Microblog Memes

While Falcon 9 is a dependable rocket...

1. One has never been turned around as re-usable in anywhere near 24 or 72 hours as Musk claimed they would be, fastest turn around to date is I think 3 weeks, roughly in line with faster Space Shuttle turn around times. No where near 'rapid'.

EDIT: My turnaround times for the Space Shuttle were off, fastest was 55 days and its more like 3 months in average. The point I was attempting to illustrate, which is Rapid Reusability Is A Huge Element To Making The Cost Effectiveness Gains Promised, And SpaceX Is Still Off By An Order Of Magnitude, Over A Decade Into The Falcon Program.

2. The cost to launch a Falcon 9 has never dropped to around 5 million dollars, as Musk claimed they would be. Even accounting for inflation, launches average around ten times the cost Musk said they would be. Musk is charging the government around 90 million per launch: Soyuz was the only option, so the Russians could overcharge a bit for ISS launches, now the Russians are not an option, and Musk is similarly overcharging.

3. Starship/BFR is woefully behind the schedule for accomplishments that Musk claimed it would reach in his hype shows, woefully behind schedule for the NASA contract.

4. Starship/BFR has cost taxpayers billions of dollars and so far has a proven payload capacity of 0, would require 12 to 16 launches to accomplish what a single Saturn V could do, has not demonstrated the capacity to refuel in orbit, is not human rated, and is now just being moved back to Starship 2 and 3, with Musk now claiming Starship 1 actually has half the orbital cargo capacity he has up to recently claimed it has.

5. For comparison, the Saturn project had a development time similar to how long BFR/Starship has... never once failed, proved it could do what it needed to in 67, 7 years after development began.

(They also had computers maybe a little bit more or less powerful than a ti-83 and had to basically invent a huge chunk of computer science)

Starship/BFR development has been a shit show.

Dear Moon is cancelled.

Remember when the repulsive landing Dragon Capsule was going to land humans on Mars?

Remember when we were going to have multiple Starships starting a Martian colony by now?

SpaceX in general has gotten high on their own supply over the last 10 years and has made all sorts of lofty claims about lowering launch costs, rapid reusability, rockets for military asset deployment to anywhere on Earth, rockets as basically super fast commercial airliner travel, all of which have driven massive public hype and investor confidence, and then these claims are just forgotten about when it becomes apparent just how difficult these are to achieve, or in some cases, laughably, obviously unworkable with even a modicum of thought.

The truth of the matter, as proven by Musk's handling of his other companies, is that Musk just says things, "We can do this now!", when in reality he's basically had a napkin drawing plan a month ago, calls this prototyping, and now its a month later, and he emailed somebody and said 'Make this happen' with no further explanation, thus the project is now in development.

bUt aLl tHe sTaRsHiPs eXpLoDeD!!!

Good name.

Replace Falcon with Starliner. Boeing is big enough to fuck up twice.

Put Google’s AI projects in the 4th box

Yeah honestly space x is rocking it because of the immense talent of the team that exists there. They do over 100 successful launches per year now. It has transformed the space industry as humanity has ever known it. That's fucking cool.

Imagine simping over a Nazi worshipper like Musk who isn’t qualified to run a McDonalds.

There's 2 main reasons spacex gets shit. First one is Musk. Second one is the weird competitive thing SpaceX fanbois do where they criticise the shit out of all other rocket manufacturers and endlessly praise everything spaceX do.

A great deal of the problem with the modern rocket industry is that it has been commercialized.

Indian and Chinese public sector agencies don't need to run around sucking off donors for money or inventing new ways to generate profit on taxpayer expense. They can operate at-cost with a consistent budget and aim at targets set by experts in the field rather than investors with the biggest wallets. Consequently, they're putting up better and more efficient spacecraft - India put its Mangalyaan probe into orbit around Mars for a measly $75M, China's the only country left with a nationally independent space station - than anyone in the private sector has managed to date.

Back when NASA wasn't an entirely owned and operates subsidiary of Boeing, it was able to go toe-to-toe with the USSR. But now the pursuit of quarterly profits is dissolving the western space industry to the point where we can't even get people off the ISS without Russia's help.