Speaking of politics though, it was a bit jarring to see the "USA! USA!" chanting. I get the intent (disliking the government doesn't mean disliking America), but it's kind of awkward to see a large crowd of immigrants doing it as the admin their boss supports is pretty blatantly harassing immigrants regardless of citizenship.
So whatever Reddit is at any one time HN is a slightly more adult version of that. HN isn't "becoming reddit" any more than the airspace above a septic tank is becoming poo. It's always an approximately fixed distance from it.
Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
Sometimes I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space.
Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.
Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and has moved at a slower pace, but he's clearly committed for the long term too.
It sounds like a no-brainer management strategy, but it's surprisingly rare in practice. People will lend on random teams and projects, projects won't try to push any envelope but just be the next thing marketing or product came up with to boost some metrics or acquire some new customer, etc.
Now I might be entirely wrong as I never worked at one of his companies, but it's the impression I get and most of his success, Tesla and SpaceX, I think he really managed to snatch the experts away from where they worked because of that.
At least I think this holds for bootstrapping. And then that top talent left, and now since the major innovations have already landed, probably you can just churn our grunt out-of-schoolers to iterate and keep the lights on.
And its also hard to say that 'top talent left'. Because arguable some of the achievements after some of those people left is bigger then before. Tom Mueller for example build the Merlin engine, but claims to be more proud of the team he build that then went on to build Raptor. So clearly even while some talented people left, many others joined.
SpaceX is not 'iterating and keeping the lights on' they are always going for something harder in the next iteration.
I'm sure Starship will make it to orbit, but I'm betting that the claim of 100 tons to orbit is where it will miss the mark. And that is the crux of the issue IMO -- because getting the new rocket engines to be reliable enough can always be accomplished by dialing back on its efficiency and overall thrust capabilities. I'm waiting to see if they will be able to deliver on its claims.
Just incredible overall to watch and very inspiring. Few things give me hope for the future like these videos do.
(Liftoff is around 33 mins in)
Well done, of course, props and snaps. But I'm looking forward to it getting up to full speed, and being able to get down from that.
Correction: the trajectory only intersects with the planet prior to engine relight testing. After that it's at ~50km [1] (though to be fair, if they make it safely through the relight, all testing so far shows they're likely to make it through most of reentry)
> Around three minutes later, Ship 33 exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands, causing debris to litter the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. While no injuries were reported, the debris caused minimal damage to infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, and prompted airspace closures in the region for over an hour. The FAA ordered SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the breakup, grounding Starship until the inquiry was complete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7#Mission...
Right now they're in a comfortable testing regime, getting up to near-orbital speed to be able to verify reentry in realistic conditions, while having the freedom to test dummy payload deployments and freedom to risk losing tiles since they will all definitely burn up or splash down within minutes of the ship reentry rather than floating around in orbit for some time.
If they go orbital, they had better be sure they won't leave a ton of tiles behind, and that they will be able to perform a controlled deorbit.
If they can make it so they only lose tiles when in a suborbital trajectory, they may be safe to begin deoloying real Starlinks as soon as V3 has proven engine relight.
Perhaps kids of my kids would be able to travel to the moon.
It’s so refreshing in a glossy PR-coated world.
They're clearly almost ready to scale this thing, if the next block version doesn't add a ton of problems back on. I'm not sure they're quite at the point of rapid reuse looking feasible, since tiles did come loose near the end of flight; not a problem for stage return, but definitely bad enough to warrant a meaningful correction before a (counterfactual) reflight.
Overall they've clearly proven the recipe works.
d_silin•1h ago