Earlier quoted context omitted.
He cares about freedom and the spark of consciousness, of which he requires a foundation of a strong and free country; maybe you're being perfectionistic, e.g. The Selfish Gene?
Maybe it's time for you to turn off your screen, go outside and touch some grass. Musk is an egotistical megalomaniac. To even think of his ego in any positive light makes the problem with you. Calling someone a pedophile because they wouldn't use his submarine is just an example.
Starship's Sixth Flight Test
401–410 of 455 posts
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's time for you to turn off your screen, go outside and touch some grass. Musk is an egotistical megalomaniac. To even think of his ego in any positive light makes the problem with you. Calling someone a pedophile because they wouldn't use his submarine is just an example.
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And what if you could have compassion for Elon instead of imbalanaced judgement, to try to understand where do you think his drive may have come from? Could it have stemmed from immense stress and/or self-esteem issues that most, if not all of us have - whether we know we have them or not, whether they drove us to succeed to the same degree or not? Maybe you've been "fortunate" to not have to experience that or that that the way you coped with it led you on a different path than Elon's trajectory?
Also, with your ad hominem as the start of this message, does that make you any better than Elon for offhand calling someone a pedophile? I'd argue your judgement and emotional regulation ability is at minimum equal to his, but probably worse, but that you also have resentment and don't put much thought into things - you just have to impulsive write 3 short sentences to quell whatever amount of emotion that you couldn't instead just let pass you by - to "let go" of it, instead venting on HN in a drive-by comment.
P.S. In your profile you say you should stop being bothered by your karma score. I'd argue it's not a problem itself, however what you do need to - would benefit to work on - are emotional regulation practices, e.g. developing stress regulation skills for your body and mind, where there's a biofeedback loop: stressful thoughts cause stress in the body, stress-filled body causes stressful thoughts - so you have 2 avenues to address and learn to : your body and your mind. Note that as you begin to find practices that allow your body to calm that will allow space in your mind for old trauma-stresses to arise, old-unprocessed memories that you probably don't even realize are there and are still causing you stress and directing your behaviour will surface, and you will need to learn how to process those.
P.P.S. You can either cower by the mob, and coddle yourself, avoiding the possible flood of downvotes that can occur when you respond in threads about Elon Musk or other "hot topics" - attracting the gaze and often knee-jerk reaction of downvotes and replies by the ideological mob who despises Elon, to keep your "precious" karma score regulated and avoid it going down - a fear , or ideally you learn to regulate yourself and learn to discern if people actually replying to you with words have any valid logical counter-points to what you've written - or if you're willing to be so gracious and potentially willing to be embarrassed, you can spend time to explain yourself and counter what they've said - or perhaps learn something new; of which your reply just let us all know that your use of ad hominem tells us a lot about you, but really nothing serious to consider about Elon.
And no, I didn't write any of this for you, although I'd be grateful if any of it began to resonate with you - a blessing for you if your reactivity didn't cause you to recoil and avoid my words for long enough that you can maybe take a moment to focus on your breathe up to a 10 count or until you notice your body and notice that your stress has at least stabilized, if not begun to calm down, so then you can begin to read again, rinse and repeat - the practice and exercise first perhaps being noticing how just reading words are causing a physical reaction in your body; or perhaps your body is so locked up in stress that you aren't even able to notice the stress changes in your body, and so then I'd recommend a holistic health practice like 75-90 minute Bikram hot yoga classes to kick your ass and break through your hardened shell that's a disservice to you by blocking nuanced signals for you to discern with; the most subtle and nuanced of signals arguably being when you develop practices to the degree of having the ability to have such a still mind the the most subtle pieces of memory or strands of thought that haven't yet been processed are able to be felt, essentially the feeling of cognitive dissonance - perhaps only recognized as a queer or off feeling that you haven't yet even come to understand yet to label yet as cognitive dissonance, which then hopefully will then allow you to consciously direct your attention to discern to see if there is cognitive dissonance; this is what blocks most people's development, that off feeling instead of consciously examining it, they instead develop an avoidant coping mechanism.
And some evidence towards this idea, that even if Elon is a megalomaniac, it is far better for us - and he knows it is far better for him and society as a whole - that he isn't a no holes barred megalomaniac, that he won't make a deal with the devil - a far easier path to riches and maintaining so-called power - control - than if giving into the methods of honeypots and blackmail-extortion that catches a web of easily manipulable-weak individuals who must now toe the line of some invisible puppet masters, who often use providing children to be raped as their lure and temptation offered-provided: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1854339192794251529 (of which we now know the Advertising Industrial Complex is a clear pathway for funding-rewarding those toeing the line as part of the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus that the globalist cabal has required ; and if anyone's reaction to anything I've written above is to ask me how tight my tinfoil hat is fitting, or use conspiracy theorist as a defamatory slur, examine your conscience and your heart deeper - for otherwise you are currently more than less easily manipulable by bad actors you want to fortify against.
Thanks for the opportunity to keep my mind busy - the excruciating pain I have to try to cope with today especially is near killing me; if you care to know why I'll spend so much time understanding something, it's not because I'm obsessed or a "fanboy" of Elon as I could preemptively predict could be your next flyby comment.
I'd recommend you feel more-better, connect to your body, so then you can think more-better.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#403Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the upper stage wasn't designed to be reusable, it'd probably have a lot less structural dry mass - no heat shield, no fins, possibly different geometry (depending on how much volume they wanted). It might also be possible to drop the sea-level Raptor engines and just use the more efficient vacuum Raptors. I don't think you'd get an order-of-magnitude difference, but it'd be significant, especially for higher-ener…
I don't understand why they don't make such an upper stage. It would allow them to refine the booster design and catch logistics while also launching payloads.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve liked some of his other videos and made it in twenty minutes. He has three arguments: SpaceX is late and over budget on HLS, booster recapture is the easiest part of Starship’s technical risks and Starship is bad value for money. On the first two he’s right. Starship was, per SpaceX’s proposal to NASA, supposed to be almost ready by now. It’s not. But neither is any other leg of Artemis, and there is no unforgiv…
Nitpick about history: the LM was definitely not one of the easiest parts of Apollo. It was the long pole in the schedule for a good while; part of why Apollo 8 was flown as a lunar orbit mission was because the LM wasn't going to be ready for testing in Earth orbit until at least early '69, and NASA wanted to test the CSM beyond LEO anyways.
It had to deal with a lot of uncertainties which were unresolvable from a distance. But conceptually and developmentally it was one of the simpler elements. Certainly simpler than keeping humans alive in space or a launch vehicle programme.
Better analogy might be Gemini. One could similarly criticise Gemini (or any of the early Apollos) as being breathtakingly behind the task of landing humans on the Moon and then getting them back alive.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with space guns is you can't just yeet rocks into orbit. Any orbit that starts at the surface returns to the surface. So you still need a disposable rocket and avionics and fuel in every payload to change the orbit once out of the atmosphere. Only now the rocket needs to survive being literally shot out of a gun and then traveling at orbital velocity in atmosphere. That puts a pretty high floor on the cos…
I think a reusable orbital tug which rendezvous with payloads is the play here. The tug would refuel from some of the gun-launched payloads.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, absolutely. We made money off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program , but it was 100% a subsidy.
Does his competition also get subsidies? Who gets more, who gets less? Are your complaints motivated by Musk's political opinions and activities?
I just take issue with pretending they aren't subsidies, and incorrect assertions NASA/government had little/nothing to do with their success.
I'm an enormous fan of SpaceX - you could probably have heard me scream a mile away when they caught the booster last month - and have a personal dislike for Musk since the Twitter acquisition and his hypocrisy there. Nothing in this thread from my end criticizes SpaceX for being subsidized. In fact, I'm all for it.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Needs tend to develop once the means are there. 200 years ago, there was no need to use electricity. 100 years ago, there was no need to use a programming language. 30 years ago, there was no need for gigabit wireless Internet.
> Needs tend to develop once the means are there. Counterexample: space stations. We've had small manned space stations for decades now, but no real application for them. They're national prestige items only.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-res...
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Falcon 9 and SLS are not in the same class.
This is true. SLS is around $ 37000 / kg to Orbit Falcon 9 is around $ 2700 / kg to Orbit So in excess of an order of magnitude difference. Starship build cost is currently estimated at $90 million [1]. Let's call it $100 million to make the calculations simple. So even if they can't reuse anything and the payload is at the low-end of what they expect, so 100t from the 100-150t range, that would be $1 million per ton…
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#410I am a fan of space. I love the things that have happened with SpaceX and breaking the space industry out of a multi-decade rut, but is it possible to dsiconect the political ambitions of Musk from the technical achievements? Or, to put it more clearly, should the discussion be less about 'look how cool this tech is!' and more about 'This tech will be the gateway to space and Mars, shouldn't we be talking about the g…
I don't think we should. SpaceX has successfully applied the "move fast and break things" approach to rockets, but that's not something you can do everywhere. If Musk, as Trump's "efficiency secretary", will reduce regulations that "hinder" Tesla from doing the same thing with robotaxis, people are going to die.