What space race?

NASA us working on a shoestring budget and managed to run some very successful missions. The Artemis Program is/was very succesful, and what does NASA get?

Budget cuts. Money diverted to SpaceX who, under Elon, has yet to do a single succesful mission (the Dragon capsule and reusable rockets were both projects that Elon bought. Starship is the first project that Elon directed).

At this point I'd expect some brain leak from SpaceX. For some, no amount of money is enough to continue to work for a company associated to that toxic twat.

I was thinking hydrazine. I don't know what this rocket was using.

Such a remarkable achievement! We should put capitalists on the Starship ASAP so they can enjoy the fruits of "their" labor!

We shouldn’t be building rockets PERIOD. They cost too much and are eventually only going to serve trillionaires.

FIX SHIT ON THE GROUND FIRST

That said,

They did a test from 300 meters, sure it’s cool but I think they have a LONG way to go before they are competetive.

Neither is doing elephant sized doses of Ketamine

I hate the guy's guts as much as anybody else, but he has kickstarted a space race, and an EV market. Credit where it's due.

And yeah I know, rich daddy, no inventions, all evolutionary, etc. But here we are.

I imagine riding a rocket like final boss fight in Just Cause 2.

It's less that people are putting faith in Elon (sure, some fanatics might be), but it's that everyone else is somehow even worse.

SpaceX is actually getting stuff to space, despite their prototypes blowing up. Hell, even if this Starship thing is a complete failure and never works, their existing rocket, the Falcon, is still far beyond any of the competition.

The SLS: $10 Billion and a decade late to develop a ship that recycles old Space shuttle parts, then costs $2-3 Billion per launch, and maybe can only launch one every 2 years.

ULA Vulcan: currently years late, still finding problems, and even after all that gets worked out, it can maybe do 6 launches a year?

SpaceX: 1-2 launches per week.

That's not faith, that's just facts. I would absolutely love to have somebody else step up and take SpaceX's crown, but... there really isn't anybody. Bezos's Blue Origin may have the biggest chance, but they are more likely to act like ULA than SpaceX.

reached an altitude of 890 feet

Kids science projects make reusable rockets that go higher.

It’s not a big deal when you’re blowing up someone else’s money with no real accountability.

I mean... its a big deal if you're anywhere near the launchpad. Or, in or around South Padre Island.

Also can't help but notice that Starbase, Texas is practically hugging the US/Mexico border. Almost as though Abbott didn't want this shit landing in his own backyard when it failed.

It also helps to be as far south as possible. You get to use more momentum to help get orbit, if I understand it correctly.

IIRC, that’s why NASA launches from Florida. That and the coast making launch failures safer.

(But I am not a physicist.)

Definitely agreed on cars, but Japan's last few moon missions had several catastrophic failures unfortunately.

Japanese cars are superior to American cars

I had a high school friend who went on to become an engineer at General Motors. One of his first projects for them was tearing down an Infiniti and a Lexus when those cars first came on the market. He said that at the time, GM cars typically had between 300 and 400 production defects of varying severity. When they took apart the Infiniti, they found 2 production defects; when they took apart the Lexus, they found 0.