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I can’t believe how little news coverage there has been about this. Seeing that thing land was probably the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s difficult for the average person to really understand why this is a major innovation. Showed this to my parents and my dad’s comment was “haven’t they already done this?”. If you don’t realize it’s a different rocket it does look basically the same as what they’ve been doing for years now.
I think the average person gets it right. It’s a nice feat to catch the booster and it will save money. But that’s a side quest. The main quest of getting an actual load to orbit and beyond is still pretty far away. At least compared with the official time line where they wanted to achieve much more than that three years ago.
I know they market mars hard, but the more relevant thing this is enabling is the starships that will be used for the NASA Artemis missions and upcoming moon base efforts. Those missions are going to need a few heavy flights each for the lander and a re-fueling ship, in addition to the SLS + Orion capsule for the actual astronauts.
Still wish the money was being invested in NASA to do themselves, and that it was being done without all the waste and environment destruction SpaceX so enjoys, but this is still a big deal to ensure Artemis happens.
Curious, how is SpaceX being wasteful? Aren’t they operating significantly more efficiently than NASA has in the last like half century? Even if you’re counting material waste, they’re hardly the worst offenders; have you seen the plastics industry? Let alone consumer packaging
NASA does a hell of a lot more work than just build rockets lol. SpaceX and all the other private space companies focus on a few of the wide array of programs and services NASA does. They certinally have some poor decisions in their history (as does every space program of the 20th century) but comparing SpaceX’s spending with an appropriate context of NASA’s spending is ludicrous. Its not something you can just put into numbers and any comparisons I’ve seen thus far have been wildly skewed in SpaceX’s favor for marketing reasons.
NASA (and ESA, RosCosmos, others) funding provided decades of R&D SpaceX uses to build its products with and the university curriculums all the engineers at SpaceX learned at.
Also, we dont know how a NASA that wasnt so de-funded since the 80s would have operated, but it’s well established that the budget cuts and uncertainty those created have been a major factor in its ability to build new programs like Artemis, Orion, SLS, etc. in a manner that would be efficient. SLS was bogged down for years waiting for congressional approval that was repeatedly blocked or maliciously modified last minute by congressional and senate republicans, a form of efficiency knee-capping that the agency never faced in the Apollo or Space Shuttle days.
have you seen the plastics industry? Let alone consumer packaging
Not an apples to apples comparison. Check out the many lawsuits and reported criticism of the more careless Starship test flights
A lot of rockets will probably be needed for the new space station being planned by Vast. That starts launching modules in 2028.
Edit: Vera -> Vast
For a company with plans so ambitious, they only have a marketing site, a YouTube channel, and some news articles from 2+ years ago, much less a partnership with SpaceX.
News article from a few days ago
https://spacenews.com/vast-releases-design-of-haven-2-commercial-space-station/
“Vast” would be a different company from the one marketing the Vera station, no?
My bad, I got Vast mixed up with Vera.
I edited my original comment.
Why is the moon more relevant than mars?
How is SpaceX destructive compared to other rocket companies? Also, do you know who built the Saturn V?
Also, do you know who built the Saturn V?
I’m not even going to get into a discussion of NASA competence. There are more than enough records available through widely accepted reporting and media to disprove any of the nonsense Elon cultists spew. Whether you subscribe to the Elon cult mindset or not is your prerogative and not an accusation I’m making…
Additionally, a significant amount of the funding for starship is coming from NASA, specifically from the Artemis program, to the tune of nearly $4 billion.
Elon can scream “mars” all he wants but he has virtually zero progress to report other than some wild plans to just throw people in tubes in the general direction. Last I checked, unless I’ve missed something, SpaceX has not put any amount of work into what is required to keep people alive on mars, much less alive on the trip to mars, and seeing as Elon’s track record on delivering promises by self-imposed deadlines is basically 0%… We’ll see if it ever even happens. Especially since he changes the goal post upon “delivery” (see: full self-driving basically never happening on top of killing more people per car than any other self-driving technology, cybertruck having a fraction of the features and capabilities that were promised on top of being extremely unsafe, semi being a massive failure, that ridiculous re-invention of the subway but for cars that makes 0 financial sense, and probably many more items I’m not thinking of at this moment)
idk about the Tesla Semi being a failure, PepsiCo seems to like them
Because there are actual plans to go back to the moon?
They didn’t say spacex was more destructive than other rocket companies. It’s been widely reported that SpaceX has been bad for the local environment.
I could be mistaken on this: don’t they get just one try?
It wasn’t the first starship launch but it was the first where they tried to land onto the chopsticks. Last time I believe they simulated the same thing but landed in the ocean instead. They did get just one try with this particular rocket since if it was unsuccesfull the rocket would now be in a million pieces.
For that particular booster, sure. For boosters in general, not really.
They could have tried again with another booster and landing pad.
The landing pad wasn’t really at risk. If they had hit it it would have been relatively low speed, by the time it was at the catch attempt it was at like 30 km/h or something. Hitting a big steel object at that speed would have probably done more damage to the booster than anything else
Not necessarily, the launch tower is something like a half billion dollar piece of infrastructure and if it had been damaged or leveled it would have been an enormous setback in terms of money and time, as the second tower is nowhere near ready