One time dealer fireball…one time.
They’ll be safe in event of explosion, they already tested that
Bezos is going to be so goddamn annoying when he starts bragging about having been to space.
Grimes and Musk are extremely dumb
This has to be some kind of parody.
There’s some interesting space drama brewing:
A few months ago, SpaceX was the sole winner of NASA’s manned lunar lander process. NASA’s reasoning was that since Artemis was underfunded and SpaceX had the cheapest and best bid, they would only do one award rather than having multiple providers. This obviously kicked off a huge shitstorm and the whole thing is mired in litigation.
Sen. Cantwell (D-AMZN) added a provision to the Endless Frontier Act which requires NASA to make a second human lander award. This would almost certainly be Blue Origin, whose lander is rumored to cost ~$6 billion, has less than 5% of the payload capacity of Starship and has more development risk. (There’s a third bidder, but the award document makes it clear that their proposal is even more expensive and crappier than BO’s.) According to this article, the House may not want to follow their lead. It’s obviously scandalous for the government to give a $6 billion bailout to the world’s richest man’s struggling rocket company, but it’s potentially stomach-able under the rationale of fostering competition. The House seems to be motivated more by hostility to private enterprise in general, which is worrying. Artemis originally looked like it was just going to be an elaborate charade to pretend that SLS has some role to play, but NASA has done a much better job than I expected of getting that money (and probably more importantly, technical support and ambitious goals) to support real innovation. Congress may want to put an end to that, which is worrisome. I’m frankly not sure how much damage they can realistically do though. I don’t see how Congress can make NASA de-award Starship, so it’s probably just wasting a bunch of money on SLS, which sucks but is not the end of the world.
On Starship generally, this article is an exciting read. Elon’s kooky Mars colonization schemes attract all the hype, but a system for getting huge payloads to orbit without throwing away a $100-million rocket will have huge benefits for anything you could want to do in space.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/01/tesla-plaid-fire/
A Tesla Model S Plaid erupted in flames as the owner was driving down the road on Tuesday, attorneys for the man said, briefly trapping him in the car after the electronically activated doors would not open.
It happened outside Philadelphia days after the man took delivery of the model Tesla has hailed as the world’s quickest production car. Tesla said it delivered the first 25 vehicles in June after Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a glitzy media event in Fremont, Calif.
One out of twenty five bursting into flames? Hmm the Fiero wasn’t even that combustible.
They named a car after a lumberjack shirt?
SpaceX is going to be launching the Europa Clipper mission to (surprise!) Europa in 2024. Improbably, a Falcon Heavy is something like 90-95% cheaper than the SLS that NASA was originally going to be forced to use, resulting in a cost savings of approximately $2 billion to the government. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to fund most of the Europa Lander follow-up mission that’s been on hold for budget reasons for a while.
In other news, the first flight of the most powerful and advanced rocket in the world, and also the first fully reusable rocket in the world, was originally scheduled for this month, which seems unlikely, but may come off next month!
They finally assembled the complete Starship test stack for the first time late last week. This is the prototype that will be doing an orbital launch test “soon,” which could mean anything from late this month to who knows when? (Apparently there’s some regulatory question about whether a new environmental impact assessment needs to be done, which would obviously delay the test for a very long time.) Cool pics:
(There’s a human for scale in the cherry-picker on the left side. The white dot you can barely make out is their helmet.)
And here’s an infographic comparing Starship to other rockets:
Blue Origin keeps creating these infographics to try to make SpaceX’s plan seem dangerous but they just highlight how badass Starship is. The whole “a launch vehicle that has never flown to orbit and is still being designed” is quite the assertion from a company that’s launched zero rockets to orbit ever.
Elon pointed out 16 launches is no problem because SpaceX has already done more than that this year.
Why do we need such a big goddamn spaceship? After fifty years of materials and electronics research you’d think we could do more with an Apollo-sized spacecraft instead of building a monstrosity like that. Good luck getting people to Mars if we need 16 mega-rockets to land some people on the moon.
To launch big shit for cheap. Starship could launch the entire mass of the ISS in something like 3 launches. It took 36 Shuttle launches at $1 billion+ a pop plus launches from Russia to get everything up there the first time.
It actually only needs 4, and those are just to refuel. Plus since both stages are reusable those extra 4 fuel launches are no big deal, it’s not like they’re building these rockets just to drop them in the ocean like every other launch provider.
“Visionary like Andrew yang” cracks me up every time
Well great, another epic boondoggle can be done with only 3 launches.
Yep this. It’s all about $ per ton to orbit.
Exactly this. Starship is not even much bigger than the Saturn V/Apollo stack, it just doesn’t dump the second and third stages.