I can't help but shed a tear every time I see Starship take off. I'm not space nut or even aviation, but it's just remarkable to see what we have been able to accomplish. Here's to a very successful launch.
if you can, visit Starbase. I can't believe its so easy and you can see those huge rockets from so close. No permission of anything needed you just drive to there.
Absolutely agree. Also the public ___location where you watch launches from is also the ___location where SpaceX employees watch from (South Padre Island). So you get as good of a view as the actual SpaceX employees do and it’s free to walk or bike in. It’s an amazing experience.
That.. is amazing and surprising!! WOW! It took me years to get an invitation to go see a NASA launch up close but that was a long time ago when the shuttle was still flying. Maybe I can convince my wife to take a spontaneous trip with me to see them up close. We could stop at a Buc-ee's!
Super exciting. I hadn’t read the debrief from 7s explosion, sounds like the early speculation had it right - leaks into a not well ventilated area and a (proper) autonomous self destruct.
I’m excited to see if they can keep data all the way through reentry - that is such a game changer long term, and seeing live plasma effects is just insanely cool.
Perhaps the moon orientated version could be called Moonraker after the Bond novel featuring a wealthy industrialist building rockets who turns out to secretly be a nazi. It is of course an implausible plot but the name is good.
> Consider what happened to Apple when Jobs was forced out...
He learned a lot, and came back with that knowledge?
We don't really know what Apple would look like if Jobs hadn't had his years in the wilderness; I suspect, for example, that Pixar wouldn't have happened.
At times, immature children benefit from a time out.
> "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything," he said at a famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005. "It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."
Right, we don't know "what if". But we do know what did happen, it is abundantly clear the effect Jobs had as a leader, and the effect Musk has had on his companies.
We also know what has happened to Apple since Tim Cook took over. Cook is a competent manager, but he's no Steve Jobs.
Musk takes enormous risks with his companies, and that's a big reason why they are so successful.
I talked to a professional race car driver once. He said if you don't walk back to the pit holding the steering wheel once in a while, you are never going to be a winner.
> Dominance?
I did say Cook was competent. But where's the never-ending stream of major innovations under Jobs? That all came to a stop.
> Musk takes enormous risks with his companies, and that's a big reason why they are so successful.
But it's a big, you know, risk. There's a chance some of this blows up in his face, and as a huge space exploration fan, I dread that possibility. I love watching SpaceX launches; I don't love seeing him tether the company to a partisan political cause.
> But where's the never-ending stream of major innovations under Jobs? That all came to a stop.
Did it? Apple Silicon? Airpods? (I also tend to see Apple's supply chain work as quite innovative, and critical to Jobs's successes.)
> P.S. I own Tesla and SpaceX stock.
I own Tesla shares (and would love some SpaceX ones). I'd really rather not see them go up in flames.
I get it, HN is a bunch of history-ignorant Ayn Rand acolytes writing code. Nobody here understands the inherent violence in that action.
As for Elon's "leadership", it disappeared sometime around the Model Y. Since then they've flubbed the Semi and the Cybertruck, two slam dunk markets, still basically have two cars, the 3 and Y, no minivans, sports cars, real SUVs, real pickups, cargo/delivery vans, heavy duty pickups (which gets you RVs and a lot of other derivative platforms.
He has failed to establish alternate brands, just stayed in the BMW-lite sphere rather than expand into luxury and sub-luxury tiers. The interiors are bland and overly opinionated, something that could easily be addressed with options (and brand tiers). There's no alternate trims, station wagons, shooting brakes.
SpaceX is no longer a "service to humanity", it is the plaything to give the ultra elites control of space and fuck off everyone else not in the great Ayn Rand hidden valley plan. No Musk company is a "service to humanity" since he did a Sieg Heil and showed what he thinks of humanity.
I get it, a mass army of high-IQ white males see nothing wrong. Everything is fine, project on schedule. None of you get government subsidies by the thousands/millions/billions/trillions, right? Yeah, those are safe.
Meanwhile I'm stuck praying Jeff Bezos can close the gap. What a world.
The Kardashians did not have money disbursement and firing authority over vast swathes of the US federal government. Maybe it is just me, but I feel that demands a little more scrutiny than reality TV stars. We certainly should not lower the expected standards of behavior and give a free pass on things we expect normal people without the power to do extreme harm to abide by.
The highest should be held to the highest standards, not the lowest.
>The Kardashians did not have money disbursement and firing authority over vast swathes of the US federal government.
True. However, I will point out that this has absolutely nothing to do with SpaceX, not even indirectly. If OP had said that he wishes that Musk had no authority/influence in the execute branch, that might or might not be something I disagree with, but it would make sense.
> but I feel that demands a little more scrutiny
Yes, but the first comment didn't demand scrutiny, it demanded punishment.
>We certainly should not lower the expected standards of behavior
Not sure how this falls under behavior. Is he farting under the dinner table? Refusing to wear pants in public? You don't like his policies, which makes him a member of the dreaded "other tribe".
>and give a free pass on things we expect normal people without the power to do extreme harm to abide by.
I do not like his policies that enabled the free and unrestrained usage of the N-word and Swastikas in his Fremont, California Tesla factory. Do you? Please explain why you agree that is acceptable workplace culture.
If you are unaware of that behavior, please educate yourself before postulating the behavior I am referencing. If you defend their behavior I will take that as defending the behavior that has been legally established as fact. I am not going to allow you to move the goalposts, so do your research first.
And please refrain from arguing: “That is not his responsibility.” Or “That is just how it is.” Please point to any other factory in California where comparable levels of racist behavior were tolerated in this millennium. This is basic workplace policy that the overwhelming majority of companies do with their eyes closed.
I can do others, but please address this one first.
1. Is rampant usage of the N-word and Swastikas acceptable workplace behavior? A simple yes or no will suffice.
2. Is it challenging or harmful to reduce the quantity of such behavior to industry norms? If yes, please identify large organizations where such behavior is the norm to present evidence for your claim.
3. Is it acceptable to allow such behavior and policy to persist even though it is simple to rectify and incurs minimal costs? A simple yes or no will suffice.
I would love spaceX de-musked because I want to support them! I want to be a share holder! I want them to be successful, but I don't want to support Musk, so I have conflicting wants.
I don't have a conflicting set of wants with the Kardashians, so I do just ignore them and it's all good.
The Kardashians didn't own and run an economically and strategically critical company.
There's a big difference between wanting Musk far away from SpaceX, and wanting a communist revolution, just like there's a difference between owning a make-up brand and the world's leading launch company.
>The Kardashians didn't own and run an economically and strategically critical company.
Fair. Do you have a problem with Musk's progress in the problems that company is trying to solve? Is there any reason to believe that if someone else were in charge, that progress would improve?
>There's a big difference between wanting Musk far away from SpaceX, and wanting a communist revolution,
Possibly, for some people. But the people who complain about Musk aren't the sort that are concerned with the economic or strategic importance of SpaceX. He's just someone they dislike, and they want him punished. Why does fate not intervene, they ask, and give him nut cancer? It gets old.
I'm complaining about Musk, and there is no part of my comment history that suggests the pattern of behavior you suggest. I'm not inclined to speak for anyone else though, so if you have a problem with how someone else handles this, I'd take it up with them.
My concern is that a clearly unstable degenerate is running strategically critical part of our economy. It really is that simple. The company is great, the man in charge is not, and unless he can clone himself he isn't spending much time running it. I don't think his removal or sidelining would be a loss to the company, and it would be a boon for national security.
Don't want Uncle Sam in your business? Don't take government contracts, especially not NatSec ones.
> Is there any reason to believe that if someone else were in charge, that progress would improve?
With him running six companies and half the Federal government, is there any reason to believe he is meaningfully in charge at SpaceX for day-to-day operations? If I had seven jobs my boss would be pretty peeved at my part-timed-ness.
Is there some censorship on this site we can't mention TWO Sieg Heils on national television?
That isn't the Kardashians. The Kardashians may be masters of propaganda, but they didn't organize the killing factories for 20 million people and kill another 20-40 million civilian deaths.
Nothing could demonstrate someone's cluelessness about fascism, Nazis, and history than that comment. You also don't know what "communism" is and it's other 50-100 million civilian deaths, so kudos to you doubling down on your ignorance.
Deorbit of the ISS was scheduled for 2030 with experiments and research continuing until deorbit. Mant research programs are depending on this continuation of service to complete recent proposals.
If you didn't think musk had a conflict of interest, this is exactly what it is. Surely you can see this for what it is.
Who wouldn't want their hundreds of millions of dollars contract paid out 3 years earlier than planned?
I don't think the expected final timeline is really the point. I think the point is cash flow, and to defund and disrupt competition. The benefit to musk is cash 3 years early and locking out competition -- win win.
Regardless, if the deorbit is scheduled 3 years earlier than expected then the US needs to pay pay pay to catch up to the schedule, right? Musk gets the money to start "Phase I" now instead of a year or two from now. It really seems like musk is conning the US and corruptly using his position for cash flow benefits.
This is a really absurd assertion to make in February 2025. His close buddy is the upcoming NASA administrator, and he clearly has the President's ear.
Musk is a Presidential adviser without a bounded specific portfolio, he has say in anything that (1) the executive branch has a say in, and (b) Trump chooses to listen to him on; as NASA is one of the participating agencies in ISS, the US executive branch has some role in it, and Musk could potentially exert influence over that.
I think that will be ~midnight here (central Europe). Is this going to do a complete orbit before landing attempt? It's not clear from the launch page. Hoping to see the deployments.
I remember seeing gen1 deploy here before I knew what they were, and panicking that the long string of dots were ICBMs!
Strangely 2 weeks ago I think it was one of the gen1's that gave a nice reentry burn up early one morning here, also a bit scary when unexpected.
Anyway exciting that they were able to turn this test around so fast after the last one, hopefully a longer show this time. Best of luck to the team.
"SpaceX reached out immediately to the government of Turks and Caicos and the United Kingdom to coordinate recovery and cleanup efforts."
to
"SpaceX reached out immediately to the government of Turks and Caicos and worked with them and the United Kingdom to coordinate recovery and cleanup efforts"
Just that it appears that they did not reach out to the UK government when this happened as they may have been unaware that Turks and Caicos are a British Overseas Territory.
Do we know when they plan to test orbital refueling? Launching a 2nd Starship to exchange fuel between them in orbit?
It looks like this is a repeat of flight 7’s mission of testing payload launch capabilities, specifically the type of starlinks starship is partly designed to handle.
If our government is so strapped for cash that it has to cancel food shipments for starving children[0], then surely we are in a deep enough fiscal crisis to stop spending money on space exploration?
With this kind of massive conflicts of interests and the way the current administration behaves you have to assume that any kind of regulation on Musk's companies is effectively removed. Even if he does not intervene directly, every employee that acts against him must assume they'll lose their job over those actions. That's a fundamentally untenable situation, there can be no actual oversight and regulation under these circumstances.
Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world) and it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.
We can only hope that the new administration will streamline the process and reduce the time needed to get regulatory approval.
> Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world)
Generally it does take awhile for a third party to understand the design decisions and their impacts then the designing person. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone working on software.
> it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.
>nonetheless we were required to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. I have pictures.
Then shows a picture. It sounds like another commenter is saying that the pic displayed by the Lex podcast is not the exact pic from Elon, but instead a similar pic meant to illustrate.
Yes, I'm aware of that. My point was that SpaceX has said they've had to do this, and if it sounds so wacky that that's unbelievable, there are actually photos of the same thing happening with seals, so I feel very little need to doubt that SpaceX was held to the same standard if that's what they claim.
Not a "citation" as much as anecdotal evidence that dispels doubt.
They take a lot longer than 6 weeks to build a Starship. They can build a Starship a month, but that's because there is significant parallelism. My guess is that there are parts on a Starship that started assembly over 1 year before the Starship is complete.
I don't know if Elon Musk or SpaceX has ever kidnapped a seal and played headphones to it, but the photos that were going around the internet for the last few years (they made the rounds in 2017 in connection to SpaceX, before Musk began referencing it in 2023/2024) were from an unrelated study in 2006: https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1848070131781455911
I'm still looking or the original study to find out what the "larger study" was about [was it an impact study related to Vandenberg? Was it part of seal monitoring, and while they had the seals they did a bunch of other stuff?], so if someone else digs it up I'd be interested in a link.
I don't know exactly how often who puts headphones on seals yet, but it sounds like as part of operating at Vandenberg, it's routine to "haul out" (by which I assume they mean, capture and remove, releasing some time/distance away) harbor seals, so they aren't in the way; it sounds like they also (sometimes? always?) perform some amount of monitoring activities on the seals, since you've already got them captured.
Also, all of this activity is apparently termed "Level B harassment".
Yeah, I agree, fuck seals. The more we damage marine mammal life with loud sounds the better. If they didn’t want to get killed off in awful ways by our tech toys they should have evolved ear muffs.
Delta IV heavies also launched from Vandenburg since long before f9 existed, and is considerably louder than falcon 9. was there a need for that study?
