The (new) Space Thread 🌌📡🔭🗿🛸🤖

[xsturmn8_BLx]

Originally Posted by Reiwa [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The purpose of hiring the guy who's hopped up on goofballs was to find ways to make space lift less expensive per ton, not reach the moon, which is not only pointless but also has already been done. That's the deliverable.

Has he done so?

Private sector is usually pretty good at making products more efficiently so they can squeeze a maximum profit out of each unit.

Well, I don't think we are talking about the same thing! I took a screenshot of an AI summary but I don't know how to upload it! So I'll put it in my own way.

Yes, I guess Barack Obama or whoever it was 'hired' the crosseyed guy with the alt-medicine family fortune because he promised us 100x decreases in cost-to-orbit and final delivery on the homeopathic cure for cancer his Grandpa and Great-Grandpa sold all over North America between (as far back as we know) the 1890s and 1940, making the Musk-Haldemann crime family fabulously wealthy and powerful. These promises were not made good, though I must admit cost-to-orbit has gone incrementally down... with the decades and the scale of shipments to orbit.

But that fella with the bad dad and all those substance & personality disorders was hired again, separately, for the Artemis program, with specific moon-related deliverables he has also failed to deliver, 'cause the Starship vehicle has been a decadelong boondoggle of poorly considered design requirements and, I'd assume, other forms of mismanagement. I wonder what that failure to develop a product where others have succeeded says about the practice of extrapolating as truisms larger systems theories about The Free Market, in this case to a single case of one company run by a dictator-owner, highly-leveraged with competing personal financial interests all over-- and also hobbled by drug use. Shouldn't the Perfect Market embodied by that addled and desperate dictator develop products with Perfect competency? Not like those government things which are run so arbitrarily! But that's neither here nor there, Reiwa, and I know you didn't exactly make those arguments [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Just musing.

Since SpaceX started missing those Artemis deadlines, the protagonist from "Speed" (that movie was about getting rich on scams and doing crank with hookers until your heart explodes, right?) has started saying we should skip Artemis altogether and cut him more checks sight unseen on any deliverables. This time, for going straight to Mars! Well howboutdat turn from the most trustworthy man in the world Scammer, son of Scammer, after accepting billions of our dollars for Artemis and giving the taxpayer nothing back?

My understanding is that Artemis was delayed in other ways, too, which got the heat off of SpaceX for its simultaneous failure to provide NASA a rocket to ride on. So there is that.

To my knowledge very little reporting exists that might educate us on this, and hobbyist places where it's discussed are drowned in lunacy & company astroturfing, so I am only communicating my personal and murky understanding to you. I hope someone will let me know if I'm way off base about SpaceX's failings relative to Artemis. Drugged-up foreign criminals from 100-year dynasties of scam artistry should not wholly control the US space program, though, and I'm sure about that part! It's a shame on us that we've remade the US Space Program into the Haldemann Homeopathic Space Program. We did not have to do that in order to enjoy the benefits of the economy of scale to which Reiwa referred. Now, off my little soapbox.