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throw5959

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Starship Flight 7 2 years ago

Compare how much money each company spent before the first/second/etc flight. The ENTIRE program has so far cost less than one set of SLS engines - that they took from older rockets without changes.

They have explicitly and publicly chosen to rapidly iterate without spending billions to make sure the first try goes well - it's simply different culture. The first Starship wasn't even something you could actually call a rocket, it was a water tower with a bunch of rocket engines.

They wanted data about the engines and got them - mission 100% accomplished, that's not a failure in any way except for media shock value because "wow such boom". Come on, you call yourself an engineer? Do you not try your software or hardware before 100% completion? You don't have CI with integration and e2e tests? There's no other way to do this cheaply and quickly, you have to try.

Call me when any other company achieves what Falcon9 did, then we can discuss issues of SpaceX engineering culture and how others are better. But they are not, few test flights are not interesting, what's interesting is that they are 10 years ahead of everybody else and offer by far the cheapest and by orders of magnitude most reliable orbital lift service.

Others should stop waiting 10 years before the first flight and accept some risk, the world would be much better by now.

Starship Flight 7 2 years ago

SpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.

Starship Flight 7 2 years ago

Almost a complete failure except for second ever caught first stage...

BTW they first tested a redesigned version of Starship today.

I don't know how to put this if you don't see the difference yourself by now, but that's not an orbital rocket that could lift anything from Earth nor land back there. One huge problem is hypersonic aerodynamics, something you absolutely don't care about on the Moon. The payload weight can be much greater due to tiny gravity. Google "tyranny of the rocket equation".

Thank you, if he really said that he is one of the best players, that would be a lie. I don't think just streaming a leveled up account is a lie, though.

Why do you talk about hours per day? Does it matter if you play less hours per day, but more days?

Apollo 11 had a three stage rocket and every stage was discarded. SpaceX is obviously not the first company to land something - but landing a rocket booster that just performed an orbital lift is the interesting and extremely hard thing to do. The payload can be entirely designed to land - but the booster has many other constraints (payload weight and its desired velocity and trajectory being some of them).

To do what Apollo 11 did without discarding the boosters you also need orbital refueling and probably rapid turnaround (or a huge inventory of boosters), which SpaceX plans to develop next. Awesome stuff.

I told you what didn't happen - the situation wasn't as clear as you say. Everybody in the space industry was absolutely sure he is totally crazy and it's impossible to do with an entire first/second stage rocket booster.

He built the company that built the booster, which to me is at least as interesting as building the booster itself.

It's not just about money - Bezos has much more money available than SpaceX had in 2002-2015, and yet his rockets still don't land.

Where does he lie about a video game? Maybe he has someone boost his level. Did he say it's not true? Just doing that can have many reasons - maybe he likes a shiny number there, wants a bigger challenge, more fun because of higher level and more items or whatever.

Just playing on an account that I didn't level up myself is not lying. I know that some competitive amateur players think it's the end of the world but no, nobody cares.

Well I heard it myself from practically anybody up until 2015. I even attended quite a lot of conference talks on this topic... I'm sure it's not hard to find it online, famously a NASA director (I think?) did so.

Sorry but no, this is absolutely not what happened. I am watching it closely ever since SpaceX was founded in 2002. There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.

Mars is completely off topic, as they didn't land the booster there. We had Space Shuttle before and it didn't say much about landing rocket boosters.

I called him crazy myself (and I do think it's true), to illustrate that I am aware of his antics and it's not a reason to stop listening.

Sure, I'm not saying Musk is the only person who has interesting things to say about it. You're absolutely correct about these other people and I listen to them too.

But you're not giving Musk enough credit. All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit, and what is interesting here is that he went and made it happen anyways.

I'm not talking just about the engineering, everything is interesting here - the project management, the hiring, the investments, the business side... Musk has a lot of input and influence in all of these, he was the one who decided and paid for it.

What other person started a rocket company from scratch and got them landing? Of course I want to hear everything he says. Yes, he's crazy - seems to be a requirement if you want to do such stuff. Doesn't mean I will ignore it. I can think for myself, it's not like I take everything at face value.

All that to say, perhaps other people don't prioritize values like you do. The technical excellence that companies repeatedly achieved under Musk is incredible.