A spacex ally is appointed chairman and guts a project that would’ve outshone them. Tired of the blatant corruption happening in this country.
I don’t think you’re educated on the matter because landing on the moon with the mission plan that they set out requires the lunar gateway to be in place, it is not and likely won’t be for a long time. It was going to be impossible to land on the moon by the third mission (unless significantly delayed) no matter who was in charge. Like all ambitious space missions in history, it will be delayed, delayed, and delayed again. Sadly that’s how it has always been.
You shouldn’t confidently spout incorrect information
“The aerospace safety advisory panel recommended that Nasa rethink its objectives for Artemis III, … The panel said that the call for a revision was urgent, “given the demanding mission goals”.”
The
fuckingsafety advisory panel suggested the changemorondude, not Isaac. But yes fuck Elon cuck the pos ket headEdit: removed unnecessarily rude words, sorry I’m just an asshole
Ah yes, the humongously successful SLS. Totally not a bottomless moneypit. And absolutely no corruption involved in keeping it alive.
Except SpaceX is part of that mission, or was?
The highly successful Starship is to be the lander. They just need to get one to orbit first.
You got them on a technicality. But multiple test articles have pretty much reached orbit, intentionally just missing orbit so they would re enter in a known location should something go wrong, and something has gone wrong most of the time.
I’m excited for the staship program because it’s the most exciting spaceflight development in my lifetime, yes fuck Elon but that doesn’t change the facts of how exciting the program is for a space lover. The upcoming launches with v3 hardware are going to be very exciting, hopefully most of the kinks have been resolved.
The more pressing issue IMO is that they haven’t really shown any of the moon landing hardware, which will be substantially different than the Starship articles they are using for testing now.
SpaceX is going through the same problem tesla currently has. All the talent that created its good products is either burnt out or already left the company. Their outputs will continue to decline while being in stark contrast to their promises imo.
Their hiring process is also atrocious and scares off any good engineers, and with Elon’s cocksucking arch, those disillusioned enough to tough out working there are very few these days.
Probably for the best under the current administration. They’d try to build an ICE detention center with Trump’s face large enough to be seen from Earth. None of the astronauts would survive.
As much as I’d love to see someone on the Moon, I’d happily wait until Trump is dead just to avoid allowing him to claim it as his personal achievement.
I swear he would issue some kind of bs executive order saying they had to wear MAGA hats in the orbiter or something fucking stupid.
He’d make them leave a plaque with his name on it up there. Or a little model trump tower, so there can literally be one on the moon.
And they would put some fucking flat earther in charge of the project, resulting in some additional ecological disaster of epic proportions.
Breaking News: Trump Orders NASA to Drill For Oil On Moon
i mean, weren’t we going to drill for helium anyways?
I don’t follow this subject, but I can only imagine this is in part due to the DOGE cuts?
Whatever the reason, I don’t think that going back to the moon at this time is a good idea. Especially if all we’re going there for is to exploit whatever resources it has.
No. The SLS program has been a complete shitshow from the start and getting people to the moon in Artemis III was never a realistic prospect. If anything, Isaacman is trying to salvage the project by injecting some realism.
It’s also due to the fact that Boeing seems to no longer be capable of building a spacecraft that doesn’t constantly fucking break, and the regime is conscious of the fact that killing the entire crew of the first manned mission to the moon in nearly a half century would be Very Bad Optics.
And if that wasn’t bad enough SpaceX is basically dead in the water. Presumably because Musks general radiation of incompetent malice has probably purged anyone who could’ve made their shitty rockets work without being spread across the fucking gulf.
How are the dead in the water in this context?
A lot of the Moon mission hinges on Starship being a reliable machine that does all of the things Musk promised. I have no doubt that SpaceX in time could build something good, they do have a lot of good people working there. But the time lines given by Musk to the government in order to get the contracts weren’t viable. And as usual Musk overpromised about the capabilities.
One of the biggest doubts at the moment is about Starship being able to go to the Moon. The plan was to send up a Starship into LEO, then send up another Starship to refuel the first one. That way it would have enough fuel to go to the Moon and work as a lander there. It doesn’t need to do much, just get to the Moon, take the people to the surface and get them back into Lunar orbit.
The issue with this is, a lot of things need to go right in order for this to work. You’d need two functioning Starships, they need to both launch into the correct orbit and rendezvous. Then they need to dock and transfer fuel, undock and separate. This is pretty much never been done, so they would be doing something new, but in theory it can be done. Hard and experimental, but in principle achievable.
However when calculations were made, it turns out once you put a Starship in the right orbit it’s not possible for it to have enough fuel to fully refuel another Starship. So Musk said they would simply stretch a Starship and use it as a fuel station. Nobody is really sure if this stretching is even possible, as this wasn’t part of the original design, but let’s say it is. Now the mission become more complicated still, you’d need the Starship that does the Moon mission. Then you’d need the fuel station ship and another ship to fuel that station. And all of this has to work and be timed properly for the Moon mission to work.
But then further calculations were made and nobody is sure how many Starship launches would be required to fill up that fuel station. Partly because Starship isn’t finalized, so the exact specs are unknown. But back of the napkin calculations put the figure at something like 6 launches. A big problem is the fuel used is very hard to store for any amount of time. As it’s cryogenic, it needs to be kept cold. On Earth this is done by using very thick and sturdy pressure vessels, combined with a bunch of machinery and off-gassing. But in space this gets harder, since the pressure vessels need to be light, they can’t be as sturdy. And there isn’t room (both in volume and weight) for all of the cooling machines, which would require too much power and cooling themselves to even work. So we end up with only off-gassing to maintain temperature. This usually doesn’t matter, on Earth the fuel that’s lost gets replaced right away up to the point of liftoff. After that the fuel is used to fly the mission and usually the rocket’s main fuel tank is empty after that. This puts a lot of time pressure on the whole thing, that fuel station in orbit is losing fuel all of the time. So it’s a race to fill it up faster than it’s losing fuel. So those 6 missions need to be flown within a day or maybe two. And if it turns out the amount of fuel being delivered is lower than expected or the loss is higher, there would need to be 12 fueling missions within a day. Not strictly impossible, but not exactly easy. And the not knowing is making people nervous.
They are so far behind schedule, on a system that hasn’t been finalized, let alone tested, it’s very doubtful they could do it anywhere in the near future. Nasa has since asked other companies if they could build a lander if SpaceX can’t do it. But canceling the whole landing part is an option as well.
I think it’s not one Starship in LEO to refuel the one going to the moon but 8 to 12, depending on how much fuel they loose. It’s super complicated and error prone.
Yes, it was sold as being one Starship in LEO, one Starship to refuel it and off it went. But now they’re onto this plan with a ship to do the mission, a ship with a different design to act as a fuel station and then at least 4 fueling missions, but more likely 8 to 12. It’s ridiculous really, to expect all of this to work out.
At the same time Nasa can’t get SLS to do what they want and that’s just a single mission. A more complicated one for sure, but still a single mission, not a dozen within two days.
Can you source it as being sold as 1? AFAIK it was never sold as 1. There might have been planning where they thought 1 would work, but not sold.
You had me in the first sentence.
tl;dr: SpaceX might be good enough to launch relatively cheap equipment into space but that’s about it.
They seem to either be incapable or unwilling to revise their design to stop the damned rockets from constantly exploding. If NASA had the same failure rate for a new rocket back in the 50s of 60s they’d have been canned. Hell if the Soviets had a similar failure rate the entire team wouldve been sent to the gulag.
What are tou talking about?
Falcon 9 is fine.
Starship & Booster are continuously improving. When you see that a starship blew up, what’s probably conveniently left off from the headlines you read is its a major revision. New engines, longer, different flaps etc. The last one went up and down wonderfully. The next one launching is v3 and has the latest engines and hundreds of changes and will probably go boom and maybe even the one after that.
They’re literally removing heat tiles from critical areas to see what happens.
In no way is SpaceX messing up here though.
Nobody has ever developed a rocket in the open like this before where stuff breaking is expected and normal.
Edit: Attaching image of their engines for example. That v3 is not a render. This is a brand new engine type (full-flow staged combustion fuel cycle), never flown before SpaceX built one and flew it. Russia built one in theory, but never flew it.
Nobody has ever developed a rocket in the open like this before
dude, please read up on the space race. we have designed rockets in the open before. they blew up far less frequently.
None of that was like what SpaceX is doing.
There were failures in the race and they were testing things, but failures weren’t the expected outcomes and part of the planned development cycle. Like they still don’t even know how to make a reusable heat shield which is fundamental to this working.
SpaceX has built a manufacturing line to churn these things out and is like we think this might work, let’s try it in flight hardware. Oh okay that didnt work, let’s try something else. Oh okay that did work now, but if we do this does it still work because if it does we can eek out 2% more performance. Oh shit now we have a brand new mark 2 engine. Does it sill work? Let’s make it longer now with more fuel and new tanks!
Starships blowing up is part of how they are iterating. No one else has done it this way, or so publicly.
The government cant handle things like this because people like you look at it as a failure and shit gets shut down. If they IPO its also going to cause issues for the same reason.
Meanwhile SpaceX has designed, built, flew and landed two orbital boosters before anyone landed one. They fucking caught it in chopsticks.
The pic reminds me of a youtuber who debunks SpaceX bullshit almost exclusively. I don’t remember the specifics, but he claimed that the v3 seen here is basically a fantasy.
Seriously, do not trust Musk to build something that works reliably under high stress. Esp. do not entrust human beings to anything Musk builds.
Ah yes, something that an arm chair rocket scientest says can’t exist
This is it firing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJdu5ee_ohA
This is the clean side of it
This is looking at the vertical slice head on we see in the original image where we see it as only the vertical part of it. There were other pictures where that 1st one came from with other angles as well, they weren’t hiding anything with a specific shot.
People said it was impossible to propulsive land a orbital booster, and said it would also be impossible to land it on a barge in the ocean.
SpaceX lands a orbital rocket on a barge in the ocean.
People said even if you can reuse a rocket, it’ll never be affordable to do so. One very prominent space person (someone in boeing or something) said, you’d have to fly it 10 times to even be worth making one!
SpaceX flew their first Falcon 9 for the 33th time last week.
People said no ones going to want to use a re-used rocket
SpaceX has people including government agencies specifically looking for used rockets as they’re now flight tested.
People said even if you can relaunch a rocket, there isn’t enough things to put into space to even warrant having one
SpaceX develops Starlink to create a use case for their new rocket.
People said Starlink would never be profitable, you have to keep sending new satellites up they’ll never make money!
SpaceX’s starlink division is now profitable and accounts for more revenue than the rest of the business. (satellites coming down now don’t matter as they can be profitably replenished. All them coming down means is bandwidth capacity will stagnate IF technology doesn’t improve to increase it when more go up)
People thought it was nuts they were going to try and catch Super Heavy booster on 2 chop sticks
SpaceX lands it on their first, and subsequent tries.
The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on, and they keep doing it.
Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket we have, and you’re sitting here going don’t trust musk to build something reliable lol.
Was it thunderf00t by any chance?
But ‘Sleepy Joe’s fault’, of course.
/s
Yes, yes, we are going to Mars in 2022, says Elon.
Still a more realistic prospect than the SLS.
Nah, we won’t see anybody on Mars in our lifetime, unless there is somebody with a death wish. While Moon is within reach. Probably by Chinese at this point.
I think one of the reasons they wanted to go back to the moon was to find the 30,000 missing Epstein files that name drumpf. When drumpf found out the mission objectives, he cancelled the mission.
heard those files can be found inside polar lunar craters were the sun never shines
Other countries are gearing up too though right?
If the US isn’t there, China and others will be.
IDK what resources are on the moon itself, but asteroids seem to have loads of accessible minerals.
Honestly, I’d prefer these were harvested from asteroids rather than delicate ecosystems on Earth.
Frozen water in/underneath craters IIRC. A potential llace to manufacture fuel there
It looks like they just got a bit too ambitious too soon. They’ve been struggling with glitches and stuff. They still want to, they just need more time.
We are going to
MarsMoonLEONowhere… Nazism?Might as well have some good tunes on the road to nowhere…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQiOA7euaYA&list=RDLQiOA7euaYA&start_radio=1
I guess killing the project outright is likely not an option without angering Congress. There has been so many issues and delays with this rocket that I really hope the capsule heat shield holds up during re-entry and the astronauts all survive.
I guess killing the project outright is likely not an option without angering Congress.
You miss some headlines over the last year?
They now aim to send them to the center of the Earth.
Führer Musk doesn’t want any competition!
