951–960 of 1001 posts
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> No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns. You make wealth concentration sound like a good thing somehow. This was publicly collected tax money, that will go on to enrich some already rich douchebag.
How will it go on to enrich someone else?
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You never watched any of the SpaceX launches? The first landing attempts? The massive explosions or 'RUD' - rapid unscheduled disassembly - events? The epic launch and synchronous landing of the twin Falcon Heavy side boosters? Why not? Maybe you're not interested in space launches, in that case I understand. Otherwise I wonder why you did not follow SpaceX in its path to reusable rocketry.
OK, the down-votes were the answer I more or less expected. Sad, really. Sad to see how some of the supposedly intelligent denizens of this site are incapable of separating the aspirational from the personal, how they can not marvel at the achievements of a company like SpaceX only because they are supposed to hate everything the leader of that company does. Also sad to see that the down-voters - or single down-voter…
...repeat...
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> > The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that. > Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact. It...really didn't. There was a new wave with a different political orientation (less conservative/elite) in the environmental movement roughly contemporary to the space program from—the 1950s through the 1970s—but it was driven by a variety of human driven (nuclear testing, oil spills,…
Regardless of what you think of those first shots from Apollo 8, you have to admit they put things into a different perspective for a lot of people. Seeing the whole of the Earth like that moved a lot of people into realizing this planet is worth saving. That one image was a significant moment causing such a spike in people paying attention that it can be forgiven for being confused as the thing. It's not like John M…
“Regardless of what you think about X, you must think Y about X” is a particularly tiresome rhetorical device, but its also being deployed as part of a motte-and-bailey argument here.
> It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did
Blue Marble (1990) is a completely different image than Earthrise (1968), and Earthrise was only adopted as a symbol of the environmental movement because the movement was already ascendant when it came out, not because it was the trigger for it.
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Remember when DOGE tried to cut out the inefficiencies and failed miserably? The "inefficiencies" and "bloated budgets" are there for a reason. If Elon ran this project "without bloat", there is probably a 70% chance that the vehicle would have exploded, much in the way of his Starship and early Falcon vehicles.
But that explosion would have cost one tenth the cost a single SLS launch and the next one would go a little further. And eventually you would be flying the most reliable rocket in history more frequently than any other rocket for one tenth the cost of the competition.
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If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions. The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote: > The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by…
Randall Munroe of xkcd? I like his work but I'm not sure I'd call him a philosopher...
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That's not even remotely true. They talked in great detail about heat shield fragmentation Artemis I, it's failure modes, the prospect of it getting worse with new designs and a number of other things at much greater detail than you are. Your comments show a fraction of the effort and detail of the thing you're criticizing and you could have made your best argument five comments ago if you were ever actually going to…
You are obviously very invested in the fact that someone who is going against the grain of the obviously bad, overly buerocratic government agency MUST be correct (otherwise, in the case you actually gave a fuck about the truth, you would be researching statements from NASA and comparing the reports) If that is so, put your money where you mouth is and place a bet on polymarket. If you are too scared to do so, then a…
"Maciej says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that's incorrect because _____."
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That's what I thought standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Pictures just do not do it justice. Same thing with Starship. My brain knows it's massive, yet feels underwhelmed looking at it on video. Musk should let his ego build replica Saturn V and a Shuttle next the Starship launch pad so there will be proper perspective available
Have you been to the rocket garden at KSC? The Saturn V isn't vertical, but they've got almost everything from the Redstone and later vertical. I was in Florida in 2018 and I think they were getting ready to display a pair of SRBs. They did have Atlantis inside, too. And of course a horizontal Saturn V. I saw that Saturn V as a child once, too. I think that the Saturn V really made me the person that I am today. Seei…
Computer processors probably take that cake.
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We don‘t want to colonize space. Colonizing space is science fiction, not a serious goal for humanity, and certainly not an engineering challenge. There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri. What I really want is for us to send a lander and a launcher to Mars capable of returning to earth the…
> We don‘t want to colonize space I do. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people also think exoplanet science is useless. I disagree with them. It the arguments are symmetric to those against human spaceflight. > certainly not an engineering challenge …how? We don’t have the technology to do this. > There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep…
Surely you must see the difference between expolanet science and dreams of space colonization. The former is actual science which further our knowledge of the universe with tangible results, and the latter simply isn’t. People who don‘t like exoplanet science may have their reasons, but people who don‘t like space colonization are simply being realistic. Because the former is science, the latter is science fiction.
Finally there is nothing about space refueling technology which requires a moon base, and especially not manned moon missions. If you want space refueling infrastructure manned moon missions is not the only way to get there, and probably not even the best way. I also have my doubts here. If space refueling is so important we would be doing it already. Sending fuel from earth in a separate lunch. A case in point James Webb was originally designed with refueling in mind. They dropped it from the final module because it simply wasn’t worth it.
Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement. It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity. It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve h…
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I think that $100 billion, spent effectively could have resulted in Von Braun Wheels in LEO. I think that it could have resulted in teleoperated lunar mining and smelting that would be allowing us to build human bases on Earth now instead of a single fly by that may end in the death of these four amazing explorers.
There is no world in which lunar mining and smelting economically produces anything useful on Earth.
But I'm curious to hear why you think that it will always be uneconomical to produce refined metals on the Earth and transport them to Earth for further manufacturing?
It seems like a logical near term thing that we're going to have to do to reduce carbon emissions and other environmental damage. Mining and refining ores are both energy intensive and highly ecologicaly damaging.