đź‘ľ Artemis I
reporters: NASA’s huge waste of money “exceeded all expectations and all systems functioned perfectly” in completely pointless and unimpressive Earth-Moon L2 Distant Retrograde Halo Orbit mission that wasted a hundred trillion taxpayer dollars
Starship catastrophic launch failure
reporters: SpaceX breaks spaceflight records by not exploding their Starship for four whole minutes, “almost” passes major milestone of stage separation, revolutionizing spaceflight as we know it. “Literally ten times as good as the Saturn V” says experts. Here is our interview with elon musk who did not sponsor this article
@kazriko Sorry, that was a bit curt.
But what I mean is that when NASA goes to space it is at least theoretically owned by the (American) public, when private companies do it it is theirs, not ours.
Musk is building rockets so he and other billionaires can bail on this planet before they destroy it. They are building rockets which blow-up and scatter garbage on threatened ecosystems and joking about it. They are failing to do now what NASA did 50 years ago using slide rules.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s not impressive, and not valuable to humanity.
Nasa did not make a rocket this large 50 years ago with slide rules. Nasa did not make a full cycle engine 50 years ago with slide rules, Nasa did not make a rocket that could land back at its tower 50 years ago with slide rules. These are all novel things that they're experimenting with here. Russia did try to make a full cycle engine and failed, and Russia tried to make rockets this powerful and failed.
@kazriko @requiem SLS uses hydrolox, the most environmentally friendly fuel there is. the SRBs are another story, but it isn’t finished with development either and they intend to use full Hydrogen and Oxygen with liquid boosters. the exhaust gas from a Starship launch pollutes Earth much more than dropping some metal in the ocean. if he’s really about innovative new technology, why the obsession with burning methane in this day and age of the climate crisis?
I believe though that part of it is that it's easier to produce methane from solar power and CO2 in the martian atmosphere than it would be to produce other fuels there.
@kazriko @requiem NASA also isn’t talking about doing what, 17 refueling launches of a super heavy lift vehicle for one single Lunar mission? the environmental cost of producing the SLS doesn’t even begin to compare to the kind of launch schedule musk is talking up. if they could ever possibly achieve that fast of turnaround time on reusable launch vehicles which is very doubtful.