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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 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.


  • You know, I’m not even sure I’ve heard a straight line about what exactly they’re trying to do and what precipitated starting the war.

    There’s been talk about wanting regime change and halting the Iranian nuclear program. But both of those things have been around for what, like 20 years? And the nuclear deal was being worked out over a decade age before trump threw a fit and ripped it up.

    Most wars have a very clear “they did this to us so we have to do this to them in order to secure… blah blah blah.” But with Iran we didn’t really get that. I just woke up one day and the headlines were “surprise, he started another war in the Middle East, checkout this new TikTok trend”

    At least bush had the intelligence to lie about WMDs. Trump just threw a fit and seems hell bent on collapsing the global economy for no reason other than the US hasn’t been bombing as many brown people as it once did.