No Stupid Questions

Imagine you want to build a cabin in a very remote place in Alaska.

Getting there is quite difficult, you did it a few times in the 60's but the path is so bad that you had to throw the truck away each time (around $45,000 per trip, for the truck + gas)

You are still planning to build your cabin but having to buy a new truck for each trip is not great, plus the fact that only one company can make this SLS truck so you can't get more than once a year.

Building a cabin in these circumstances is close to impossible.

Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused. The trip from the hardware store to the build site now only costs you around $100 for the gas plus truck expenses AND you can now do the trip to the hardware store multiple times a day !

Now building the cabin becomes way more accessible.

Replace the Alaskan cabin with a scientific base on the moon or Mars and multiply the amounts by 100,000 and you have an approximation of the situation

A lot of people pointed out a lot of firsts, huge cost reductions, regular flights, but let’s look from the opposite direction …..

Mass to orbit. SpaceX came from nowhere not too many years ago, jumped ahead of established manufacturers, until now they launch most of the worlds satellite mass to orbit, with an unparalleled success record, even with the recent failures. And this is with a rapidly growing space market

Everything they’ve achieved has not only let them scale up far surpassing the rest of the industry across the world, combined, but with reliability and cost to attract all that business

I don’t know what it would take for you to call it a revolution, but the impact on space business is revolutionary

Not a fan, but it generally boils down not to where they can fly but how they differ in other aspects, mainly cost.

SpaceX is currently the world pioneer in heavy reusable rockets, which is another way to say they are the only ones to launch big stuff up there so cheap, and it gets even better.

They are essentially doing the good side of capitalism - making stuff cheaper - applied to space, one of the most expensive industries in the world.

I don't know they just launched and caught a rocket yesterday, that's pretty fucking cool.

Because no one else is doing space things as well as spaceX is even if you think they suck.

Rockets are just cool tech. So is space tech. It grabs our imagination in a way that most terrestrial things dont.

https://lemmy.world/post/20836468

Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon's many, many side project misadventures he's pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it's worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.

What you're asking is akin to: why are people impressed by the airplane? We've already reached the Americas and India by boat.

SpaceX, and others actually are not advancing science per se, but are greatly improving/optimising the engineering so that it can be used in cheaper ways by others.

There's also the issue that after the moon landing we didn't really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded

SpaceX is not run by Elon and he's kept from being involved closely by a buffer of people that keep him from getting too close to making any "elon" level changes.

SpaceX is successful despite Musk, not because of. And the woman who runs it knows that and keeps Musk away from any important decisions or impacts.

So the stuff they're doing is legit, cool aerospace stuff.

It's just not something Musk should take credit for. He does/will. But he shouldn't. He's a hack.

I hate Elon just as much as the next guy, but pretending that this wasn’t a marvel of engineering is really disingenuous. People with intelligence beyond my comprehension made that a reality, and just because the company had his face on it, it doesn’t make it any less impressive

Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he's been pulling off.

That said, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.

Up until 5 short years ago we had:

• No main booster recovery
• No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
• No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
• Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
• No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
• No push for reusability at all

This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.

This is like making the first aeroplane that's able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.

Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.

Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that's all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.

We're talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.

I've seen so many people grudgingly pretending what they saw wasn't one of the coolest fucking things they've seen all year all because they hate Musk. Like, you know he's not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right? By all accounts he's more of a hindrance and these amazing fears of engineering have been accomplished despite him, not because of him.

I personally don't really care how big of a douche Musk is, as long as he's willing to fund these kinds of things.

NASA, nor anyone else, has done this before. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say NASA did this already.

Because they are impressive in the way NASA was. Which is the problem - we should be doing this as a nation and not subsidizing whatever a billionaire fancies at the moment.

My guy they just caught an object falling from space using a pair of giant chopsticks

Wait, when did NASA land a fully reusable rocket like fucking Buck Rogers?

Then do it again, but capture it with the freakin' launch tower?

When did NASA even have a reusable rocket? Oh, the shuttle, the bastardized money pit for NSA/NRO/Air Force, that appears to have been designed to orbit a surveillance satellite chassis, which most people know as Hubble (it's one of many, this one being used to surveil the universe, instead of the earth).

And the shuttle was a quasi-reusable orbiter, not a rocket.