161–170 of 189 posts
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Do you know SpaceX's cash flow? If so, please share. Otherwise, I can just claim you are speculating towards your own bias. If you think the data is bad, at best all you can claim is "we don't know"
And this is imo what you should have done instead if saying 98%. I agree with other commenters in that this is extremely misleading.
Put differently, why do you think there isn’t an abundance of people chiming in to say “there’s not enough data to make a claim” rather than jumping to defend SpaceX’s honor? If people were truly rational, the strength of their convictions would be proportional to the strength of the data being it.
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The bulk of their own launches are for their own infrastructure. That doesn't bring revenue at the launch date. They aren't paying themselves to launch their equipment; it's an investment in future revenue. Even looking at optimistic projections for 2023 Starlink revenue puts would still mean govt contracts dwarf Starlink revenue by 4:1. > And that is outside of their Starship business, that is by now a large part of…
I meant to say Starlink rather then Starship. They have over a million subscribers now. Plus larger clients in shipping and air travel, plus the military. Honestly I don't get your issue. You can just go to wikipedia and look at the list of the launches. So clearly the 98% is wrong, this isn't a question, its not speculation.
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This isn’t new. It’s exactly how the airplane was invented over 100+ years ago. The Army didn’t tell Orville and Wilbur how to build. They dangled the carrot of a lucrative military contract to incentivize their innovation. It’s what transitioned the effort from hobbyists to an actual industry. There was no “industry” until the govt put up money because the govt was really the only entity that could bear that kind of…
I think that is where we differ, but maybe I didnt explain my stance well. I agaree that the government contracts are a carrot, and broadly speaking supports the entire space industry. Im not debating that at all. However, I do think there is a narrative difference between companies that that humm along doing the same thing eating eating their carrots, and a new one that beats them at their own game and steals all th…
I still give SpaceX credit that they did a much better job of raising the bar in response to that incentive. I have some reservations about the way they’ve gone about some of it, but at the end of the day I think they have done a much better job than the legacy aerospace companies.
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Being cheap is developing a next generation war-fighter that blows every other aircraft out of the water? next generation halo lenses, with advances stealth, manuverability, and rate of weapon deployment? With multiple different variety's and add ons to enable all weather and VTOL? What is cheap about the initial contraints of the project?
The F-35 (more specifically, the JSF program out of which the F-35 was the successful contender) was conceived as a comparatively cheap multiservice, multirole fighter to reduce both initial development and ongoing operational costs by having a high degree of commonality between the conventional air force model, the CATOBAR navy model, and the STOVL marine corps model; It was also supposed to replace basically every…
If they can pull this off I think we may enter an age with a clear "Before super heavy reusable launch" and "after". It's mind boggling how much stuff a Starship will be able to chuck into space and come down and then do it again and again. Consider this, the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment anywhere in the world within 90 minutes using this kind of capability. International…
If they can pull this off I think we may enter an age with a clear "Before super heavy reusable launch" and "after". It's mind boggling how much stuff a Starship will be able to chuck into space and come down and then do it again and again. Consider this, the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment anywhere in the world within 90 minutes using this kind of capability. International…
> International Space Station sized habitats are a handful of launches over months, not dozens over decades. A single Starship launch could place multiple hubble-sized space observatories up in a single launch. Even if they just stacked a modified Starship designed to stay in orbit (just enough fuel to get into orbit, ability to jettison engine section, some solar panels bolted on) and shot that up, that'd get you as…
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I think it is highly unfair to compare concepts to actual built rockets, might as well just include the Enterprise from Star Trek as well at that point.
Why? How big is the enterprise?
Well, the Enterprise from Star Trek is fiction, so legitimate answers would include "zero actual size" and "as big as they say it is".
A true fan would probably reply: "Which one?"
An enlightened person might point out that Star Trek fans are very online, all this info and much much more than you wanted to know is just a google away.
640m / 2000 feet, or thereabouts, is also an acceptable answer.
But the unbuilt rockets in that animation were somewhat legitimate designs, a few steps from actual working prototypes; therefor those sizes had to be somewhat buildable; whereas the Starship Enterprise is FTL fiction, with warp drives powered by antimatter handwavium.
Press releases from SpaceX have alluded to a possible launch date of 420, which I think would be hilariously on brand.
Hitler's birthday?