Comment on Huge SpaceX rocket explosion shredded the upper atmosphere

Johanno@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• pipe01@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There is, you can be billions over budget and years behind schedule like NASA

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  • Hydra_Fk@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Keep licking them boots.

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    • masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      My god, the fucking dumbasses on here.

      “Oh my god, Elon Musk’s companies make electric cars, therefore electric cars must be bad”.

      Great logic man! Yep, hardware rich development programs and fixed price government contracting must also be bad because SpaceX has used them to lower launch costs for NASA by orders of magnitude.

      Jesus fucking christ, the dumbass blind hate for SpaceX is fucking mind numbing.

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  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.

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    • masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.

      What are you talking about?

      NASA spends a fixed amount of money for launch contracts to put stuff into space.

      NASA’s traditional method of contracting, where they would design something, and then having Boeing on retainer to keep asking for more money to build it, and then have congress step in at every step and tell them to use X contractor because it’s in their district, and then not actually get to build or test anything for decades, and then discovering problems and paying Boeing a fuck ton more money to “fix” those problems later, led to massive cost overruns and subpar performance on literally every single launch program they’ve had for the past several decades.

      Now NASA is spending that fixed amount of money to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. and gets a) orders of magnitude more stuff into space and b) does it with no risk of cost overruns since they’re all fixed price contracts.

      Competitive bidding on fixed price contracts, is literally the alternative model that the government should have been using this whole time instead of subsidizing their traditional contractors with cost+ contracts.

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      • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        The alternatives are setting up SoEs to build your rockets, or putting people responsible to the state and not the shareholders on the board.

        There is a core conflict of interest in that every dollar of profit these companies make is a dollar that isn’t going into building the rocket or lowering the cost.

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  • sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Or like the military…

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• iAvicenna@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I mean to be fair I think they are probably the first (and maybe still the only?) company that tries to build rockets that can landback and be reused.

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• masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is *literally *the first one. There’s only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.

  And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything.

  Design it, build it, test it, and get it immediate feedback on, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, it’s a lot cheaper to do it upfront.

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• catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Sure, you can do it for real and destroy billions worth of equipment.

  Shit happens in R&D. Some loss is expensive.

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• Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There is. The SLS. That is much more economical, right?

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  • Wanderer@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That sounds so futuristic.

    As it’s NASA is it using technology decades more advanced than the competition?

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    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Are you joking? Well the answer is no, no the SLS is about 40 years behind as far as technology goes. It’s basically a shuttle derived launch vehicle, the boosters are similar to the shuttle side boosters and it uses 4 slightly updated RS-25s (the space shuttle main engines) in the center stage.

      Except instead of getting with the times and attempting some reusability, it actually has less reusability than the shuttle had. They actually throw away all of those expensive high performance hydrolox engines on every launch.

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      • Wanderer@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I was just leaning into the joke Diplo started.

        Most people on Lemmy make their mind up on nothing except “Elon bad memes”

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    • Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Oh definitely. And an absolute steal at just 2.5 billion a pop.

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• ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Another one what? Did you only read the headline…?

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• Noodle07@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Earth gravity is a bitch

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• Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s literally exactly what spaceX is developing, rockets you don’t have to blow up every flight.

  Fully reusable rockets have never been done before, but they’re coming.

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