Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Real Reason SpaceX Developed The Falcon Heavy Rocket!" video.

Imagine of there were some space junkies who didn't make ridiculous claims every time they opened their mouths and made another video of hype and nonsense. I'm actually an aerospace engineer and think Falcon Heavy is fabulous but I had to stop listening to this diatribe of hype and nonsense at 38 seconds. Starship is folly and totally unnecessary when you have Falcon & Crew Dragon combined with Falcon Heavy. You have the means to put serious chunks of hardware into orbit at an affordable price as well as get people up and down. Starship has just been a colossal waste of money and time. New Glenn (or whatever Bezos is calling it) is also a similar colossal waste of money and time. They should have learnt from Apollo and the Russian N-1 that big rockets can only work with a small number of super powerful engines. Otherwise its so complicated that even a minor failure is fatal.
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@Skinflaps_Meatslapper I'm actually Australian but went to college in America in the late 80s. I was there when Reagans Star Wars was the big game in town. Most of us realised it wasn't going to work, especially the post grads, but they were on scholarships so they kept that part quiet and go there degrees. As an undergrad our focus was Space Station Freedom which we expected to build and then be back on the moon circa 2001. The first major hint all was not going well was when SSF got canned after the 3rd attempt. It 1st came in with a $20Billion price tag and VP Bush freaked out and said it had to cost less. So they came back with a redesign that had a price tag of $30 Billion and VP Bush went bananas and re-iterated "cheaper." On the 3rd attempt they had a price tag of $40 Billion and VP Bush said "FK-OFF." While we were pondering that Challenger happened. I'd actually been in Florida only 2weeks earlier and seen Columbia take off. Sadly we were 60 miles away but even at that distance it was spectacular. Probably the saddest part of the last 40+ years has been the exploitation of the research funding. If you look through the X-Planes there's a significant number of "never delivered" projects that really should have delivered. If you look at the X-38 crew return vehicle, what a wasted opportunity. Its compatriot the X37 ACTUALLY WORKS so why didn't they just scale it up and man rate it for 4-6 people? Its no different here in Australia. We finally got a Space Agency a few years back. One of its first publications was a "Road Map" for Australia's space future. The VERY FIRST item detailed was "Advanced Space Based Water Management" with the hope it would be available in the mid 2030s. So I spent my own time and money doing a detail project plan using air launched small satellites based on a scaled down Pegasus XL. Because funding here isn't that great I went with money I knew was available because there were a couple of very controversial over funded security contracts. I ended up with a budget of $720 Million and got told to go away. Then they gave our Air Force $7 Billion (10x as much) for a Space Program based around some of the ideas I had seen FAIL as part of the Reagan Star Wars program 35 years earlier. So I have a fairly nuanced (frustrated) and critical view of these matters of WASTE and STUPIDITY.
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