If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).
Did Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation?<p><a href="https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742</a>
It is interesting that T-0 says "Excitement guaranteed" instead of "launch" or something. Besides being funny, it seems like they are officially accepting the reality that it may not go as planned (even at so early a stage), but will be thrilling nevertheless!
They seem to be increasingly confident about the Fish & Wildlife approval. Wonder what kind of internal messaging is happening there (F&W just saying "we're still signing it but it's fine" or something).
I can’t wait for the time when Starship is proven and launching frequently - though there is a lot to be said about the excitement of right now, when it hasn’t yet had a successful launch.<p>Really got my fingers crossed for a true rapid drop in cost to launch mass to orbit.
I finished reading the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, and, for all his faults, Musk really knows how to get shit done. I was constantly amazed by his ability to strip a process to its essentials before embarking on its construction. SpaceX single-handedly* brought down the cost of space flight by using off-the-shelf and custom-created-from-metal components, where they only had to pay for the raw cost rather than the markups by others (the "idiot tax" as mentioned in the biography).<p>Generally, I simply don't give a shit about what a founder says, I have a Toyota in addition to a Tesla, and I don't care what the CEO of Toyota says at all, so I always find it puzzling when people talk about their dislike of Musk in particular, as if that should matter when buying their products.<p>*for some definition of the theoretical hand of a company
Rocket reusability is overhyped nonsense that we could have had decades ago except we only just recently produced the billionaire narcissist class that think that reusing the thin metal shell on a booster is somehow “game changing”. It’s not. It will never be.
Can't wait to have Isis in space.. We kicked the problem of growing up as a species down the road for so long, now it's time for a nuke for everyone (who is not in a gravity well). Let's get this over with by bribing us out of today's problems into even bigger tomorrow's problems with the tools of yesterday to handle internal crisis.<p>Sure downvote reality, that will make it go away. The sort of points I want to see, the bankruptcy of "I have no plan".