Most of the Falcon 9 launches are for Starlink and are paid for by SpaceX themselves. How is that “the government subsidizing them”? If you want to argue that they’re using money they got from NASA to fund those launches, is your plumber feeding their family from you subsidizing their life?
Because now it’s practically a necessity. Before that, you could easily not put a case on your phone, exercise some basic care with it and you would’ve been fine. None of my previous phones had a case on them. Not a one. Because I don’t drop them, I don’t throw them and I don’t use them for hammering in bolts or whatever. But the camera bump finally got me to put a case on my phone, because the damn thing not sitting flat on a flat surface annoyed me too much.
Cause no one wants to look like the idiot. And when no one has read the article, it’s a lot harder to dispute the claims of what the article is about. It’s a vicious cycle - someone who hasn’t read the actual article makes claims about it, others who also haven’t read it react and before you know it, you’re ten posts deep, arguing about something that may or may not have happened. All it takes is one person to make an under-informed post and another to pick up on it. The difference between thousands and millions of users affects only the probability of it happening.
It’s not Reddit behavior. It’s just the limited capacity we have for dealing with the flood of information we’re exposed to. Between that and the daily stresses of work, family and whatever else a given person has going on, there’s no time to filter out what is or isn’t important, there’s no time for nuance or thought, there’s only time enough for a knee-jerk reaction before the next aggravating thing comes along.
We (as in humanity) can continue to develop both EEG caps and direct implants. The technology is young and there’s no telling what side benefits and additional functionality either one can have.
And the implant, much like early EEG devices, barely works for now. Imagine what they’ll be capable of 10-20 years down the line.
The SLS is arguable, I’d say. The design requirements were set by the government, but it’s not built by NASA. It’s built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and ULA, all of which are private companies. I don’t think NASA has ever built a rocket, actual construction has always been contracted out to private companies. Even the first Atlas was repurposed from an ICBM built by Convair and General Dynamics.
There’s a point at which you learn more from actually building something and putting it through its paces than simulating. It’s a tough balance to strike , no argument there. Simulating until you’ve covered every conceivable edge case and failure mode is ludicrously costly and time consuming. Relying entirely on yeeting shit and seeing how it fails risks missing the edge cases. But so far, I’ve seen little reason to doubt that SpaceX has found a working balance between simulation and practical testing. They’re certainly progressing faster than the industry historically has and the F9 has had no failures, even partial ones, in over 200 flights. That’s a track record that most launch vehicles can’t meet. It’s definitely possible there’s a 1/1000 flaw in the Falcon 9, but until it actually happens and they lose a rocket and/or a payload (gods willing it won’t be crew), it’s nothing but a hypothetical “but what if…” scenario.
No they didn’t. They had, a mockup of an empty shell into which they might eventually fit the vehicle. And they still have that.
Blue Origin: “Here’s renders and a papier-mâchė model of what our lander will look like. It’s assembled together in lunar orbit, from an automated cargo ship, our own lander and another Orion.” Note that this isn’t what they won the option b proposal with.
SpaceX: “Here’s renders of what our lander will look like. We have a full scale prototype out in Boca and we’re blowing it up to see if our math and simulations are right on how much pressure the tanks can take. It’ll require some modifications, such as larger landing legs and dedicated landing engines.” And their HLS proposal isn’t a vehicle carried in the Starship’s cargo bay, it is the Starship.
what you’re failing to understand is that this 2.94 billion dollar bid was already AFTER they were informed of the budget changes.
I can find no source for SpaceX’s initial bid being higher, let alone 2x higher (to meet your claim that they bid on the same level as BO, not even gonna consider Dynetics).If you have one, I’d like to see it. And if it is the case that SpaceX was picked because they were willing to slash their bid in half, then I would expect BO’s follow-up litigation to be based around that. Instead, BO focused on the claim that NASA didn’t give their proposal proper evaluation and consideration.
I doubt minimizing corporate loss was Lueder’s motivation there. Presumably neither Steve Cook or Jeff Bezos offered Lueders a large enough bribe job matching her qualifications.
That wasn’t my point. The point was that if their proposal had been closer to the budget set aside for the award, as opposed to being double the budget, they might have been contacted to see if they could complete the contract for the lesser amount.
SpaceX didn’t need a mockup to present. They had prototypes of the base vehicle and a proposal for necessary modifications to perform the contract duties and an established track record of developing ambitious rocket engines and launch vehicles. BO had bits and pieces of other things they were gonna bolt together and a pretty model of how it’ll look like, we swear, scout’s honor. But if you’re talking about the Blue Moon that eventually won the secondary bid, that’s not what they initially proposed.Blue Moon Mk2 is a variant of a lander that’s been in development since 2016, so two years longer than SpaceX’s Starship prototypes. The one that’s planned for a lunar landing this year, Blue Moon Mk1, isn’t the one they bid for HLS. It’s a robotic lander, smaller than the HLS’s Mk2. So fancy that, they won a HLS contract when they bid a variant of something they were already working on, much like SpaceX did. And remember, BO is developing a lander. SpaceX is developing a fully reusable super heavy lift rocket, an interplanetary transport craft and a lunar lander as part of the same package.
AFTER being told to do so. That’s the entire problem. Blue Origin and Dynetics both came forward and said they’d gladly match that bid, but since they didn’t get the special information that was only given to SpaceX, they couldn’t know this.
Finish reading my post. SpaceX’s initial bid was 2.94 billion and the final award was 2.89 billion. Again, they agreed that they can do the job for 50 million less than what they originally bid. BO’s and Dynetics’ proposals would’ve suffered a much larger hit. And sure, BO got the secondary contract for 3.4 billion, after rethinking their entire proposal. So why did they not submit that one in the first place? If they had, they might have gotten a similar call.
Is it? Starship has been in development since at least 2012-ish (as the “mars colonial transport” or “its” or “bfr” or a few other names). It hasn’t done a succesful mission yet. ULA’s Vulcan was anounced in 2014, and it works just fine. So I don’t really think it’s actually faster or better, but it IS more showy.
The first time Starship was spoken of was in 2012, yes. The very first idealistic designs of it. The design that’s actually being tested is from 2018. So 5 years to go from “Alright, this is what we’re gonna do” to full stack flight testing. Roughly on pace with their previous rockets, the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 took about 4 years.
Absolute and complete lie. Its exactly the opposite. SpaceX did not, and still DOES NOT have a solid design or mockup of HLS. Dynetics and Blue Origin had both.
Blue Origin had (and still has) no experience with human-rated capsules. Their proposed lander had to be assembled in lunar orbit or launched on another SLS. The Dynetics lander was over its own mass budget. It was literally too heavy to do the job it was being proposed for. Meanwhile, SpaceX proposed a derivative of what they were already working on. Blue and Dynetics had no practical development done on their landers, they would’ve relied on the HLS award to even get started on actual development.
The problem is that SpaceX had a bid at the same level of the others, but they lowered it when Kathy Lueders gave them a call (and not the other parties) to lower it. This is spelled out in NASA’s own document:
SpaceX’s bid was just under 3B. Blue Origin bid at a bit under 6B. Dynetics wanted 9B. This information is freely available online. SpaceX was also given the least in design development funding, with 135 million versus Blue’s 579 million and Dynetics’ 253 million. It’s not terribly shocking that a company with a good track record and the lowest bid wins a contract.
No, the contract stated that anything between zero and three were options, based on funding. They said the goal was two, but then budget was reduced. Nobody was told this. The number of contracts was also reduced to one as a result. Nobody was told this. And then Kathy Lueders gave SpaceX a call, and not the others, to share this information.
They needed a lander contract. The entire Artemis project was already fucked when it comes to the timetable, but delaying the HLS contract would’ve made things even worse. And when the budget got cut, they negotiated with the one bidder who was deemed most likely to still get the job done with the lower budget, as opposed to the other two whose bids were wildly over what NASA could give them. SpaceX bid at 2.94 billion and the final award was 2.89 billion. Again, BO bid 6 billion and Dynetics bid 9 billion. Losing 50 million is an easier pill to swallow than getting half or a third of what you need.
Point 1: SpaceX’s entire development philosophy is “test early, test often and learn from failures”. This is a much quicker pace than simulating every imaginable failure scenario and leads to faster progress in development. With the Falcon 9, that process proved wildly efficient and successful, culminating in a launch vehicle so reliable that it’s cheaper to insure a payload on an F9 that already has multiple launches under its belt than a brand new booster. And they’re turning enough of a profit to develop the Starship largely on internal funds, seeing how the early Raptor flight tests were before the HLS contract.
Point 2: Just adding, the Raptor engine is the first full-flow staged combustion engine to ever get off a testing stand and actually fly. The engineering complexity of these things is on the level of the Shuttle’s RS-25.
Point 3: SpaceX were the only ones with more than designs and mockups to present, and they had a reliable track history from working with NASA on the commercial resupply and crew projects. And I see no problem with awarding a contract to a bid that actually fits into the budget.
Point 4: Multiple options was always part of the plan. NASA wants redundancy, so that if one of the providers runs into problems, the other provider can continue (and perhaps even take up the slack) instead of everything coming to a grinding halt. For a perfect example, look at the Shuttle and Commercial Crew programs. The Shuttle got grounded and since it was NASA’s only manned launcher, they had to bum rides from the russians. In contrast, the CC contract was awarded to Boeing and SpaceX. With Starliner’s continued issues, SpaceX has picked up the slack and fulfilled more than their initial contract in launches, instead of NASA having to bum rides from the russians again. The initial HLS contract was supposed to go to two providers, until the budget got cut. Blue’s bid was always the favorite for the second pick.
I think in two languages and sometimes one of them is better for expressing my thoughts, even if it’s not the language that we’ve been using for the conversation so far. And sometimes it just happens mid-sentence.
“In order to fight monsters, we created monsters of our own. The Jaeger Program was born.”
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If you’re gonna hate someone, hate them for what they actually did, not for what their detractors want you to think they did.
Modern news media is fucking awash with cleverly worded half truths that are repeated so often, by so many who don’t take a moment for critical thought, that they become almost a rallying cry. It’s Hunter’s Laptop all over again, but aimed at the left.
Because if you launch something from Earth, you inherit the Earth’s orbital speed around the Sun. At that point, whatever you launched will just continue to orbit the Sun. It takes less energy to accelerate to a solar system exit trajectory than it does to scrub off all of the excess velocity and end up on a trajectory that intersects the Sun.