No Stupid Questions

Imagine you want to build a cabin in a very remote place in Alaska.

Getting there is quite difficult, you did it a few times in the 60's but the path is so bad that you had to throw the truck away each time (around $45,000 per trip, for the truck + gas)

You are still planning to build your cabin but having to buy a new truck for each trip is not great, plus the fact that only one company can make this SLS truck so you can't get more than once a year.

Building a cabin in these circumstances is close to impossible.

Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused. The trip from the hardware store to the build site now only costs you around $100 for the gas plus truck expenses AND you can now do the trip to the hardware store multiple times a day !

Now building the cabin becomes way more accessible.

Replace the Alaskan cabin with a scientific base on the moon or Mars and multiply the amounts by 100,000 and you have an approximation of the situation

Not a fan, but it generally boils down not to where they can fly but how they differ in other aspects, mainly cost.

SpaceX is currently the world pioneer in heavy reusable rockets, which is another way to say they are the only ones to launch big stuff up there so cheap, and it gets even better.

They are essentially doing the good side of capitalism - making stuff cheaper - applied to space, one of the most expensive industries in the world.

Because no one else is doing space things as well as spaceX is even if you think they suck.

Rockets are just cool tech. So is space tech. It grabs our imagination in a way that most terrestrial things dont.

I don't know they just launched and caught a rocket yesterday, that's pretty fucking cool.

Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he's been pulling off.

That said, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.

Up until 5 short years ago we had:

• No main booster recovery
• No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
• No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
• Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
• No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
• No push for reusability at all

This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.

This is like making the first aeroplane that's able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.

Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.

Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that's all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.

We're talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.

A lot of people pointed out a lot of firsts, huge cost reductions, regular flights, but let’s look from the opposite direction …..

Mass to orbit. SpaceX came from nowhere not too many years ago, jumped ahead of established manufacturers, until now they launch most of the worlds satellite mass to orbit, with an unparalleled success record, even with the recent failures. And this is with a rapidly growing space market

Everything they’ve achieved has not only let them scale up far surpassing the rest of the industry across the world, combined, but with reliability and cost to attract all that business

I don’t know what it would take for you to call it a revolution, but the impact on space business is revolutionary

SpaceX is not run by Elon and he's kept from being involved closely by a buffer of people that keep him from getting too close to making any "elon" level changes.

SpaceX is successful despite Musk, not because of. And the woman who runs it knows that and keeps Musk away from any important decisions or impacts.

So the stuff they're doing is legit, cool aerospace stuff.

It's just not something Musk should take credit for. He does/will. But he shouldn't. He's a hack.

What you're asking is akin to: why are people impressed by the airplane? We've already reached the Americas and India by boat.

SpaceX, and others actually are not advancing science per se, but are greatly improving/optimising the engineering so that it can be used in cheaper ways by others.

There's also the issue that after the moon landing we didn't really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded

I hate Elon just as much as the next guy, but pretending that this wasn’t a marvel of engineering is really disingenuous. People with intelligence beyond my comprehension made that a reality, and just because the company had his face on it, it doesn’t make it any less impressive

Because they are impressive in the way NASA was. Which is the problem - we should be doing this as a nation and not subsidizing whatever a billionaire fancies at the moment.

I've seen so many people grudgingly pretending what they saw wasn't one of the coolest fucking things they've seen all year all because they hate Musk. Like, you know he's not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right? By all accounts he's more of a hindrance and these amazing fears of engineering have been accomplished despite him, not because of him.

I personally don't really care how big of a douche Musk is, as long as he's willing to fund these kinds of things.

My guy they just caught an object falling from space using a pair of giant chopsticks

Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon's many, many side project misadventures he's pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it's worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.

NASA, nor anyone else, has done this before. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say NASA did this already.

Wait, when did NASA land a fully reusable rocket like fucking Buck Rogers?

Then do it again, but capture it with the freakin' launch tower?

When did NASA even have a reusable rocket? Oh, the shuttle, the bastardized money pit for NSA/NRO/Air Force, that appears to have been designed to orbit a surveillance satellite chassis, which most people know as Hubble (it's one of many, this one being used to surveil the universe, instead of the earth).

And the shuttle was a quasi-reusable orbiter, not a rocket.

If you ignore Musk for a moment, it is impressive. Maybe not every launch (I wasn't even aware of another one), but a company that's actually pushing for more space exploration. That's cool beans.

There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:

1. SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.

2. they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.

3. the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA's SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).

4. the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA's original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.

5. finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.

Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don't need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.

For me being impressed with SpaceX is kinda like loving a piece of art even though the creator turned out to be an asshole. Or liking Star Trek, even though Berman was shady af to put it mildly.

What SpaceX does is very impressive from a technical point of view. Even if the rocket never amounts to anything except this one successful test, it's still amazing they pulled it off. It tickles my engineer brain. And I think it's worth to honor all the people that made it happen, despite them having to work for Musk. Combine this with what could be in the future and you can hopefully see why people hail this test flight.

Now I still have serious doubts about Starship in the moon program. The on orbit refueling seems very sketchy and unproven at this point. Sure they will get two rockets into orbit, mate them up and transfer some fuel, that's a given at this point. But how much fuel are we talking? And how fast does the turnaround need to be to prevent losing a lot of it? How many ships and how many launches? Will this completely offset the cheaper launch costs due to reusability? It's a huge unknown and will push back the moon program to well into the 2030s.