants used as part of hypergolic combinations that aren't toxic. For example, oxygen, used as part of the hypergolic ignition system for SpaceX's merlin engines.
Liquid oxygen as a hypergolic propellant? No. Rockets do not use liquid oxygen as a hypergolic propellant.
Merlin engines combine TEA-TEB with liquid oxygen to start the engines but do not use TEA-TEB as a propellant. TEA-TEB also spontaneously ignites with air; that shit is insane but you deliberately chose not to mention TEA-TEB because you know TEA-TEB would fuck you up (presuming you could even consume it without catching fire first!) Leaving out such a pertinent detail leaves it hard to believe you're not arguing in bad faith.
Why are we even talking about hypergolic propellants? Because a fear mongering comment upthread suggested that rocket propellants are extremely toxic. Scratch hyperbolic propellants off the list and what are you left with? Kerosene, methane, hydrogen, and oxygen. None of these present a significant toxicity threat, the worse of them is kerosene which can contaminate the soil and groundwater but all of the others vaporize harmlessly. So the fear monger was trying to cash in on the toxic reputation of hypergolic propellants to insinuate that Starship presents such a threat itself. This is complete nonsense, a bad faith argument that even a single minute of research can refute.
> Liquid oxygen as a hypergolic propellant? No. Rockets do not use liquid oxygen as a hypergolic propellant.
No, I said they use liquid oxygen as a propellant, and they use liquid oxygen as a hypergolic. The fact that this doesn't make LOX a hypergolic propellant is precisely my point.
> TEA-TEB also spontaneously ignites with air
> you know TEA-TEB would fuck you up
EXACTLY. Hypergolic is a property of the combination of chemicals, toxicity is a poroperty of a single chemical. Air is non toxic no matter what you combine it with. TEA-TEB is toxic no matter what you combine it with. Air being hypergolic with TEA-TEB does not suddenly make it toxic, nor does it suddenly make TEA-TEB non-toxic.
I'm not arguing in bad faith, you just are fundamentally misunderstanding what point I am trying to make, which again is that hypergolicity != toxicity. No more, no less.
> Scratch hyperbolic propellants off the list and what are you left with? Kerosene, methane, hydrogen, and oxygen.
You are repeating the misunderstanding about hypergolicity. Scratch propellants that can be used in hypergolic combinations off the list and you have nothing. Scratch hypergolic propallant COMBINATIONS off the list, and you still have non-hypergolic combinations of all those highly toxic propellants. Methane and oxygen are both non-toxic, but that has nothing to do with the fact that they need an ignition source to burn with one another.
I figure it would depend on the rocket fuel. LOX and Liquid Hydrogen/Methane probably isn't so bad, stuff like hydrazine I could imagine wouldn't be great.
Depends on the rocket fuel. Oxygen, methane, hydrogen are basically completely non-toxic. RP-1 is a pure form of kerosene and is non-toxic enough that it doesn't need special handling. Hydrazine, fuming nitric acid, nitrogen tetroxide... basically all hypergolic propellants are absurdly toxic.
The SpaceX tests at Boca Chica have been almost entirely oxygen, methane, and RP-1.
Which rocket fuel? There's so many different ones. Methalox engines produce water vapor. Kerolox engines use refined kerosene, so lots of soot and your regular fossil fuel combustion byproducts. And then there's the hypergols, which are indeed, incredibly toxic.
The goal with Starship is to try to use Methalox everywhere so that's the only thing that needs to be resupplied. Long term this would be meaningful for ISRU, but short term this would be meaningful for in-space refueling and propellant depots. A more typical approach of using different fuel types for different things would create all sorts of restrictions on capabilities and would make in-space refueling more complicated.
Why would you think that methane is toxic? I know the average american knows nothing about even 6th grade chemistry but these kind of comment pop up on every thread about rockets.
>Two of six mice exposed to 70% methane in air died in 18 min, whereas mice exposed to 70% nitrogen in air developed only ataxia. Animals exposed to 50-90% methane in oxygen showed mild depression and a marked decrease in locomotion, but no ataxia. Thus, the toxic effect of methane is much greater than that of nitrogen when available oxygen is low, but methane has little effect when oxygen is readily available.
It seems that the toxicity of methane should be discussed not alone, but rather with respect to the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere in question.
“As of 2023, by mole fraction (i.e., by number of molecules), dry air contains 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases.”
Did they take out nitrogen, added 7 parts nitrogen to 10 parts of air, use something else than mole fraction, …?
> I know that if I was a turtle at Boca Chica I would rather deal with the occasional rocket launch than the ATV's that also use the beach.
If only it were that simple. If the occasional rocket launch is what causes that turtle's species to go extinct because it damages the shells of their eggs or the bright light disrupts their mating schedule or whatever that is all that matters to the turtle.
If only there was some multi-year programmatic environmental assessment that could be performed by experts in the field to determine whether this would occur or what mitigations would ameliorate the concern...[1]
Nah, that's crazy talk. Instead let's just speculate wildly.
When I took the tour of Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral several years ago I was kind of shocked by the number of alligators there. It was a bit jarring to see a Space Shuttle on the launch pad and alligators all over the roads. Some armadillos and lots of birds as well.
I’ve noticed that too, it’s infested with alligators. They get under cars in the parking lot. Walking up to a deep hiss emanating from beneath your car is a bit unnerving.
I recall an article that part of the prep work for shuttles landing in Florida included the usual "Foreign Object Debris" walk through to check the surface for things that might be a problem for the shuttle... but that this often included needing to wrangle alligators (sleeping in the sun on the nice warm tarmac :-)
Quick, name the date of the event? Without checking the sources? Not 9/11, right?
Chernobyl also demonstrates this effect that humans avoiding the place are beneficial to the wildlife. While both Bhopal and Chernobyl events are pretty horrible, I think the GP has a point.
I got the year for Bhopal correct, I didn't bother trying to guess the day or month (mostly luck, but I remember that I was younger).
I guessed 1989 for Chernobyl, at least I got the decade correct (remember it happened in either Jr High or High school for me).
I was a year off for the Challenger disaster (I remember riding the school bus to high school when it happened which narrows it down to about 3 years).
Boca Chica is possibly the best launch location in the entire USA. Not many people realize that it is at the same latitude as Miami!
The major issue with Boca Chica was the (literal) handful of residents who lived there, some of which refused to move when SpaceX first came around with offers to buy their land. I don't know what is the current status of them.
When doing eastbound launches the rotation of the Earth gives you some free starting velocity. This free velocity is higher the closer you are to the equator. Also helpful in eastward launches is ocean to the east of the launch site. If something goes wrong and your rocket crashes the debris is likely to hit uninhabited water rather than a suburb.
The bonus velocity you get for launching further south can end up increasing payload mass by significant percentages or giving a smaller mass more velocity to achieve higher orbits with the same amount of fuel.
I think the issues are political. Musk hasnt done himself any favors, it seems every person has a very strong opinion of him and therefore spacex, Tesla, and X. I’m sure there’s lots of “whoopsies” going on in the agencies looking at the launch license where approvals, reviews, or even emails stay in the todo pile for weeks. One dedicated person could double the time spent at any stage in the process.
This is why most CEOs and politicians never talk publicly except what the PR team and lawyers have carefully reviewed. When they give speeches they are written well in advance and carefully practiced. Once in a while a CEO or politician does and people at first like the candidness, but eventually (see Musk, Trump) they say something that someone doesn't like. Everyone has and thinks such thoughts that make us look really bad, but most of us get away with it because nobody is listening.
> This is why most CEOs and politicians never talk publicly except what the PR team and lawyers have carefully reviewed.
TBH, I find this sad. I remember when Marcus Lemonis got into trouble for a fairly benign off-hand remark. It really drove home the point how fickle people could be at the slightest perceived slight.
Then add the media that loves to fan the flames and it ends up being a really unfortunate system.
We need to find a way to get people back to honest and open dialogue.
Every once in a while enough people die that the remaining living choose not to kill each other. We call it being a liberal, and it doesn't happen very often (most people confuse liberal with other political stances that at one time liberals also commonly held, but these days most people we call liberal are not)
Well, many tech company owners and CEOs have been clearly supporting and voting democrat, yet no one ever thinks that’s a major issue, including republicans who use their companies. Facebook openly helped Obama with data, Schmidt was a massive Hillary supporter, Bezos is completely left wing, etc etc.
Seems like the intolerance of the left goes a lot further and is a lot more effective.
Amazing that the one time a tech billionaire is vocal about their views which lean right (sorry, second after thiel), suddenly everyone wants politics out of boardrooms?
There is no shortage of Republican billionaires having their way with American politics for personal gain and anyone who is paying attention is repulsed by it.
Look at Harold Hamm of Continental Resources oil company. He was asked to be Trump's energy secretary but he didn't want to leave the company he started which made him worth $25 billion.
Instead he has a superpac that funds Republican candidates and causes, and he flies his jet to Washington to schmooze politicians into supporting the oil industry through policy making.
He busses employees to the capital and hands them signs to protest bills which would raise taxes on the oil industry.
He emailed employees encouraging them to vote against medical marijuana because it's corrupting society.
I wanted politics out of boardrooms a long time ago!
Cape Canaveral wasn't a super attractive location in 1950 either; swamps, hurricanes, a lot of mosquitoes, hot summers.
But, same as Boca Chica, it is on US soil, relatively close to the Equator and you can launch rockets eastwards over the sea. And in both cases, closures of the sea for launches don't disrupt important sea lanes.
These days launching East isn't that important as it used to be at the height of the Space Race. However some 1/5 payload advantage is still interesting, so the factor is definitely taken into account.
They looked at the other sites, as a requirement of the EIS and PEA. There are none better. The only other places already have people or are also basically protected reserves or whatever. You know of any prime beach real estate that DOESNT have people? SpaceX would gladly develop that instead! There are none. And the Florida launch site (already reaching capacity and not a suitable site for prototype testing) is, of course, also a wildlife refuge.
Closer to the equator makes it easier to achieve an equatorial orbit and some slight benefits from the initial speed of the Earth's rotation but Super Heavy is so ridiculously over sized it doesn't need it. Things like the ISS are highly inclined so they're easier to reach from Russia's launch site as your latitude is essentially the default inclination you're be in when you hit orbit without spending the fuel to change it.
Coastal is still better from the perspective of being able to safely abort. The further inland you go the more risk you run of failed launches resulting in big pieces of the craft coming down over populated areas.
I'm pretty sure ITAR prevents US companies from exporting orbital rocket technology, as it's dual-use. Any government with access to a SpaceX rocket could learn a lot about how to develop long range missiles.
There’s a launch site in the Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands, and I’m pretty sure we don’t share tech with them. The ESA probably doesn’t share tech with the countries who host launches, IIRC they are French “territories” anyway.
It's not feasible to transport Starship or Super Heavy halfway across the Pacific. Even if you could, the launch site on Omelek Island is part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site[1] which is controlled by the US military. The Republic of the Marshall Islands never has access to the restricted technology.
It's hard to overstate how restrictive ITAR is. For example, ITAR covers generation 3 night vision devices. The US is hesitant to allow their export to allies, even for peaceful purposes.[2] When I bought a night vision device, I had to sign an acknowledgement that I wouldn't take it out of the country or even allow non-citizens to look through it (even on US soil). People caught violating these rules can be imprisoned for years.
I'd be wary of putting anything on an island chain like the Marshall Island. Their max elevation is only 10 meters and it's only going to get worse and they'll be hard pressed to build the sea walls needed to keep your space port open.
It also doesn't solve the ITAR issues which are strict when it comes to rocket technology because it's so close to the tech needed for ICBMs.
Unless I'm missing something, the ESA does its launches from overseas France in French Guyana and since France takes part in building the Ariane rockets, they would already have access to the tech
ITAR feels... outdated. Mate recently went from boat building to rocket building by acquisition. Suddenly place got retinal scans and wireless buttplugs, even tho they've been building same thing for months now.
Elon recently admitted (again) the planned frequency of Starship launches could be too high even to Cape Canaveral (10/day), so ocean-based launch platform may become necessity. By the same logic Boca Chica doesn't look like a long-term high-frequency launch place.
It does scream 'Research and Development' site way more than literal spaceport. If they get all the other issues fixed and the rockets are mostly reusable it might still be good enough as a production line.
SpaceX's first launch attempts "were launched from Kwajalein Atoll using the SpaceX launch facility on Omelek Island and range facilities of the Reagan Test Site."
There is also the "Kodiak Launch Complex (KLC), is a dual-use commercial and military spaceport for sub-orbital and orbital launch vehicles." Private companies Astra and ABL Space Systems have launched from it.
They gave up on Kwaj mostly from the terrible logistics and corrosive environment though. If it was hard getting an F1 there, I can't imagine the pain of assembling Starship...
The Spaceport Company is also trying to develop a system for providing near coastal ocean launch facilities that they call it Spaceport as a Service. Their team includes a person who helped to write the Part 450 regulations while at the FAA previously.
IIRC it was Boeing and about a half of ex-USSR space industry. So not exactly or even mostly USA. I had a girlfriend back then whose father worked on the program. Great times those 1990s.
Yeah, that was a bit odd - the main part Boeing - seemingly! - provided was the connection to the markets and to the regulatory environment. The rocket was Ukrainian, with Russian engine and a booster stage, and the launch platform was of Norway origin. But the company was still based in USA.
It isn't completely out of the question, Rocketlab has a launch site in New Zealand for instance. But, it does involve a lot of red tape, making it more expensive and less easy to move fast with. Probably also comes with a pretty limited list of options of significant US allies in stable regions (a large number of which likely aren't meaningfully cheaper/less regulated).
I don't think NASA's Kennedy Space Center, nor Cape Canaveral Space Force Station are exempt from EPA regulations. SpaceX has had to perform Environmental Impact Studies for all of their launch sites there as well.
There is 1000s of miles of coast on the Atlantic, hard to believe there no other easier location on the entire Eastern seaboard.
I understand that there will be a performance penalty at higher latitudes, however that really shouldn’t matter to what bocca chica is used for by spaceX
- FAA would never give licenses 100s of launches from Texas ever, volume is always planned from be Florida , just for experimental flights the penalty shouldn’t be a factor,
- given the order of magnitude change in payload capacity with Starship and reusability the performance factor shouldn’t really be critical even for production ?
The current , past and inevitable future delays at Bocca Chica is costing spaceX a lot , they are cash flow positive and far ahead of competition so they can afford it, but this is certainly does not look like the most optimal plan .
Sure, I am not playing armchair rocket scientist, I claim no expertise.
From my own experience:
I drove to Bocca Chica three weeks ago and also took the fantastic helicopter tour from south padre, while it was awesome to get ridiculously close to the launchpad (walking behind the dunes gets you really up close) unlike at Vandenberg, KSC where you cannot get so close from public land this easily it definitely looked like an inconvenient site
- roads are pretty narrow and don’t look to be that high load bearing for heavy traffic and are being worked on (it is single lane in part as they are still working on it piece by piece to strengthen them), it takes a while to go from Brownsville to Starbase
- there is also a border checkpoint that takes a long time to cross during peak hours > 30 mins on the way back.
- you can actually see the Mexico border (a light house) from the OLM, I was getting cell signal from Mexico. It is less than 10 miles, so close to the border comes with its own problems was my impression .
- limited space to expand either Starbase and also at the launchpad. You can fly close only to starbase and it is quite visible from the air.
I am no expert, these are just a tourist’s observations, however in 70 years of American rocketery smarter people than me private and public have done the research and rejected places like Bocca Chica before for good reason.
Claiming that this is the perfect spot and no other feasible location and it is just that I don’t know(which I don’t) better seems a bit silly?
People can make mistakes not every decision makes perfect sense in hindsight. It does not detract from the work they have been able to do so far.
not sure why you're being downvoted, you're correct. They're not allowed to launch test articles at KSC, precisely as it'd impact their capability to launch F9 and other launch providers close by.
So what you're saying is that SpaceX should shut everything down each time they launch a falcon 9... of with they do an insane number of times per year. When launches happen there they interrupt everything.
If that's going to be a problem with testing it's going to be a problem if/when they actually start using Super Heavy as something other than a debris machine...
Launching westward - on the Earth, from a non-polar site, to non-polar orbits - carries a large delta-v penalty, which translates into a huge payload penalty.
Launching westwards is working against the rotation of Earth, not the cheapest approach. Israel just does not have a large body of water, or a,large desert, to let the spent booster descend (or crash) into. I bet their launches all turn eastwards after reaching sufficient altitude.
What SpaceX is doing in Boca Chica is completely irrelevant compared to other environmental damage being done completely legally ex, in Louisiana by shipping and the oil industry, simply because it is grandfathered in. Like, literally dredging thousands of acres of wetlands into the gulf as regular business.
Everything that happens affects the environment somehow, but the scrutiny here is wildly disproportionate to the actual impact, of disrupting a couple acres of beach.
The "corporation" of SpaceX is a unique national asset that no other nation currently has, and it provides incredible value to US citizens to maintain that edge (Starlink alone, and Starship would give us a launch capacity that dwarfs Russia or China).
That matters! That's important! This isn't a "corporations vs the people" issue. Industrial policy requires thoughtful tradeoffs, and this FAA/EPA action isn't one.
You're telling me your giving up your car, and your computers, and everything else you use that comes with an environmental cost.
What's worse is non-optimal launches will have far more environmental impact because you have to do more of them or use more fuel. Talk about cutting off your own nose.
It's a baffling suggestion anyway no matter which direction you look at it from, there's nowhere on the west coast of the US that would be friendlier regulatory environment SpaceX than Texas. They would still have to deal with the exact same federal government, except to launch west they'd also have to deal with California and that would be jumping out of the frying pan straight into the fire. So what exactly would you hope to solve by launching west? Launching west to solve SpaceX's problems at Boca Chica cannot be a serious suggestion, honestly just baffling.
Because the things that can't be changed are good. Namely, lots of empty land to expand into, near the coast for shipping, good geo-position, temperate weather, sparsely populated but still close to a city and airport. We can expand the road and the state/fed gov will sell SpaceX the wetlands to cover them with concrete if necessary.
I'm not a space person, so this may be a very basic question but how is this same rocket supposed to launch from locations on the Moon or Mars? The propulsion force is obviously less because the gravity is less there, but that really enough to overcome all of this work they have to do on Earth? At least at Boca Chica you can get a construction crew there.
The large lower booster only launches and lands on Earth. The upper section (the Starship) will be able to land and launch on other bodies, but it has only a fraction the number of engines.
There is a different version of Starship for landing on the moon. Supposedly, for Mars, the single stage part of the rocket has enough acceleration to get off of Mars on its own.
The more you look into it, the more it becomes apparent that Starship is optimized for launching very large constellations of LEO satellites, not for Mars colonization or even Moon missions. It's publicly pitched as a Mars colonization rocket because this pipe dream is the foundation of SpaceX's recruiting strategy. (It's easier to motivate rocket engineers with the dream of Mars colonies than with SDI contracts.)
No other ship can launch 150+ tons in a 9m-diameter payload bay, use propellant that can be created on Mars, and can vertically land and take off again.
It seems all of these are required optimizations for Mars colonization or Moon missions. The fact that NASA selected Starship as its human landing vehicle for the US's return to the moon strikes me as a remarkable vote of confidence by a highly qualified organization with far more data than we have and a lot at stake.
The biggest issue with the Mars plan is there's no money in it, no customers lined up and ready to take advantage of it. And even if a serious organization of prospective colonists started organizing and got funding now (nobody has a plausible answer for how a Mars economy would work, how it would get enough Earth cash to pay for itself) it would still take decades for them to develop viable Martian colony hardware. Even test-runs of such technology in closed environments on Earth are in their absolute infancy and have virtually no funding. As a Mars rocket, Starship is a bridge to nowhere.
Yet Starship is costing SpaceX a whole heck of a lot of money to develop. I don't think that makes any sense unless they have some other business plan in mind for it. Launching massive constellations of satellites is that plan, there's a huge amount of profit potential in the near-term if they can make Starship work. Starlink alone might make Starship worth it, but fulfilling SDI contracts could be the real money cow (incidentally, SDI is politically polarized, and this might be part of the reason why Musk has "gotten political". If Musk really wants SDI contracts then he needs republicans to fund it.)
If you're inclined to believe Musk is sincere with the Mars colonization talk, then perhaps you could conclude that the plan is to make insane amounts of money building huge LEO constellations and then use that to fund Mars colonization. But from what I understand, Musk has said that SpaceX won't be building colonies and is focused on building the ships to get there instead. Who's buying?
> The fact that NASA selected Starship as its human landing vehicle for the US's return to the moon strikes me as a remarkable vote of confidence by a highly qualified organization with far more data than we have and a lot at stake.
Maybe. I'm very surprised SpaceX won that contract, maybe people at NASA really believe they can do it. Or maybe they decided to give SpaceX enough rope to hang themselves. Or maybe nobody really expects Artemis to get that far and the whole thing is basically a joke at the taxpayer's expense. Or maybe there are people at NASA who believe in SDI and want to make sure Starship is successfully developed. In any case, even if they can actually do the moon missions there's a huge gap between hanging out on the Moon for a few weeks and making a serious go at a long-term Martian colony.
I see. The important distinction that was a bit ambiguous in your post is that the Starship /program/ is better suited to LEO constellation delivery, not that the Starship rocket itself has some flaw that makes it ill-suited for Mars or the Moon.
Frankly, as someone very interested in Starship (and SpaceX in general), I don't disagree with you. But this isn't really a revelation - the strategy has always been Starlink first, HLS (NASA Human Landing System) second, Mars third. Due to delays and NASA-driven deadlines, it's arguable that HLS has moved into the top spot and limited launch activities will need to focus on fuel depot milestones instead of Starlink launches.
The Starlink business model is impressive. Two million people worldwide (as of Sept 2023) paying $200/month grosses $4.8 billion in revenue - about what NASA paid for HLS, IIRC. I don't see why pursuing that is a problem, and spending $5B on Starship to get a 30,000 satellite constellation in orbit to expand the capacity to 20 million subscribers per year or more is a slam dunk financially.
As for Mars, we know one thing: nothing will happen without a new heavy lift rocket similar to Starship. Once that's in place, doors will open - one may be to Mars, but I agree it's much further down the road than people think.
But I do believe that Musk's goal is Mars, and he's willing to spend a large percentage of his fortune to get there. In the meantime, he's betting that a lot of people will come along for the ride and address the challenges of a Mars mission (not even "colony") with new innovation.
Without Starship, there's no reason to research ISRU technologies like efficient Sabatier reaction equipment, or automated assembly, or million other Mars-specific technologies because we have no vehicle to get there.
With Starship, he's able to pull an entire industry forward. Maybe it is made of crazy dreamers, but crazy dreamers are often needed for a step-change level risk.
Perhaps it's a good thing. If they can figure out how to launch next to protected lands without damaging them, then they can set up launch facilities virtually anywhere.
The FAA will complete a Written Reevaluation (WR) to the 2022 Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) evaluating the new environmental information, including Endangered Species Act consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If the FAA determines through the WR process that the contents of the PEA do not remain valid in light of the changes proposed for Flight 2, additional environmental review will be required. The FAA will post the completed WR on this site.
Not even a due date. Not sure it qualifies as "news".
I wonder if they ever considered moving the launch site 5 or 10 miles south into Mexico. It would certainly change the regulatory regime and Mexico would gain a facility with access to space.
Are you familiar with the Boardroom Meeting Suggestion meme, where the guy says something audacious (or simply reasonable) and gets thrown out the window? Your comment fits that meme perfectly.
Yes, SpaceX is a private company, and no, they're not a weapons manufacturer at the moment... but only because the DoD has only asked them to loft surveillance equipment and not told them to launch warheads, and only because they've aimed for orbital targets above the atmosphere rather than on a different continent.
They've no doubt signed their life away on not exporting Merlin, Draco, and Raptor engine designs. You may be annoyed at the NSA's attempts to control and restrict "military grade cryptography" in the 90s, or at various bureaucracies that attempt to license which trades and businesses are allowed or not allowed to do various kinds of work. But in rocketry, they're deadly serious about their job.
I am actually reasonably familiar with ITAR, including part 121, category 4 (or IV). And Mexico has 'special trading partner' status under the USMCA (formerly NAFTA) and there are carve outs between the US and Mexico.
I recognize the reality of such a move would be complicated, require licensing and review, and have geopolitical consequences that everyone would want to weigh in on.
All that said, SpaceX could start that process in earnest (which is to say, announce it, start knocking down the regulatory hurdles) and that would give them tremendous leverage in their discussions with the FAA. It would take a while, it would take persistence, but the longer they pushed for it the closer it would get to reality. It would create a credible alternative (if somewhat longer) path to launch against the push back by the US Gov't agencies.
The politics of space flight are complicated, but they are politics.
I would think that the people here who watched Uber take on the politics of the cab monopolies, or the EU's politics of privacy reaching in and impacting US companies, would begin to understand that laws and regulation are an expression of the prevailing politics and when the politics change the laws change to support the current point of view. Those examples are clearly not as significant as national security politics but history tells us that even those change.
The crypto wars, which I was in the middle of, are a good example of going from "you can't do that" here are the laws, regulations, etc. To "okay fine."
To be clear, I don't expect SpaceX to advocate for building a launch facility in Mexico. Their somewhat mercurial "technical guy" with the billions of dollars at his disposal however doesn't seem to shy away from politically difficult strategies if he sees an advantage in them. That makes betting against SpaceX opting to build a launch facility further south not as safe a bet as it would be say for Blue Origin doing something like that.
The launch site is 20 feet from the border. (hyperbole, but they are pretty much on the edge. You can walk there.)
The FAA directions explicitly tell them they're bound, obligated to seek clearances from Mexico to do work which impacts Mexicans. I read the doc:
The VLA is approximately 2.2 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border and the LLCC is approximately 1.3 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border. ... SpaceX would coordinate with the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation–Mexico if any airspace, land, or water access restrictions in Mexico were required.
There's precedent for these sort of foreign enclaves that would still be a part of the host country but fall within the geographical borders of another. Mexico could be open to some sort of agreement.
France keeps French Guiana and the ESA gets to launch rockets there. It's strategically valuable.
Guantanamo was more just an example of a foreign presence that avoids the challenges of actually working in a foreign country. A "rocket embassy" in Mexico would probably just have some of the same challenges of getting stuff to Texas.
There was Sealaunch[0] a Russian company. And they had a pretty good track record of launches. But it eventually fell into bankruptcy. At the moment, SpaceX does not have the capability to do ocean launches.
It does lead to a question about how happy different branches of the US government are with each other.
I don't know how any of this works though; assuming everyone else was cool with it, does the FAA need to be consulted in such a scenario? Does the FAA have worldwide jurisdiction over launches by/for USA companies?
This will presumably matter in the (IMO unlikely) case of suborbital city-to-city civilian transport via Starship launches.
> Does the FAA have worldwide jurisdiction over launches by/for USA companies?
Yes it does. Per https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/commercial-space-transportation... "An FAA license is required for any launch or reentry, or the operation of any launch or reentry site, by U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, or by any individual or entity within the U.S. "
That would require an ITAR export license for Mexico, which shouldn't be too difficult since there are many defense manufacturers located in Mexico (ITAR is for weapons of course, but the same export controls apply to rockets)
This is structurally a reminder they are bound to meet the rules, which are government rules not the ones they want to believe apply, the ones a government can force on them and shut them down, for not meeting.
But, wrapped up in nicer language.
SpaceX must obtain a modified license from the FAA before it is authorized to conduct a second Starship/Super Heavy launch. The modification must address all safety, environmental, and other regulatory requirements. As part of that license application determination process, the FAA will review new environmental information, including changes related to the launch pad, as well as other proposed vehicle and flight modifications.
The VLA is approximately 2.2 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border and the LLCC is approximately 1.3 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border. ... SpaceX would coordinate with the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation–Mexico if any airspace, land, or water access restrictions in Mexico were required.
Ie, they have obligations to other economies, significant economies which the US government does not want to piss off.
I don't understand why so many people are so cynical about Starship being able to fly reliably when SpaceX has repeatedly demonstrated that they can build rockets.
It feels like if a prototype Toyota had a wheel fall off and everyone immediately assumed Toyota was incompetent and incapable of making cars. It just makes no sense.
I still think the belly-flop landing into the catch tower still seems… unproven to me.
I think it’s plausible that they can make it work, but I don’t think it’s a certainty that it’ll work out. I don’t really know what the backup plan is, if they can’t get the belly-flop and flip to a high enough level of reliability.
I also think the development timelines promised to NASA seemed… overly aggressive (as if they were Musk timelines, which never hold instead of Shotwell timelines, which usually only slip a bit)
That’s… not quite true. They tried (3? 4?) times, and the final flip-and-land catadtrophically failed all but 1. They have done it once, mostly gently, but they have not yet, to my mind, demonstrated that they’ll be able to do it reliably.
It seems likely that they’ll get there, but “hit it once” is not demonstrated to my satisfaction.
When they can hit it 3 out of 4 tries, I’ll believe they can get to a place where it’s reliable enough for cargo missions (95%). When they land it 50 times in a row without a failure, then I’ll believe they have a good shot at putting people on it eventually.
This is what I mean by the (imo) unfounded cynicism about SpaceX. Failed 3 or 4 times, kinda sorta got one. That's a bad record for a certain type of engineering; but not for SpaceX, who is intentionally trying to launch fast, fail fast, and iterate.
It took _20_ launches to get a successful Falcon 9 upright landing. By 2021, across 31 launches they had a single landing failure. Across all of 2022 and 2023 YTD, 137 launches, their success rate is 100%.
By comparison, the shuttle program had 2 failures across 135 launches.
SpaceX is achieving higher levels of reliability for way less cost than anyone else.
Failure is part of the process and the process is clearly working.
> This is what I mean by the (imo) unfounded cynicism about SpaceX. Failed 3 or 4 times, kinda sorta got one. That's a bad record for a certain type of engineering;
I wasn’t saying that the failures indicate that the process isn’t working. You’ll notice that wasn’t my initial point at all when I expressed my skepticism.
I only brought it up to respond to the point: “They have already flight tested the belly flop flip and had no problems with it.”
That isn’t true. They have had problems with it. That’s why I mentioned those tests.
Could they continue to iterate on it and work out those problems? Yes! They could. Could they continue to iterate on it, and find the problems to be very hard to overcome? Yes, that kind of thing has also happened in SpaceX history.
I’m not saying they’re doomed to fail. I’m saying there’s something that seems to me relatively high risk, and a core part of their plans. I don’t think that aspect has been fully de-risked, and I don’t understand what the alternative option would be if they can’t make it reliable enough.
If you call that unfounded skepticism, then I’d turn around and say you’re being overly optimistic.
> It took _20_ launches to get a successful Falcon 9 upright landing.
I know. I watched every single one live. As I’ve watched every single Starhopper test live. I remember exactly where I was for their first successful landing of each.
I’m not hoping they fail. I desperately want them to be successful. If you asked me to bet on it, I’d say more likely than not that they get it sorted. But I’m less confident than I was for the F9 landings.
SpaceX is trying to do many unprecedented things with the Starship. Any of those things could fail, because the approach they took turned out to be wrong in retrospect.
The same is true for all good R&D projects. If there is no real risk of complete failure, you are not being ambitious enough.
You probably hold yourself to the same standard on separating the good vs the bad but do you allow that same freedom from everyone you know? It’s like finding out your family doctor cheated on his wife after he died; it says something about character but doesn’t diminish accomplishments.
The next question is if we are able to afford everyone the freedom to separate actions from character then would we be better off?
I couldn’t agree more. Online if you utter respect for some of his accomplishments your considered a fanboy. He’s an idiot on social media but he’s accomplished some amazing things for humanity.
For humanity, really? So he cares about humans? Human rights? He values life?
He seems to care for future humans, current humans can suffer, it doesn’t matter because everything will be so great in 100 years. But wait, maybe it won’t be so great because another great leader will disregard current humans, for humanity?
As an US corporation they would still need FCC and FAA licenses for all launches. In addtion, operating in a country that is not a US ally will significantly complicate compliance with export control and ITAR. The main relief from regulation would be that EPA regulations don't apply, and that hasn't been a major holdup:
> In the Written Re-Evaluation, the FAA concluded that the issuance of a vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, that the data contained in the 2022 Programmatic Environmental Assessment remains substantially valid, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action. Therefore, the preparation of a supplemental or new environmental document is not necessary to support the Proposed Action.
The biggest issue with their last launch was that the flight termination system failed to destroy the rocket in a prompt manner and needs to be re-certified, regardless of where they launch from.
I was under the impression they can't due to ITARS / it being technically rocket technology. I know EU launches from French Guiana but that's still technically France or at minimum has a deep relation
I don't see why SpaceX couldn't launch from there even if it required some kind of special ITAR permission first. It's not like those haven't been made before if needed. SpaceX has launched EU spy satellites anyway and the US used to launch some satellites with Ariane 5 etc. Or am I missing something here? It just seems like it shouldn't be a big deal if SpaceX constructed a launch site in French Guiana or some other country that participates in American space programs.
I think the problem is more logistical. SpaceX does not launch rockets like other companies do. They build them at the launch site and then roll them out and launch them right next to the factory. If they launch from French Guiana they would have to ship the rockets, there, plus build a facility to make repairs and adjustments. It would just be an incredible headache for them.
Elon Musk has stated that launch pad/landing tower complex is just as important and difficult to build as the rocket. And that building the manufacturing factories and the processes to build one rocket a week is even much harder. Having the factory and launch site at the same location is a huge plus especially given SpaceX's philosophy of quick iteration.
The rockets are built at the site they're launched from, they'd need to rebuild all that infrastructure. They're already doing this at KSC and have been for the past year or more now.
N1 (USSR Lunar mission) rocket had similar engine group design - 30 similar engines (NK-15).
I remember one professor in our university who did post-mortem analysis of the program failure.
He compared that setup with 3-body problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem) where system exhibits nearly chaotic behavior on small disturbances - not stable. 30+ driving engines just multiply the severity - extremely not stable. Plus parasitic resonances in engines and all such wonders.
N1 had very fat backlink (for that time) to base where control system / computers of the engine pack was located. Sure, computers are better now than when but I suspect problem of controlling such pack is not really solvable due to instability of physical system.
I really want to be mistaken but here is my educated guess - this thing will not fly.
All successful designs so far have one or two main engines, may have additional engines but of significantly lower thirst.
The N1 failures were attributed to the engines, NK-15, which had too aggressive parameters for the time. The next generation of engines, NK-33, showed much greater reliability.
With the system of such complexity, which was planned to get to work with test launches - because ground-based test systems didn't exist (for the first stage) - it's no big wonder first four launches weren't successful. Even with them the 4th almost completed the 1st stage burn. The chances for the next flight, with NK-33, to be successful at least for the first stage were rather good, and in few more flights they could get to operational reliability.
Time and money were against the engineers, however.
This all doesn't prove ~30 engine stages can't fly. They are more complex - sure, but still.
> All successful designs so far have one or two main engines
What a ridiculous falsehood. Every manned rocket to reach orbit since 1966 has used 5 or more engines. Of those that are currently operational, none have fewer than 8.
N1 designers did not have good computers. Chaotic behavior does not mean that system is impossible to control (e.g. double pendulum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6vr1x6KDaY).
> All successful designs so far have one or two main engines, may have additional engines but of significantly lower thirst.
What? The SLS has 4, and its the highest tonnage rated operational rocket in existence. The Falcon Heavy has 27 engines and flies commercial NASA missions
I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.