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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • You’ve written a whole lot for someone who doesn’t seem to know what they’re talking about.

    It has not made orbit.

    It has done a suborbital flight.

    The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.

    These statements are intentionally misleading. The starship was less than 100 dv short of orbit when they decided to cut the engines in order to test another flight regime. It takes at least 8500 dv to make orbit, which means they were already 98.8% of the way there and they still had plenty of propellent to spare. All systems were nominal, they could have continued, but they had already proved their capability to make orbit and were now aiming to accomplish more. The fact is, they did achieve the kind of speed you need to reach orbit, but rockets have been able to reach orbit for a long time, that’s not impressive, but rockets have only just begun to start returning to earth.

    And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing.

    So far, the SLS has spent 23 billion tax payer dollars. They have built 1 rocket. But saying they “built” the rocket isn’t even fair, as they salvaged the engines from previous space shuttles, expending engines that had previously been reused. What will they do when they run out of pre-built engines? Prices will go up for sure…

    Again, the SLS is attempting to use antique engines and essentially develop nothing new, and it has cost the public $23B. The starship is attempting to develop many ground breaking technologies, is so far achieving more of their goals with every launch. And they’ve spent 3 billion doing all of that.

    At this point it may also be worth noting that the SLS has been in development for 14 years, the starship has been in real development for 5-7 years.

    I remain in the position I started, to deny that SpaceX is doing something truly astonishing is plain bonkers.



  • Also the SLS doesn’t seem much better.

    Are you joking? The SLS is a pretty major step backward for American spaceflight. If we continue flying the SLS, and make all the launches we plan (spoiler alert, that isn’t going to happen) then the cost per launch could be as low as $2 billion. But more likely we will end the SLS program when it proves to be a never ending money sink, and with so much money put into development, we’ll end up with a per launch cost upwards of $5 billion. Meanwhile, for that price it can only manage to get 95 tons to low Earth orbit.

    Compare this to the Saturn V, which could lift more and cost much less, even when adjusted for inflation. The Saturn V cost $185 million, or $1.23 billion adjusting for inflation. And it could put 141 tons into low Earth orbit.

    To sum up, this new rocket is much less capable and much more expensive than what we were doing 55 years ago.

    You could of course also compare this to what spaceX is doing… Their aim is to make a rocket of similar payload capability 100-150t, but with a per launch cost of about $100 million via reusability. That’s an order of magnitude of improvement, that’s huge.








  • That’s a bonkers take. It’s the largest and most powerful rocket in history and it’s already made orbit. The raptor engines are the first full flow staged combustion engines to ever be put into a production rocket (This is a holy grail of rocketry). All estimates suggest that it’s also probably much cheaper to build than any of the other heavy lift rockets. And that was accomplished while also building full reusability into the design…

    The work they’ve done is nothing short of astounding. Which makes your take come off as either insane, blind, or biased.




  • Humans are great computers, we’re just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It’s not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.

    If it’s worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.