Needles & Grooves

too much

I googled spaces explosion to see if I could find a video and ALL THEY DO IS BLOW UP! And he said this would happen and he has “favorite” explosions.

We?

What SpaceX is doing is legitimately cool and it’s maybe the only good thing Musk has going.

They had to blow up a lot of Falcon 9s to produce what is now the most used and most reliable launch system on the planet.

@djdavedk NASA Picks SpaceX to Land Next Americans on Moon

“They had to blow up” no, they didn’t.

caps lock

WHAT OF IT?

I’M LITERALLY AN OLD MAN LITERALLY YELLING AT THE LITERAL SKY HERE!

@Lee Newman Iterative design. Every loss gives them data to improve the design further. It's worked out for them.

@kvetcha Well I guess it has. Elon Musk's growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies

All the coverage of this reads like propaganda. I think anyone trying to sell this as a pure success is feeding Musk's PR machine. Saying they knew it would fail and needed to blow it up to learn more is absurd logic. NASA is and probably will always be far less efficient money-wise but that has a lot more to do with bureaucracy than not wanting to blow up rockets "on purpose."

@kvetcha i get the need to fail to create success and I get iterative design. What I don't like is the expectation to fail and the "need" to fail. I would rather, especially since tax dollars are at play, them plan to succeed. But the cavalier "oh well it's to be expected" paired with an ecstatic response in that failure are a little hard to swallow.

Not to mention that I prefer the sterile reserved old NASA than the concert going U2 just hit the sage constant rumble of SpaceX. But it may just be me being all curmudgeonly too.

@Lee Newman I do have a friend who works there, and the attitude was very much that they were hoping and aiming to get separation, flip, and orbit, but the official goal for this first full-scale test was just to get airborne and not blow up on the pad. The enthusiasm’s genuine, though. SpaceX doesn’t pay as well as other aerospace, so if you’re there you are there because you believe in the work.