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Take a look at videos on YouTube by ThunderF00t. SpaceX is pretty problematic. Currently, around 80% of SpaceX's rockets are dedicated to launching Starlink sat

by sfblah 2y ago

Take a look at videos on YouTube by ThunderF00t. SpaceX is pretty problematic. Currently, around 80% of SpaceX's rockets are dedicated to launching Starlink satellites. This is because they've already soaked up all the demand for satellite launches, and things like starship don't really have a reason for existing. Also, in spite of massive improvements in technology since the 1960s, they're vastly underperforming the track record of the Apollo program. My view is that Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are just cults of personality. Sure, they've produced a non-zero amount of technological progress, but for the most part they're leading us to dead ends.

cubefox 2y ago
> Also, in spite of massive improvements in technology since the 1960s, they're vastly underperforming the track record of the Apollo program. The SpaceX budget is several orders of magnitude smaller than the Apollo budget. Also, the Apollo era rockets were entirely unable to launch a large constellation like Starlink at reasonable cost like Falcon and Starship. > Sure, they've produced a non-zero amount of technological progress, but for the most part they're leading us to dead ends. Not sure whether you are serious. Assuming you are, what would be the better alternative then?
- sfblah 2y ago
  It's not several orders of magnitude smaller. According to ChatGPT, SpaceX has spent $20-30B as of 2023, compared to $160-170B in 2023 dollars. That's less than one order of magnitude, and consider that SpaceX is starting with all the knowledge gained from Apollo, plus 50 years of technological progress. To your second question, the better alternative is not to send a bunch of junk into space. Aside from low-orbit satellites, space is a waste of time and a distraction, and increasingly appears just to be a way to trick people into ignoring disastrous fiscal and monetary policies while enriching one person.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    Don't cite ChatGPT, it's prone to confabulation. According to Wikipedia: > At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities. That's far more than the roughly 13,000 SpaceX employees. Moreover, that's just Apollo, there were also related programs like Gemini. (The SpaceX employee number also includes people not working on the Starship program.) > To your second question, the better alternative is not to send a bunch of junk into space. Aside from low-orbit satellites, space is a waste of time and a distraction, and increasingly appears just to be a way to trick people into ignoring disastrous fiscal and monetary policies while enriching one person. How do you know Musk gets rich from SpaceX? Do you think they make a large profit? Anyway, Starship could be used to launch giant telescopes, which must be useful for science: https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its-time-to-build-the-exoplanet-telescope/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its-time-to-build-th...
    - sfblah 2y ago
      If you can't see that Musk's entire net worth is downstream of US government action and bubble idiots buying his lies, I can't help you.
minetest2048 2y ago
Even if thats true, who else can launch satellites at SpaceX price and regularity? This is an actual question, when Falcon 9 stage 2 exploded several months ago, my cubesats got delayed I know several space startups that's currently limited by launch prices
- sfblah 2y ago
  Who cares? Since the 1960s, space launching has never been limited by supply. It's limited by demand. That's why 80% of SpaceX's cargo is for satellites to support their marginally useful Starlink business. Like Hyperloop, "space startups" are just dressed up snake oil. Imagine if there were hundreds of "startups" aiming to sink stuff for some reason to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Sure, doing that is difficult and fun to think about from a science fiction perspective, but the bar to show how such a thing could be useful is and should be quite high. I asked GPT to give me the 5 most compelling space startups created since 2020. Here's what it gave me: * Space refueling * Getting things back from space more cheaply * Removing space debris * Getting things to space more cheaply * Microgravity life sciences Of these, only the last one is an actual product. The others are just picks and shovels for nonexistent products. And, I don't see why microgravity life sciences requires the ability to deploy unlimited quantities of crap to low-Earth orbit.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Oh my good you have really gone deep into the rabbit hole. Sad to see. > Since the 1960s, space launching has never been limited by supply. It has been limited by price. Tons of business that now exists could have existed before. There is a whole history of sat companies that went bust, and big reason they did go bust is because the capital requirements were to high. And even if your statement was true, the only reason it was even remotely true is because things like the Space Shuttle were subsidized by the government at billions and billions of $ ever year. Now the government doesn't have to subsidize launch anymore. > That's why 80% of SpaceX's cargo is for satellites to support their marginally useful Starlink business. 4 million subscribers 'marginally useful' ... > Like Hyperloop, "space startups" are just dressed up snake oil. Hyperloop was literally just a idea blue paper. Starlink has 400 million subscribers and has had a literal influence in the larges European war in 7 decades. But sure those are comparable. Totally. > I asked GPT That you resort to that because you clearly don't know any of the industry yourself is very telling.
mardifoufs 2y ago
Thunderf00t has basically 0 credibility when it comes to SpaceX. He predicted that starlink couldn't ever work, for example. In fact, he even thought that this landing would fail. Like he might have good point hidden somewhere, the issue is that we know that he will reflexively "debunk" anything SpaceX does, and predict failure every time. Meaning that his takes on SpaceX are beyond useless.
- sfblah 2y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+hominem+attack https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+hominem+attack Edit: Just out of curiosity, I looked up his video about Starlink, and his point was it's a bad business, not that it's physically impossible to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y I'd actually love it if you could find a single thing he says in that video that's provably false. I'm quite confident history will judge Elon Musk properly, as the "Too Big To Fail" version of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
  - jimrandomh 2y ago
    Talking about someone's track record of predictions is not an ad hominem, in the context of evaluating their credibility with respect to the subject of those predictions.
    - sfblah 2y ago
      Actually, it is. From the dictionary: An ad hominem attack occurs when someone attacks the person making the argument rather than addressing the argument itself. For example, saying "You're always wrong, so you're wrong about this too" without addressing the current claim would be ad hominem. That's exactly what the person I responded to was doing.
      - rlt 2y ago
        Claim: > Take a look at videos on YouTube by ThunderF00t. SpaceX is pretty problematic. Response: > Thunderf00t has basically 0 credibility when it comes to SpaceX. He predicted that starlink couldn't ever work, for example. In fact, he even thought that this landing would fail. You’re claiming Thunderf00t is a good resource on SpaceX. The response gave examples of how he’s been consistently wrong. That is not an ad hominem attack.
panick21_ 2y ago
Please for the love of god don't look at ThunderF00t. He is literally just a guy who made a job out of farming money from uniformed people who dislikes Musk. He has no credibility at all, like literally 0. Nobody that follows this topics, even if they don't like Musk or SpaceX consider him reputable. He is literally a professional hater. He just continually moves the goal-posts to always present himself as 'the reasonable skeptic'. > Currently, around 80% of SpaceX's rockets are dedicated to launching Starlink satellites. And the other 20% are still more launches then the whole of the Western world would have had before SpaceX. SpaceX is simply so fucking successful that you have to totally reconsider how you look at the numbers. > and things like starship don't really have a reason for existing And if Starship is cheaper, then Falcon 9, and that's literally the whole reason it exists, then making Starlink and other launches cheaper still makes sense. Stopping innovating because of market share is an idiotic thing to do. Its what people argue who don't understand the difference between absolutes and %. The market for space launch and space economy will be much bigger in 10-30 years. Now we can argue how much bigger, but its defiantly gone be bigger. And also, Starship literally needs to exists because the government want's to land on the moon. And using Starship and sharing lots of technology with a launch vehicle that is needed for Starlink anyway just makes a whole lot of sense. > Also, in spite of massive improvements in technology since the 1960s, they're vastly underperforming the track record of the Apollo program. What an absurd criticism is this? In the 1960 they basically had no regulation, 100% political support and literally unlimited money. SpaceX had barley any money at all until like 2020 for this project and even then they could only invest a fraction of that into Starship. If you compare Apollo, the NASA budget was around 20-40 billion $ per year compare to SpaceX who only crossed the 1 billion $ per year in like 2022. So this is exactly what I mean when I say ThunderF00t has 0 credibiltiy. Nobody should talk arguments like this seriously. Its just arguments from bad faith. I suspect he knows that he is fully of shit, but he has makes a lot of money from continually telling everybody what they want to hear. > My view is that Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are just cults of personality. Sure, they've produced a non-zero amount of technological progress, but for the most part they're leading us to dead ends. ThunderF00t is closer to a cult of personality. He has achieved absolutely nothing, he can't even edit videos as well as most 13 year old on tictac. He is a man in his 40 and his humor is even more childish then that of Elon Musk. And your claim is simply bananas. Calling landing rockets and Starlink 'non-zero' is the understatement of the century. Starship has literally revolutionized space internet and global connectivity, and literally everybody, including all their competitors and every government in the world understands and reconizes that. And literally some of the largest cooperations on earth, plus major nations are trying to replicate it. Amazon is investing 10+ billion $. Europe, China, Russia all will try to replicate even part of it, but they all know they can't match it. Lower LEO internet will basically not go away for the rest of human history, unless civilization crashes or somebody comes up with something even better, but we have no idea what that would even be. But somehow you call it a 'dead end'. What are you even talking about. I mean seriously, please break out of your bubble and look at the world with objective eyes.

by sfblah 2y ago

cubefox 2y ago

> Also, in spite of massive improvements in technology since the 1960s, they're vastly underperforming the track record of the Apollo program. The SpaceX budget is several orders of magnitude smaller than the Apollo budget. Also, the Apollo era rockets were entirely unable to launch a large constellation like Starlink at reasonable cost like Falcon and Starship. > Sure, they've produced a non-zero amount of technological progress, but for the most part they're leading us to dead ends. Not sure whether you are serious. Assuming you are, what would be the better alternative then?

sfblah 2y ago
It's not several orders of magnitude smaller. According to ChatGPT, SpaceX has spent $20-30B as of 2023, compared to $160-170B in 2023 dollars. That's less than one order of magnitude, and consider that SpaceX is starting with all the knowledge gained from Apollo, plus 50 years of technological progress. To your second question, the better alternative is not to send a bunch of junk into space. Aside from low-orbit satellites, space is a waste of time and a distraction, and increasingly appears just to be a way to trick people into ignoring disastrous fiscal and monetary policies while enriching one person.
- cubefox 2y ago
  Don't cite ChatGPT, it's prone to confabulation. According to Wikipedia: > At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities. That's far more than the roughly 13,000 SpaceX employees. Moreover, that's just Apollo, there were also related programs like Gemini. (The SpaceX employee number also includes people not working on the Starship program.) > To your second question, the better alternative is not to send a bunch of junk into space. Aside from low-orbit satellites, space is a waste of time and a distraction, and increasingly appears just to be a way to trick people into ignoring disastrous fiscal and monetary policies while enriching one person. How do you know Musk gets rich from SpaceX? Do you think they make a large profit? Anyway, Starship could be used to launch giant telescopes, which must be useful for science: https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its-time-to-build-the-exoplanet-telescope/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its-time-to-build-th...
  - sfblah 2y ago
    If you can't see that Musk's entire net worth is downstream of US government action and bubble idiots buying his lies, I can't help you.

minetest2048 2y ago

Even if thats true, who else can launch satellites at SpaceX price and regularity? This is an actual question, when Falcon 9 stage 2 exploded several months ago, my cubesats got delayed I know several space startups that's currently limited by launch prices

sfblah 2y ago
Who cares? Since the 1960s, space launching has never been limited by supply. It's limited by demand. That's why 80% of SpaceX's cargo is for satellites to support their marginally useful Starlink business. Like Hyperloop, "space startups" are just dressed up snake oil. Imagine if there were hundreds of "startups" aiming to sink stuff for some reason to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Sure, doing that is difficult and fun to think about from a science fiction perspective, but the bar to show how such a thing could be useful is and should be quite high. I asked GPT to give me the 5 most compelling space startups created since 2020. Here's what it gave me: * Space refueling * Getting things back from space more cheaply * Removing space debris * Getting things to space more cheaply * Microgravity life sciences Of these, only the last one is an actual product. The others are just picks and shovels for nonexistent products. And, I don't see why microgravity life sciences requires the ability to deploy unlimited quantities of crap to low-Earth orbit.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Oh my good you have really gone deep into the rabbit hole. Sad to see. > Since the 1960s, space launching has never been limited by supply. It has been limited by price. Tons of business that now exists could have existed before. There is a whole history of sat companies that went bust, and big reason they did go bust is because the capital requirements were to high. And even if your statement was true, the only reason it was even remotely true is because things like the Space Shuttle were subsidized by the government at billions and billions of $ ever year. Now the government doesn't have to subsidize launch anymore. > That's why 80% of SpaceX's cargo is for satellites to support their marginally useful Starlink business. 4 million subscribers 'marginally useful' ... > Like Hyperloop, "space startups" are just dressed up snake oil. Hyperloop was literally just a idea blue paper. Starlink has 400 million subscribers and has had a literal influence in the larges European war in 7 decades. But sure those are comparable. Totally. > I asked GPT That you resort to that because you clearly don't know any of the industry yourself is very telling.

mardifoufs 2y ago

Thunderf00t has basically 0 credibility when it comes to SpaceX. He predicted that starlink couldn't ever work, for example. In fact, he even thought that this landing would fail. Like he might have good point hidden somewhere, the issue is that we know that he will reflexively "debunk" anything SpaceX does, and predict failure every time. Meaning that his takes on SpaceX are beyond useless.

sfblah 2y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+hominem+attack https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+hominem+attack Edit: Just out of curiosity, I looked up his video about Starlink, and his point was it's a bad business, not that it's physically impossible to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y I'd actually love it if you could find a single thing he says in that video that's provably false. I'm quite confident history will judge Elon Musk properly, as the "Too Big To Fail" version of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
- jimrandomh 2y ago
  Talking about someone's track record of predictions is not an ad hominem, in the context of evaluating their credibility with respect to the subject of those predictions.
  - sfblah 2y ago
    Actually, it is. From the dictionary: An ad hominem attack occurs when someone attacks the person making the argument rather than addressing the argument itself. For example, saying "You're always wrong, so you're wrong about this too" without addressing the current claim would be ad hominem. That's exactly what the person I responded to was doing.
    - rlt 2y ago
      Claim: > Take a look at videos on YouTube by ThunderF00t. SpaceX is pretty problematic. Response: > Thunderf00t has basically 0 credibility when it comes to SpaceX. He predicted that starlink couldn't ever work, for example. In fact, he even thought that this landing would fail. You’re claiming Thunderf00t is a good resource on SpaceX. The response gave examples of how he’s been consistently wrong. That is not an ad hominem attack.

panick21_ 2y ago

Please for the love of god don't look at ThunderF00t. He is literally just a guy who made a job out of farming money from uniformed people who dislikes Musk. He has no credibility at all, like literally 0. Nobody that follows this topics, even if they don't like Musk or SpaceX consider him reputable. He is literally a professional hater. He just continually moves the goal-posts to always present himself as 'the reasonable skeptic'. > Currently, around 80% of SpaceX's rockets are dedicated to launching Starlink satellites. And the other 20% are still more launches then the whole of the Western world would have had before SpaceX. SpaceX is simply so fucking successful that you have to totally reconsider how you look at the numbers. > and things like starship don't really have a reason for existing And if Starship is cheaper, then Falcon 9, and that's literally the whole reason it exists, then making Starlink and other launches cheaper still makes sense. Stopping innovating because of market share is an idiotic thing to do. Its what people argue who don't understand the difference between absolutes and %. The market for space launch and space economy will be much bigger in 10-30 years. Now we can argue how much bigger, but its defiantly gone be bigger. And also, Starship literally needs to exists because the government want's to land on the moon. And using Starship and sharing lots of technology with a launch vehicle that is needed for Starlink anyway just makes a whole lot of sense. > Also, in spite of massive improvements in technology since the 1960s, they're vastly underperforming the track record of the Apollo program. What an absurd criticism is this? In the 1960 they basically had no regulation, 100% political support and literally unlimited money. SpaceX had barley any money at all until like 2020 for this project and even then they could only invest a fraction of that into Starship. If you compare Apollo, the NASA budget was around 20-40 billion $ per year compare to SpaceX who only crossed the 1 billion $ per year in like 2022. So this is exactly what I mean when I say ThunderF00t has 0 credibiltiy. Nobody should talk arguments like this seriously. Its just arguments from bad faith. I suspect he knows that he is fully of shit, but he has makes a lot of money from continually telling everybody what they want to hear. > My view is that Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are just cults of personality. Sure, they've produced a non-zero amount of technological progress, but for the most part they're leading us to dead ends. ThunderF00t is closer to a cult of personality. He has achieved absolutely nothing, he can't even edit videos as well as most 13 year old on tictac. He is a man in his 40 and his humor is even more childish then that of Elon Musk. And your claim is simply bananas. Calling landing rockets and Starlink 'non-zero' is the understatement of the century. Starship has literally revolutionized space internet and global connectivity, and literally everybody, including all their competitors and every government in the world understands and reconizes that. And literally some of the largest cooperations on earth, plus major nations are trying to replicate it. Amazon is investing 10+ billion $. Europe, China, Russia all will try to replicate even part of it, but they all know they can't match it. Lower LEO internet will basically not go away for the rest of human history, unless civilization crashes or somebody comes up with something even better, but we have no idea what that would even be. But somehow you call it a 'dead end'. What are you even talking about. I mean seriously, please break out of your bubble and look at the world with objective eyes.