"I have contained my rage for as long as possible, but I shall unleash my fury upon you like the crashing of a thousand waves! Begone, vile man! Begone from me! A starter car? This car is a finisher car! A transporter of gods! The golden god! I am untethered, and my rage knows no bounds!"
NASA had a pretty consistent budget for 30+ years, and even if one contract gets canceled. SpaceX is by far best and most important NASA supplier, whatever NASA does with its budget, SpaceX would likely be involved.
And Starship primary mission is next generation Starlink, not NASA.
> the debris field of two Starships breaking up in medium orbit could wipe out significant parts of the starlink constellation
Do you have any evidence of that?
NASA wouldn't allow operations that could potentially destroy most sats around the world in any plan it signs.
Have you done any actual analysis on the flight path, how and where docking would happen, the decay orbits and so on, do you have anything modeled? If not I going with NASA and SpaceX analysis over yours.
> How much does that hold when Elon has the ear of a know-nothing president who is absolutely unconcerned by any evidence?
Your argument is that SpaceX would destroy its own multi-billion $ project?
That's silly, SpaceX now is a huge social media and AI company. SpaceX did like 3 billion in involvement in Starlink. The other rocket companies could never do something like that and survive.
> How much do reusable launchers really bring down costs?
Without reusable launch the flight rates they have would not be possilbe so they are the bases for why the business has value.
> Were the companies that elected not to go this way (almost all of them)
Actually literally everybody is getting into re-usability. Maybe check your facts. ULA is working on engine re-usability. RocketLab next rocket is reusable. Europe and China next rockets will be reusable. BlueOrigin of course as well.
> where would Arianespace be today if they had elected to try reusable rockets and ended up at the same point as SpaceX?
It would have failed because Arianespace literally couldn't build a reusable rocket. You can't just magic up a reusable rocket.
If in 2014, when Europe decided to not do the Ariane 5 ME and instead do an Ariane 6 reusable, it would take another 5 years minimum until a reusable rocket would happen.
Ariane 6 took 10 years while being a minor, evolution of Ariane 5 based on Ariane 5 ME project. It involved using a new engine that had been in development for 15 years already and would take 25 years to fly for the first time.
The main engine was only slightly upgraded and could never be reusable.
It would take 15 years at least to have a new engine and rocket developed. And it would have cost 3-5x as much as Ariane 6.
This would not have happened because it was politically impossible, literally totally impossible, Arianespace can't make decisions like that.
Arguably it would have been smarter to do Ariane 5 ME and not do Ariane 6 and instead build a smaller reusable rocket. Basically what they are doing now but 10 years earlier.
> (Note that SpaceX is where it is today also thanks to taxpayer money in military contracts and decades of R&D paid for by NASA and given away for free) .)
That is very reductionist. Many companies get taxpayer money in one way or another. SpaceX from the beginning did lots of private funding and had lots of private costumers. In terms of aerospace they are pretty unique in how much of their own investment they do.
And they actually mostly LOST MONEY on their early government contracts, because they offered them so cheaply. But those government contracts allowed them to lend money and invest. Had they not been able to use that and get many private costumers, they would have gone bust.
As for only because of NASA R&D is true but its just the typical everything is connected argument. Yes because government helped road infrastructure 300 years ago we have SpaceX today, but every other company also had roads and NASA and didn't turn into SpaceX.
RocketPlaneKistler got a better deal from NASA and wanted to build a reusable rocket, yes they are dead and SpaceX is where it is today. ULA had decades of massive subsidies and insane priced launches and have done nothing innovative what so ever.
You think the average person writes performance optmized code?
If you are on that level then you know pretty well what you are targeting. And even then in 99% of cases you just look at the top level profile.
If you do performance analysis for some specific embeded project that is not using a standard profile, then its a bit more work, but hardly impossible.
Bruh, the "average person" won't buy a riscv-based computer in decades. The average bystander to the riscv project indeed writes high-performance code for their, so far, mostly non-existent or emulated riscv processors.
Your seriously arguing the the avg person write performance code so critical that minor difference in hardware implementation are relevant? Most people write code that isn't that performance critical, fireware or they are porting existing software over. A extreme minority of people that interact with an ISA is hand optimizing code.
Lol... the RISC-V ecosystem has loooong passed that stage. RISC-V is eating into markets from deeply embedded to automotive, high-end server cpu's to specialized accelerators. That's mass-produced hard silicon.
It's here to stay, coming to a device near you Real Soon Now (tm).
You need to look up what Solar roof actually was, you would design it so that it would only be solar in some places, the others it was just a normal rooftile that looks the same.
Most US cities centers were not built to late, instead they were bulldozed for the car, those are 2 different things. The US used to have beautiful city centers and nice urban fabric around those centers.
> A lot of them were built with transportation in mind.
Complete nonsense, the Post-1945 push for suberbia had nothing to with 'transportation in mind', the reason they wanted it was totally different.
The reality is more that they pushed suberiba and only then realized the transportation problem it caused, and then they reacted with every increasing highway and stroad building.
> Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative.
Its not an alternative because its either not funded or badly organized.
Its bad because the government doesn't care that its bad, its not actually a fundamental problem.
People use public transport in villages of 20 people where I live. The idea that you need some mega city for public transport to be viable is an American fantasy. Even if its not for everybody, it still makes sense.
Also most people live plenty urban to make public transit perfectly viable.
Self driving cars means even more cars on the road, and reduce the avg occupation even more. Even in a same rural environment this isn't great. And in an urban environment is insanely fucking stupid.
I don't think it was clear that it would be out compete on price or performance. If you compare roof + solor to solar roof, the idea was that eventually it would compete with doing both separately.
I'm also not sure if its actually worse on longevity.
What evidence do you have that little effort was put in development? As far as I can tell that not at all the case. The early version was bad and it took multiple generations for it to become a real product.
Structural support. A few sheets of steel is what we are trying to safe money on?
So the money we are saving is commodity solar, commodity steel and community battery (or any other form of power).
And instead of those things we add, insane engineering complexity, insane complex heating, insanely complex maintenance or standing backup, insanely expensive transportation and insanely complex operations and insanely complex communications?
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