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Spacex Starship IFT-2 launch today
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Dan123456:
@Wrapper said: “The thing is that SpaceX's trial and error is cheaper than current "traditional" rocket development which in  last decades was more like industry rotting from inside due to complacency and government bailouts.”

We do not know if that is true. Musk says it is cheaper… but he also says we will have full self driving cars “next year”… every year for the last decade  :P

He could easily open the books to the world and show us that is cheaper, but till then I don’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth as 99% of what he says is bullshit!

Also Musk takes soooooo much government money for his companies it isn’t even funny. He is just a massive hypocrite as hold his hand out for hundreds of millions of dollars in government assistance while at the same time saying “companies getting government assistance is bad”.

Edit: I messed up the quote thingy so was trying to fix that… but this will have to do for now  :P
wraper:

--- Quote from: Dan123456 on November 20, 2023, 11:14:17 pm ---we do not know if that is true. Musk says it is cheaper…

--- End quote ---
We know that very well actually. If you actually look into it, before SpaceX it was all about cost+ contracts (like paying $1B annually to ULA for basically existing (worded like for providing launch availability or something of sorts). And SLS being all about politics and contractors spread over all US states to make senators happy. Just before SpaceX came into the game, ULA lost all sense of shame and on average was charging $400+ million per launch of Atlas V, and that was besides receiving $1B/year as mentioned above. Basically no commercial customer was launching from US soil due to utterly ridiculous cost that only US government was ready to pay. SpaceX had to sue US government to get any air force contracts at all. Since then ULA halved their prices but still are not competitive. As of SpaceX, there is plenty of info how much money they receive from the government, and for the services they provided it's not that much, especially compared to others (2-3 times less for the same job).
CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: Dan123456 on November 20, 2023, 11:14:17 pm ---@Wrapper said: “The thing is that SpaceX's trial and error is cheaper than current "traditional" rocket development which in  last decades was more like industry rotting from inside due to complacency and government bailouts.”

We do not know if that is true. Musk says it is cheaper… but he also says we will have full self driving cars “next year”… every year for the last decade  :P

He could easily open the books to the world and show us that is cheaper, but till then I don’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth as 99% of what he says is bullshit!

Also Musk takes soooooo much government money for his companies it isn’t even funny. He is just a massive hypocrite as hold his hand out for hundreds of millions of dollars in government assistance while at the same time saying “companies getting government assistance is bad”.

Edit: I messed up the quote thingy so was trying to fix that… but this will have to do for now  :P

--- End quote ---

I think I detect a little animosity towards Musk here ;)

You are right.  We don't have a detail breakdown of SpaceX costs for Starship or anything else.   But we do know that NASA spent $92 Billion for 1 SLS launch to date.  And to their credit for $92 billion we got a successful launch.  And we have some sort of idea of the total cash flows into the Musk companies.  Which indicates expenditures of single digit billions per year.  If they get the Starship worked out in less than a decade his method will be cheaper.  It seems likely to be far less than a decade, and the annual costs are best guessed in the few billion a year meaning that his method will have turned out far cheaper.  For a far better product. 

Don't let your anger over what Musk did to Twitter or the oversold claims for underground transportation and solar rooftops blind you to the things that have turned out pretty well.  Teslas are among the best electric cars out there, Falcon9 is a solid space launch system and the real cost for launch is less than half of the competitors, possibly far less than that.  Users of Starlink are pretty darned happy with that product and even the Russian astronauts like the Dragon better as a way to get to the ISS.
Stray Electron:

--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on November 21, 2023, 01:41:30 am ---
Don't let your anger over what Musk did to Twitter or the oversold claims for underground transportation and solar rooftops blind you to the things that have turned out pretty well.  Teslas are among the best electric cars out there, Falcon9 is a solid space launch system and the real cost for launch is less than half of the competitors, possibly far less than that.  Users of Starlink are pretty darned happy with that product and even the Russian astronauts like the Dragon better as a way to get to the ISS.

--- End quote ---


   I'm not a fan of the Musk and I don't want this thread to go further askew but you DO have to admit that he's accomplished a lot of things that others thought were impossible and he's clearly developed several entirely new technologies.
coppice:
Here's a fun video if you like rockets self-destructing:



He seems to have only included the ones that self-destructed, but the ones that went wild and had to be destroyed are some of the more amusing failures. There have been a LOT of those, especially in the early days. In the 70s I watched a hour of launches going wild just due to EMC problems, which was part of a training course on the importance of taking EMC seriously in design, I think produced by NATO. It might have been the US military.
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