451–460 of 1001 posts
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I’m surprised he is vertical. He acts like how Biden looks.
I expect him to be walled off from external appearances within some amount of time so he can focus on truly important projects. Like redesigning the lawn. Or the amount of gold leaf on everything. My real question, if/when that happens, who is pulling the strings with the most sway?
Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3 billion it will be ready in 2050 for 50 billion. Much better for making your friends rich.
Stainless steel was a questionable choice for starship. If the pros outweigh the cons, which is yet to be seen, it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices. In general it's a terrible choice for rockets. I'm not saying Boeing would do a better job, but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.
Yea but isn‘t that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them.
I‘m not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they picked the best material given the options, right?
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> I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore. But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the point! > We don't have titans of industry anymore. What?!
SpaceX and to a much lesser extent Tesla are good examples. Excluding those for a minute, what else does the US have world-leading manufacturing of? Semiconductors? Nope. High speed rail? Nope. Auto industry? Nope. Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope. Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope. ????? The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.
At least for now.
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Starship has yet to demonstrate that capability. They would need to show rapid re-usability for it to be viable. Not to mention docking and orbital re-fueling. Falcon Heavy seems to have that capability though. I suspect that Starship will have similar cost to Falcon Heavy when they get done with it. Maybe marginally cheaper. The re-entry problem is really throwing a wrench into things.
SpaceX has already successfully landed and reused a booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. As for the reentry problem, that seems to have been solved in the last couple of test flights. Still much more economically viable than SLS even if they can't reuse the upper stage.
Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.
Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
the whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one finicky government-funded-Elon-company
I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government? The same as any other launch provider would be doing? At this point the vast majority of SpaceX's activity, and likely cashflow, is from its mostly self-funded Starlink.
SpaceX won the original HLS contract because their design actually had hardware in testing, actually met NASA's payload, landing area and testing requirements, had a clear path to commercialization and was willing to cover most of the cost themselves, as otherwise NASA wouldn't have been able to choose anyone given the limited funding allocated by Congress.
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> I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore. But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the point! > We don't have titans of industry anymore. What?!
SpaceX and to a much lesser extent Tesla are good examples. Excluding those for a minute, what else does the US have world-leading manufacturing of? Semiconductors? Nope. High speed rail? Nope. Auto industry? Nope. Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope. Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope. ????? The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.
The US is second in manufacturing and far ahead of numbers 3 and 4 (Germany and Japan IIRC).
Could we just bring back the shuttle?
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Self-finance ? Is that what you call US government money?
Last years SpaceX revenue was 15 Billions, of which 1.1 came from NASA. Their revenues is higher than entire NASA budget. https://deepnewz.com/company-earnings/spacex-2025-revenue-to...
There is just so much wrong with this from start to finish. Here are a few things, by no means inclusive: 1. We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting. 2. Nothing based around SLS is remotely serious. The cost and timeline of doing anything with it are unreasonable. It is an absolute dead-end. The SpaceX Super Heavy has been more capable arguably as early as the secon…
> We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting Of course, but there a few things to consider. 1. This is a new race. The olympics happen every four years to see which nation is the current best. It seems it’s time to find out again. 2. The last time the US was dominant was 56 years ago. That’s three generations. Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely unli…