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SpaceX isn't cool anymore around here because HN leans left and Elon backed the right-wing horse.

If Elon had gone "woke" then all the right-leaning sites would be overflowing with SpaceX and Tesla haters.

It's just political tribalism. If you take a side then the other side must vilify you and anything you touch becomes contaminated to them. If a left-winger says the Earth is round right-wingers must insist it's flat, and vice versa.

I personally believe SpaceX to be the most important venture on Earth of any kind, and it's vastly more important than Elon Musk himself or his politics. Thousands and thousands of people work for SpaceX. It's not like it's a one man show.

In a hundred thousand years whatever sentient life descended from Earth life that has populated our region of the galaxy will have no memory of Elon, Twitter, Donald Trump, or the culture war fight of the week in 2023.

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HN leans left? If anything in my view it leans hardcore free market libertarian/"move fast and break things". Individual people may hold common "liberal" political views like supporting gay rights, the right to abortion but on economics issues and things like government regulation of huge tech, HN is basically indistinguishable from Peter Thiel.

Note that actual leftism is not the same thing as modern liberalism. By the economics textbook definition of the term Ronald Reagan was a modern Liberal.

It's heterodox but it probably leans left numerically speaking, which reflects the industry and the regions where the industry is concentrated.

You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be "left leaning", this place is the text-book definition of conservative libertarian echo chamber

I think you're flat-out wrong in general - and on a personal level, I'm rooting for SpaceX despite their founder's shenanigans.

If someone can back up a claim with reasonable evidence I'll hear it.

For example, I'm not sure I even care about the level of damage documented here, but I applaud the author for doing the research and presenting facts (other than the extraneous dead cat in the first photo).

Nope. The problem is that Elan, recently, has very much been leaning to Delusional Management PHBism. HN very much leans to the sorts of competent workers who have to suffer under that kind of management, while busting our asses to make it look like their screw-loose "pedal-powered supersonic time machine cars will start shipping soon!" promises have some basis in reality.

Comment posters on HN are the type of people who would rather spend time commenting on others' ventures than working on solving the actual problems.

Is it not you that is the most entrenched in the culture wars here? I see language about celebrities; politics; toxic modern discourse; corporate value.

In other comments, I see discussions about the event; its impacts; how to weigh those relative impacts - positive or negative; questions about why the engineering choices that were made, as they appear quite sloppy in hindsight.

Indeed, I might say someone who wishes to detach from the political side of things could easily comment that SpaceX might not be treated as a "cool" entity in this situation because they have made a failure, which might not be bad in itself, but a failure from quite a disappointing mistake. This will naturally color the discussion, don't you think? The emotional state of the audience isn't "interested in what went wrong", because that's obvious! Instead the tone is more related to the nature of mistakes - incredibly though, I don't even see a suggestion that mistakes are the new culture of Elon companies. So why are you whining?

All disposable rockets are dumped in the ocean, sometimes with toxic propellants still on board. Yet I've seen no end of articles about how bad this test is for the environment. I saw it all over the place even before this launched.

SpaceX wants its rockets to be fully reusable, which means when they work they will not be dumped in the ocean. They're also using less toxic and less CO2-intensive propellants on Starship than most other rockets that burn RP-1 (kerosene) or worse solid or hypergolic fuels. What are the SLS boosters emitting and what happens when those fall in the ocean?

I'm not a fan of Elon's recent political turn, but I also know a double standard and a politically motivated pile-on when I see one. SpaceX is much more important than Elon or his politics, and their launch vehicles aim to be considerably "greener" than anyone else due to reusability.

I'd say HN leans engineer, which is probably where the critical perspective is coming from. What engineer sees that as a success, or even acceptable?

Anyone who knows anything about the history of space flight knows that you don't do really big new things without a high probability of some "RUD"s.

Nobody else is innovating. Of course SLS works. It's 1970s technology.

None of the problems with this launch were because they were just innovating too hard.

> It's 1970s technology.

So's how you keep this from happening.

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