T-4hrs from time of post
Spacex puts nasa to shame with their launch streams. They should have spent some money on being broadcast ready instead of having celebrity cameos, what a joke.
Damn really needed this right now. That launch teared me up, felt like a shot of hope right to my frontal cortex. Science and exploration really does bring out the best in all of us.
Got to add 3 of them are licensed ham operators!
Humanity’s first chance to test the effects of the Van Allen belts on a Canadian.
Booster ignition… And liftoff! Blah blah…in the original video it goes blank. Another video shows a Florida man sitting on a lawn chair. Then they switch back and the rocket has already cleared the launchpad. Blah blah traveling at more than 1200 miles per hour… Let’s now cut to a large black cloud… And we’re back to the rocket, but could someone please get all the ants loaded in my pants I can’t shake the camera properly like a super 8!
I mean have you ever tried filming an explosion from less than 100 metres? If you don’t understand it or disagree with it just articulate that instead of condescending the whole thing. Just makes you look bad.
All I’m saying is that someone screwed up. Its not 1998. We’re in 2026. Someone should have had the warewith of thinking about when the cameras were going to cut, how much vibration they would see, etc. This is not our first rodeo. At 100m you would be well cooked. But they should have picked a good spot and used an actual tracking camera.
hearing them say the toilet shut off made me laugh. I guess they can’t take a shit in the rocket capsule for the next 10 days.
Oh no, really had high hopes the Wolowitz Zero-Gravity Waste Disposal System was up to snuff on this launch.
I’m glad for another moon mission and all, but we should have fuckin shipyards and a sizeable colony there by now, if we we functioning properly.
Yeah, Star Trek is a fun time.
Colony, shipyards, just keep bankrupting the country.
Hi trees, I’m forest! Can I have some more strawmen and ragebait please?
Edit: I can see you’re terminally online so I probably won’t respond again.
For real, by now the Moon should feel as accessible as Antarctica.
That is simply never going to happen. The hardware to get 4 people to the moon and back costs about 5 billion dollars, to say nothing of the additional supporting costs.
The cheapest you could take a round-trip to Antarctica is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000…
Nonono… we’re going to transport thousands for free , just like Scifi. And the point of traveling to a dead rock still eludes us.
Right now, yes. If it was as commoditized as putting satellites into orbit is now, the price would be orders of magnitude lower.
But yeah the investment to get to that point would be immense and take decades.
Why. Why do we need to go to the moon. To build a Subway Sandwich shop?
It takes a lot less to launch a rocket from the lunar surface to anywhere in the solar system than from earth. If we ever get manufacturing working on or around the moon then it opens up a lot of possibilities for larger payloads. This means we can send more further and it makes the whole process cheaper.
So that people like you can complain about it on the internet.
There are loads of reasons but if you want a practical one we should do it for the helium 3 and other materials that can be found on the moon and in space.
Because it’s there.
It’s expensive, but not nearly that expensive. Starship has charged $90m so far. That’s including a healthy profit I’m sure. SLS is ridiculous in how much it’s cost. It’s not a good comparison for how much it would cost if this were a normal occurrence.
Starship is certainly far more expensive than it would be too, because there’s a lot of technology that has to be developed, and that R&D has to be paid for. The more launches there are, the more spread out that cost becomes, and the cheaper a launch costs.
That’s the unmanned cost, but manned should be similar eventually, and potentially cheaper if it’s common enough. It’s a crew size of 2-4, so it’s 22.5m/person. Still far more than Antarctica, but essentially zero compared to the cost you gave.
If starship works, it’ll be great.
Right now starship has delivered precisely 0 grams of anything to any orbital level.
The commercial moon trip that was planned for that Chinese billionaire was canceled due to a lack of confidence and nasa has reopened the lunar lander contract because of how far behind starship is.
The entire design paradigm of starship as a lunar vehicle is also highly dubious. Requiring double digit launches of refueling tankers, that have never been tested or demonstrated as possible, just to get to the moon is not exactly cheap or low risk. If we’re generous and say that launching anything to LEO on starship costs the same as a falcon 9 launch(74 million), and it will take the 16 refueling launches to get to the moon that NASA conservatively estimates, and there’s no boil off of fuel between refueling launches or scheduling delays requiring extra launches due to boil off, then the total cost of a moon mission with starship is now 1.18 billion dollars. The SLS, Frankenstein creation that it is, costs roughly 2.4 billion for a launch. SLS is double the cost on paper, yes. However there is a few massive points in its favor: it has flown twice without blowing up unexpectedly, it does not require over a dozen launches of other rockets to do its only job, and it has actually delivered a payload to the moon. Starship right now can claim none of these things.
Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles, it currently has no way to deploy any meaningful cargo to Leo besides fucking starlink satellites. So it can’t even be used to construct the lunar gateway or an orbital tug.
Please stop huffing Elon’s vaporware.
Starship barely makes orbit.
Holy shit the techbro Kool aid is potent here.
I don’t like the guy. I’m just pointing out the expected costs. I don’t care what the current status of the ship is. The point is the price that was given was ridiculous compared to what it even should be now, let alone an alternate version where it’s common.
While I dislike the “techbro god” owner of SpaceX as much as the next guy, completely dismissing what they’re doing is dumb af.
I would’ve been inclined to agree with you as of 10 minutes ago, until I read this Wikipedia article saying Starship refueling will require 10 or more launches. Damn, that means at least $1b to leave LEO assuming each launch is around $100m, so not really all that much cheaper than expendable stages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Propellant_Transfer_Demonstration
When people first saw news about humans reaching the moon, it was a feeling that we today can’t even fully understand. It was the unimaginable becoming true, the thing from science fiction. It was a great display of what our science and technology were capable of. People were in awe, shocked, in disbelief, all at the same time, for a long time.
Now, the empire is so decadent, that the only thing they can try is a remake of the same feat. They think they can choose how history will be written, but future historians will very likely describe this as a desperate move from a crumbling power.
Yes, but this is really the first step of a manned mars mission. Once we had been to the moon, it didn’t really have much value doing it more, it’s just a dead rock.
2022 wants it’s comment back, SpaceX failed on this project and burned $30B tax dollars while doing it. Oh well, who needs healthcare anyway, I feel fine.
Yeah I wouldn’t say this has been rolled out well. I just saying why we stopped going to the moon, and why is might have value now as part of a long term mars project. The original space race propelled science and engineering forward incredibly - it probably indirectly helped your healthcare a lot. I don’t know if this effort will be quite as useful. But we should be able to fund space exploration as well as healthcare - it’s just a political choice.
I thought those rocks were usable as fuel?
Not the rocks. The helium-3 in the rocks, maybe.
Rocks are not fuel.
Kinda depends on the rock, right?
Unfortunately with Trump being there, this shall not be the greatest launch, for he may plan to use this for his own propaganda campaign.
What then, in my view were the greatest launches? Indeed, when the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched and Apollo 11 went up, that was a monumentous achievement for mankind.
Unlike the Apollo and space shuttle missions and all who have went before, there is little scientific reason for this launch. It is space politics; all that money could have been used to build homes instead, to improve the general wellbeing of Americans, instead of enriching and entertaining the billionnaire oligarchs’ interests. But that is my own view, I s’pose.
Had Americans’ wellbeing been improved greatly, the FPTP system abolished for proportional representation, and there been no billionnaires and media oligopolies, no conflict of interests, no wars the US was waging… the US might have faced a much more golden age of spacefaring.
Wonder what the orange bastard will say when it burns on reentry due to the faulty heat shield.
I watched the several hours long broadcast and Trump wasn’t mentioned or shown a single time (if he was even there, I don’t know).
This reads as someone who isn’t really that familiar with the aims/goals of Artemis. This about a stepping stone to a lunar base and then ofc to Mars and beyond. There’s a TON we still need to learn about and obstacles to overcome if we’re ever going to make it any further than the moon. Affects of deep space travel on the human body including radiation (check out AVATAR), immune systems, activity/sleep patterns are just a few of the experiments that will be performed. All of these have the potential to have huge impacts on healthcare on Earth as well, just as spaceflight science has in the past. So many technologies we use today came from NASA or spaceflight research. Here is a just a small list. I could go on, theres a large portion of NASA that does Earth-based science (weather/climate change research), but the point is NASA research has long had a positive impact on both our daily lives and economic output.
This is not even to mention, it’s been 50 years of technological change and growth since the last moon trip. This means thousands of new systems and technology that are yet to be tested by humans in deep space. The bigger the goal (Mars etc), the more incremental the testing steps need to be in order to proceed safely.
As for the politics, this isn’t some Blue Origin Jeff Bezos dick rocket going up on a very low suborbital flight just so he could say "i’M aN aStRoNaUt’. This is a program for entirely scientific purposes. You can definitely argue that it is still political, and I don’t disagree. Exploration and especially space exploration has always been inextricably linked with politics. But hell, I’d argue the original moon landing was WAY more political than Artemis; the whole reason the Apollo program had the timeline it did was because we wanted to beat the Soviets to the punch. And compared to the Apollo days, NASA now operates on a shoestring budget if you account for inflation.
I agree there’s a lot the US spends money on that should be going to better the lives of it’s citizens, but NASA funding isn’t one of them imo. As of 2018, NASA funding accounted for only 0.5% of the federal budget. That’s not a lot to take from in comparison to the many other areas where there is bloated federal spending.
Arguably both things can be true at the same time. Whilst I enjoyed watching the launch, not only from a scientific and human endeavour, there was an advert about 20 mins before launch which was unnecessary propaganda talking about US exceptionalism, “best and longest democracy”, manifest destiny themes and lots of other political bullshit that not only is untrue, was totally unnecessary for this next stage of space exploration - and unfortunately, was more similar to that of the 60s propaganda than anything we’ve had in a long time.
I don’t disagree with the grossness of the American exceptionalism propaganda that they always include, but you have to remember they have to get all of their funding from congress and also to a certain extent have to keep the approval of the American people. So honestly a certain amount of patriotism circle jerk is unfortunately to be expected/necessary.
I dunno. Most countries have decent education systems to help prevent the need for self-glorification. Its just weird that your population needs to hear that about themselves. They shouldn’t need to be told, as pride in your country is a feeling. It just shocks me that they still ignore the genocide of the native population, slavery and all the shitty things. It’s a refusal to acknowledge their foundings and white-washing their history. The vision portrayed is a fiction.
If you look at your country and think “meh. It’s okay, could be worse but could a whole heap better” and without resorting to bigoted reasons, you’re doing okay. Anyone who requires blind praise about the country they were fated to be born into seems odd. Maybe it’s just me. But this isn’t really in keeping with the nature of this community so I’ll stop now (though it is psychology so…😃. No, I’ll stop.}
But this isn’t really in keeping with the nature of this community
I just want to jump in here to say that you’re clearly the one being aggressive and arguing in bad faith.
You’ve had your ramble about how disgusting US exceptionalism is. Congratulations, everybody in this thread has literally already said this. Nobody disagrees with you. We already know.
OP only made two points:
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This flight isn’t “been there done that” science, like quite a few ignorant posters above have already said
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He explained why NASA, an organization that is made up mostly of people who are probably disgusted with the US administration, are required to say something patriotic on their broadcasts.
So ultimately the question is, who are you actually talking to?
Hmm, didn’t think I was being aggressive or arguing in bad faith as I wasn’t arguing at all. I was agreeing, and just find it odd that there’s a need for the propaganda and pandering. It’s not something that should need to happen and doesn’t happen elsewhere, and is ridiculed when it does. I find it somewhat fascinating that a country like the US has to spend time self-propagandising to its citizens rather than letting its actions do the talking for it.
Who am I talking to? Anyone who finds that juxtaposition interesting too.
Ultimately, this is a science community. I admitted that I pondering politics and psychology which wasn’t the main topic of the thread so I said I was stopping. But if you decide to read it in another way, I won’t stop you.
Edit: there’s only 14 comments in this thread, and 1 or 2 mentioned propaganda so no, not everyone has mentioned it. Maybe many don’t see it like that being that it’s just normality to them (like those who don’t think reciting the pledge of allegiance daily is strange)
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