Reusable rockets save milions
My dude still waiting for trickle down economics to kick in
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Yeah, it hasn't been cheaper, prices are pretty much the same and if it weren't for the US government funding them, SpaceX would have been bankrupt
Wait wait you are telling me Musk didn't pull himself by his boots straps and actually is the biggest welfare queen there is? Nooo, I can't believe it...
Not sure which way you're leaning with this, but musk is a fucking scammer asshole. Just to make that clear.
I don't get this argument. The US government has invested into a tech development. Which means that spacex seemed to have a good base to pull that off. I didn't see a line of other companies doing anywhere near that capability.
Also, everyone calls for government to take lead in doing stuff for the betterment of humanity, but the second that happened, everyone loses their minds. Make up your mind, are we ok with government doing stuff or not?
Yeah, government subsidies literally exist to try and get people to do the thing they're subsidizing - it makes no sense to hate on a company that completes them.
It makes sense when the company basically exploded on the scene with impossible claims which then turned out to be (obviously) lies. SpaceX always claimed to make rockets 10 times cheaper due to reuse. This wasn't possible, isn't possible, and won't be possible due to how rockets work. Yet here we are, the US is paying SpaceX normal and expected prices while they keep claiming impossible bullshit
Man that is not the point here.. The point is that your uni now can send stuff to orbit when 10 years ago it was economically prohibitted. Elon can fuck off but spacex IMO is a net positive to humanity.
Cube sats were sent to orbit for university projects long before reusable rockets became commercially available
The less can be sent into orbit, the better. We have enough trash in orbit as it is. No need to clutter it up any further.
good thing that uni projects are low orbit...
Yeah better go back to the caves where there were no plastic, right?
Edit: I'm all for sending stuff out in space in a responsible manner, just got bored about lots of people being anti tech here. Probably answered the wrong person, sorry!
BTW isn't most stuff in low orbit falling out down in the atmosphere or is that just not enough to chean it up?
You realise that littering close orbit with more shit is just going to turn it into a whirling extraterrestrial claymore for anything trying to leave the planet.
Everything that goes up there should have a lifespan to come back down.
Yup, low earth orbit (LEO) still has some thin atmosphere that slows things down a tiny bit and makes them deorbit over time. That's why, for example, the ISS has to reboost to stay up and can chuck garbage bags overboard and not really worry about them. The deorbit time depends on a lot of factors including the mass and surface area. Starlink sats are supposed to passively deorbit in about 5 years.
Satellites are why everyone in Africa has a mobile phone and they didn't have to build huge infrastructure projects to connect everyone, billions of the poorest people in the would have cheap access because of satalites which gives them access to education, healthcare information, tools to politically organise and all sorts of other benefits.
GPS is a service we all use regularly from the richest to poorest, hugely advanced and totally free to use - it's a literal lifesaver
Another literal lifesaver that's free for everyone to benefit from is whether satalites, when people get warned of incoming hurricanes and typhoons that's satalites.
The various global warming research satalites could also save our lives, and the lives of everyone in the planet.
And the things we have planned in space will help avoid resource depletion and allow development of far higher standards of life for everyone, mining titanium for example could make this incredibly useful metal as cheap as steel which would totally revolutionise things like water treatment and construction.
Yes musk is an idiot but that doesn't mean satalites aren't awesome