SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
I really wish they’d stop putting Musk’s name on things like this. He didn’t design the engines, he didn’t plan the flight path, he did nothing but throw a bunch of money at a company because he’s obsessed with Mars.
He does force them to cut corners for the sake of more headlines though
Which is why I’m nervous for when they decide to start doing manned flights.
Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket in the world and it used to explode like this too. It’ll be 5-10 years of successful unmanned flights before anyone rides on this rocket.
And what of worker safety at Space X?
Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death.
It’s not the rocket or the engineering I’m concerned about, it’s the push to meet deadlines at the expense of safety.
You literally said you were concerned for manned flight in your last comment. So originally it was the rocket and engineering you were concerned about.
I said I was concerned because of the corner cutting, which isn’t an engineering problem
That might’ve been what you intended but it is not what you said. You didn’t bring that up until your 2nd comment.
You’re oh so slightly twisting the dude’s words. What he said was:
This could be expressing concern about the flights themselves, or about something that happens around the time the decision to start doing manned flights is taken - like cutting corners that leads to employees getting injured.
Dude even clarified what he meant, and you’re like “nope, I won’t accept that”?
Was NASA exploding rockets this frequently when they pioneered all of this decades ago? It only took NASA 8 years to go from first entering space to landing on the moon. SpaceX is nowhere close to that and they’ve been launching rockets for 17 years.
Damn you clearly know nothing about space flight history. Tell me, what agency has the most spaceflight deaths? I’ll give you a hint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
Damn you clearly know nothing about technological development. Elon stands on the shoulders of all those who gave their lives in the past. He benefits from all the safety regulations.
And still with all of that. The tens of billions of dollars the government hands out to him. And more than twice the time of the Space Race he had accomplished so little. How many successful rockets did NASA develop in that time? A lot more than SpaceX.
Rocket go up Rocket blow up Stonk go up
Different design processes and NASA has to appease Congress who likes to cut funding if a rocket blows up.
But the Design-build-test-break-redesign-etc process that SpaceX uses is cheaper, quicker, and gives more data.
And blows up real good
Look how long it took to develop SLS and how much money was spent, and then how much each launch costs. And the moment Starship is complete SLS will be obsolete.
It took 8 Years AND $25 billions ($248 billions adjusted to today’s dollar value).
For comparison NASA awarded a contract for spacex to develop the Human Landing System, the value of the contract is $2.89 billions.
Exploding rockets is totally common in rocket science. In fact, their mission objective wasn’t even for the rocket to succeed at making it to space. When you put millions of pounds of fuel into a tube and heat it up, there is a lot to take into account. No one has ever launched anything this big, so they are going to have to iterate quite a few times. Even the computer models can’t catch everything. Sometimes it is as stupid as a bad part manufacturer.
No, but the resources given and the requirements set are different. The Saturn V did not have to be reusable and was awarded two orders of magnitude more funding. Which is ultimately why it stopped being made.
The US government has a pretty good track record on making sure astronauts don’t die.
Blame the poster. The CNN article itself doesn’t have Musk in the headline and barely mentions him at all (there is one quote near the end).
EDIT
Or maybe don’t blame the poster. From the URL and web archives, it appears CNN may have changed the title.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/18/world/elon-musk-spacex-starship-launch-scn/index.html
Perhaps it’s time for titles that match the article headlines as a matter of policy here?
Actually, I just realized the poster may have used the original CNN title.
That is precisely what happened. I use the title that gets pulled when you paste in a URL.
That is already the rule. CNN changed the headline after I posted it.
what? didn’t he start SpaceX because Russia WOULDN’T take his money?
He tried to buy Russian decommissioned ICBMs but the DoJ wouldn’t let him.
IIRC, they wouldn’t take his money because he misunderstood the price they wanted, tried to bargain it down and lowball them, and ended up pissing them off so much they doubled the price.
He did insist they slap an X on it tho. Thats gotta be worth something, right.
Sadly, Thats how capitalism work hence they keep using Musk’s name. Anyone with money is valuable in our economy.
This just false. Sure, he did not do everything alone but he has a huge hand in engineering concepts and design decisions. Lots of hate and complete misunderstanding how spaceship, spaceX and Musk work in this thread.
When Elon still wrote code it was so bad they had to scrap most of it.
And the one they did use ended up into a fridge’s firmware.
The dude prefers reviewing source code on paper.
Anyone who writes code knows that is not a practical way to review.
Maybe in his time he got book smart about some physics/rocket concepts. That’s the least I would expect anyway. But that doesn’t mean he really has any expertise to offer to the product.
I agree it makes no sense. A fair number of my clients are morons and about 2 or 3 times a year they want a printout of the code.
You’re wrong. Watch some videos on starship development and the history on spacex in general.
He doesn’t do shit. All of that is just him saying buzzwords he learnt from the actual engineers so he’d look smart.
Videos like what?
Several on Everyday Astronaut’s channel for instance.
I do not know that channel, can you link one of those? I would like to see what he has to say.
Look for the three tours that Tim did with Elon
https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=everyday+astronaut+elon+musk
Not OP, but it’s really not hard to find.
https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?si=4t0wMNSlWjUBClqg