41–50 of 219 posts
I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.
But still, competition is good.
Why don’t they just give the money to spacex? This is such typical French/eu behaviour. Let’s build something that already exists, for 10x the price, 10 years late, so that we can create jobs and have our own... Except the market viability is close to 0. how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.
I don't want my tax money to go fund SpaceX. SpaceX is American and all their capabilities are practically owned by American entities. Europeans like me cannot even work for SpaceX, so unless we have our own parallel programs we would just have no capability at all in this space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, it would be foolish of the EU to be so dependent on a foreign company, dependent on a foreign law on a subject as strategic as space. It is a crucial choice that, as a EU citizen, I applaud.
It's not beyond the realms of possibility that around the same time as the sample returns to Earth, the US could have geologists' boots on the ground on Mars doing actual geology in situ, courtesy of SpaceX/Starship. Kind of puts this effort in perspective. They should be going all out for reusability, but instead they chose the oldspace pork approach. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
I mean... maybe? What's your suggestion here? NASA and ESA should put all interplanetary work on hold, in case Musk delivers on time and on budget for once?
Why don’t they just give the money to spacex? This is such typical French/eu behaviour. Let’s build something that already exists, for 10x the price, 10 years late, so that we can create jobs and have our own... Except the market viability is close to 0. how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but that’s true for all space companies. The surprising thing about SpaceX is that SpaceX delivers more than other corporations which promise less than SpaceX promises.
You agree with what I said, but the sentiment with which I said it wasn't positive enough, so now you've gotta jump in to defend SpaceX? That marketing scheme sure does work. It's no surprise that the best-funded company produces the best results, but it would be interesting to find out if a more honest company could produce better results with equal funding.
Generally with more money behind them, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they not even planning to at least try and send a fuel factory on the first Mars launch?
I don't know. But in any case, it's not just the fuel. Have you seen the proposed Moon-Starship? They'd require some quite impressive crane to even get cargo into the ship. Additionally, there's the problem of the landing site. It's considerably more difficult to land a rocket on unprepared, rocky terrain than on a carefully prepared landing pad. Plus a suitable area has to be found first, too. There's simply no guar…
Why don’t they just give the money to spacex? This is such typical French/eu behaviour. Let’s build something that already exists, for 10x the price, 10 years late, so that we can create jobs and have our own... Except the market viability is close to 0. how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.
i bet US would have loved Airbus do not exists so Boeing made more money.
For strategic industry you don't want to minimize your dependency on external factors, some natural disaster happens and you no longer have food to feed your citizens or no longer have medicine or your software will refuse to run etc.
> The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement. I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years. But still, competition is good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangential to the topic of this post, but how have you found brilliant? I’ve been considering it but don’t know if it’s worth adding another subscription to my monthly spend when I could presumably get a lot of the same knowledge from YouTube (albeit in a less structured way). Any thoughts?
Plus: Brilliant’s computer science courses cover slightly more than my actual software engineering degree from Aberystwyth university, and their maths courses cover more than I did at A-level. The various introductions to matrices (in different contexts each time), are better than the introduction I had in my A-levels (with a good teacher!), and I would say they are of comparable goodness to 3blue1brown. Only, all of…