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I fully respect your argument and where you are coming from. Thank you. As an engineer, I fully support Elon Musk's approach. Space in general is unreliable an

I fully respect your argument and where you are coming from. Thank you. As an engineer, I fully support Elon Musk's approach. Space in general is unreliable and there are thousands and thousands of moving parts in space travel and the payloads they carry. A simple error or fault in any of these parts can create unpredictable outcomes. Remember the Apollo missions?Columbia space shuttle disaster? So, to me it seems perfectly acceptable to focus on reducing the costs of these missions to the point where these missions become cheaper, some fail - we learn, and ultimately failures won't matter much because we cut the costs down by tenth or even twentieth. If we move at the pace of the current industry, it will take 500 years to out a man on Mars. Obviously I am exaggerating but you see my point. Let them try something new, fail but learn and ultimately speed has to matter because humanity has ambitions and Universe is friggin big.

tajen 10y ago
We still need to account for the carbon emissions of such an explosion. A complete carbon study would include how much GHG we save thanks to the satellite we pace, how much we encourage emitting more GHG by making rockets ten times cheaper and encouraging satellite, how much energy we require to generate that weight of H2, how emissions of a normal launch at high altitude compare to ground-level emissions (hint: GHG from rockets are around 9x more harmful than the same weight of a Boeing 747's kerosen), and how frequently we have explosions that lead to no satellite launched and pollution. Whether SpaceX is actually advancing humanity is the real question here. But it seems the aircraft industry is much worse (3-5% of global warming). https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4c9ts4/what_are_the_environmental_effects_of_rocket/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4c9ts4/what_are_the... The best way to know would be to introduce a tax on GHG and let the markets decide which activities lose their affordability, instead of each of us trying to make a GHG calculation of our own activities.
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  Good points. One thing to note is that not every failure will or should lead to an explosion.

tajen 10y ago

We still need to account for the carbon emissions of such an explosion. A complete carbon study would include how much GHG we save thanks to the satellite we pace, how much we encourage emitting more GHG by making rockets ten times cheaper and encouraging satellite, how much energy we require to generate that weight of H2, how emissions of a normal launch at high altitude compare to ground-level emissions (hint: GHG from rockets are around 9x more harmful than the same weight of a Boeing 747's kerosen), and how frequently we have explosions that lead to no satellite launched and pollution. Whether SpaceX is actually advancing humanity is the real question here. But it seems the aircraft industry is much worse (3-5% of global warming). https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4c9ts4/what_are_the_environmental_effects_of_rocket/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4c9ts4/what_are_the... The best way to know would be to introduce a tax on GHG and let the markets decide which activities lose their affordability, instead of each of us trying to make a GHG calculation of our own activities.

perseusprime11 10y ago
Good points. One thing to note is that not every failure will or should lead to an explosion.