politics

Firstly I wasnt even thinking about co2 emisions and was thinking almost exclusively in total mass movement. Secondly when I was refering to the amount of fuel required for slow down for landing I was more so thinking yet again in total mass. Almost all of my points on the matter had to do with the idea of alocating energy toward putting stuff in space.

What do you think the GHG from the manufacturing comes from? Expendable rockets means you're "al[l]ocating energy toward putting stuff in space" much less efficiently because you're spending (apparently) much more fuel and energy to replace the rocket.

If you meant "total mass and fuel in the rocket", then frankly that's an arbitrary and cherry-picked metric in this context. If you're talking about the social impact and technological history of first NASA then SpaceX developing reusable rockets, then "efficiency" should include everything that they're paying for.

I doubt think the falcon is completely bad either, just that it has its niche. If memory serves me right its mostly doing things like putting satalites into orbit, thats a great use of a reuasble rocket.

…So its "niche" is… Literally the entire thing that space launch rockets are scientifically and economically useful for???

Literally every space mission, outside of like upper atmospheric research sounding rocket launches (which aren't really relevant to space launch), is "putting satellites into orbit" (regardless of whether those artificial satellites house crew that they're then going to ferry Mars, or whether they're just there to relay your cat gifs).

All I was stating is that such rockets can be kinda inefficient for certain jobs. To put it in nautical terms you wouldnt use a fishing trawler as heavy cargo ship.

"For certain jobs"— Yeah, no, not really, at least unless you can name those "certain jobs".

Sometimes a payload is too heavy for reusable mode but still okay for expendable mode. But that's not really being "inefficient", just too small, and would be more efficiently solved with a bigger reusable rocket. And there are certification and supply chain concerns which mean that expendable systems like SLS and Ariane 6 still sorta have a place for now, but that's not really an efficiency issue either.

But overall, from tiny cubesats to massive moon landings, reusable rockets are consistently and increasingly demonstrating significant efficiency advantages in all areas of spaceflight, because as it turns out, despite all of Chief Twit's mistakes and harms, throwing away the rocket after you use it once was in fact just a sorta dumb way to do things in the first place.

Perhaps this is showing my ignorance for arospace shit, IDK but as I understand it more fuel and less mass means you can get shit farther. Thats all I was really thinking.

Yeah… I feel like you're getting defensive because I might have come across as trying to dunk on you… Which is... Fair enough, I guess, and sorry if I came across that way.

And I get not wanting to like anything that Musk's tied his name to. But you presented yourself as an authorative/informed speaker on a technical subject, while making a claim that simply isn't true.