Posted on 02/18/2022 8:45:00 AM PST by SunkenCiv
"It will obsolesce all existing launch systems".
Elon Musk recently provided the first big update on SpaceX's Mars-bound rocket, Starship, and its competitors are watching on with "a mix of awe and horror", according to a report from Politico.
At his latest Starship presentation, SpaceX CEO Musk highlighted the fact that Starship will be reusable over and over again at a fraction of the cost of previous rockets. It's a development that threatens to leave NASA and other competitors in its wake as it launches to the proverbial stratosphere...
While it has long been known that Starship would be reusable, the advanced capabilities reportedly have other space organizations, including NASA, worried that their own in-development rocket projects will be rendered obsolete...
Starship is designed to be the first reusable spacecraft that will be able to take crew and cargo to the Moon and Mars before returning to Earth. By contrast, NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) for its Artemis Moon landing missions has gone billions of dollars over original budget estimations and is years behind schedule. What's more, NASA estimates that an SLS mission will cost approximately $2 billion per launch, while Musk announced in his latest presentation that a Starship mission could cost a comparatively low $1 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at interestingengineering.com ...
See? We are thinking exactly the same. ;-D
no elon has already moved Nasa cheese
Elon totally exposed the underperforming government jobs/welfare program named NASA.
Who knows.
why yes he has, starship has been test flown and landed, just need to test the booster, get the FAA out of the way. continue development. SLS cant even get out of the VAB to 39B for a wet dress rehearsal
NASA has always been something of a jobs program. For example LBJ and others put much of NASA in Texas and the South and it was not because they liked SciFi.
However NASA then did good work, but as the domestic poltical culture soured a bit on it. NASA moved to the back burner in peoples minds and the governments budget it became more important as a jobs program. Something John Glenn was famous for in Ohio pork. I guess it can be thought of at least he kept it going. Unfortunately now its first and foremost primarily a jobs program and grant provider.
NASA had better get used to the idea that it is out of the manufacturing business as SpaceX has shown their business model is just a giant rape gang abusing the taxpayer with only expensive, useless bastards as the offspring.
Here is a montage of the "death by obsolescence" that Musk has visited upon NASA:
And don't get me started about what Musk did to the major car manufacturers.
Okay, I had to look Maxwell up. A Scottsman! A Scottsman with a long list of papers and accomplishments.
He deserves his recognition.
What whizzes me off about Edison was the way he went about sucking the wind out of everyone else’s sails. A megalomaniac if there ever was one.
Tesla was the true genius but Edison had the money and the press.
He more than a list of papers - he’s responsible for everything we know about the electromagnetic spectrum ; without him Einstein would have remained a postal clerk and Tesla would be unknown, as would AC, WiFi and a lot of other things we take for granted today.
See :
The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 1st Edition, by Basil Mahon
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Changed-Everything-Maxwell/dp/0470861711/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1FAAQ5IX7K5JV&keywords=the+man+who+changed+everything&qid=1645230222&sprefix=the+man+who+changed+everything%2Caps%2C151&sr=8-1
Look closely at the rocket, under the “R” of “Part 2”.
Pokemon.
I wasn’t belittling Maxwell at all. I meant that his work was recognized in his day and is still accessible to scientists and researchers who know his work.
Maxwell seems like one of those people who appear maybe once a millennia who so “upsets the apple cart” that lesser minds make discoveries willy nilly thereafter.
Unfortunately for the world Nikola Tesla had angered Edison who then did everything possible to stop funding and reporting for Tesla’s work.
As an added insult the government swooped in after his death and confiscated all his notes and drawings.
What could have been?
BTW, I saved the link. I’ll probably buy the book next month.
While I can’t begin to follow their research I can appreciate the people who take great leaps and make for a better world.
As an added insult the government swooped in after his death and confiscated all his notes and drawings.
What could have been?
—
That also happened to Wilhelm Reich, sentenced by a kangaroo court to 20 years for contempt and then denied his heart medicine. We will never know what he wrote in the few years he spent in prison before he died of the inevitable heart attack
Yeah, it’ll probably be dubbed a form of racism and demands will go up to shut down SpaceX.
LOL
The muzzies (especially of the rich OPEC states) will continue to see the benefits of hiring SpaceX. :^)
Musk is a polymath genius, and he’s got Edison in his rearview mirror. Edison wasn’t just some nimrod, either.
I agree — crapping ones pants is something that resonates all the way down from the White House. :^)
Well put. The first time I’d ever heard of him was during his Falcon 1 development on that Pacific Island.
I’d watched the arc of Beal Aerospace, which IMHO helped light the way, not least because it tore the mask off the corrupt gubmint policies toward the aerospace industry. Beal wanted to use Sombrero Island in the Caribbean, and they ran into environmental impact on that. Perhaps Andy Beal should have planned to use the Bob Truax / Sealaunch idea, from the very beginning, using a launch deck from international waters.
When those Falcon 1 failures happened, I thought (and may have posted here, not sure) that it was going to prove more difficult than Musk thought, and that trying to do the project from such an isolated location was impeding progress.
Then, number four worked, after number three came within an nth of doing it. That fourth launch would have been the last attempt if it had failed. Success led to piles of private investment money, Falcon 9, congressional hearings, roadblocks by turncoat Demwit / RINO Richard Shelby, until SpaceX prevailed in its lawsuits and — more importantly — wildly successful designs.
I like how the Ev Astronaut framed it, “failure is an option”. Heh. At NASA, that was always used unintentionally ironically anyway.
We’ll have to part company regarding Venus, but otherwise, wholeheartedly agree. Musk is going to beat NASA back to the Moon, is going to beat China’s crewed missions as well. First thing is likely to be an uncrewed orbit-and-return, followed by an uncrewed landing, followed by a third, longer duration uncrewed surface mission, all in pretty rapid succession.
Once that happens, the wacky “Hello Moon” lunar orbital tourism will happen, and Congress will roll over and kick some cronies out of bed, forcing NASA to more closely focus on the actual mission, instead of some kind of mealy-mouthed “multiple sourcing”, which clearly doesn’t exist.
OTOH, the CCP may extend its control (through blackmail and bribery) over Congress, which will gladly dump all our old-line defense aerospace companies in order to shift US spending onto Chinese (state-run in all but name) companies. The same kind of shift happened when Reagan’s Space Station Freedom was repudiated and replaced with the kumbaya BS ISS and paying for the Russia space program.
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