Comments by "Zach B" (@zachb1706) on "Thunderf00t" channel.

  1. It is crazy because that’s not what happened. A single person doesn’t have the ability to decide on a lander without reporting to a committee of experts and stakeholders. The committee and a later GEO investigation found that SpaceX simply had the best bid. It was the most capable, most feasible, most detailed and came in at the lowest price
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  2. > they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a manned program You know they provide manned flights to the ISS, right? They’ve sent 50 people to space, they’re the only US entity capable of manned spaceflights at the moment. They’re more than capable
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  3.  @JohnDoeWasntTaken  yes but she based her decision off of findings of a committee because not doing so would have immediately got her done for fraud. Thunderf00t critiqued things like her use of first person language, which is generally a standard for these sorts of documents. Don’t believe me? Look up the Source Selection Statement for the new Space Suits, or any NASA contract for that matter. He’s obviously not a reliable source in this matter
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  4. I don’t know. The first fully reusable rocket will be a pretty big contribution. Or the first spacecraft capable of taking humans to mars.
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  5. You can’t just build the lunar module. All the factories and engineers are gone, a lot of the designs and technologies lost. You’d have to build them almost back again, which would be enormously expensive- that’s just what happens when you don’t build something for a long time.
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  6. But on top of that it wouldn’t be capable of this mission anyway. 1) It could only carry 2 astronauts and support them for 2 days. Starship HLS will carry up to 6 for 7 days. 2) It couldn’t take much cargo to the surface. Starship will be able to take tons of cargo down with the astronauts, and will have a cargo variant that could carry even more. 3) The LM was expensive. The program cost $30 billion, and each lander billions. Starship will cost $2.9 billion, and each subsequent mission probably costing below $1 billion 4) There’s no way to launch it. SLS wouldn’t be powerful enough to launch the Apollo payload. You’d have to do a second launch and assemble in orbit, which is just more cost And so on. It’s just a dumb idea
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  7.  @nomsuranom1665 they don’t design the experiments. But yeah the ISS was a giant disaster. When NASA gets rid of it, it’ll be replaced by a number of commercial stations for a fraction of the price
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  8. I wish libertarians had taken over the government. The country would be in a much better state. Anyway, SpaceX has already saved NASA billions and are doing the same here with their Starship program. NASA expected the cost to develop a lunar lander to be around $10 billion, and knowing them that means more like $20 billion. So SpaceX is doing the same at 1/7th the cost.
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  9.  @mathiaslist6705  yeah
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  10. It’s in development…
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  11.  @johnthefactfddict3281  > you literally can’t drop below the 0.5-1.0 billion dollar per launch Falcon 9 charges $62 million for a launch. SpaceX’s claims it costs them between $20-25 million to pull off that launch. Where are you getting these numbers from? Fuel is cheap, it makes up less than 1% of the cost of most launches. For Starship it’s estimated to cost ~$1m to refuel. The main cost is construction, which is why Starship is aiming to be fully reusable.
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  12.  @johnthefactfddict3281  Starship does not cost $1 billion to launch. That price includes the total cost of the Starship development which includes R&D and Infrastructure like launch sites, offices, factories, storage bays, etc. The actual marginal launch cost, the amount for SpaceX to launch a new rocket, is estimated to be around $90 million, and that’s now with no reusability or mass production. Starship WITH reusability and a high frequency of launches will be cost less than $10 million to launch, cheaper than Falcon 9
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  13.  @johnthefactfddict3281  but the benefits aren’t just lower costs. Starship will enable larger and heavier payloads to reach orbit. One example is Airbus’s new module for Space Stations, LOOP. It’ll be the largest and heaviest module sent to orbit, and it can only launch of Starship. Starship will also enable massive satellite constellations. Being both cheaper and larger than Falcon 9 it’ll have an unparalleled ability to launch satellites on mass. And single satellite launches will get cheaper, Starship can take up multiple all at once.
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  14. neoqueto haha 😂, Thunderf00t a flat earther?
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  15.  @lazarus2691 exactly. Falcon 9 actually far over-exceeded expectations, which essentially killed the Falcon Heavy
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  16. Orunitor because he’s talking about the weight of the gasoline, not the volume it takes up.
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  17. Creators want ads, they get paid for them
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  18. I’d hire that safety inspector.
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  19.  @gaborrajnai6213  imagine defending the SLS. Even NASA employees know it’s a rort, it’s there for Congressmen to buy votes. SLS launched 6 years behind schedule and $12 billion over budget. And it was meant to be launched again this year but that’s been delayed until next year.
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  20.  @gaborrajnai6213  and it’s not like they had to reinvent the wheel. It’s essentially a revamped Saturn V connected to Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters.
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  21. Send the engineers to Antarctica?
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  22. $3 billion paid out over multiple years would do nothing. Universal healthcare would cost $3 trillion… each year.
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  23. Yeah he was actually. Thunderf00t is a grifter
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  24.  @Jkim890 I don’t understand your point, but developing a lunar lander with the capabilities HLS will have for $3 billion is a miracle. NASA was estimating it’d cost them $10 billion, and that was for a far less capable lander
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  25. That actually isn’t a nefarious case. The hammers were sold along side a large engine, and nothing was itemised. But when it came time for accounting NASA needed it itemised so they simply divided the cost of each item equally despite obviously being skewed because of a large space resistant engine
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  26. Besides, NASA itself has admitted that SpaceX has saved them tens of billions already. Starship HLS itself comes in at 1/4th the cost NASA was projecting if they had developed a lander themselves.
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  27. Because that’s not how the world works. All of the engineers and technicians that worked on the Saturn V are gone, all of the factories are gone, many technologies used are obsolete, many of the designs lost. You can’t just rebuild Saturn V, you need to redesign it. SLS is just that. And just like Saturn V it is insanely expensive.
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  28. It’s still under development. > $3 billion so far It’s a fixed contract, $3 billion up front.
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  29. No one has ever made a fully reusable rocket before.
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  30.  @miscamisca6775  the Space Shuttle expended a massive fuel tank with every launch. That tank alone cost $270m each. So no, it was only partially reusable. And the nature of the reuse was nowhere near as good. The Shuttle and SRBs required massive refurbishment. Much of the time the boosters weren’t reused at all and just scrapped for parts. Starship is built to require minimum refurbishment.
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  31.  @miscamisca6775  except not all of it is reused, hence it isn’t a fully reusable rocket. The original design of the Space Shuttle was actually meant to be fully reusable, but its design goals changed due to the Air Force wanting a larger cargo bay and yada yada. They had to ditch the idea because with full reuse they wouldn’t be able to support the increased payload.
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  32. Those terrawatts of energy go straight into our atmosphere as heat
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  33. Well that’s why it is released into space isn’t it. Or absorbed by plants, or other things.
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  34. And billions of dollars
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  35. What?
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  36. corthew 1. Mars is 142 times as far away from earth as mars. So we’re not even 1% there. 2. Sending people to the moon does not equal supporting them as a colony, thus not a proof of concept. 3. We haven’t shown our ability to send a rocket back to earth from mars. Any feasibility will come from the ability for us to give the astronauts a safe return 4. What about the challenges of surviving on mars, the temperatures, the lack of oxygen and water, ect.
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  37. They’re not the only ones making a lander. Blue Origin is making one as well. But they’re years off. They say they’ll be ready by 2029 at the earliest but it’s more likely going to be later than that.
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  38.  @goldenshatter  ikr. People just like hating on SpaceX because of Musk, even though they’re the best astronautic company in the world.
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  39. I think if you looked further they weren’t made by the government at all, but contractors that the government paid. And yes they did hold the IP and if a company wanted to use it they’d have to pay. Anyway the first commercial microprocessor was developed by Intel on their own around about the same time as the Air Force.
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  40. Why do this, why not develop it themselves? I’ll just say this, the structure of government departments are not well suited for keeping costs low or innovating. There’s no incentive to do either of those. SpaceX has saved NASA billions because they do what NASA does at a fraction of the price. Why? Because if they don’t they go out of business. It’s a direct incentive, that’s why capitalism has been so successful
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  41.  @tycurtin7565  when the shuttle program shut down many were kept on under the SLS program. By your same standard that should have been a roaring success because NASA of the past had already laid out the groundwork. No, it was an absolute disaster. 6 years behind schedule and $12 billion over budget. All that to deliver a rocket with no commercial value.
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  42.  @tycurtin7565  a public organisation certainly can do everything a private organisation can. I mean there’s nothing on paper that stops them. But they don’t, because they lack any mechanism to incentivise keeping costs low or innovation. For a private company it’s built right in. The more they can cut costs the more they can profit. They’re more likely to take risks in order to make that happen. And in a competitive environment not innovating can lead to bankruptcy.
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  43.  @tycurtin7565  But most importantly, and this is incredibly true for NASA: instead of being run by people with a real passion and success in the industry, these departments are overlooked by people who have absolutely no clue. Actually not just people who have no clue, but people who are incentivised to work against the departments wishes in order to gain votes or donations. That’s how we got SLS
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  44. SpaceX is attempting something far more ambitious than anyone has built before on a fraction of the budget Saturn V had.
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  45. He has a big say over the design of Starship. He’s the reason they’re catching the booster, the engineers weren’t sure it was possible. Well we know now
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  46. They aren’t. They were already developing Starship as a fully reusable vehicle from the ground up - the first rocket of its kind. HLS came later and their bid was essentially an adaptation of what they were already developing. That’s why they were able to bid at such a low price ($2.9 billion for a lander is a steal).
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  47. We need a 4000 lb white man with a bitchy black woman with the worlds oldest man
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  48.  @kirishima638 literally nothing melted through on the booster. But you are right it’s not reusable yet, that’s something they can work on now that catching is a sure thing
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  49.  @kirishima638  no the cover shielding the QD nozzle broke off during reentry, there’s videos online showing it happen. It’s an easy fix. There was no burn through.
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  50.  @Cara.314 fuel is cheap.
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