Stop supporting Elon.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
255 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
68599 readers
3938 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
SpaceX is more than just Elon.
As with X, I'll support it as soon as he's out.
If we stop doing business with SpaceX, we immediately demolish most of our capability to reach space, including the ISS until Starliner quits failing. Perhaps instead of trying to treat this as a matter of the free market we should recognize it as what it is - a matter of supreme economic and military importance - and force the Nazi fucker out.
Sure. As long as he goes, I'll support it all day long.
People really under estimate how important he is to SpaceX.
Reusing f9 1st stage - His initiative
Landing f9 on a barge - His initiative.
Making Starship Stainless Steel - His initiative
Catching Starship booster on chopsticks - His initiative.
The list goes on and on.
Without someone like him pushing for these radical things that everyone else thinks is impossible or a bad idea we wouldn't recognize what SpaceX would be.
Instead we have things like starliner which is a disaster, and blue origin which started before SpaceX and has never reached orbit.
SpaceX would slowly transform back into 'old space' if he was forced out as there are very few people willing to take the risks he takes.
Edit: and it's even very possible that the wrong CEO takes SpaceX public too soon which would make all the risk taking and fail fast development cycle they use impossible. Think of the stock crashing when a test flight fails and the pressure from investors around that.
Are those examples actually his initiative, or him championing someone else's idea?
Reusing f9, landing F9 on barge, and Stainless steel were his initiatives. The SS one was a particularly hard win for him with a lot of internal push back.
Catching Starship on the chopsticks might have been an idea he heard outside of SpaceX, but that he then championed, again to a lot of internal push back, I'm not 100% about it being an external to spacex idea though.
Edit clarity and below
Those are just examples though. And I'm sure there are times as you suggest that people suggest a difficult idea that he then champions as well.
That he can champion these radical things, his idea or not, is still the key point of his leadership that will be lost.
For example, someone must have suggested they use a full-flow staged combustion fuel cycle for raptor. He had to sign off on that. No one had ever designed and flown a engine like this before. The russians came closest making one, but never flew it. The predecessor to this engine in the 60s or whenever, NASA didn't even think it was physically possible to make until the Russians made it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I don't think his personal accomplishments really matter in the face of his support for the far right, crushing hatred of trans people, calling people pedophiles and the absurd amount of misinformation and bigotry that he promotes on xitter.
If SpaceX needs an absolute piece of shit like him in order to succeed, then there shouldn't be a SpaceX.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Thankfully SpaceX is MORE than just Elon. Unlike Twitter, where he's removed everyone and turned it to slop. He makes no money from it, so why shouldn't he fuck with it?
SpaceX actually makes money. Elon won't fuck it up. (Or he will, but atleast we will have learned an insane amount of things thanks to them.)
I'm sure it makes money and he may not F it up, but that's not the point. The point is that Elon has turned into the douche of the century along with his butt-buddy Trump.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Ya, it's also massive ecological damage so we can all go "ooooh ahhh!"
Do you like modern tech? Do you like the chips in your device you're using to comment right now? You can thank the space industry. Without Apollo we would still be 30 years behind in integrated circuit technology.
If I was given the choice by a genie, on the one side you have your laptop, Lemmy, car, etc, but millions of people an animals suffer, or on the other hand, our tech evolves more slowly and sustainably, I'd choose the latter every time.
I'll take being 30 years behind and still have <insert any species we've driven extinct>. An entitlement to the lives and well being of others for the sake of "progress" is pretty sick.
The suffering doesn't just go away because we don't have modern tech.
Pointless reply, not all suffering has the same cause of course, but most of the unnecessary suffering (i.e. that suffering of all sentient beings on top that which occurs due to the nature of life itself) is caused by human activity, specifically where selfish individuals have felt entitled to cause suffering in others, destroy ecosystems, extinct species, and oppress peoples in pursuit of their goals.
The world is not ours to consume.
But a very small portion of human activity is developing chips or launching rockets. Most of it is manufacturing disposable junk or building roads/buildings.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
And launching space junk and making viewing the stars less and less clear at an historic rate.
People pay good money for that ‘junk’. A quality internet connection basically anywhere in the world, including at sea and in very remote areas, is far from junk.
Yeah I'm going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I've had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.
Really Starlink should be absorbed into and ran by the UN. We only have so much LEO to use, one company is bound to become a monopoly and LEO is the world's not any nation's property.
The UN has no teeth by design and there's a lot of money to be made privately, what makes you think it would happen?
pipe dream
Fuck the UN.
Seriously - when you choose a country with vile fundamental human rights abuses as the head of the human rights commission...
load more comments
(1 replies)
I agree, but at what cost? When the satellites burn up, they are likely worsening the hole in the ozone layer. And even if they don’t, they are probably contributing to Kessler syndrome, which could ruin low earth orbit for generations.
Sources:
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89909-7
Edit: formatting
Starlink satellites will never contribute to Kessler syndrome. They are far too low for that
Even if they just stopped working in their existing orbit (worst case), they will burn up in a handful of years max
load more comments
(1 replies)
And they're on track for ~130 this year.
It's cool that spaceX has rockets can come back and be reused.
China just fires unregulated rockets that in danger people, wild life etc. from toxic and debrid
China rocket crashes after 'accidental' launch
Chinese rocket debris seen falling over village after launch
I'm a Rocket Lab fan. Tons of innovation, slower progress due to not having the richest man behind, but on track to launch a reusable medium rocket, FULLY reusable and with a sensible guy at the helm.
I wish rocket lab the best and hope that one day they can have a competing heavy lift/human certified spacecraft.
However, it's nigh impossible to ignore how much SpaceX alone has reshaped the space industry and is basically forcing everybody else to step up.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Out of curiosity - how many megatons of carbon has that produced, and how many billionaires will all the starships carry when they've exploited the earth's resources and left all it's living creatures to die and escape to mars?
SpaceX launches in 2023 were about 0.02 megatons of CO2 directly. I don't know how fugitive emissions from fueling and defueling, especially on starship with methane.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-falcon-9-co2-emissions
200,000kg/launch, 100 launches.
The carbon is not the problem.
SpaceX launched about 429,125 kg of spacecraft upmass in Q1, followed by CASC with about 29,426 kg
Smaller satellites (<1,200 kg) represented 96% of spacecraft launched in Q1, 76% of total upmass
So the way I'm personally reading this is 2/3 of this is starlink launches
The chart says companies/space agency, so I am assuming that NASA stopped launching rockets? It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
Indeed, NASA stopped launching rockets with the space shuttle. But that was the single best decision that NASA ever made. The space shuttle was an extremely expensive death trap. (It was damn cool, but a terrible way to get to space)
It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
You can blame the trump administration for that, with their commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. But the truth is, NASA has always heavily relied upon private companies, it's just that in the past they were all defense contractors (Boeing, Northrop, lockheed, rocketdyne, ULA). The other annoying truth, these commercial programs have actually been wildly successful (except in the case of Boeing's participation).
But it's been wildly successful in a few respects, one of which is that nasa has been able to focus on exploration again. Without having to support the huge costs of the shuttle program, they've been able to put a lot of their money into landers, interplanetary probes and space telescopes. I think we have more ongoing exploration missions than ever before. The Europa clipper mission launched just yesterday (on a SpaceX Rocket coincidentally). https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/
load more comments
(1 replies)
I watched the recent test of catching the returning second stage booster in the chopsticks, and had a lump in my throat. Absolutely fucking amazing, nobody is in the same league as that crew.
All those launches being subsidized and facilitated with US tax dollars while he used it to put telecom satellites up.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Damn, the absolute collapse of the European space industry...
With ISRO coming on strong, and Russia alienating most of the world, I’m fascinated by what this could turn into in the next couple years
I wonder if elon has been testing all these rockets in a desperate attempt to escape the planet with a bunch of other billionaires now that global warming is on track to destroy us. It would help me understand why the wealthy all seem so hell bent on accelerating the destruction.
load more comments
(3 replies)