SPACEX | NASA | Space Exploration | Other Space Ventures

BobbyJohnstone said:
Tesla sales/income down 20% apparently. That’s a pity. Maybe Elon can sell seats n his next launch. I know one guy who deserves a seat…..
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Keeps cutting prices, including the 6th cut quietly made Tuesday night ahead of their poor ER yesterday… to increase demand (as his core consumer leaves his market).

Always great for the longterm margins and financial viability of a company.
 
SebastianBlue said:
That’s the hedging they always do ahead of tests.

A mate of mine works for the ESA as a research analyst and immediately texted me with nothing but laughing emojis when it blew up. Followed with even more quoting the SpaceX tweets.

Everyone knew what Musk was doing and that an explosion was not planned.

But SpaceX will of course now act as if it was all expected and this was a great success. It is what his companies do. The same reason I know on the call after Tesla’s next earnings release he’ll pinky-promise Full Self-Driving in 12 months for the 15th time.
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Musk said beforehand it had a 50% chance of reaching orbit at the first try and 80% before end of the year
 
BlueHammer85 said:
Musk said beforehand it had a 50% chance of reaching orbit at the first try and 80% before end of the year
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Again, hedging.

It wasn’t meant to blow up, their own release prior to, during, and after confirm that. And Musk himself was visibly unhappy in the control room when it had the “rapid, unscheduled disassembly”.

I personally always love seeing a fascist racist misogynistic man-child troll grifter get his comeuppance for a moronic stunt featuring a vanity project that won’t benefit anyone for at least a century (as he sells his absolutely farcical vision of colonising Mars) and, even if it does finally work, and we somehow find another planet suitable for mass human habitation (and invent a propulsion system that actually allows us to get there), it won’t be us peasants reaping the rewards. All of his projects were never meant to actually benefit people like you or me.
 
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Is it crazy to expect that we could build habitable "stations" on the moon and deep in the sea to ensure the survival of humans post a cataclysmic event?

I mean the moon so it's off the Earth. And in the sea to be safe from land and air disasters. I'm not smart enough to understand why these would be silly questions but I suspect that they are.
 
I'm suprised it was allowed to fly as long as it did. Sat there ages obviously having failed.
 
Summerbuzz said:
I'm suprised it was allowed to fly as long as it did. Sat there ages obviously having failed.
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They still get data, and that is invaluable.

Not sure if it self-destructed or happened automatically though.
 
TonyM said:
Is it crazy to expect that we could build habitable "stations" on the moon and deep in the sea to ensure the survival of humans post a cataclysmic event?

I mean the moon so it's off the Earth. And in the sea to be safe from land and air disasters. I'm not smart enough to understand why these would be silly questions but I suspect that they are.
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It is currently (and in the near future) much more feasible to build deep sea stations than a habitable station on the moon. There are many, many challenges that would need to be overcome with both, but the former is far easier than the latter, as the list of issues with living on the moon is substantially longer (including some pretty severe physiological problems that we’re not entirely sure we can ever overcome completely, without some truly transformative genetic engineering, that is).

And as far as colonising Mars, that is very, very far off in the future, if we ever end up doing it at all (there are very smart people that have made the case there are better places to colonise in our own solar system, much less outside of it).

I am a huge nerd who has been fascinated and obsessed with space travel and the idea of humanity colonising the solar system (and then far off galaxies) since I was very young. I’ve probably read a quarter of the science fiction and nonfiction ever written on the subject, that’s how interested I am in the concept.

But the more I have studied that aspiration—and the more I have talked to people far smarter than me trying to make it a reality—the more I understand that it is a monumental task that requires absolutely massive changes (and leaps) in not just our technology, but also our global culture. That’s even beyond the almost certainty that the vast majority of people on earth will never actually benefit from any eventual off-world colonisation.

We would need to completely restructure how humanity collaborates and is governed to support such an endeavour. Individual countries, companies, even entire unions of states or super powers will not be sufficient to be successful. This would be a global coordinated effort at a scale never seen in human history.

The problem I have with people like Musk—apart from his fascist, racist, misogynistic, grifting, and juvenile leanings—is that they are smart enough to know all of this but they choose to sell an unrealistic (perhaps unattainable) vision to the masses in order to personally profit, and in turn use the wealth generated to insulate themselves from the consequences of the actual real, immediate harm and cataclysms happening on the only known planet conducive to mass human habitation.

He’s not trying to save the planet via off-world colonisation or electric vehicles. He is trying to use those “projects” to get as much money as possible to subsidise his efforts to create apparatus that allows him to extend his life and possibly survive any cataclysm (either slower like climate change or quicker like an asteroid strike, even more severe pandemic, or even a Carrington Event level CME).

And, worse yet, he’s managed to dupe millions in to genuinely believing his farcical visions and helping to realise his salvation, with almost none of them (or their children or their children’s children or their children’s children’s children) ever standing to benefit from it. Almost no one will.

It is just infuriatingly sad to see.

Edit: I meant to link this great overview of why colonising Mars is an incredibly challenging endeavour that we are absolutely nowhere near being able to achieve. A lot of the things discussed in the video also apply to the Moon, which is still far easier to colonise than Mars.

 
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SCEtoAUX said:
They still get data, and that is invaluable.

Not sure if it self-destructed or happened automatically though.
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Apparently it was remotely 'blown up' but only after it didn't separate from the first stage as planned.
 
Robinho's Subbuteo said:
Approximately to be exact?
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To be exact with the conversion of the equivalent CO2 metric tonnage emissions of the Methane burned/destroyed as part of the launch and explosion. The number of cars were slightly rounded for simplicity.

I am a retired data scientist, so nearly everything I have ever said or created has been qualified with “approximately”. ;-)
 
crooky said:
Apparently it was remotely 'blown up' but only after it didn't separate from the first stage as planned.
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I am sure whatever small part of it still intact was remotely destroyed (to the extent it could be, mostly to protect tech/IP), but the larger explosion was a “rapid, unscheduled disassembly”. It wasn’t an intended, controlled destruction, by SpaceX’s own admission.

Most of what we hear now is merely spin.
 
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