Starship Flight 7
(spacex.com)653 points by chinathrow a day ago
653 points by chinathrow a day ago
Survival of our species, for one. Never the mind short-sighted folks like yourselves clawing us back the entire way.
At this point in time the humanity has nothing to offer to any other intelligence (if there is any) out there, nor it doesn't have a need itself to go outside of its own planet, and the big mess that it made out of it. It's akin of letting a toddler walk out of the door and roam into a busy street merely for a satisfaction of its curiousity. What is more likely to happen is that the valuable resources that we still have will be gone (it won't take long, as consumption is growing at exponential rate), without ability to recover - a one way ticket to stone age. It's nice to dream and look at the stars, but can we please sort the shit here first?
Just to Mars, and maybe the asteroid belt. See [0].
[0] Expanse, The.
To export the enjoyers of capitalism (a.k.a. humans) outside this planet, to visit the stars.
beautiful although one wonders what they're trying to escape
Every one of these are like right out of a sci-fi novel. It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Between this, AI (even in its current LLM form), and mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life, we are going to become an interplanetary species far sooner than many “skeptics” imagine.
We are just one more lander / sample mission / whatever away from having solid proof of life elsewhere in the solar system. That is gonna jumpstart all a huge race to get humans out into deep space to check it all out.
People worry about AI stealing their jobs… don’t worry. We need that stuff so humans can focus on the next phase of our history… becoming interplanetary. Your kids will be traveling to space and these (very overhyped, don’t get me wrong) LLM’s will be needed for all kinds of tasks.
It sounds crazy but I maintain it’s true and will happen sooner than you’d think.
> Your kids will be traveling to space
I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number. There is nothing in space to travel to until we build extremely complex habitats, and that can't be done with manual human labor, it requires mostly automatic drones and maybe a handful of human controllers living in the ship that brought them there.
And building habitats that any significant amount of people (say, 1000) could actually live in will take a loooong amount of time and a huge amount of resources. And the question of "why would anyone waste time and resources on trying to live in conditions more inhospitable than anything the Earth can ever become, even with a major asteroid crashing into it in the middle of a nuclear war and a global pandemic?" will crop up long before more than one or two of these are finished.
> I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number
Someone born today will have children living into the early 2100s. The first flight ever was a little more than a hundred years ago. Using your kind of logic, no one would have predicted most of the technology we take for granted today.
> It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Hate to break it to you, but Space X isn't it. You can't have a CEO that is not aligned to the truth and reality to lead a company into something that is beneficial for humanity.
I like how chopsticks catch (a very impressive feat) completely distracts everyone from totally fucked timeline and already spent budget on mars mission. Its like any criticism is being drowned in loud cheers. Only time will tell, but I hope I will be wrong on this one
What's the criticism exactly? Like I don't get your point? Yes they are behind on timelines and on Mars, does that mean that we should post reddit-tier cynical comments every time about that? I'm not saying that you're doing that, it's more that I don't get why this is surprising.
And on the other hand, it's also funny to see how "skeptics" (whatever that means in this case) dismiss or belittle achievements that were claimed to be impossible a few months or years ago (for example, the chopstick landing). It's like a never ending treadmill of
this is impossible->okay it happened, that's cool, but now xyz is impossible.
Plus, it seems normal to me that people care less about some sort of budget details or delays than really cool technical feats.
They're the ones who were sent in to return two humans from the ISS after Boeing's ship malfunctioned last year. The explosions are typically from R&D projects; SpaceX is capable and practiced at transporting humans (and cargo) without their ships blowing up, and that's where most of their actual business currently is. (The Dragon is the vehicle they use for manned ISS missions.)
I actually get this take, but for me it's the ultimate distraction and a way to legitimize the CEOs rubbish behavior.
"How can he be wrong when he is a genius and can land a rocket in two chopsticks?"
I’m in a slightly different boat. The CEO’s rubbish behavior sucks, but the company shouldn’t be diminished by that. The people behind SpaceX are a modernd day Apollo Program. Absolute marvels of engineering.
They are making the impossible merely late. Which, you know, is still pretty fucking cool.
I’d love to see any other country or competitor catch a stainless steel rocket larger than the Statue of Liberty that was just cruising back to earth at sub orbital velocity. Everybody else is so far behind it’s not even funny.
Spacex is cool as shit. Screw the “skeptics” and haters. Some people have a complete lack of imagination.
> very late
when was your fully reusable full-flow staged combustion rocket engine scheduled flight, again?
Why does that matter? SpaceX is setting themselves up for failure by insisting that they need to nail re-entry first. Whenever they focused on a test flight for re-entry I'm wondering why they aren't working on more important things like the payload doors or orbital brimming. They will get the re-entry tests for free!
And even if they don't. The upper stage is cheap enough that it can be expended and still be cheaper per flight than Falcon Heavy. So that tells me that the delays are on purpose. Their test flight planning is designed to maximize ego stroking.
Starship started development in 2012. SLS started development in 2011, New Glenn in 2012.
SLS flew in 2022 around the moon. New Glenn just flew, reaching orbit with an actual payload.
Starship hasn't reached orbit, the best they did was send a banana to the Indian ocean.
Remind me again how SpaceX is the fast company?
4M viewers. comparable to top politics events.
ship looks to be lost. this was the main part, so it's almost complete failure.
these tests are designed to fail — the data collected now will ensure they don't blow up with actual people on them. test seems like a success to me
Still a failure in my book, it blew up before it could deliver its payload so they couldn't do many the tests they intended to do.
It is possible they will have to add one more test launch to their schedule, delaying commercial operations because of that.
It is not a complete failure, but to me, it is more failure than success, even by SpaceX test flight standards.
Compared to the previous flight, that I consider a success, the booster catch was nice, but it is not the first, and they have plenty of tries left to perfect it, so it is not in the critical path.
they didn't get the telemetry after, what it was, 16 min(?) hope they'll find the reason which will be hard without black boxes like on airplanes. as every engineer knows it works flawlessly only at the end. if ever.
the booster was the same, great, but not surprising.
IIRC they had 30 cameras on board & who knows how many sensors (probably hudreds ?).
So even if an engine bay fire burned the electronics and interrupted all coms (or FTS blew it up) they should already have a lot of data by that point showing how it went wrong.
You're assuming the viewer count is accurate? That seems rather naive.
Can someone tell me what's the point of all this? To export capitalism outside of solar system?