It’s also frustrating that people keep saying SpaceX “relies on taxpayer money” as if we’re just giving them money for no reason. It’s all contracts! SpaceX only gets money for providing some kind of service. They’re not being bailed out or anything. The Musk hate is justified but so misdirected.

How are there so many people in this thread talking with such confidence and yet know absolutely nothing? SpaceX is the reason NASA doesn’t need to rely on Russia to get astronauts to and from the ISS, so that’s one huge benefit. And Starlink is in such a low orbit that their orbits are constantly decaying and will burn up in the atmosphere without any orbit corrections. So there will never be a chain reaction crash.

What do you mean little to show for it?

I respect the integrity to do that!

No, it’s true. The Biden admin drafted this in December, 2024. We have to do better than the right and actually live in reality.

Where are they? I want to pull up with my homie and surprise him 🤫

But SpaceX has literally lowered the cost of a launch by an order of magnitude. They also are flying one of the most successful rockets ever flown.

I don’t know if I quite agree with that being a morale issue. But that same logic nuclear reactors are immoral because if they blow up they can cause a lot of harm.

I do agree that it is a little sketchy for human flight, but they wouldn’t use it if there was a significant chance of it harming the people on board.

Going to the moon was a fantasy at one point. I just don’t see any downsides to trying to become multi-planetary. Even if it fails there would still be technology developed in pursuit of that goal that helps life on earth.

That wouldn’t happen for an extremely long time. It will be many generations before Mars would be self sufficient enough that they could wage war on Earth. I don’t feel like that’s enough of a possibility to not even try colonizing another planet.

I’m not aware of any reason on why we’d want to colonize the bottom of the ocean, but there’s many reasons to want to become a multi-planetary species. Space exploration has also lead to many technologies being used in everyday life today.

What’s morally questionable about fission fragment drives?

I read aggressive as in accelerating aggressively. Possibly to get around people?

While that is true, it’s not fair to say “see they lied! In completely different circumstances you only get a fraction of the range!” Even for ICE vehicles they use ideal conditions to measure their MPG/range even though most people aren’t driving in ideal conditions.

Looks like the plan is for it to eventually reach speeds over 4000 mph.

Maybe I live an extremely boring life, but I definitely do not have a Charlie in my life.

As someone who has floored it in a Tesla with no racing experience, it really isn’t hard to stay in the lane.

I get your point, but isn’t that essentially what any rocket is? Lol

Fair enough. Starship is still in its infancy though so I wouldn’t completely give up hope yet.

Apparently you don’t know how to have a conversation… Doing a quick search it seems like Starlink is around the break even point for operating costs and revenue, so if you’d like to provide sources to refute that, that’d be great.

What makes you think Starship isn’t going to Mars?