but is it significant harm, compared to other things?

i mean, every company harms the environment somewhat. streets pollute the environment through their presence. oil refineries leak huge amounts of methane into the air. factories often produce toxic chemicals as by-products.

Falcon 9 has launched over 500 mission with a very high success rate. Of course the bulk of advancement should be coming from NASA and we need to spend more there, but SpaceX is putting up big numbers in successful payload lifts.

Damn, looks like I didn’t get my wish: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/19193050

For a couple of minutes.

My feed rn:

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.

If you like SatNav, accurate weather tracking, and advanced intercontinental communication then ya like rockets ya dipshit.

While Id be the first to ban private rocket launches outright, we shouldn't abandon the advances of the space age because of them.

NASA ran the projects. They have specifications to contractors for manufacturing. That's a far cry from farming out the entire process and renting space on a commercial rocket.

I mean, I wouldn't either. I wouldn't want to risk death. He knows it's not risk-free.

good.

sad that he wasn't on it though.

I'm all for mankind colonizing the stars, but I don't want that A hole down a K hole Elmo involved in any way. I don't trust the cunt not to have a back door into the colony, that he opens whenever his fee fee's get hurt, or if his K hole runs dry.

Neither is doing elephant sized doses of Ketamine

Comparing an engine out where the mission went on without issue and a huge fireball on the pad is apples and oranges.

Hardly. Honda have just replicated what Falcon 9 has been doing every week for years.

Oh please. Elon will long be dead before we are ever seriously colonizing mars.

Rocket fuel is toxic. Don't cook with it. Don't touch or breathe it. Don't even look at it.

Once it's burned it's mostly safe, aside from the usual problems with combustion products.

“iT wAs A rApId UnScHeDuLeD dIsSaSsEmBlY”

Japanese cars are superior to American cars, why wouldn't their rockets be?

How many times does this gotta happen before we start calling them missiles instead of rockets?

NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It's still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.

But ultimately it's still just contracting.