Mastodawn

Women Interface Network

flagLesbianBreizh

👾 Artemis I

reporters: NASA’s huge waste of money “exceeded all expectations and all systems functioned perfectly” in completely pointless and unimpressive Earth-Moon L2 Distant Retrograde Halo Orbit mission that wasted a hundred trillion taxpayer dollars

Starship catastrophic launch failure

reporters: SpaceX breaks spaceflight records by not exploding their Starship for four whole minutes, “almost” passes major milestone of stage separation, revolutionizing spaceflight as we know it. “Literally ten times as good as the Saturn V” says experts. Here is our interview with elon musk who did not sponsor this article

Kazriko Apr 21, 2023

@requiem I bet the cost of those programs are several orders of magnitude different by the time they're done. The Starship will be a whole lot cheaper because they're willing to test, test, test, on novel designs rather than sticking with proven systems, and overdesigning everything. I'd be surprised if the Starship costs even 50 billion by the end, let alone 100 trillion. Artemis also is going to ultimately give us a disposable rocket with barely any reusable components, while Starship should be extensively reusable.

requiem 🦫Apr 21, 2023

@kazriko starship won’t give “us” anything, it’s private property.

Kazriko Apr 21, 2023

@requiem @winter Us as in humanity, all of the airplanes that we ride around in to travel around the country and between countries are private property as well, and yet they give us the ability to get to Japan the next day.

requiem 🦫Apr 21, 2023

So the rich, got it.

Kazriko Apr 21, 2023

@requiem @winter Normally when someone says "the rich" they are implying something that costs $50k or more, rather than being able to go around the planet for $1.5k, or go to the other end of the country for $200.

requiem 🦫Apr 21, 2023

@kazriko Sorry, that was a bit curt.

But what I mean is that when NASA goes to space it is at least theoretically owned by the (American) public, when private companies do it it is theirs, not ours.

Musk is building rockets so he and other billionaires can bail on this planet before they destroy it. They are building rockets which blow-up and scatter garbage on threatened ecosystems and joking about it. They are failing to do now what NASA did 50 years ago using slide rules.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s not impressive, and not valuable to humanity.

Kazriko Apr 21, 2023

@requiem @winter This seems like more of a rant against Musk than against Starship. Again, I don't care at all for the guy, all I want to see is results.

Nasa did not make a rocket this large 50 years ago with slide rules. Nasa did not make a full cycle engine 50 years ago with slide rules, Nasa did not make a rocket that could land back at its tower 50 years ago with slide rules. These are all novel things that they're experimenting with here. Russia did try to make a full cycle engine and failed, and Russia tried to make rockets this powerful and failed.

Women Interface Network

flagLesbianBreizh

@kazriko @requiem Raptor 1 has 1.81MN thrust (unclear what altitude). RS-25 (Space Shuttle, SLS) has 1.86MN at sea level, 2.2MN in vacuum

Kazriko Apr 21, 2023

@winter @requiem And were there 27 RS-25's on the shuttle or SLS? That's what would be required to equate the thrust of the Superheavy booster, and this is what I'm talking about, total thrust of the rocket.

Women Interface Network

flagLesbianBreizh

@kazriko @requiem 👾 and I'm addressing the engine itself. it's impressive sure, a full flow staged combustion engine, it's the most successful attempt at one yet, but musk thinks he can do literally anything with this engine that primarily suited to first stage launch. last I checked it can't throttle down under 40%. their own Merlin is a vastly superior landing engine and didn't have anywhere near this kind of problems in testing (because they developed and tested it in normal ways and not in all-up tests that are definitely going to fail, cost the entire vehicle and usually the launchpad, and pollute a threatened ecosystem

Kazriko Apr 21, 2023

@winter @requiem The merlin using Kerosene is far more polluting though than Methane. In the long run, it will be less polluting than the SLS. After all, every SLS launched will drop debris into the ocean, while once they get the design down, no more SH boosters will do the same.

Women Interface Network

flagLesbianBreizh

@kazriko @requiem SLS uses hydrolox, the most environmentally friendly fuel there is. the SRBs are another story, but it isn’t finished with development either and they intend to use full Hydrogen and Oxygen with liquid boosters. the exhaust gas from a Starship launch pollutes Earth much more than dropping some metal in the ocean. if he’s really about innovative new technology, why the obsession with burning methane in this day and age of the climate crisis?

Kazriko Apr 21, 2023

@winter @requiem SLS may have an advantage on fuel cleanness, but the costs of building a new one, such as the pollution released while mining the minerals required to build it, and smelting them probably exceeds the pollution released by a SH launch.

I believe though that part of it is that it's easier to produce methane from solar power and CO2 in the martian atmosphere than it would be to produce other fuels there.

Women Interface Network

flagLesbianBreizh

@kazriko @requiem NASA also isn’t talking about doing what, 17 refueling launches of a super heavy lift vehicle for one single Lunar mission? the environmental cost of producing the SLS doesn’t even begin to compare to the kind of launch schedule musk is talking up. if they could ever possibly achieve that fast of turnaround time on reusable launch vehicles which is very doubtful.

@winter @requiem Eh, we'll see. I guess you'll never see more than one or two SLS launches per year because of how ridiculously expensive it is.

Women Interface Network

flagLesbianBreizh

@kazriko @requiem that's a government problem, not an engineering problem

requiem 🦫Apr 22, 2023

@winter @kazriko damn, I don’t even remember where this started…