An alternative to anything related to Elon would be great.

Yes, let spend money to fuck up other planets as well instead of saving this one. /s

Genuinely curious: how many explosions before the successful test?

N420HA. Not sure if that's the model or the plane's license plate but either way hell yeah

How does Helium fit through places that Hydrogen can't even though its bigger? Is it because Hydrogen would react with things along the way while Helium won't?

It's the only planet we can terraform (As in repairing some of the damage we've done), we are nowhere near able to terraform Mars, not even theoretically and disregarding cost.
Maybe in a century we can. But only maybe.

That’s exactly what they will say.

This wasn't much more than a toy rocket:

6.3 m in length, 85 cm in diameter,
The test was completed successfully, the first time Honda landed a rocket after reaching an altitude of nearly 300 meters.

But still they were successful on their first try, so we will have to see where they take it from here.

"... it'll be the same, but it's a huge honor to work on this project in our company."

Imo it's a good thing tho. Spreading our civilization across multiple planets is the only way to guarantee long long term success. Obviously we should also fix the climate change issue (and many others). But still, being spread across the solar system would give our species redundancy. An extinction event on earth like a large meteor strike would no longer be the end.

Anything that erodes SpaceX's monopoly is good for me

The planet isn't doing anything, we are poisoning ourselves. Or as lemmy puts it "big evil corporations (which we support everyday because it's cheaper than buying local/sustainable) are poisoning us".

Apparently they got it right on the first try.

How does it make spaceX’s accomplishments less impressive? SpaceX pioneered it. Space X did it first, with a significantly bigger rocket and at a significantly higher altitude. Honda no doubt achieved this by looking at what spacex did and how they did it and copying it.

This actually makes spaceX’s accomplishments look even more impressive.

And we reward you for this huge honour with the worst working conditions you can imagine. You’ll live at your desk.

If it had vtech and a fart cannon it would have hit 600m.

I bet they poached 0-3 engineers.

You left out the "but you have to learn Japanese and move to Japan" part of the job pitch. That makes it a harder sell for most people.

It's actually interesting how similar rockets and jet engines are. You could think of a rocket as a jet (or sometimes two jet engines) where the afterburner is always on and the air intake is replaced by an O2 tank..

It's proof of tech. It'd be stupid and wasteful to do all the tests on a full size rocket.

Yeah, tail numbers are a lot like license plates.