Not sure why SpaceX is in this group, except "cause musk", since they're objectively the best rocket company out there.
The rest are obvious, but the Falcon 9 is the cheapest, and most reliable rocket.
While Falcon 9 is a dependable rocket...
- One has never been turned around as re-usable in anywhere near 24 or 72 hours as Musk claimed they would be, fastest turn around to date is I think 3 weeks, roughly in line with faster Space Shuttle turn around times. No where near 'rapid'.
EDIT: My turnaround times for the Space Shuttle were off, fastest was 55 days and its more like 3 months in average. The point I was attempting to illustrate, which is Rapid Reusability Is A Huge Element To Making The Cost Effectiveness Gains Promised, And SpaceX Is Still Off By An Order Of Magnitude, Over A Decade Into The Falcon Program.
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The cost to launch a Falcon 9 has never dropped to around 5 million dollars, as Musk claimed they would be. Even accounting for inflation, launches average around ten times the cost Musk said they would be. Musk is charging the government around 90 million per launch: Soyuz was the only option, so the Russians could overcharge a bit for ISS launches, now the Russians are not an option, and Musk is similarly overcharging.
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Starship/BFR is woefully behind the schedule for accomplishments that Musk claimed it would reach in his hype shows, woefully behind schedule for the NASA contract.
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Starship/BFR has cost taxpayers billions of dollars and so far has a proven payload capacity of 0, would require 12 to 16 launches to accomplish what a single Saturn V could do, has not demonstrated the capacity to refuel in orbit, is not human rated, and is now just being moved back to Starship 2 and 3, with Musk now claiming Starship 1 actually has half the orbital cargo capacity he has up to recently claimed it has.
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For comparison, the Saturn project had a development time similar to how long BFR/Starship has... never once failed, proved it could do what it needed to in 67, 7 years after development began.
(They also had computers maybe a little bit more or less powerful than a ti-83 and had to basically invent a huge chunk of computer science)
Starship/BFR development has been a shit show.
Dear Moon is cancelled.
Remember when the repulsive landing Dragon Capsule was going to land humans on Mars?
Remember when we were going to have multiple Starships starting a Martian colony by now?
SpaceX in general has gotten high on their own supply over the last 10 years and has made all sorts of lofty claims about lowering launch costs, rapid reusability, rockets for military asset deployment to anywhere on Earth, rockets as basically super fast commercial airliner travel, all of which have driven massive public hype and investor confidence, and then these claims are just forgotten about when it becomes apparent just how difficult these are to achieve, or in some cases, laughably, obviously unworkable with even a modicum of thought.
The truth of the matter, as proven by Musk's handling of his other companies, is that Musk just says things, "We can do this now!", when in reality he's basically had a napkin drawing plan a month ago, calls this prototyping, and now its a month later, and he emailed somebody and said 'Make this happen' with no further explanation, thus the project is now in development.
Musk is gross and SpaceX has some questionable marketing claims that you've identified, but I don't see how anyone could claim that anything about the company's products are a shitshow.
Falcon 9 has radically changed the economics of the space industry, and has no competition to force lower prices.
Starship has had a very successful testing campaign, and operates within a different development paradigm than Saturn. They've shown more progress on more technology in the last year than almost any rocket ever. It won't be long before Starship has demonstrated all the capabilities you mentioned. While the price tag is large in absolute terms, it will be very cheap relative to the competition.
Dear Moon was not canceled by SpaceX, and no one who follows the industry has ever believed Musk's timelines.
I guess I'm confused, because everything I know about Starship points towards it being one of the most incredible engineering accomplishments ever. There are lots of other problems with SpaceX's leadership, environmental impact, and work culture, but aren't the products inspiring?
3 weeks, roughly in line with faster Space Shuttle turn around times
The shortest shuttle turnaround time was 55 days. Almost three times as much as Falcon 9. The fastest post-Challenger turnaround time was 88 days, I believe. After Columbia, the fastest turnaround was around 5 months.
NASA claimed that the shuttle could achieve a turnaround time of two weeks (page IX). It looks like SpaceX is not the only one setting unrealistic timelines?
They don’t have rapid reusability because it doesn’t matter to them, they have enough rockets that they can work on multiple at the same time to get the same effect
Dear Moon is cancelled.
Looked this up. The guy says he cancelled it because it was delayed too long. Pretty much shows they didn't have the patience needed for spaceflight in the first place.
The main issue with spacex is that they use taxpayer money to build infrastructure, research, and in many other ways fund a company who's accomplishments will never be shared with the world unless there is a price sticker on it.
Can you describe "the list"?
The Soyuz is cheaper. Roscosmos is an objectively better rocket company.
....buddy.....
From looking up the numbers, it seems like a soyuz launch under the cheapest circumstances can get decently cheaper than a falcon 9 launch, however, it also carries significantly less payload mass, so the actual cost per mass to orbit is lower for falcon 9, which makes the comparison a bit like comparing a van to a semi truck; if you want to move something small enough to fit in the van, without any other cargo to fill the space, then the van makes sense. But if you're running a logistics network and have enough cargo to fill whatever vehicle you're using, the bigger truck is going to be cheaper to use.
As far as them being a better rocket company though, Roscosmos has just been operating a group of designs that are quite ancient in terms of rockets, especially the soyuz which is an evolution on an original design that literally predates Sputnik. They're not bad rockets per se, but Roscosmos didn't develop them and they don't seem to be innovating much beyond them, and so are quickly becoming out of date as more groups work on things like rocket reusability. SpaceX by contrast has been quite innovative in the space especially with regards to reuse, and has such a high capacity that one satellite constellation it owns accounts for a majority of operational satellites at the moment.
SpaceX has Gwynne Shotwell who actually is the reason to find SpaceX interesting. She is so powerful that she can overcome Musk's perpetually increasingly unstable drag coefficient.
Ooh, so SpaceX is basically thanks to her
They also socially engineered ways to keep that dipshit Musk away from the projects and sabotaging them all. “Here is a shiny sprocket that we are too dumb to figure out, need you to help us!”, and that idiot gets to play smart and leaves the real work alone.
One of these things is not like the others. Falcon 9 is the most successful and impressive rocket ever built.
Put Google’s AI projects in the 4th box
Related, but I'd say Falcon Heavy is. Especially if you add in the dual booster landings.
One of these things is not like the others. Falcon 9 have liked anyone yet.
Musk is a pissbaby, but I'll whiteknight spacex until they blow up a tourist.
They avoided this by just not performing contracted missions
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-dearmoon-crew-reacts-private-mission-canceled
Probably for the better
Oh come on. SpaceX is doing way better than Boeing atm.
Yeah honestly space x is rocking it because of the immense talent of the team that exists there. They do over 100 successful launches per year now. It has transformed the space industry as humanity has ever known it. That's fucking cool.
Yeah too bad it's led by Musk. Luckily he's still too distracted with ruining Twitter
Replace spacex with blueorigin and I'm there.
No, Starliner
Nah, the VSS Enterprise
Space x doesn't belong there
Why is SpaceX on that I mean I know "musk bad", but seriously they're doing well. Just put Boeing on there again this time for Starliner.
I first thought it was the Starliner. Then the group would have been "full of technical issues".
They are not doing well, they take tax payer money and blow them up, literally.
They are paid both taxpayer and private money to put things, including people now, safely into orbit. A thing they do frequently and reliably, without any explosions. Yes, their dramatically destructive development method of launching unproven prototypes and pushing them to the limit does seem wasteful, but it actually has allowed their engineers to very effectively identify the weak points in their systems and remove or compensate for them, resulting in designs that are redundant only where needed, but still reliable. Despite a lot of competition from international and the older American aerospace companies, they remain one of the most cost effective and reliable options for space launches in the game.
Now, I'm all for some Musk mocking these days after how much of a jackass he's revealed himself to be, and I am now convinced that Space-X succeeded in spite of him, but it is successful.
You mean like Bikini Atoll?
Imma be honest, I deem Tesla successful. At start, their mission was to get EVs started up and going. And they fucking did. After showing how much can EVs achieve, they forced whole world to shift focus - they succeeded. As of what happens with the company now...I don't care. They did hella lot of good for everyone, now they can fall off. Would prefer if Musk fucked off instead and let them cook, but eh.
I disagree. EVs needed more battery development which occurred largely independently of Tesla, and instead they just reaped the reward of other people's labour.
Technology wise, true. But it's not about technology. Tesla pushed for EVs to become mainstream. They made them wanted by people. Up to that, automakers ignored that tech fully, cause money was with ICE.
You can't deny the impact that they had on propping up EVs as desireable, though. There wouldn't be so many Teslas on the road if the opposite was true.
They did a lot of good for whom? A lot of things are successful and shit, that's not a metric.
You son of a bitch, I'm out.
Muskians are having fits in the comments
Imagine simping over a Nazi worshipper like Musk who isn’t qualified to run a McDonalds.
Two of your team members are Elon
Gwen Shotwell actually. Honestly fantastic name.
If you're going to hate Elon Musk it might be a good idea to work out what companies he actually is and isn't CEO first
No one cared when Astra’s first three attempts (with a much less ambitious design) recently failed to reach orbit. Of course, launching rockets is hard and SpaceX’s first, less ambitious rocket also failed on its first three attempts. I’m sure other manufacturers have had their own share of problems. IMO people mostly think worse of spacex because it gets more publicity, but some degree of failure is always to be expected with new ventures in commercial rocketry.
There's 2 main reasons spacex gets shit. First one is Musk. Second one is the weird competitive thing SpaceX fanbois do where they criticise the shit out of all other rocket manufacturers and endlessly praise everything spaceX do.
A great deal of the problem with the modern rocket industry is that it has been commercialized.
Indian and Chinese public sector agencies don't need to run around sucking off donors for money or inventing new ways to generate profit on taxpayer expense. They can operate at-cost with a consistent budget and aim at targets set by experts in the field rather than investors with the biggest wallets. Consequently, they're putting up better and more efficient spacecraft - India put its Mangalyaan probe into orbit around Mars for a measly $75M, China's the only country left with a nationally independent space station - than anyone in the private sector has managed to date.
Back when NASA wasn't an entirely owned and operates subsidiary of Boeing, it was able to go toe-to-toe with the USSR. But now the pursuit of quarterly profits is dissolving the western space industry to the point where we can't even get people off the ISS without Russia's help.
musk's dragging it down with his constant bullshit.
That's true in general for everything he touches, but rockets are designed to overcome a lot of drag :)
the expandables
That sub still brings a smile to my face.
Yeah, I don’t know why everyone was so mean to it
Poor little guy was under a lot of pressure
Top left: An aerospace conglomerate with an all-consuming focus on short-term profits, leading to endemic problems. The featured product being the 787, a functional and popular airliner which had numerous problems related to excessive outsourcing. Some safety concerns about newly delivered planes of this type, due to the company's endemic problems. As an airline, I would prefer to buy Airbus. And as a passenger, I would avoid the 737 Max totally and all Boeings for the first years of service.
Top right: A major electric car company with major leadership problems. The featured product is an automobile which compares disfavourably to other electric pickup trucks in most conventional metrics. As a consumer, I would look at alternatives.
Bottom left: Someone thought they could build a submarine.
Bottom right: The world's leading space launch company. Also the world's leading satellite internet company. The featured product is the Falcon 9, a large rocket capable of sending a large payload into orbit or beyond. The first stage can then land and be reused. Some concerns about the leadership of the company, and the side effects of their failure tolerant testing. As a for-profit company, I would have no other choice in launch providers. As a consumer, I could be in a situation where they are the the only real provider of internet access.
A very diverse "team". Assembled by someone with a different perspective than my own.
A team for what? Causing the apocalypse?
Is the the "GTFO this planet and let everything else fall apart" team?
Well this team ain't gonna last long the Boeing is gonna fall apart and he sub is gonna implode
Yeah keep em all together at a central place so they can more easily be avoided
We can build the ultimate vehicle. We have the VC. We have the teknowklegy. We have the tech bros. We are, the $600 billion money pit.
gotta wait for Bezos to catch up with the shenanigans.
Doesn't he have a wierd pissing at work thing and have cameras in delivery trucks that penalize you when you yawn? I'd say rhe fuckin billionaire is qualified to fuck right off.
i forgot bezos doesn't own blue orgin anymore
There was an idea, Musk doesn't know this, called the Unforced Errors. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable deathtraps, see if they could become something less. See if they could fail together when we needed them to to lose the battles we never could.
The Blunderbirds
Still gotta find a fourth member
Had a 5th member lined up but then there was a tragic and completely unexpected incident and now there's an opening.
God damnit Boeing what did we say about silencing teammates
So skibidi no cap
