Comments by "Zach B" (@zachb1706) on "Smarter Every Day BOOST-ED!" video.

  1. She didn’t decide alone, she made her decision based off the ratings that stakeholders gave to each proposal and there was no doubt a lot of discussion behind the scenes. One thing Thunderf00t glosses over is that the stakeholders and later a GAO investigation agreed: SpaceX’s bid was simply the best.
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  2. We need to stop pretending a single person was able to make a decision about where $3 billion was allocated on their own. They just followed what the committee who analysed the 3 submissions found
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  3.  @DataScienceDIY  the price is fixed, the timeline is really the only issue. That wasn’t helped by the Blue Origin lawsuit holding up HLS, preventing NASA from working with or providing funding for Starship development for 7 months. And the GAO found that the program was just optimistic to begin with. NASA expected the lander to be built 25 months faster than most of their own projects take. But even if it was ready this year it wouldn’t have been able to launch. Artemis 2 hasn’t even happened (meant to be 2023) and it is delayed until 2025 because of Orion. The Space Suit still isn’t ready, and won’t be ready until atleast 2026. Etc etc. The only thing ahead of schedule is the damn rover!
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  4. 1. SpaceX’s bid was far cheaper than the other options. It was half the cost of Blue Origin’s lander, and a third of Dynetics 2. It was the best thought out. SpaceX delivered a detailed document and quickly responded to issues NASA bought up. Both others were much slower to respond and many issues were left to be figured out later 3. Starship was a much more capable lander. Blue Origin had to essentially redesign their lander for the second round. It was reusable and didn’t leave anything behind on the moon 4. NASA was interested in its capabilities to launch large masses to LEO and beyond. 5. NASA is heavily focused on commercialising space, as it makes it cheaper for them if they aren’t fitting the entire cost of development. Blue Origib and Dynetics didn’t have a good plan to commercialise their landers, whilst SpaceX did.
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  5.  @nancypotts9877 Apollo didn’t need refuelling because: - It was much smaller - Most of it was left behind, with the astronauts leaving on an even tinier ascent stage - It could only support 2 astronauts for 2 days, so the life support system was smaller
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  6. Ie SLS, which cost $24 billion and has launched once…
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  7. Humans can explore bodies much more thoroughly and quickly. Also a lot of Artemis is exploring how we can survive on another body, we are the experiment
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  8. There’s also actually good reasons to go there. Half the point of Artemis is to learn how to build a sustainable human colony - we are the experiment. Humans can work faster and are more flexible.
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  9. It isn’t very strange she left for SpaceX either. Many top NASA execs have left for SpaceX recently, actually SpaceX has created a problem for NASA as they’re taking all their talent.
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  10.  @icemachine79  see I hear you complaining about SpaceX winning a contract legitimately, but you aren’t at all disturbed by the Senator of Blue Origin’s home state essentially gifting them a contract of their own?
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  11. Yes it was remote controlled
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  12. SpaceX has saved NASA tens of billions…
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  13. Ikr
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  14. So was JFK, he started Apollo
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  15. What do they have to add? NASA has already said they believe in this being manageable.
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  16.  @ahettinger525  because there’s a lot of unknowns involved. How much fuel will be needed, how much a Starship can take up, how long the refuelling will take (longer = more boil off). When we get closer we’d get a clearer picture
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  17. It doesn’t, in space velocity is generated by throwing matter out at a very high speed.
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  18. No there’s some companies working on them. But they’re never replacing standard engines.
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  19. There was an investigation, nothing was found. In fact they supported choosing SpaceX, who had the best offer.
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  20.  @ContraVsGigi  the Apollo lander was tiny. Starship will be twice as wide and have 3 levels of living space and a large carho hold. Starship will be able to support 6 astronauts on a week long mission, Apollo could only support 2 for 2 days. Starship will be fully reusable and will not leave anything behind, both aren’t true of Apollo. They are completely different crafts.
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  21.  @geebsterswats  plenty of NASA execs have jumped ship. I think what is really odd is the senator who wrote the law that ended up giving Blue Origin a contract for Artemis 5 was from Blue Origin’s home state…
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  22.  @icemachine79  and yes it was legitimate. She based her decision off the findings of a committee. It’s analysed my multiple people. If there was any sign of a conflict of interest it would be studied. But I think the most damning evidence is the GAO report that came out later: Starship was by far the best option
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  23.  @icemachine79  she didn’t aid in the technical aspects of the bid, she didn’t even change the price. She negotiated with SpaceX to push payment clusters into later parts of development so that NASA could afford it in the short term. Why was this done with SpaceX and not the others? Well SpaceX’s bid was already determined to be the best, and it was by far the cheapest - half the price of BO.
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  24.  @icemachine79  that decision of who had the best proposal was done by the Source Evaluation Panel, not Lueders
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  25.  @icemachine79  have you read it? It literally says that it was the SEP that evaluated all of the proposals, rated them on a number of metrics, write a report on their methods and conclusions and advised Lueders. She stuck with the conclusions of the SEP, which was most favourable towards the SpaceX bid. It was also the cheapest by far which was an important factor when your budget is cut.
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  26.  @icemachine79  that’s pretty standard for Source Selection Statements. TF criticised the use of first person language which is also standard. Actually everything about this process was standard. Just go read the SSS document for the xEAVS (the Space Suit) contract, or Commercial Crew, or any program that has gone this same process Accusations of corruption are pure speculation that aren’t supported by any evidence.
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  27. I think Renewables can make up a large part of the grid, but as you build more they get exponentially more expensive as storage needs and redundancy goes up. So you will need something else, and really it’s chemical or nuclear
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  28. Well their criticism was wrong. Commercial Crew saved NASA tens of billions
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  29.  @ahettinger525  NASA would have to delay it to 2026 anyway because Orion, the Space Suits and more aren’t ready. The original Sep 2024 timeline was impossible, the Sep 2025 timeline was optimistic, Sep 2026 to early 2027 (like GAO suggested) is a lot more reasonable on the timeline of average NASA projects.
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  30.  @DeepDeepSpace  no by Payload Research
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  31. I think the craziest thing about it all is the claim that Lueders chose the Starship to get a job at SpaceX. Like she alone has the power to choose how $2.9 billion was spent and she never had to explain herself to anyone else. The 2 events (choosing Starship and joining SpaceX) didn’t even happen close together. BO already had their contract by that point. And it isn’t uncommon for NASA execs to jump to SpaceX, many of SpaceX’s executives are ex-NASA employees. It’s a weird argument that teeters on libel. Especially because later investigations agreed that NASA chose the best option. Really it wasn’t even a contestz
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  32. (And then conveniently ignore the strange circumstances that lead to Blue Origin getting a contract)
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  33. Starship isn’t designed specifically for Artemis. It was well designed, by far the most detailed and well thought out of the 3 HLS proposals but it isn’t purpose built. Which is actually one of its strengths. Being able to do so many things keeps the costs low, SpaceX quoted half of the BO bid. It also is interesting for NASA who might want to use it to launch payloads. But yeah it’s overkill. But again for NASA they see that as an opportunity to expand their scope.
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  34. All of the experts and engineers, all of the factories and equipment, and many of the designs and technologies used to build the lunar lander aren’t around anymore.
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  35. They haven’t had any of the problems that the N1 had
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  36. ⁠ @SmokeTheHolyChalice  NASA couldn’t afford 2. The HLS budget had been cut by Congress. SpaceX had to change their contract just so NASA could afford it, and their bid was half the price of the others.
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  37. That’s called the SLS. It came in at the small cost of $24 billion
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  38.  @RogerM88  IFT-3 failed because it was flying sideways. Anyway Steel was chosen because it was cheap, heat resistant, but most importantly because it’s significantly rasier to work with than aluminium or god forbid carbon fibre. That suits their goals of a low cost, mass produced, reusable rocket.
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  39. Starship is already quite heavy, and the lower the fuel load to account for no payload. In fact having no payload is what caused Flight 2 to fail because they vented oxygen mid flight to adjust for the lack of payload, and that oxygen set alight
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  40. Exactly. Also Starship is designed to be extremely cheap to begin with
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  41.  @ContraVsGigi  and in terms of refuelling, Starship will be fully reusable. So you aren’t throwing 15 ships into orbit, you’re sending a few multiple times. NASA isn’t concerned because all of this happens in LEO without anyone on board where issues can be addressed quickly.
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  42. I’ll pay attention when they actually build an orbital rocket
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  43. Well that video aged terribly because now every launch provider in the world trying to make their rockets reusable.
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  44. In the far distant future, assuming we don’t blow ourselves up, that’s how I see us dominating the galaxy. We’d send thousands of ships to a planet with materials and robots to build a sustainable colony and then clone humans to populate it. They’d be sent all across the galaxy.
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  45. So serious they killed 14 astronauts… Okay but yeah there risk averse approach to development is why their projects are so expensive
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  46. It isn’t like saying we’ll have a space elevator. It’s far less complicated than a space elevator We’ve already refueled things in orbit, just not a cryogenic fuel.
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  47.  @lazarus2691  wow that’s crazy. I knew SLS was bad but wow. Contracted for $380m, now estimated to cost $1.5b. Meant to finish early last year, instead will finish late 2027
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  48. 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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  49. > 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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  50.  @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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  51. 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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  52. 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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  53. 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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  54.  @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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  55.  @lazarus2691 exactly. Falcon 9 actually far over-exceeded expectations, which essentially killed the Falcon Heavy
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  56. Yeah he was actually. Thunderf00t is a grifter
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  57. 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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  58. 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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  59. 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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  60. 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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  61.  @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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  62.  @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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  63.  @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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  64.  @Cara.314 fuel is cheap.
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  65. What?
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  66. Efficiency has never been something NASA is known for. Literally every one of their projects goes over budget and years behind schedule. They are full of bloat and bureaucracy.
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  67. It was actually Obama. He started it with Commercial Crew after a report found that the Constellation program was an absolute disaster in every aspect. It did extremely well.
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  68. 0.3% of the US budget as a whole not the US military budget
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  69.  @DeepDeepSpace estimates say that 15 expendable missions with Starship would be cheaper than SLS. Way cheaper in fact, and that’s without reusability.
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  70. There’s nothing like Earth, but there’s definitely inhabitable planets. Or planet, it’s really only mars. Some moons of Jupiter could be candidates
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  71. Humans can do a much wider range of tasks more quickly than any rover can. Humans don’t need to be designed for years to carry out specific tasks, they can be flexible.
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  72. He’s purposely conflating Musk’s claim they can get the marginal launch price of Starship to $2m with the entire cost of development (which is currently $1.9 billion, well atleast that’s NASA’s share)
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  73. You have absolutely no idea what you’re on about. SpaceX is best poised out of the entire space industry for the future. Even if Starship goes bust (which it won’t but stick with me), Falcon 9 is the cheapest and most reliable heavy lift rocket ever built, and has a cadence no one could dream of Even without NASA SpaceX could survive. The Space Industry is already mostly built for the military, Space Force has a higher budget than NASA
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  74. It was a camera placed on the rover. It wasn’t Apollo 11, I think it was 15 or something.
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  75. Ever watched boats go over the horizon? You’d see it curves
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  76. The Van Allen belts are spheres of high concentrations of radiation and other particles caused by our magnetic field. Dangerous, but not to astronauts who travel through them quickly. It mainly prevents us from putting a space station in the belts
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  77. Rockets curve to build up horizontal velocity. If they just went straight up they’d just fall straight back down. They need horizontal velocity so they maintain orbit
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  78. lol 😂
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  79. Pretty much every proposal required refuelling of some sort.
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  80. No one simps for the SLS. Not even NASA employees. It’s so bad that it’ll essentially be relegated to Artemis as all of its other missions get changed to far cheaper rockets. And it’ll probably be replaced before Artemis ends.
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  81. Actually no they don’t. A lot of designs were lost, either accidentally or purposely thrown away by suppliers when Apollo was ended. But even if they did have them, all the experts and engineers, all the factories and equipment, and many of the technologies simply don’t exist. You’re starting from scratch
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  82. And then on top of that we want to make it cheaper (Apollo was incredibly expensive), safer, more capable, etc.
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  83. Yeah pretty much. Artemis isn’t just redoing Apollo, it has a much greater scope.
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  84. lol
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  85. He can’t be nice because he used to be an engineer for the DoD?
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  86. Apollo cost $250 billion. Also a lot of digital processing power wasn’t needed because the Apollo lander relied on analog inputs and had humans that could manually guide it.
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  87. Russia? Keep up with the times, Russia hasn’t been competitive in space for over 5 decades. China is the new kid on the block.
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  88. We don’t really. It’s more of a testing ground for technologies like infrastructure, but it’s not needed to put people on Mars. The current best plans for a Mars mission (Starship and Mars Base Camp) both launch from LEO
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  89. What about Musk’s track record of 50 people to orbit and back aboard Crew Dragon?
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  90. *300th very soon. They’re at 295 or something
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  91.  @thomasbecker9676  https://youtu.be/A0FZIwabctw?si=CiXG0Dv37vK6VjQT
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  92. Why didn’t who use compressed air + CO2?
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  93. I see it as a testbed for technologies we’d use on Mars (space suits, enclosures, rovers, solar/nuclear power, in situ resource utilisation). But as a launchpad like NASA proposes, I think it’s foolish. The 2 best options we have of getting to Mars atm (Starship, Mars Base Camp) make no use of the Moon.
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  94. Cheaper is wrong. Saturn V was incredibly expensive. The Lunar Module it launched was also tiny and isn’t close to the capabilities that HLS needs
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  95. You can’t just blow the dust off something you haven’t used in 50 years. All the experts and engineers, all the factories and machinery and many of the design documents are gone. You’d be starting from scratch. Which is what NASA initially planned. But then they went to commercial partners and SpaceX offered a much more capable lander at a quarter the price. Of course they were going to go with them.
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  96. Starship is still in development… Starship V2 will come out sometime this year I believe. It’ll have the new Raptor 3 engines, a slight height increase, a few other changes and will have a 100-150T capacity
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  97.  @thorin1045  what? They aren’t changing the engine, V2 will have the upgraded Raptor V3 engines though. This is something they did with Falcon 9 as they have improved the Merlin engine over the years. And completely redoing the second stage? They are changing the arrangements of the doors slightly and making it a couple meters taller, but I’d hardly call that “completely redoing”.
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  98.  @thorin1045  1. “Not fully from scratch”. No young’s right, it’s not fully from scratch. In fact it’s not from scratch at all. It’s still a Full-Flow Closed-Cycle Methalox engine. It still has many of its components V2. Some are removed, some are changed. It’s an upgrade. 2. No again it’s not a complete redo because you already have the design down pat. Making the fuel tanks a bit bigger (if that’s even necessary) isn’t a massive overhaul. 3. What does this have to do with anything? The design doesn’t need to be locked in yet.
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  99. Apollo was a rush to the moon. There was no worry about budgets, safety, future sustainability. Artemis is bigger, better and cheaper that Apollo in every way, that’s the goal atleast.
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  100.  @piotrd.4850  hardly cheaper? NASA spent ~$290 billion on Apollo before they put the first people on the moon with Apollo 11. Today it’s expected they’ll spend ~$90 billion by Artemis 3. If you go part by part you’ll see this same reduction as well. SpaceX is being paid $2.9 billion to design, build and launch a lander (well 2 if we count the rest). They’re charging $1.1 billion for Artemis 4. If we just assume that $1.1 bullion be the cost for all future landers then after 6 (the number of times Apollo landed), NASA will have paid $8.4 billion. The Apollo Lander program cost $27 billion.
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  101. lol what
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  102.  @nunofoo8620  A closed ecosystem isn’t needed for a sustainable colony on Mars, Mars already has the resources to sustain life.
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  103.  @mdjey2  anything useful? Like water and CO2 which is abundant? Like iron (literally the reason the planet is red) and other metals which are abundant throughout? Sustainability is definitely achievable. And it doesn’t have to be done right away, the first humans will have ample resources to support themselves sent in advance.
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  104. So you’re starting from scratch. But we don’t just want to go back how like did in Apollo, we want it to be cheaper, more capable, support more astronauts for longer, and carry a larger payload with it.
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  105. Go look at how Dragon meets up with the ISS
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  106. ⁠ @SmokeTheHolyChalice > why are we not questioning that the women She wasn’t responsible. Her report was based on ratings by a larger committee that thoroughly scrutinised each submission. SpaceX had by far the best submission, and came in at half the price
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  107.  @SmokeTheHolyChalice  Writing in the first person is standard for these sorts of documents. Go read the Source Selection Statement for the Space Suits as an example. It doesn’t mean the author made the decision on their own, they have to go through many consultations to come to that conclusion.
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  108. But that’s stupid. We’ve put loads of things on the moon, and we’ve put loads of people in space. But it’s impossible to put people on the moon because Starship’s development is a bit delayed?
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  109. In Destin’s video he literally says that we will go to Mars in the next couple decades
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  110. Blue Origin’s bid wasn’t as good, they were just pissed their lobbying didn’t work the first time Oh well, they lobbied their way to a contract anyway.
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  111. I’m pretty sure Elon can already retire…
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  112. Yes there’s 3 or 4 still there.
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  113. Apollo Objective: Don’t lose the crew* *Optional
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  114. You mean, like the NASA executives he was talking too?
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  115. Except they have already far exceeded the N1. None of the problems they are having is due to having lots of engines
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  116. Starship by a mile.
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  117. You Elon haters are craaaazy 😂
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  118. You mean the rocket we haven’t made in 50 years? You can’t just make Saturn V. All the experts and engineers, all the factories and equipment, and many of the techniques, technologies and designs simply don’t exist anymore
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  119. If SpaceX had your mindset they would never had attempted landing Falcon 9. Risks need to be taken. Hot Staging has worked perfectly both times, why would you cut that?
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  120. Sure, but we want a more capable lander. Apollo could only support 2 astronauts for 2 days, was not reusable - leaving most of itself back on the moon, and could not carry much cargo. There are other more technical details like it was kept at a very low 5 psi pressure to reduce mass even more but to keep it simple it was a barebones machine. HLS needs to support up to 6 astronauts for a week, is fully reusable, can carry a lot to the moons surface, will run at higher pressures and so on.
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  121. Yeah when you don’t do something for 60 years you tend to forget how to do it. The engineers retire and die, the blueprints get lost, the factories shut down. NASA is essentially having to rebuild everything to get back to the moon.
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  122. Very little of the DoD’s R&D is useful for space flight.
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  123. Yes, SLS is more than 12 Starships even if they’re all expended. Also you’re not factoring in the cost of developing a lander. NASA estimated it’d cost them $10 billion to develop one
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  124. No it’s just hard. Ask anyone in the industry
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  125.  @than217  Apollo had a 1/10 chance of killing its crew. It’s a miracle it didn’t. Even the best capsules today still have a 1/300 chance of losing a crew - imagine if planes were like that. Spaceflight is hard
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  126.  @than217  all I’m saying is Space is Hard. Which is true
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  127. 😂
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  128. Steel was actually a good change. Building Starship out of carbon composites would have been a nightmare, incredibly expensive as well. Steel is much cheaper, much easier to build with, much more heat resistant and so on.
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  129. We don’t know about all of Starships deployment methods. I’d assume they’d have some off of faring option like Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket because there’s already payloads they would require it.
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  130. The current plan is to work on Booster reuse, and then start launching payloads before Ship reuse is done. So they’re already have a staggered approach like you suggest, just without a massive redesign in the middle.
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  131.  @DeepDeepSpace  they wouldn’t have gotten the HLS contract with a Falcon Heavy lander.
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  132.  @DeepDeepSpace  and did any of them get a contract? Starship was a more capable machine. But not just more capable, it was the cheapest option, because Starship has commercial applications outside of taking humans to the moon.
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  133.  @RogerM88  well do the math. Currently it’s estimated it costs ~$90 million to launch a full stack. Even at that price HLS + 16 refuelling missions comes short of the $2 billion launch cost of SLS. With partial reusability that cost would come down even further. With full reuse it would come down further again. Whilst also taking much more mass than SLS can.
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  134.  @RogerM88  propellant costs are between $1-2 million based off prices NASA pays for Methane and LOX. And yeah $90 million. $2 billion includes many external costs like R&D, building infrastructure and other fixed costs all of which don’t increase with successive launches. $90 million is the marginal launch cost as estimated by Payload Research
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  135.  @RogerM88  great, so a rocket which costs 20-200x the price to launch can carry up the same payload. Big win for SLS indeed 😂 And a larger Starship V2 with Raptor V3 was always the plan. They’ve been working on Raptor V3 for a few years by now. And we can’t really comment on deployment methods yet. Starship will have a reusable fairing configuration similar to Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket. This is because there are already payloads built for Starship, like Airbus’s LOOP module, which require a large opening. There’s a lot behind the scenes we don’t know.
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  136.  @RogerM88  mate I already explained that the launch costs are far less than $2 billion. Do you have a developmental issue or something?
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  137. You can’t just swap out the engines 😂
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  138.  @karstenschuhmann8334 so spend hundreds of millions redesigning Falcon so it can give them data? Falcon will be obsolete soon, that’s the plan. Starship will be the only rocket SpaceX launches. Estimates from Payload Research put the cost to launch a fully reusable Starship will be half the price of Falcon 9, whilst being able to carry 10x the mass.
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  139. Orion doesn’t have the Delta-V to follow the path Apollo took. It was designed under Constellation to only go to LEO; where tugs would take it to the moon. That and the lower payload capacity of SLS compared to Saturn V mean it’s very underpowered.
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  140. That’s why they have to burn 4600t of fuel/oxidiser to get 100t into space Well technically they take more into space (you have to include the mass of starship and the fuel they leave behind for the landing), but yeah the payload is tiny for the amount of fuel. That’s just physics of a chemical fuel engine
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  141. The only solution would be to use Fusion/Fission to get to space.
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  142.  @nikitatarsov5172 you’ve made up a whole story in your head just because a NASA executive moved to SpaceX, loads of NASA higher ups have done that.
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  143.  @Nomolyx1  oui?
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  144. It pushes off the matter it expels behind it at high speeds.
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  145.  @jadediquattro5355  no one told me, I applied the Conservation of Momentum.
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  146. It doesn’t look sci fi though. Hard certainly, but it isn’t the Millennium Falcon
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  147. lol. Starship saves NASA money. They were expecting to spend $10 billion on a lander
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  148.  @ThePastelAssassin  > starship can’t reach orbit It can, it reached orbital velocities in IFT-3. But SpaceX purposely put it on a path where it intersected with the Earth. This ensured that in the case of a mishap the ship landed in a predictable area. > each flight seems to cost about a billion No, a flight cost a fraction of that amount. The best estimate for the marginal launch cost puts it at ~$90 million, and with reusability <$10 million.
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  149.  @ThePastelAssassin  and you keep going on about Chandra, Starship didn’t kill Chandra, Congress did.
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  150. ⁠ @ThePastelAssassin we’re talking about 2 different prices here. The price to develop starship and the price to launch. It cost $2 billion to develop starship last year. Most of that is spent on R&D, infrastructure, maintenance and other fixed costs. The actual cost to launch is lower, a fraction of that cost. Infrastructure is a big one, their facility out at Boca Chica is seeing massive investment including factories, houses, office buildings, launch towers, etc. To illustrate the point, they plan to launch 6 times this year on that same $2 billion budget.
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  151. They’ve really exhausted all they can do with the Falcon platform.
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  152. Yeah, part of the reason NASA chose Starship was that it had commercial applications. That’s important to NASA because it means they don’t need to fit the full bill and that it’s more sustainable. Blue Origin and especially Dynetics had no real plans to commercialise their landers.
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  153. Robots are shit still. Nowhere near as fast or versatile as humans, still need to be preprogrammed to do everything, still fail all the time. In a day an astronaut could do what it takes a month for a rover to. And they can do stuff a rover can’t.
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  154. But if you want to talk about corruption, why not talk about the fact that Blue Origin even got a contract was because a Senator wrote a bill forcing NASA to reopen the HLS bid…
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  155.  @ContraVsGigi  well that’s the plan with Starship. It’ll require very little refurbishment between flights. Every component has been designed with that philosophy in mind. I don’t know the schedule they plan for the refuelling run, but if it’s over a month they can use 4 Ships each going up once a week and being refurbished for the next week.
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  156.  @ContraVsGigi  I guess when you’re out of good arguments you can default to that 👍
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  157.  @ContraVsGigi  English please? Anyway, I’ll leave SpaceX’s history of proving people wrong as my final proof. People said they would never land a rocket. They did. People then said landing rockets made no economic sense. Now everyone is trying to make one. The head of NASA said that Boeing’s Starliner was more promising than Crew Dragon. 4 years of successful Crew Dragon launches later and Starliner is nowhere to be seen.
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  158. Loool now I’ve heard everything
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  159.  @flowrebaz6189  it was never meant to go to orbit. It got pretty close to orbit velocities but was kept suborbital to ensure it landed where they wanted
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  160. What do you mean, like a space tug?
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  161. Artemis has over 20 partners I believe. Japan and ESA are major partners, Canada is a big partner as well.
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  162. Rockets aren’t 8x more efficient. In fact Starship will be using less efficient fuel Starship is also far heavier, and will bring that entire mass down to the moons surface, and then back up to Orion. That’s why it’s so tricky
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  163. ⁠ @TheColleenDabeanShow they didn’t sell that off, they just stopped doing it because Apollo was insanely expensive with no goal beyond putting men on the moon.
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  164. Moved on from the 2016 SJW hate craze and is onto the 2022 Elon hate craze
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  165. It’s great actually. Commercialisation has saved NASA billions. They’re saving billions with Starship HLS. They were predicting it would cost $10 billion to develop their own lander. Starship is doing it for less than a third that price
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  166. The Dynetics proposal was heavily flawed. Their proposal had negative fuel reserves meaning they’d have to cut mass - a considerable amount. They weren’t able to tell NASA how they planned on solving that problem. That was one of the many issues they didn’t address. It was also incredibly expensive. Their quote was 3x greater than SpaceX’s. NASA also believed SpaceX was more capable. And it also had no real plan for reusability or commercialisation, and was less capable than Starship.
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  167.  @downix  except Dynetics didn’t have a plan to solve the glaring issue of their lander being too heavy. And that was just one of many problems they didn’t address sufficiently. SpaceX had no unaddressed issues in their proposal.
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  168. Said no one ever. Even NASA employees know it’s a jobs program that somehow developed a rocket
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  169.  @Michael-sb8jf  yeah it works, as long as you have the $2 billion it costs to launch it. Actually the cost to launch it was so great a satellite that was meant to launch on it this year instead is launching on Falcon Heavy
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  170. And it won’t be HLS. It’ll be a fuel depot in orbit.
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  171. It made it to orbital velocity, but the path they put it on had it intersect with the earth. This meant if there was a mishap they can ensure the rocket lands in a safe area.
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  172. Well yeah that’ll be their main market. And it was one of the reasons they were able to offer such a low bid.
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  173. Artemis was never a sole NASA project, Constellation was. And that was far more bloated and behind schedule than Artemis
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  174. Pretty much what the SLS is, at the low low cost of $25 billion
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  175. Doesn’t need to be profitable, just affordable for NASA. We will have a moon base
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  176. Apollo landed an absolutely tiny lander and left most of it behind on the surface. Artemis is using a massive lander which will land and take off in it’s entirety
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  177.  @coasterblocks3420  all of the landers were unrealised…
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  178. NASA couldn’t launch Apollo today. The disaster that is SLS cannot lift a payload that large. But even if they could, that would just be stupid. The Apollo Lunar Module can only carry 2 astronauts and can only stay on the moon for just over a day. You leave most of it behind every launch. It can hardly take anything with it.
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  179.  @alexturnbackthearmy1907 no, literally everything is behind schedule. From Orion to even the Space Suits. The original timeline was highly optimistic
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  180.  @alexturnbackthearmy1907  yeah they do, they just haven’t told us. They have a full mockup of HLS’s interior, it was sitting behind Musk during his speech last week.
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  181. SpaceX is literally the leader in launching things to space, but yeah
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  182. Because Saturn V only launched a tiny payload, of which only a tiny fraction went to the moons surface and an even tinier portion came back. In contrast Starship is massive, and all of it will go to the surface and all of it will come up. So it needs refuelling That’s just physics until we develop Nuclear Pulse Propulsion or something
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  183.  @dcon9995  they did…
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  184.  @mc1993  what does this have to do with the 2008 housing crisis?
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  185.  @Kandralla  um how?
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  186.  @Kandralla  any method of evaluation will be subjective, is that you’re revelation?
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  187. Artemis is by far the most public and detailed of the 3.
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  188. And Japan is decades away.
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  189.  @RSBDeprecated  FTL travel isn’t necessary to travel in a human lifetime. Proxima Centauri is “only” 4 light years away. It also happens to have a potentially habitable planet.
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  190. You’re crazy
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  191.  @J-Johna-Jameson let’s return to this conversation in a couple years when Starship is regularly launching massive payloads to space.
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  192.  @KingofCrusher not all of the design documents survived. On top of that all the experts and engineers, all the factories and equipment , all the calculations are either gone or outdated. So you’re essentially starting from scratch. That was what the SLS was
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  193. Lol
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  194. Well yeah. Starship will be the first fully reusable rocket ever as well as the largest rocket ever. The Raptor engines on it are the first of its kind.
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  195.  @treadinglightly-gg9cc you realise SpaceX is the leader in space at the moment? They make up 80% of earth’s launch capacity. They’re the only US company capable of putting people into space and they do so regularly to the ISS. They operate the most reliable rocket of all time. Is that snake oil?
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  196. Yeah fire him 😂 How will NASA get astronauts to and from the ISS without SpaceX
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  197.  @cccmmm1234 on purpose. They chose a path that purposely intersected with the Earth so they could ensure it landed in a safe area in the case of a mishap. They were within 0.1% of orbital velocities
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  198. SpaceX has saved NASA billions
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  199.  @tomservo5007  NASA literally said that themselves. Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew alone have saved tens of billions alone.
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  200. 1. Starship HLS was a cheaper option. NASA estimated it would cost $10 billion to develop a lander on their own, Starship costs $2.7 billion 2. SLS is a disaster. It’s way too expensive, and far behind schedule. It isn’t a great launch vehicle to base Artemis off
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  201.  @youtubevanced4900  okay? It’s still way too expensive. It costs between $1.5-2 billion to launch it. Also where is this lander coming from?
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  202. Or SLS. Or Orion. Or the space suits.
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  203. A Biosphere isn’t needed for Mars, nor does SpaceX have to fund it.
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  204. I like the idea of countries fighting over who can go to the moon first instead of launching nuclear war
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  205. You won’t need that many. You wouldn’t even need 10. If they’re able to reuse Ships then redundancy is built in as long as you have 3 or more tankers
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  206. Because Saturn V launched a tiny little Lunar module, Starship is absolutely massive.
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  207. Exactly what? Starship and the Shuttle are nothing alike - not in their goals, not in their capabilities, not in their development
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  208. No, Saturn V could only take 140t. Officially Starships capacity will be 100-150t, so it isn’t finalised. And importantly that is fully reusable, expendable will be able to do higher capacities.
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  209. Constellation was really the only other attempt. A report came out that it would run way over budget and wouldn’t land people on the moon for 25 years. Many parts from Constellation was scrapped or repurposed into SLS and Artemis. Artemis plans on getting people to the moon for 1/4th the price and less than half the time.
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  210. Plenty. One interesting piece of research was printing organs in space. Weightlessness makes it possible to accurately shape complex parts of the organ.
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  211. Starship V3 in its expendable form plans on launching almost as much mass as Sea Dragon was planned to.
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  212. What are you even trying to say? You think it’s too big?
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  213. SpaceX’s design was more capable and came in at about 1/4th the price. It’s delayed for sure, but let’s not kid ourselves, the NASA design would be as well. The NASA space suits were so behind schedule that had to contract that off to a private company
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  214. Starship V3 is the final iteration, it’s their target. Theoretically it is possible but they need to make some leaps to get there, but again it’s the long term goal.
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  215. Nuckear War or a massive Asteroid both pose a massive threat to the future of our species, the only way to ensure our survival is a self sustaining civilisation on another planet.
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