Space X Went Boom

At least flights to Mars should be cheaper.

I know! I mean, its not exactly Rocket Science, is it?

Someone was going to say it. It might as well be me.

Good.

20 yrs ago the us space program was dead and outsourced to the Russians. Today the largest vehicle to ever leave the ground flew 20km up, a vehicle that can carry 8 double decker busses and will in 3 years return yanks to the moon, within the decade fly them to mars. Like Oppenheimer and van Braun , elon is not the smartest man in the room nor the most likable but he is the man who can get the smartest men in the room

Luckily he's mostly just reporting what SpaceX does rather than driving it directly. He'd be better off if he stuck with that.

Should we start a go fund me page for a few people here 😷?

I think putting men on the moon and bringing them home safely nearly 54 years ago is the greatest thing humans will ever do.....

An extraordinary achievement that is so unbelievable that alot of people dont actually believe it.....

If on Mars fûck all is found…..people will just give up.

32.35 billion was NASA’s funding for this year. Hundreds of billions a decade.

The only planet that has any proven life forms is Earth.

NASA has been around since 1958.

NASA, ROSCOSMOS or indeed any other agency worldwide have found nothing.

comes a time where it’s just not good value to be pumping an agency full of that sort of cash.

Surely it'd be more prudent as a species to take the money we seem to be wasting on space travel and divert into coming up with a solution to global warming or hunger. I always thought that if enough scientists worked on it, a grain that could grow in any environment or climate could be created.

Oh but wait....we discovered something a billion miles away that is impossible to reach from earth. That's something right?

An explosion is still data - you learn more from your failures than you do your successes.

Next time they launch one of these starships and it succeeds it wont be a happy accident - it will be because of meticulous modelling and work based in no small part on the data they got from this launch.

People seen to be celebrating a failure yesterday, why I don't know but it wasn't a failure.

It was flagged that there was a chance of failure and now they will make a correction and try again.

That's why it was called a test launch.

was one hell of a size bottle rocket!

The survival of humankind depends on colonization of other planets. It's not something that needs to be done today, or in the near future, but it absolutely 100% needs to be done. From the space travel point of view, we are just sticking our noses out of the caves, but we will eventually emerge. It may take us 10.000 years, but we need to start and keep at it.

Also:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-wouldnt-have-without-space-travel

I wonder if that is comparing like with like though? Saying we could send a rocket up 54 years ago and now we can not even get it into orbit - is missing the point that we are talking about two very different rockets here - with very different specs and targets and goals - using very different technologies.

It would be a bit like comparing one of the first cars to modern attempts at self driving cars and merely say "Look - after all this time cars are still crashing".

Remember also that while apollo 11 went to the moon - apollo 13 exploded. There was barely 10 months between these two events. So I am not sure "space travel has regressed" so much as "Pushing the frontiers of space travel technology is as risky and problematic as it ever was" therefore?

The first knee jerk response I would have to your post is to point out that space exploration - and biological food science - are in no way mutually exclusive. Investing money into one does not mean we have to take it away from another. But note too that we send plants and animals into space and learn quite a lot from doing so.

So do not be under the impression that progress in one field is isolated either. If we want some kind of universal grain or or other break through in biology - there is no reason to assume that some data or discovery in space science will not help us achieve it. Just in terms of Space Programs for example - how much do you know about the history of hydroponics, aeroponics and advances in plant genetics and biotechnology, and how much of these were done by NASA engineers?

That said though: I think I heard a statistic once - though I did not go to verify it - that the US Bailout of the banks not so long ago managed to exceed the 50 year budget of Nasa. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is also keen to point out that the budget of Nasa in 2011 was 4 tenths of a penny per tax dollar. If you hold up a dollar and cut into it 4/10 of 1% of its width - you do not even cut far enough into it to reach the ink.

So just how much money are we "wasting" really?

I am not so sure that solving problems like a universal grain is merely a matter of throwing endless numbers of scientists at it. Scientific discovery it often about incentives and all kinds of nuance that goes deeper than merely the number of heads in any given laboratory.

But even if we assume that you are right - that increasing the number of scientists does have that effect - where are we getting those scientists and how are we motivating them to enter into that career path? Money is one incentive sure. But when you push the frontiers of science in exciting ways - especially in things that capture the publics imagination like space travel - it stimulates and inspires a new generation of scientists. And that new generation of scientists graduates into a field replete with new and deeper data to work with precisely because we push those frontiers. Think of Isaac Newton who developed the system we call "Calculus". He was inspired to do so due in part to contemplation of space and planetary bodies and their motions. And that Calculus led in part to ground breaking studies in optics and thermodynamics and a wide range of scientific and engineering applications

And all that is not to mention that many discoveries in many disciplines of science happen when we push the frontiers. Often discoveries that are made (think radiation in physics or penicillin in medicine to name two of many many examples) are even made when we were not expecting them and were doing something completely different with totally different intentions and goals. When we push the frontier of our knowledge we sometimes find what we were looking for - and sometimes we find things we never even knew we could/should be looking for. When we shake the universe - we are never entirely sure what will fall out.

On top of that - space exploration has the potential to develop into it's own industry and economy. Space Tourism for example. Stimulating new economies and industries brings jobs, tax money, education programs. It feeds back into society and generates societal wealth. Societal wealth that then allows us to further fund other science programs and research. Is that not what we should want? Would that not help fund research into your universal grain?

Finally - when we push the frontiers in this way we often come out with technologies that push back into society and stimulate economic growth and applications. Think of integrated circuits so common in almost everything we do - and how much of those owe their existence to how the Apollo program required lightweight and compact electronics for the spacecraft. Cordless tools and memory foam and water filtration systems are three more random examples that come to mind of technologies I have read were pushed forward due to the requirements of NASA. How much of our technologies like GPS today trace their existence back to our space programs? When those pushing the frontiers of science hit new requirements - whole advancements and industries and economics rise to meet those challenges.

Remember also that this "wasted money" was not from tax funded NASA. This was Space X - and associated with Elon Musk. So when taking the "Why waste money up there - what about our problems down here" approach to evaluating such space programs remember also Elon Musk's association with things like NeuraLink which seeks to alleviate human suffering in all kinds of ways such as allowing Quadriplegics to walk again - and who knows how many other aspects of human suffering?

While I bow to your superior knowledge, and you clearly do know yourself, that "space tourism" is precisely the problem. It will be a play toy for the rich, while vast swathes of the global population will be struggling to survive.

Many things important or even just plain normal to us today started off as the play things of the rich did they not? What about when Cars were first invented and rolled out? What about when computers were? What about the first Mobile phones? Televisions? The printed word? Our first forays into Aviation developing into the budget airlines we know today? What areas of medicine were once reserved at first only for those who could afford it but are common place today?

The list of things in our past that came into our world - were at first the purview of only the rich - but developed from there to be common or even indispensable parts of every day life - is probably much larger than I even guess at myself.

But as I said in the longer post above - even if it was the plaything of the rich - when industries and economies build up around such things that too feeds back into our society in terms of tax, jobs, education paths, research paths and more too. But even then "Space Tourism" is only one tiny part of the post I just wrote. Focusing in on it and it alone I think is to risk missing many other relevant points in any "Is Space Flight a waste of Money?" discussion.

The point is that every time we push the frontiers of space flight - the results in our world are palpable.

Hydroponics, aeroponics, hydroponics, Microbial detection, air filtration and purification systems, Medical imaging, Freeze-dried food, Telemedicine, Artificial limbs and prosthetics, aluminum foil, bubble wrap and Styrofoam, High-strength adhesives and sealants used in construction and manufacturing, Cordless appliances, water filters, Scratch-resistant lenses, memory foam bedding, LED Lighting, Protective coatings, Self-healing materials, Advanced alloys, Heat-resistant materials, Lightweight materials, Infrared thermometers, Digital image processing, Satellite communication, GPS, Earth observation and mapping, integrated circuits. And thats just what my memory churns out - but they all owe their existence or improvements in whole or in part to Space programs.

"Like Oppenheimer and van Braun , elon is not the smartest man in the room nor the most likable"

Admittedly, von Braun "only" had a diploma in engineering and a doctorate in physics but the only rooms where Oppenheimer wasn't the smartest were the ones he was sharing with the likes of Fermi, Teller or Feynman. He had three Nobel prize nominations and may even have won if he'd lived long enough.

Musk might be more akin to General Leslie Groves. Not the smartest man in the room but smart enough to know that he needed some really smart people to make it happen. But while Groves was a bit of a bollox, he wasn't a weapons-grade douche-canoe like Musk.

We can't not do what we're genetically programmed to do, to make our way back to our own planet. We will get there eventually.

For some people on Boards every thread is a "free houses" thread.