Technology

Poorly built rocket

Yeah anyone following space YouTube has seen this a dozen times already and knows that it was a deflagration likely due to busted lines and not a detonation. The test stand is likely undamaged (In anysignificant way at least) and it was just an engine test of likely raptor 2 design. This has nothing to do with IFT4 or starbase as far as we can tell.

No, it was a test stand at the McGregor rocket testing facility, it wasn't even at Boca chica (the place where all the finished rockets are launched from). This is not a big deal and won't affect their schedule at all.

You're right, Elon Musk being associated with a company is negative. And what SpaceX has accomplished despite that association is truly impressive.

I think around here most people agree that billionaires don't earn their billions, they reach that point having benefited from the efforts of thousands of workers. So why don't we recognize those people's work? Somehow, SpaceX has managed to avoid the meddling that we see from Musk in relation to Twitter and Tesla.

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia's soyuz to get us to and from the space station. We didn't have anything that could launch people into orbit.

Before SpaceX we were launching single use rockets built by companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA), which was founded as a joint venture between defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (They're still around and still for the most part suck)

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive. NASA didn't and still doesn't really build their own rockets, they contract out, and the contracts had been cost-plus, meaning ULA got an agreed on profit plus expenses. So if the schedule slipped on development or development cost more than expected, they actually make more money. There wasn't much of a private market in space.

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components, re-established a U.S. sourced crew capsule, and using fixed price contracts they reduced the cost of launch by an order of magnitude. And by publishing fixed prices to get into space, they pretty much by themselves kicked off the private space economy. SpaceX launches more frequently than any other company, and more than any nation.

And they did all that with a better safety record than previous programs! I can't speak to this particular explosion, but SpaceX has taken an approach where they create new designs quickly, and test them quickly with the potential for explosions, before they put humans at risk on a live launch.

Elon Musk didn't do all that, the people at SpaceX did. And if anything I'm concerned about the point when he gets tired of fucking up twitter and tesla and turns his attention to SpaceX. I'm hoping the national security aspect of the company will mean responsible adults prevent him from interfering.

The people on lemmy are college kid level extremist on literally everything and it would be funnier if it weren't so exhausting.

Maybe he lost interest because of all the bullshit Elon Musk promised that came to NOTHING, remember a few years back he promised there would be manned missions to Mars now... NOW!!! MANNED MISSIONS!!! They were supposed to be well along building a base on Mars that should have started 2 years ago!!

Reality may seem kind of dull compared to the fantasies Musk promised.

Personally I never believed Musk for a second, and I thought Neil Tyson was a blabbering idiot for parroting him. But many fell for it, and my wife thought I was "negative" for not believing and agreeing with them!

But things like the James Webb telescope are 100% cool.

Where's your evidence proving exactly how much Starship has cost in total? Or wait, maybe you are just making bullshit up because you have no idea how much it has actually cost them because they don't disclose that information like NASA does.