SpaceX Astronauts Begin Spacewalk, Putting New Spacesuits to Test

Other than when a powerful and explosion-prone rocket destroyed its launchpad, hurling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete thousands of feet. But it's almost 18 months since that happened.

But you know it ISN'T private, because every rocket ever designed will end up in public space, either literally in outer space, or dropping parts in the ocean, or a tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of exploding somewhere less convenient.

This idea that you can just make your own little closed off launch pad and therefore ignore society is stupid.

Some of the more onerous pushback comes from people who have been ignored before and turned out to be right. For example, when Dupont and friends first started producing PFAS, someone out there was crying foul about "hey maybe we shouldn't just dump this everywhere", and they were ignored, it was dumped everywhere, and now we get to deal with the consequences because nobody listened to those people.

This has happened hundreds of times, including serious things like lead paint and leaded gasoline, which we KNEW caused direct and measurable harm to people, and yet was completely ignored. A portion of the public has obviously lost ALL trust for the private sector claiming any sort of "this couldn't possibly cause problems" and are willing and able to take action.

If you are a "big" enough entity, there is no such thing as "private". Anything you do, affects a lot of people, and you should be treated that way.

What happens if a commercial companies beats its competitors?

Prices rise.

But now the companies need money for AI and prices rise.

Without real competition what stop SpaceX from rising its prices?

SpaceX doesn't have real competition after Boeing failed.

What happens in such a monopoly?

The prices rise.

Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper?

Guess what happened next?

And second giving people bullshit useless projects like SLS, does not actually keep them 'hot'. Its more like warmed up Pizza. The people and more importantly organization lose the actual ability to do things quickly at reasonable prices.

Somehow it seems acceptable that SLS will cost more then 30 billion $ in development cost and 2-4 more billion $ per launch. Not to mention the time.

Don't misunderstand political pork as actually strategic workforce development or long term government policy. That just what you personally wish it to be, not what it actually is.

Why are they designing rockets then? Has very little to do with science.

Nobody denies that NASA should 'lose' money you are literally arguing a straw man. The question is 'what should NASA spend its money on'. And wasting 80+ billion $ on a completely broken architecture that makes no sense what so ever seem to most people like a bad idea.

People actually WANT NASA to actually do more science, and actually advanced tech development.

Personally I think NASA should be building things like nuclear reactors for space, or mars, moon missions. They should work on super-advanced engines. On chemical systems to make water on Mars. There are lots of things NASA could do that there simply isn't another way to do it.

What NASA should be doing is reinvesting in 70s technology that is completely useless and out-dated for purely political reasons.

I don't fucking understand why everybody who criticizes NASA is attacked with 'you hate science' when this is not actually what people are complaining about. Its just kneejerk defense of all that is wrong with NASA and congress.

I have to imagine you mean turn a profit directly on the research itself (isolated down to the cost per specific item of research).

Because obviously big tech can quite trivially fund fundamental research at an enormous scale as they see fit while printing their traditional gigantic profits.

Apple + Microsoft + Facebook + Amazon + Nvidia + Google = over half a trillion dollars in annual operating income (around $126 billion in op income last quarter).

They could fund NASA (~$25 billion) and would never really notice it. It'd take about four to six months of further op income growth by those six companies and NASA's budget would be covered in perpetuity.

> Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices. Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants.

> “That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”

SpaceX builds all 33 engines on a Starship for that amount.

Also thermal management seemed to be an issue, as they were restricted to operate in the shadow of the spacecraft.

Good for a v0.1 beta.

I still disagree with the general sentiment though. Space is more important than most other pursuits.

You've also got to include the emissions needed to extract/purify/cool/pump all that fuel/oxidiser (and any other consumables like nitrogen), a percentage of the construction emissions cost for the 1st stage, pre-flight refurb emissions, the whole of the 2nd stage, and some percentage of the Dragon capsule (including alterations made to it). Then you add all of the emissions of the ground operations needed for this flight including 1st stage recovery (and also any flight/boat diversions required from 3rd parties because of the exclusion zone).

I'm also assuming that the altitude you emit certain things at (e.g. aluminium vapourising in the atmosphere) changes their impact vs at ground level.

Personally, I think this mission is more worthwhile space tourism than Bezos who's pretending a high-altitude rocket flight that doesn't reach orbit is 'going to space'... at least they're testing new spacesuits on this mission.

"Starship launch produces 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure combining different types of greenhouse gases in one unit). That's 2.72 times more emissions than those produced by a single SpaceX Falcon 9 launch"

Note, I did mis-quote when I said 28k tons of greenhouse gas, it is 28k tons of CO2 equivalent.

Table 3-7 shows an estimated 83794 metric tons CO2e for 24 starship+superheavy launches, much lower than the figure in that article ( 1872000 tons CO2e for 24 launches ).