Wouldn’t your proposed headline also be noteworthy, inappropriate, and worrisome? Not at the same level, surely, but it doesn’t make the idea sound good.
The problem here is the normalization and promotion of a product that turns human suffering and shame into entertainment and cash. It happens a lot throughout history and it is bad every time. It is morally wrong to profit from the suffering of others.
This is entirely inaccurate.
ISS does not use cryogenics for propulsion. Why? Because cryogenic fuel transfer is crazy hard. Starship cryogenic demonstration was just moving fuel between two tanks in the same vehicle… a trick NASA mastered and surpassed with the Shuttle external tank.
For better or worse, both China and the US view space primarily as a means to demonstrate dominance and prove technological superiority. Antarctica is significantly easier to get to, has way less tactical utility, and seems otherwise irrelevant to the conversation.
SpaceX playing soccer with COPVs and then bolting them on the vehicle doesn’t feel like a more comforting answer but I agree it’s one I didn’t list. Not sure I understand why people would be rattling around inside the vehicle after a single engine test and then not re-running the single engine for a regression test.
/shrug, still you’re right. Unreported damage post-installation would totally do this, it’s just not a root cause I’ve seen. Would speak to a breakdown in safety culture for my folks, not sure what the safety culture looks like on the Starship line.
I’ve seen that math and something like that could work. Elon turned off the spigot on falcon heavy launches to create a bigger market for Starship.
Blue’s lander aggregates in a manner similar to what you describe, as did NASA’s original government reference design.
The other thing you’re talking about is basically Gateway. You’re pitching (more or less) the NASA concept circa 2019. :)
Oh c’mon.
Cannot possibly spin “blew up randomly during test prep” as a positive outcome. They probably don’t know how not to build that specific one unless they happened to instrument the faulty prop system components - they know that it failed but likely not why or how to fix it.
All evidence points to Starship having a super-finicky MPS that fails on the regular… which probably means they’re chasing performance by removing mass from the MPS and tank structure… which means either this design doesn’t work (totally possible) or that the as-built performance falls short of what was promised.
If you want to stan for Musk, I guess everyone has a type and I’m not going to shame you over it… but blowing up during test prep is not a good news story.
Maybe. Regardless, problem either in design or build.
Designing under-reinforced tanks indicates that the design can’t make payload and they’re cutting too far into structure allocations to make up for it.
Rupture could also be poor materials (sign of Boeing-style disregard for standards and safety) or a bad weld (same plus maybe training issues on the line). Means they’re running bad QA/QC protocols if the faulty material/construction made it to flight.
Chasing performance at the cost of safety sounds right down Musk’s alley.
The surface area of the moon is about the same as the continent of Africa. Think about all the different kinds of dirt you might encounter on Africa. If you were building a house in Morocco, would you want to rely on soil samples from South Africa?
Regolith properties vary based on location even with the samples we’ve got. It’s reasonably important to understand the local soil conditions before we start trying to land 10-story buildings on the surface. No other option but to send something up to learn that info. Cheaper to use a robot than a human.