Reusable rockets save milions
My dude still waiting for trickle down economics to kick in
Man that is not the point here… The point is that your uni now can send stuff to orbit when 10 years ago it was economically prohibitted. Elon can fuck off but spacex IMO is a net positive to humanity.
The less can be sent into orbit, the better. We have enough trash in orbit as it is. No need to clutter it up any further.
good thing that uni projects are low orbit…
Yeah better go back to the caves where there were no plastic, right?
Edit: I’m all for sending stuff out in space in a responsible manner, just got bored about lots of people being anti tech here. Probably answered the wrong person, sorry!
BTW isn’t most stuff in low orbit falling out down in the atmosphere or is that just not enough to chean it up?
You realise that littering close orbit with more shit is just going to turn it into a whirling extraterrestrial claymore for anything trying to leave the planet.
Everything that goes up there should have a lifespan to come back down.
You realize that is exactly what starlink and other satellite constellations are designed to do right?
The fucking whoosh on this one.
they meant they are designed to de-orbit you dense luddite
Yup, low earth orbit (LEO) still has some thin atmosphere that slows things down a tiny bit and makes them deorbit over time. That’s why, for example, the ISS has to reboost to stay up and can chuck garbage bags overboard and not really worry about them. The deorbit time depends on a lot of factors including the mass and surface area. Starlink sats are supposed to passively deorbit in about 5 years.
Cube sats were sent to orbit for university projects long before reusable rockets became commercially available
Yeah, it hasn’t been cheaper, prices are pretty much the same and if it weren’t for the US government funding them, SpaceX would have been bankrupt
Wait wait you are telling me Musk didn’t pull himself by his boots straps and actually is the biggest welfare queen there is? Nooo, I can’t believe it…
Not sure which way you’re leaning with this, but musk is a fucking scammer asshole. Just to make that clear.
I don’t get this argument. The US government has invested into a tech development. Which means that spacex seemed to have a good base to pull that off. I didn’t see a line of other companies doing anywhere near that capability.
Also, everyone calls for government to take lead in doing stuff for the betterment of humanity, but the second that happened, everyone loses their minds. Make up your mind, are we ok with government doing stuff or not?
Well, you seem to think the public is a monolith and not a bunch of squabbling tribes.
The people who understand shit want progress and understand the government (when not held back) can make wonderful things happen.
Then you have the people who can’t see benefit for anything past the end of their nose arguing to turn the clocks back to 1922 because grandpappy said it was better.
I don’t have an issue with governments outsourcing “space Works” to other companies. It’s a necessary thing I think.
However, SpaceX (from Elon “I’m a scammer, baby” Musk) which arguably is the most successful amongst the companies from Musk, has… issues.
The basic premise behind the reusable rockets was that they would be 10 times cheaper! Yeah and then reality hits and space x rockets are just about the same cost because of how rockets work.
See, rocketry is basically transportation, just like a trailer truck transporting goods. You always have the vehicle, the fuel, and the material you transport.
With a trailer truck, you don’t need a lot of gas to go very far. This means you have a lot of weight for both the vehicle and thebcargo. So the truck itself can be made very sturdy and you still transport a lot of cargo. Trucks can go for thousands of miles with no or light maintenance and can last very long.
Now take an airplane. Airplanes need more fuel and need to be lighter for flight so you need to use lighter materials. Lighter materials equate more maintenance, more risks of breakage, more work to keep them going. Transportation with airplanes consequently is much more expensive.
Rocketry is at the very edge of what can be done with all known Materials. A rocket typically is about 5% cargo, 10% rocket, and 85% fuel. This is what is needed to get any rocket into orbit. I’d you want to get beyond Low Earth Orbit you might need multiple stages. All this needs to be as light as possible while at the same time as controlled violent as possible to get you there. Rocket engines basically need to pump insame amounts of fuel uit to get a exhaust flow rate that is high enough.
Because of this engines have an enormous wear and tear whist at the same time being as light as possible. Remember the truck engine where it really matters little if you add a few kilos more or less? For rockets, each kilo matters. So rocket engines are extremely fragile in comparison whilst at the same time plowing though factors more power in just minutes.
So Elon comes with the idea of reusing rockets. Cool. Contrary to what he always claims, this his was not a new idea, this was not his idea. (None of his ideas are his, nor new, nor great). This was done in the 80s-90s by NASA and the conclusion was that the cost and waste of returning and reusable rockets typically is the same or more than simply dumping them.
Funny detail: look at DARPA tests where everything is done right and people applaud the safe conclusion of tests vs. SpaceX where people always applaud when rockets explode. It’s weird!
So now look at what SpaceX charges for their reusable advertised as 10 times cheaper rockets and… they cost about the same as other rockets.
Then look at fucking musk. That last rocket they sent up didn’t have flame diverters at the launch Facility because Elon decided it wasn’t needed. Before launch, people who know rocket launches all wondered “eeeehhh WTF are we doing here?” and the launch destroyed ,(obliterated is a better word) the launch facility and heavily polluted the entire area and adjacent ocean. A car parking lot 5 miles away had all cars pelted with debris, it was a fucking disaster.
In conclusion: I guess the main problem I have with SpaceX is Elon Musk. The guy is like trump in that he lies through his teeth with every word he utters. He always comes up with just plain stupid and impossible ideas (let’s daily transport people with ballistic rockets!) and people lap it up thinking he’s a genius. He’s an idiot. And he’s in charge of SpaceX. SpaceX regularly lies about the costs which is a problem. SpaceX does stupid shit because of Musk, which is a problem.
I’m sure there are some very good and intelligent engineers working at SpaceX but I feel their voices and decisions are overrun by the CEO, Musk, making the company a bad thing.
The only trickle-down I believe in is that half that boy trickled down his mamas leg.
Smoking crack from an n64 trident might just give me the edge I’m looking for.
God I mean just the crack alone is bad but now you wanna smoke through old Nintendo plastic
I can feel the cancer in my dome forming as we speak
the nintendium is coursing through me
Nintendoneitis
I’m 99% sure this is how they came up with Majoras Mask
When you’re high on crack, cancer is irrelevant.
I’m pretty positive the only thing keeping my mother-in-law from getting lung cancer is the constant supply of cheap cigarette smoke she’s pumping into them. That shit’s killing the newborn cancer cells before they can ever replicate.
If my shadowrun players had their characters do this or something similar, I don’t think I could say no to them regaining their edge points lol
Do you think your high will look pixelated?
No, it’ll have big polygons.
/c/bigpolygonproblems
And just 3 textures.
“his own car” more like “the car he promissed to the real tesla founder and wanted to say FU to”
Interesting, where did you hear this?
Finally, the suit alleges that Tesla had guaranteed Eberhard the second Roadster ever produced after Musk insisted he get the first, but then failed to provide that car.
Don’t see anything about that being the same car launched into space in that article specifically, I’m still looking though.
Source: I made it the fuck up
I think Musk is a hack and a conman, but what the fuck is with lefty twitter accounts that think behaving like a completely braindead troll online will sway anyone? Hexbears on lemmy have the same style of moronic shit slinging.
People have given up on actually swaying people, as it’s been seen that the most entrenched opinions never ever ever change their stance about anything, regardless of evidence shown.
The most enjoyable thing to do thus is openly mock them, making their entrenched lives miserable.
The most enjoyable thing to do thus is openly mock them, making their entrenched lives miserable.
You are overrestimating the effect this sort of discourse has on people, they are mildly annoyimg at best, and the “mockery” only has the effect of making them look ridiculous.
Yeah, I don’t think you’re the target audience, chief.
And you are ignoring the appeal of an obvious joke that’s designed to be annoying to liberals/centrists and whatever. But also just be funny to everyone else. This sub is memes the twitter account is obvious ragebait/ shit posting just from the name alone…
The key here is “enjoyable” not “making their lives miserable” it doesn’t matter whether anyone actually suffers or any change is enacted, it’s a joke it’s primary purpose is to be funny. It’s secondary or tertiary purpose might be propaganda or education or whatever, it’s still mostly just funny, for people that get it at least.
The joke here is on some level obviously includes the absurdity of arguments constructed against a nonsense critique trying to defend a system that the people arguing don’t even really realize the joke is critiquing. Which is why the account tries to amp up the absurdity with their (non) dismissal of the pointles arguments.
To pull this whole joke into a more centrist perspective it’s like posting whatever inclusive or “woke” idea on /pol/ and just typing nonsense as the replies to the highly structured but deeply misunderstanding shit that /pol/ will dream up on that given day. And having a great laugh about it.
Just that we exchange /Pol/ for twitter which is now apparently partially musk dickridig and as such a conservative late stage capitalist realist echo chamber. And we laugh at the stupid defenses they spin up for a non attack on their chosen saviour. Where the point of the joke is so obviously not understood by the people replying, but obviously understood by people voting here.
And probably only partially understood by you, and or me, but that’s something we don’t need to get into, because if we do, we are again missing the point of the joke.
The kind of weirdos that simp for Musk are the exact same ones that dread being openly ridiculed for it. Their Twitter profile is part of their actual persona.
woosh
Melting plastic while trying to smoke drugs only makes you smoke the plastics. Totally not speaking from experience.
I don’t entirely get what’s going on in the comments here but I just love how one responder pointed out how SpaceX is not the same as Tesla when no one prior had mentioned either.
Every online discussion has the potential of becoming the outlet for one commenter to articulate his personal retort to a fictional argument constructed of a thousand previous or inexistent arguments.
Technically they have, because the implication of the original post is that because Musk burned money sending his car to space, he had to fire 10% of Tesla workers.
The ballast could just as easily have been university student design team projects and he would have been doing a ton of good for the world, but instead he decided to waste all that fuel and a whole car for publicity. “Efficiency”.
On the first flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket, a university satellite was the payload. Not only did the launch fail in just the first few seconds, but the payload crashed back. Landing in the shipping container it arrived in. First launches of rockets do not have good track records. Risking a silly car was arguably more fun than the equally useless “mass simulators” used on most first launches. If it were my satellite, I would not have wanted it on the first Falcon Heavy launch.
To give an otherwise unfunded project the chance to go to space, however slim, is worth far more than a tesla roadster with an astronaut mannequin, and costs far less. What was their satellite design going to do on earth?
Plus if it blows up, you could still say your satellite blew up on launch. Not the worst story there is to tell.
There isn’t any way we could find a million high school students to donate experiments or golden records. What we need is to use government investment to shoot shameless product placement for my other company into space and live stream pictures of it.
What government investment are you talking about? SpaceX paid for the first flight with their own cash. Launch contracts for Falcon Heavy were for subsequent flights. Heck, SpaceX got in trouble from the US government for the live stream of pictures.
He was my favourite ghostbuster
Economy Crisis
