I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.
Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon that they would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.
There were several people here on HN screeching that a few lumps of concrete strewn on a beach is an ecological disaster of unfathomable proportions.
Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink affecting their precious telescopes, while ignoring the minor detail that Starship will be able to launch a JWST-sized telescope weekly if they want to get above the atmosphere.
We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.
This type of false equivalence and extreme hyperbole is why it polarizes people. The preferred terms of the conversation are so insane as to invite that specific outcome.
> affecting their precious telescopes
You also seem to feel entitled to adopt the position of a rank bully. Where does this entitlement come from? While reflecting on that, you might find a more charitable and honest answer as to the sources of polarization on this topic.
> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.
We'll have the future with or without Space X. This type of angry hype and blind argumentation simply underscore the above points.
As for the future... SpaceX has certainly inspired a large number of companies looking to try to emulate it success, but none have really managed to achieve anything comparable to increasingly dated SpaceX tech at this point, let alone where SpaceX is taking us with technologies like the Starship. So with this I think there's also a reasonable fear that without SpaceX we'd relapse back into the past since 1972, in terms of space progress - which is to say near zero.
One really cannot overstate the impact that SpaceX has had on space in the past, is continuing to have on space in the present, and will almost certainly continue to have in the future. That people want SpaceX to fail, and imperil all of this, just because they don't like somebody they don't even know, is such a terrible reflection on the state and motivations of society today.
Which leaves rockertry. Reusable rockets are quite an achievement, sure. So far the real world impact is limited to satellite internet, which is not available globally yet.
Starship still has to be launched successfully to count as rocketry advancement.
When a launch is "only" $50M, you can get away with much fewer redundancies, less testing making the thing you launch much cheaper.
And yeah, the first large-scale change we've seen from it is vastly better / cheaper satellite internet, but there will be others. Axiom space is a good example; a private company sending astronauts on missions.
Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back.
And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.
Where do you see society in 50 years?
That state-of-the-art is still sending rovers to Mars and hoping to achieve a fly-by of the Moon is nothing short of a complete and catastrophic failure in space. People often blame the money, that's not it. The Apollo program, in 2022 dollars, cost about $16 billion a year - starting from absolutely 0 knowledge. NASA's had at least that level of annual funding for the past 60 years. The thing, these great futures we all imagine don't create themselves. Without people, the sort of people who rarely emerge in a society, pushing humanity forward in any given direction, the future isn't going to be any better than the present, and there's every reason to think it may even be worse.
It's not hype. The progress made by SpaceX is demonstrable and profound.
Do you want the future of permanent settles on other celestial bodies in 200 years, or within our lifetimes? Because the latter will almost certainly require SpaceX achieving its long-term goals.
The grievances raised against both Musk and SpaceX are petty next to what humanity stands to gain if SpaceX is successful.
He's legit terrible as a person, someone who spends a significant amount of his time dedicated to trolling is not someone we should look up to
But he gets a special pass from his little cult for being homophobic and having racist overtones.
Anyone who doesn't value the attention of their fellow humans is either underdeveloped or evil.
no
Trolling is maximizing for being obnoxious
Dark humor is great, being obnoxious is not
Yeah, no, trolls don't tend to be warm and humane. Trolling is the opposite of that actually. And it usually stems from cowardice because sincerity makes you vulnerable and that takes courage.
However, no matter how much I dislike the person I do appreciate the achievements at PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX in which he took part.
This intolerance to dissent was responsible for billions of innocent people being imprisoned in their homes during the COVID pandemic
People being free to share wrong ideas has social value.
And no, sharing a false or premature report is not extremism. Demanding censorship is.
I mean, he deleted the tweet after it was shown that the article it shared was without merit. What else do you want?
There are good reasons people are anti-Elon, and I don't need to list them here now. Technological advancement is nice, and it can be a good thing that one "eccentric" billionaire puts a lot of money into this. But there are consequences, and it's good that there are people who are critical of this. It's ok that people like Musk are scrutinized. In my opinion, there's way more room for scrutinity by mainstream media instead of them instead of sucking up every word he says.
And yes it is okay for Musk to be criticized. Putting billionaires up on a pedestal is almost as annoying as vilifying them for being successful.
If either answer is no, then the brag about capacity isn’t really relevant.
Everything holds back more space-based telescopes - launch capacity, manufacturing capacity, research ideas. But the cheaper launching becomes, the more funding can be devoted to other parts (although something like Amdahl's law will apply), and may even trigger a virtuous cycle where cheaper launches mean you can get away with more standardised, less hardened hardware, which in is then lighter and can be launched more easily, and...
> are those telescopes going to have the same availability to researchers as terrestrial ones?
No, of course not, space telescopes are massively oversubscribed and difficult for even superstar researchers to get time on. That's exactly why we want to launch more of them.
Just for fun: what exactly could the parent have said to change your mind? Because if the answer is "nothing", then you're a rock.
It’s actually super straightforward.
The response seems “opposite” what was said because if you read between the lines, the whole comment was about hypothetical future improvements to the cost dynamics.
It's perfectly fair to say that constructing a road to a remote community will mean better ... everything ... for that community, but you're blaming them for not also building a hospital and a school at the same time as the road.
I mean, yeah, technically it's possible that we lose current capacity and we never get enough space capacity to make up for it but if you argue for this particular outcome, I think it's rather improbable. The parent made a very good point: cheaper and better lift to orbit means better ... everything. It would mean you have cost and capacity improvements for the whole chain, and yet nobody bothers to use this for JWST successors. That's a very thin line of probability you'd be arguing for.
And no, the condition doesn’t need to be that nobody bothers to use it, it’s that it doesn’t get used at such a scale on a timeframe people care about to replace the infrastructure it destroyed.
Why do they not have access to space telescopes? because they are currently extremely expensive to build and launch. Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper. It would allow them to iterate the design and send more units of the same models/design and reduce the design/research cost per unit.
This seems very handwavy. It appears space telescopes are actually more expensive because space telescopes are really expensive, not because it’s hard to move them to space.
Yes better/cheaper launches would reduce the risk, but that risk is 100% baked into the design and cost of the launch. There’s nothing the payload can do to mitigate the risk of the rocket failing, so there’s no reason to think x% of the telescope’s cost is actually due to the risk of the launch itself.
They could take 10% of the JWST budget (not including launch) and buy back 6+ launches. Seems to me launches are not super relevant.
I am not an expert at all but that at first blush that seems like bullshit. I’m 100% open to sources of info I should check out on this though.
Edit: FWIW another more believable argument than hypothetical future capacity satisfying the same demand would be “global internet is more important than terrestrial astronomy.” Not quite ready to say I agree with it but it seems very compelling!
I have not heard a single one claim that it will 'destroying billions of dollars of equipment'. And most don't want to stop further space craft.
What they do call for is regulation about these things in general. SpaceX is basically doing them a favor by modifying their sats, there is no legal obligation.
https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa...
And I’m not arguing for stopping further spacecraft either.
“Hey they don’t even legally need to mitigate their externalities!” is usually a good sign of “things that need regulation.”
The very broad survey orient visible telescopes are most effected of course.
Regulation both for visibility and for debris is warranted. But getting their by streaming 'earth astronomy is over and Kessler syndrome' is pretty counter-productive. If we can get away from that kind of language maybe we can actually make reasonable progress on these questions.
Unfortunately I can not find the series of lectures from astronomers and SpaceX. That had really go information. But there is an active working group somewhere that is meeting regularly that can probably be found somewhere.
They’ve said: this incurs a huge negative externality on the astronomy community.
The response was: it doesn’t matter because Starship will send up space telescopes at some point hopefully (TBD how long it’ll take, if ever, for them to reach the same availability as extant terrestrial telescopes)
That is the counterproductive response.
Worst case estimate for a single Ariane 5: 200 million €.
Average launch cost for Space X: 50 million € (poorly researched I know)
The cost of the James Webb space telescope?
50 worst case Ariane 5 launches or 200 Space X launches.
I don't think the launch vehicle matters here.
Most of the cost was research, development and testing of new technologies. Building 10x JWST would not cost 10x what we paid for a single telescope. A single launch also means everything has to be perfect, there is no prototype in space, no second try and no learning from mistakes.
The project would also probably have made drastically different design and management decisions if they knew in advance they were sending >5 units instead of one.
Even the researches, unless very selfish, should know that ideally you want many more very powerful space based telescopes if you actually want to do research and not just marvel at the stars from your patio.
We obviously want larger launch capacity in the long run. It's not even a question. Falcon 9 is already the most successful rocket ever on almost all stats of usefulness, why shouldn't we have at least SOME faith that spacex will be able to build starship and use it?
Real terrestrial telescopes are better than hypothetical space-based ones.
And I didn’t say we don’t want more capacity nor that Falcon 9 isn’t the most successful rocket ever, nor that I don’t have faith in SpaceX’s ability to create Starship, nor that Starship won’t eventually add space-based telescopes.
I said that none of that actually addresses the current concerns of people who currently need to do their work, as GP implied their complaints are totally irrelevant because “someday we’ll launch more.”
- Starlink interferes with terrestrial telescopy much less than the baseline issues such as weather, atmosphere, etc.
- SpaceX has already done great work in ameliorating these issues anyway with better non-reflective coatings and design.
- Telescopes in space are orders of magnitude more useful than terrestrial ones, so it would not be a surprising net positive at all.
- Even if the previous point weren't true, telescopes are not really equivalent to taking kids to school. One is a necessity, the other is a nice to have. The truth is that most of the low-hanging astronomical fruit that can be gleaned from the "middle/bottom of the market" has already been picked anyway. Almost all new/significant astronomical discoveries/research are happening with space-based telescopes for exactly this reason. People aren't unraveling the secrets of the universe with a telescope in their backyard anymore.
- This entire situation has really nothing to do with Starship being a good thing. You can argue that Starlink is a net negative (for all the above reasons this seems hard to justify in practice), but that argument is orthogonal to whether or not Starship is good. This isn't really your fault because the parent comment is the one that initially conflated the two, but I felt this point should be made.
In any case the degree of interference thing isn’t too comforting since I would assume these issues are additive to one another.
Thank you for the good counterpoints! Would love to hear an astronomer’s take on whether the terrestrial-hanging-fruit has been picked, so to speak. It would not surprise me for sure.
There was a man who was massively effective in getting multiple once-in—a-generation revolutionary companies of the ground by sheer grind and lots of luck (yes..both). We should thank that man of yore.
But that man is now a convenient stooge for the right wing and a pointless edgelord whiling away his money on pointless projects.
Both of these can be true. It’s okay.
Here’s to hoping Tesla, SpaceX and all his other world changing companies succeed inspite of him and let him cement his complicated legacy.
Go Starship Super Heavy!!
PS: Shoutout to Gwynne Shotwell for being a massively effective administrator for this incredible rocketship of a company.
She’s the low key (on this forum anyway) hero of human space flight in this decade. Absolute unit.
Can you imagine what things would have been like in Ford's time if he had the internet and Twitter to spread his views?
That said, I have nothing but contempt for the man and am petty enough to have schadenfreude in any of his personal comeuppance.
I believe in "free speech" but also think that absolutism in that regard is horseshit.
The same with the FDA - we don't want a repeat of Thalidomide babies do we ???.
Here comes elon zealot just copy and pasting empty claims and ignoring the actual facts we have. The lack of accountability is just staggering. And the only defense is a cave man ad hominem - oh they are just butt hurt anti-elons.
Elon Musk has a long list of bogus claims, outright lies and now currently on trail for fraud. His shtick is to make semi-revolutionary clam in X years, and before people start asking about that claim in near future he is making new claims about something completely new.
Thats why people are calling him out on his BS claims. So lets have a look:
The re-usability claims are all bogus, a make believe at best. For one, Starship is basically an early prototype rocket. Two, falcon 5 - a much simpler design - has current re-usability window at one month (as far as i remember). How do you go into weekly launches...
Empty claims of Elon Musk that they will work out the kinks are akin to Elisabeth Holmes claims. Or self driving tesla Next Year(tm), or underground tunnels, or hypelink, or amazing AI robot buttler all next year (tm).
Not to mention pretty strong evidence for Kessler Syndrome is already happening. And polluting orbit with starlinks are not helping.
global internet being provided by Starlink - you mean a toy for rich. Right? Cuz even tough it somewhat affordable now, for starlink to actually make money need and will cost way more.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.
SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
Whatever is motivating this narrative you've adopted about Musk, it isn't the pursuit of truth.
lmao, we managed to fuck up our very own perfect planet in 200 years of industrial revolution and the plan is to go transform a dead rock into earth
Elon or others I'll still find it stupid, this isn't minecraft
> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present
It's more like the present is (more than) slightly inconveniencing our future, and ego maniacs like Musk are a big part of the problem
It's the plan to protect humanity (as in the genus) from extinction level events such as asteroids, mega-volcano eruptions or global wars. As a nice side effect, the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.
That's a nice thought but it's 100% sci-fi, we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain. What if this race for survival is exactly the thing that will cause our end ?
> the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.
Except it's literally the opposite... we need a lot of co2 on mars to make it habitable
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-poss...
Sorry but I don't follow. We need to act because it's a real possibility, even though it's uncertain.
> What if this race for survival is exactly the thing that will cause our end ?
... "we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain."
Why would it cause our end?
> Except it's literally the opposite... we need a lot of co2 on mars to make it habitable
Sure, but that's not the only thing you need to do there. You also need to make fuel - out of CO2 that's already there.
> Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon
You know, polarization takes at least two poles. If some people are rabidly anti-Elon, so some people are rabidly pro-Elon.
> Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink
They do not complain about the global internet. They have nothing against the global internet per se. They complain about satellites. There are no fundamental physical laws stating that the global internet comes with littering the sky with thousands of bright satellites. They can be less bright at least, or probably one can use some military expertise on making flying objects undetectable by any means. Then come costs/benefits analysis and the question becomes too difficult for an armchair experts to grasp. So they instead prefer to construct a strawman they feel comfortable to fight.
When you allow yourself to use such a rhetoric devices, you shouldn't be surprised when the other side becomes polarized. They reciprocate and then you feel the right or even an obligation to throw some more shit into your discussion, and then you have no chance for a meaningful discussion.
Or because he constantly stomps on experienced engineers with stupid ideas and puts the whole thing at risk. Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.
Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk. At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions without having to cater to his ego and make him think the idea was his.
Name one other company, person, or even a country that can and is willing to do that. There are none. As long as SpaceX can and no one else can, the future of SpaceX is on a pretty sound footing in my opinion.
I'm sad about the interference that Starlink causes to ground based astronomy, this doesn't mean Musk is ignoring those issues.
And I value government agencies making sure that business interests are balanced against democratic will of the people, that doesn't mean they're funded at the right level for a rapidly growing industry.
SpaceX knew that the concrete wasn't the final solution, it was always temporary, they had already started building the steel water cooled plate before the first test flight. Based on the data they had available from the series of static fire tests leading up to the test they thought the concrete would ablate and survive one test flight before they took the downtime to replace it. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Elon overruled all the SpaceX engineers on the timing of when to install the steel water cooled plate or are you Literally making things up?
Learning more by moving quickly and taking calculated risks is clearly the better approach, as evidenced by the current dominance of the Falcon 9 and SN 25 and booster 9 sitting on a repaired OLM and being scheduled to make another orbital attempt in less than 2 weeks.
Unfortunately, #LiterallyMakingThingsUp seems to be a trend these days.
I think most people agree that it's better for SpaceX business, but some don't agree that it's worthwhile for our society with what happens if failed. It's like Tesla's "FSD Beta" situation.
Wouldn't that be called working from first principles? Proving it doesn't work can be quicker in the long run than over-designing something based on what you think won't work.
Iterative implementation works very well for many kinds of software development projects. When an iteration involves 200 tanker trucks carrying fuel and oxidizer and dozens of rocket engines and results in destroying launch infrastructure and dumping debris into wetlands and inhabited areas, one might conclude "iteration" has made the jump from sound engineering principle to management fad dogma.
The upside was they got lots of data to improve the next rocket, which they already did. It's ready to go again, just waiting for FAA approval.
Or they could have done that the first time with a flame trench and a water deluge system that prevented the energy of the rockets from damaging the rockets dooming the first stage and making concrete rain on the neighboring wildlife reserve.
Elon could have verified that hypothesis with a full static fire test AND be able to see the damage to both rockets and pad from an actual launch without destroying a rocket.
This is why SpaceX grew from the start with an immune system to prevent Elon from ruining too much stuff.
I believe he’s better observed in Twitter, which is a company that didn’t develop an immune system to deal with him.
It seems that while the explosion would have been avoided with a deluge or flame trench, it could have also likely just been mitigated with a thicker concrete pad or a vent system.
Even Elon said this. It was a gamble, it didn’t pay off.
Not in the least. SpaceX hires a lot of rocket scientists who are industry experts. They're more agile than the entrenched players since Boeing/Lockheed legacy space programs weren't efficient but SpaceX has relied upon expert consultation and expert advice from folks in the industry to build their rockets. I don't see them as building from first principles at all, they're building on what's come before standing on the shoulders of the rocket engineers who've come before.
Do you have more information on this? My quick googling turned up nothing.
> In addition to the siting and sizing of the pad, SpaceX does not have a flame trench, nor do they have a water deluge system used to suppress heat and sound energy from any launches, as the Army Corps of Engineering permitting required to add these civil engineering systems is itself a multi-year process.
> No large rocket complex on the planet: not in Russia, nor China, and certainly not in the US, exists that doesn’t contain one or both of these energy suppression systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279
https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to
Sometimes you do something against conventional wisdom, and people call you a genius. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off.
I am assuming that you are employed, rather than an employer.
> Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea
They expected it to break but be ok for one launch. Its a reasonable risk to launch sooner.
> Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk.
And yet the he has lead the business for 20+ years and the company has been getting more and more and more successful. I guess that just happens by magic.
> At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions
When SpaceX does good its because Musk wasn't there, when it does bad its because of Musk. Classic.
Of course everybody who leaves SpaceX tells a different story. Journalists and others who observe SpaceX tell a different story.
Musk has literally been the leader since the company had 5 people, and he always had control of the companies direction. Shotwell is one important part of the team. But she was recruited by Musk and promoted by Musk into the position she now has.
People also used to say 'Musk has nothing to do with engines its all Tom Mueller' of course then Tom Mueller responded saying that was false. And of course once Mueller left, SpaceX is still doing great things with engines.
So the reason why 'Musk is always throwing into the ring with SpaceX' is simply because its the truth and all Anti-Musk Twitter warriors are not actually informed about the topic they simply have to discredited Musk whenever they can. Often they don't even care about spaceflight, they care about being against Musk.
Product is way more interesting in this case than BD, considering it's the most badass rockets ever made. But feel free to praise Shotwell too, that's great too.
Of course as soon one says this, someone else will misconstrue this as some ridiculous claim that Musk is a singular genius responsible for inventing everything. This is of course silly. He's only one human with a limited schedule. There are surely thousands of things happening every day at SpaceX which he has zero involvement in.
As we often say in computing: ideas are easy, execution is everything. But the biggest successes of SpaceX weren't just about having ideas, they were about having the gumption to fund them, and an ability to recruit the best people so that execution is possible. In fields like rocketry, one might instead say ideas are easy, identifying when an idea should have a billion dollars thrown at it is hard, and execution is damn fucking hard.
If 4 of those data points don’t convince you, you obviously don’t want to be convinced even in the slightest
Also, you need a vison to advance things. Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke
Viable electric cars were a thing even way back in the late 19th century [1]. The problem was that burning oil was cheaper (as the users had to pay none of the externalities for decades), and so it lost out for a good while despite being more efficient (i.e. energy contained in the fuel vs distance driven) on paper.
On top of that came the massive, decades-long lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry to get rid of public transit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.
> until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.
I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
1. If that were true, EVs would have been much more successful in America. They haven't been. The Nissan Leaf was around long before Tesla and it never went far, because the range sucks.
2. Back in 1900, 100 miles would have been great. In 2000, it's not sufficient at all for most car-owning Americans.
3. You can't have the same range at higher speeds: energy usage goes up dramatically with speed. So you need much more energy storage, and the battery tech of the time just wasn't sufficient.
>I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
That's a very good point. It would be interesting to see an alternate universe where this was the case.
The problem is that, because of cars, they built everything farther apart, and people willingly chose places to live farther away from work. Just look at a map of the city of Phoenix AZ for instance: 100 miles' range won't cover a trip from one side of the city to the other side and back.
However, for vacations, a rental car is absolutely the right idea. That's what people here in Tokyo do: there's lots of convenient places to rent a car for shopping trips to Costco, or a trip to the mountains, etc., because so many people don't own cars.
Fundamentally the issue with long term Mars habitation is that any technology that allows us to live on Mars full time without support from Earth would make even the wildest 'destroyed' Earths livable. The only thing Mars gives you is there's not going to be people beating on the outside of your trillion dollar dome trying to get in.
Electric cars are nice and all but if you want to credit Elon Musk with contributing to the switch from gas to EV, you also have to credit him with killing high-speed rail with spitballing about the vaporware that is building underground vacuum tunnels to shuttle cars around, aka the Hyperloop (before it became a closed-loop underground taxi service with no regard for fire safety).
The real danger is that life forms hitchhiking the first humans can totally overwhelm any existing life and completely condemn it.
Build a lab. Run it with things that we hope are good enough, but don't value enough to get home (back to earth) safely.
If we're really smart we can even use the whole thing to bootstrap a useful environment to get to and a far easier environment to get back from.
I mean very different robots from the rovers we've sent to date. Maybe not even more complex robots but definitely bigger (and smaller too) robots.
Their task not to survey with minimal disruption, but to actively disrupt. To build, to transform materials (lab), to create the base buildings and infrastructure of civilization. So there's somewhere with resources to better support humans.
IIRC you need 6 tonnes of food and oxygen just to keep them alive for the transit.
Has that ever been done for human consumption before? Relying on a novel technology in a setup where, if it breaks, everyone on board dies, seems rather dubious.
There were also experiments with "undifferentiated lettuce tissue", using C13-labeled acetate to investigate whether crop plants are able to properly feed off of acetate as their main food source, instead of photosynthesis-based small molecules.
What I'm suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance. Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor.
Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking. Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit. The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation...
[0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.
That’s a weird thing to list as a criticism, the centre core ends up going way higher and faster than a normal booster, they know recovering it is a stretch. One did landed successfully, but was lost on the way to shore due to rough seas. On most flights they expend the core to get additional performance, doing so doubles GTO delivery capacity.
As for ‘delayed for years’ that’s relative to knowingly highly aggressive target timelines. Compared to space industry standards they were still completed at break neck speeds.
Both these criticisms are just attempts to use skewed optics to turn what are actually some of SpaceX’s bigest successes into apparent failures. SpaceX shoots and hits much higher than anyone else. The fact that they aim even higher than that is no sign of failure.
Shotwell is great, but so are lots of other people that work for SpaceX.
They were once 7 people in a room. If Musk was new CEO that just came in 2 years ago of course he wouldn't get much credit.
But Musk has been leading SpaceX for literally 20+ years. So to just say he has nothing to do with it is stupid, and every single person that worked there and left tells a different story. The same for journalists and other who interact with SpaceX.
If anything people are continually surprised how involved Musk is, when anti-Musk people always stress how he is an absent boss. But then you hear about 5h meetings where Musk and engineering team sit together and go into minute detail and Musk makes decisions in those meetings.
Its really only people from outside who dislike Musk that push this story.
So yes, Shotwell was great. He increased her responsibility over time. And Musk reward that by promoting her. But so were other people that Musk recruited and put into positions, Hans Königsman, Tom Muller, Jim Buzza and so on. But dispite many of them leaving the overall organisation still continues to do well.
So at some point, leadership is something that matters.
> every single person that worked there and left tells a different story.
Is just not true. It's okay if that's your experience talking to people that have worked there, but I have also talked to people working there. As much as you chastise people who dislike Musk, these kinds of absolute statements come from people that seem compelled to leap to his defense.
Besides, I believe their landing method is to catch the booster with the mechazilla which should be quite a show.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9eoubnO-pE&ab_channel=Space...
Yeah, well they're trying but the FAA isn't letting them launch. It's possible the one they want to launch will make orbit, or maybe it will be the next one etc.. The point is it will never achieve anything if it keeps getting delayed by the FAA.
If Elon didn't want things to be delayed so bad by the FAA maybe he shouldn't have launched on 4/20 for the lulz without adequate launch site infrastructure for such a launch.
The FAA shouldn't let them launch until SpaceX has proven they've done the work and have done their best to mitigate these issues going forward - both the actual consequences and the decision processes that led to them. From what I remember the FAA basically rubber stamped SpaceX's incident report (or whatever it was called) that the Internet reported as being from the FAA itself.
As for the not adequate launch site infrastructure that had 0 to do with the date, they built the pad long before launch, expecting the fondag to handle the heat/pressure and it didn't work, they didn't suddenly build a pad throw it together and say we're launching cause 4/20 because LOL.
It's incredible that we live in a world where a statement like this has at least some veracity.
I was following starship from the time when was still called ITS or BFR.
I have great news for you, they have already done that!
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700789411279966339 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cltnwVMcYgw
Forgive me if I'm not going to click on a Twitter link, but the YouTube video only covers site infrastructure. I see no evidence that Elon won't Elon again. 4/20 blaze it.
By the way, I absolutely despise the man and his antics, but I don't want to live in a world where SpaceX fails, just to spite him.
I think he's posting a lot of crap, and probably doesn't have much of a filter and is impulsive at times. Clearly he's got some mental problems that lead him to say and retweet stuff on a whim that he probably doesn't actually believe. I think we can all understand these imperfections.
At the end of the day, he's an incredible human being, flaws and all. No one's perfect, and he's cocky and pushy and rude and stuff. But he'll be in history books, and mostly for having done a whole lot of good for humanity, while pissing off a lot of humans.
- He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
I’m sure there’s plenty more I’m forgetting.
I get a kick out of Elon/Twitter schadenfreude as much as the next person, but I also have to consider that maybe the "growth at all costs" Wall Street mentality has permeated our society and psyches so thoroughly that it triggers a strong kneejerk reaction to anyone going against that grain. Here is a leader who is finally saying, to hell with the investors and the board and kowtowing to the advertisers, I will make the changes I feel are right, and we are rejecting it because it's "mismanagement." Where mismanagement is defined as not playing along with the public market incentives.
I'm sure it's a swing too far in the apologist direction, but you gotta wonder...
1) It lacks all nuance because your question implies that if a person provides benefits to [whomever] and it's greater than their antics/demons, then you should like them. And that's simply not how the world works. And
2) The comment even said they wouldn't want to live in a world without SpaceX despite his antics.
People are complicated and so too are the views individuals hold about other people. It's not a spectrum where people eventually just dismiss extremely concerning things because someone made something cool.
That's the matter of the question. Elon Musk has some significant achievements which shouldn't be dismissed just because he behaves less than perfect somewhere else.
You don't seem to understand me at all. elteto listed a few things, which can be agreed with, and yet which aren't enough to explain cryptoegorophy's question "Why people hate him". I'm reminding that there's another side of things - people in this discussion generally quite aware of that, and only some focus on a one-sided picture. You don't need to repeat that the question is flawed - you just have to correctly understand the question. That is, it's a reminder of another side, which is necessary for cryptoegorophy's question. It's true that it's a complex question, but you don't understand me if you think I don't leave the room for nuance. Or, in other words, you can just dislike a man - but to explain why people in general have a correlated opinion, you have to look at the whole perspective.
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
Why does Starlink work in Ukraine?
Have seen this claimed many times but nothing to back it
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
Mismanaging a company is hardly unusual, nor a reason to hate someone unless you are a shareholder or employee
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
Tesla shares are up massively, so this is not a reason to hate him, even if you are a shareholder. It is a reason to hate him if you are a short seller, I guess. He has Tweeted about crypto, but there is no evidence he participated in any pump and dump
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
Can you cite anything for this? I assume it is just more of the same media hysteria about him being some kiind of right wing fascist with no actual backing.
On the ocelot question - he will cynically tickle them to death instead.
This is about as reasonable discussion as can be had on the topic of Musk. Which is sad.
Tesla / Space X are already amazing in almost ever respect, it doesn't need all the silly hype machine on top of it. Yes, it is neat to think about Mars bases eventually but that should be a stretch goal not pushed as "It is 4 years away!".
Starship is an incredible achievement already and I suspect it will come together quicker than we anticipate (less than a decade, probably in the next 2-3 years) but Musk had always promoted time lines and ambitions that were silly. Like point to point public rocket travel by 2030. The thing cannot land yet and they are already thinking 50 steps ahead with a stated date. That doesn't detract from Space X's achievements but it does cast a shadow over them as a whole.
You do know that the next Artemis mission is in 2024? According to your timeline it would be delayed more than the much hated space launch system which actually went to the moon
Starship and access to orbit, as well as Starlink (which cheap access to orbit enabled) are indeed insanely powerful geopolitical tools. Many of the existing geopolitical engineers would hate to see him not be firmly subordinate to themselves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the FAA’s decision is being used as a bargaining chip here. You don’t get to do things like this in the USA unless you play ball 100% with the existing people who control access to orbit.
Nobody is richer or more powerful than the people who presently control the satellite-based weapons and surveillance systems that the US operates. Nobody will be able to be in a position to replace or supplant them without some sort of negotiation with them.
Imagine it: with a working Starship, Musk could replace GPS, Keyhole, and whatever the rods-from-god system is codenamed, in a matter of months (or perhaps weeks, if the payload design work is already underway), for anyone on the Earth who he thinks would benefit his goals. A lot of the leverage that exists against him (and can presently be used to constrain him) would be gone, never to return. It’s already fairly obvious that the geopolitical status quo on Earth is not very important to him.
The latter is possibly dismissable as "Well, that's just your opinion, man..." but he gives muscle to his opinion by making business decisions with strategic policy implications (e.g. turn off Ukraine starlink service at strategig moments..)
The twitter vandalism is very clearly "his works".
Social media has always been cancer, some people just want it more preferenced to their sort of cancer by a centralized system.
But otherwise I see little evidence it's actually stopped anyone from using it other than people giving heartfelt anecdotes on HN and lots of talk about Mastodon that unsurprisingly died off quick.
Twitter is irrelevant; he is doing product (read: design for manufacture) design on electric cars, battery systems, rockets, internet access satellites, brain computer interfaces, solar, humanoid autonomous robots, and tunnel boring machines, in approximately that order.
Twitter is like 20th on the list, but it’s a great target for narrative-based outrage (“the bullied one gets rich and buys the playground” etc). Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that. Freedom of expression for all is far more important than censoring racists (which doesn’t stop them from being racist or stop the spread of racism anyway).
What version of Elon Musk are you thinking of here? Read literally anything he says and it's immediately clear that he's always been the bully. He wasn't some underdog who was bullied and pulled himself up by his bootstraps to prove everyone wrong, he's the son of an apartheid emerald mine owner who made some good business bets and has now figured out how to scale up his bullying to a national scale. The already-rich bully bought the playground so that nobody could stop him from bullying everyone even more.
> Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that
Ah, the old "I'm free to publish racism but you're not free to call me out when I do so". These free-speech "absolutists" always abandon their morals as soon as they get the opportunity to censor someone who is making fun of them for being a douchebag. It's always about wanting a spout-racism-free card, never about the inalienable rights of mankind.
And FYI, if your 401k has some index fund exposure you're probably the partial owner of some cobalt mines in Congo that have questionable labor practices.
> but you're not free to call me out when I do so
in the GP post, literally or in meaning. So... I think you're at least exaggerating too much, at least in some places.
However I do see your point.
People who actually value personal freedoms understand that there are always tradeoffs: you cannot simultaneously have freedom-to-bully and freedom-from-bullying. It's a difficult problem. People who claim it's simple are not actually interested in solving it. The people who say that freedom-to-bully is infinitely more important than freedom-from-bullying (as all "free speech absolutists" are inherently claiming) are, quite obviously, bullies that want to get away with bullying.
> I've never seen a counterexample
Perhaps that Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" was made too much in jest and didn't really correspond to some real events, before or after. Or people like Vaclav Havel, who got to the power from the power's opponents, didn't have opportunity to refrain from silencing a political adversary. I don't know.
Which is petty and stupid. But AFAIK he has not censored political content he disagrees with, so I much prefer it to the previous regime.
Can you back that up, with actual data, and not the politically motivated articles from democrat aligned media?
The only specific cases of this I’ve seen was an actual bot network saying the n word a lot when Elon took over, which was obviously a coordinated attack.
Other than that, where is this racist hell hole that twitter has become apparently? Where is the proof?
This makes absolutely no sense, yet people keep repeating it
TWZ: Do you trust Elon Musk?
KB: (Laughs) In what sense?
TWZ: There was the discussion over Walter Isaacson’s book excerpt and whether Musk shut off Starlink to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol last year, or whether as he claimed he denied a request to provide it.
KB: Look, [Starlink] is a private property of a private person. Yes we really very widely use his products and services. The whole of the line of contact talks to each other to some extent using his products and services. The only thing I can say here is that without those services and products it would be a catastrophe. But it is true that he did turn off his products and services over Crimea before. But there's another side to that truth. Everybody's been aware of that.
TWZ: So he did turn it off?
KB: This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.
TWZ: But did he ever put it on and then shut it off?
KB: There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/exclusive-interview-wi...
That's my point though. I am not judging the content of his opinions. I am concerned about the fact that he is voicing them with little care. Everybody has some weird opinions and half-baked ideas. It's very different to have these thoughts in your head vs sharing them with friends and family or to to voice them to 160 million followers. He can think in private whatever he wants and I wouldn't care or judge him unless it starts to impact other people. I think lots of weird shit, but it just makes my wife roll her eyes. Nobody is gonna die from it.
Or you know, people acknowledge both but his dumbassery overshadows his genius by a long stretch. Bezos, Zuck &co at least have the decency to shut the fuck up when they should, which is 99.9% of the time on 99.9% of topics. That's all he would have to do to be more appreciated
I'm not saying that Musk is perfect, or that you're doing this, but people like to fault this wildly ambitious projects for what they haven't achieved. But when they do work they have an outsized impact on the status quo. When Starship succeeds (and I believe it's just a matter of time whereas Tesla FSD is still an "if") it will revolutionize space travel in ways that seem sci-fi today.
State-of-the-art today is building machines that cost billions of dollars and throw them away after using them one time!
Both my rockets and Starship have reached space the same number of times.
Also, Starship is beyond the planning stage
Wouldn't it be more apples-to-apples to compare "all your rockets" to "all of SpaceX's rockets", or "all your superheavy-class rockets" to "all of SpaceX's superheavy-class rockets"?
I'm just facetiously pointing out that Starship hasn't launched yet. There could be major flaws. Someone else might have a better design brewing but with little to show for it. The irony is that Starship's design looks a lot more like the sci-fi futurism of the 50s - we're returning to it after testing out shuttle-style reusable vehicles.
Secondly, you're assuming that reusable rockets are better than one-time use ones. While this may be true for certain kinds of missions, it is not at all clear for many others.
Reusable rockets fundamentally will have lower payload for the same thrust, for the simple reason that they need fuel for the return stage. They will also need to be made from sturdier materials to survive reentry, which again limits their capacity.
> One explicitly, that Starship will work in anything resembling its current design and promised operational paramters.
We have a test flight behind us, which showed many tens of seconds of the stack flight. That's a big achievement validating the rocket architecture and general parameters. Frankly I'd assume we crossed equator in rocket development here, we're in completion stage more than developing.
> This is by no means as guaranteed as you make it out to be (it's very much an if, not a when).
You know, there are no physical laws which prevent Starship from working. SpaceX shows economics on their side. At this point it's not guaranteed that Starship will fly - because it's hard to predict the future - but it's a pretty safe bet that Starship can be made to fly.
> The promises of rapid reusability are very much up in the air, and the whole many-engine design is also not proven in the slightest yet.
There are many successful many-engine rockets. Soyuz has 5 engines but 32 nozzles firing at launch. Falcon Heavy has 27 separate engines. Saturn-I had 8, Falcon 9, Black Arrow 8 - the last one just 4-5 times less engines than Super Heavy. To say it's not proven in the slightest is bending the reality a bit too much.
> Secondly, you're assuming that reusable rockets are better than one-time use ones. While this may be true for certain kinds of missions, it is not at all clear for many others.
It's important however what those cases are. By now we have a good history of Falcon-9 launches, where for a number of years we have a substantial reduction of cost to orbit for a wide variety of payloads. So maybe - maybe - there are many other kinds of missions where reusability is a disadvantage, but those kinds are clearly in substantial minority.
> Reusable rockets fundamentally will have lower payload for the same thrust, for the simple reason that they need fuel for the return stage. They will also need to be made from sturdier materials to survive reentry, which again limits their capacity.
That's technically true, but arguing this is a bit like arguing that a car made for a single travel would be lighter and cheaper that the one made for repeated use. True, but quite irrelevant for most practical cases.
As became apparent in the post mortems, the rocket lost its chosen flight path the moment it left the pad, probably due to the engine failures. It flew of course, but it was a failed launch from T+3 or so. The safety systems also failed to self-destruct the rocket on command - they thankfully did enough damage for the atmosphere to take care of the rest.
Basically the launch only proved that the parts hold together and the engines produce enough lift. The engines themselves are still far too prone to failure (apparently this was using an older generation, so maybe that part is already fixed).
> There are many successful many-engine rockets. Soyuz has 5 engines but 32 nozzles firing at launch. Falcon Heavy has 27 separate engines. Saturn-I had 8, Falcon 9, Black Arrow 8 - the last one just 4-5 times less engines than Super Heavy. To say it's not proven in the slightest is bending the reality a bit too much.
You're right, I was exaggerating a bit. Still, my layman's understanding is that there is a fundamental difference between Falcon Heavy's multi booster design with 9 engines per booster, and Super Heavy's 33 engine design on a single booster. Maybe I'm wrong on this.
> So maybe - maybe - there are many other kinds of missions where reusability is a disadvantage, but those kinds are clearly in substantial minority.
As I understand it, the disadvantages start once you want to put large payloads beyond orbit. Starship's main goal is to put a payload on the moon (this is what the NASA funding is for) and for this purpose it is much worse than a traditional single use rocket: instead of a simple trip to the moon, the design is to launch to orbit, then do an additional 6 or so launches to refuel it while in orbit, and only then will it have enough power to fly to the moon.
SpaceX is banking on the launch being so cheap with their hopes of rapid reusability that they can do 7+ launches of Starship for less than the cost of a more traditional mission. Falcon 9 definitely is not that cheap compared to other rockets, but perhaps Starship will indeed be.
> As I understand it, the disadvantages start once you want to put large payloads beyond orbit. Starship's main goal is to put a payload on the moon (this is what the NASA funding is for) and for this purpose it is much worse than a traditional single use rocket: instead of a simple trip to the moon, the design is to launch to orbit, then do an additional 6 or so launches to refuel it while in orbit, and only then will it have enough power to fly to the moon.
American plans to go to the Moon in 1960-s included a variant with LEO docking. That would allow using a smaller rocket, as the payload needed to go to the Moon could be assembled on low Earth orbit in several launches. NASA decided to go with one rocket of the size which was very ambitious at the time - about an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest existing one.
The Starship goal is to bring even bigger payload to the Moon. Sure, it could be done by scaling up the Starship. But the fate of big rockets so far - Saturn-V, N-1, Energiya, even Space Shuttle to an extent - is that they suffer from the lack of use. The more they are used, the better and cheaper they get. So, no, the SpaceX goal isn't actually to bring even bigger payload to the Moon - it just happens that this scale, which Starship has, is good to land on the Moon a lot of payload in one launch. So, given that you want to use the Starship which is being created for many different missions, how would you use Starship to fly to the Moon? You'd refuel it on LEO. Noe we can remember the actual SpaceX goal - it's flying a lot of people and cargo to Mars, and SpaceX decided to create the biggest rocket they could reasonably plan, which is still not that large given that Mars wants thousands and thousands tons of stuff, so even this big rocket should be used with refueling on LEO.
Once again - Starship is the biggest rocket SpaceX can build, from technical and economical standpoint (this reminds me the Soviet engineers chain of thoughts when they were planning N-1). It's still small enough for the task (flying to Mars), so LEO refueling is still needed. If it's still needed, it's logical to use it for Moon flights as well.
Yes, instead of one flight (like Saturn-V) Starship needs several, for refueling. In exchange it brings larger payload to the Moon, so since we're planning to go there and stay, it could be justified. So, we're using a universal reusable super-heavy rocket for many different tasks instead of building a system for each task separately. We're losing in time - since we need multiple launches from Earth for single flight to the Moon - but gaining and payload and - crucially - in developing bespoke solutions for different tasks.
I think overall it's an advantageous approach.
The second, I disagree, reusable is definitely better in every way. I'm sure there are edge cases where it needs to be proven or a particular mission, but no other machines are as costly and disposable.
Rocket designs haven't evolved much over the last 50 years. Competitors all claim to want reusability but none of the major players are pursuing it seriously. Engine design and manufacturing is hilariously obsolete. NASA has become a jobs program instead of a innovator. I'm just happy to see a radical new approach to design, manufacturing and testing.
Okay, but SLS got close to the moon. It doesn't matter that it can't do a rendezvous with Starship, because it fulfilled its mission.
Yeah SpaceX is goat. Between starlink, self landing rockets and this, oh man.
Right now they haven't even proven that the many engine design is actually workable, rhier engines failed at a spectacular rate in the single full test launch that they conducted (maybe because of the ill-conceived launch site, maybe for other reasons).
So, no, Starship already has a place in history.
They don't need to prove it to people who accept as the only proof the demonstration of the fact. Remember you can have proofs in different ways, and professionals are fully aware of this.
Twitter/X most certainly not among those accomplishments.
Because people like Elon and Gwynne have knowingly lied or purposefully mislead the public regarding Space X.
An example is the Point to Point travel, this is not every going to happen. Anyone with a bit of knowledge about rocketry etc. knows this has a zero percent chance of happening alone because of the noise it would case. In their presentation they had Zürich as a destination, Zürich is so small that you would blow out every window in the entire city. Launching starship in Zürich will never ever happen.
Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_International_Airport
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230306-just-how-loud-is...
>Even 1.5 miles (2.4km) away, the noise from a Saturn V launch was recorded as being 120 decibels
https://www.wkcgroup.com/tools-room/inverse-square-law-sound...
Gets you 101.6 decibels from 20 km away.
Okay, how about 200 km over water? 81.6 decibels. Okay as a yearly event, not something that should happen every week.
Okay, how about 2000 km over water? 61.6 decibels. What was the point of this idea again?
From the Starship Noise Assessment https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/AppendixB_No..., it looks like you need maybe 20 miles distance for a tolerable level of noise (around 100 dB)
So I'm not sure regular launches from the lake will be tolerated by the lake shore's inhabitants. This is why Starship launch platforms should be 30km from shore (not 20km as I wrote previously)
The other side will form the opposite opinion to signal that it is different.
The fact in of itself of polarisation of public discourse exists because there is a polarisation industry innocuously named social media.
It has subverted political discourse and education too.
Despite this, there are still enough reasonable people for science and scientific progress to continue.
However, one may right well feel pessimistic about the future.
Its ultimate problem was that it was still ultimately more like a TI-83 graphing calculator than an iPhone. Much as people mocked the handwriting recognition, it was technology which could have been iterated upon. It turns out the key missing ingredient for the Newton was wireless internet access — and of course an internet worth connecting to.
A number of reasons, actually.
- Because the entire idea of "the Earth is fucked, so let's go set up camp on Mars" is a train of thought that's only applicable to the ultra-rich, and in the current economic environment that's (pretty understandably) an unpopular idea.
- Because after Starship's failed attempt at landing and highly-destructive launch earlier this year, people who care about the nearby wildlife refuge at Boca Chica are understandably not thrilled about continued ops there.
- Because the man behind SpaceX -- whose past achievements are admittedly impressive, at least in the spaceflight industry -- is increasingly associated with deceptive marketing, poor design choices, and incompetent product management, and when a corporation like SpaceX relies on significant funding from taxpayers that's a troubling combination.
- Personally, for me, coming from startups, "move fast and break things" scales terribly in terms of (for lack of a better word) social responsibility, and with the company's stated ambitions, I don't see this ending well.
SpaceX does a lot of cool shit, but let's not pretend like they're advancing the state of human existence here. They're a commercial entity, even if not publicly traded, but with Musk at the helm that feels like the tradeoff between being purely profit-driven vs having later-years Howard Hughes behind the wheel.
Anyway, it's pretty disingenuous to call Starship in particular "the most capable and sophisticated rocket ever built." So far it's capable of doing a significantly suborbital hop and failing to land. You could argue that it's failed at the one thing a spacefaring vessel should, by definition, not fail at.
I do trust in the FAA's judgement here, but I hope they work closely with Fish & Wildlife. The effects of climate change are increasingly endangering wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico, and having chunks of concrete the size of a living room flying into the water isn't helping.