And they're on track for ~130 this year.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I'm a Rocket Lab fan. Tons of innovation, slower progress due to not having the richest man behind, but on track to launch a reusable medium rocket, FULLY reusable and with a sensible guy at the helm.
I wish rocket lab the best and hope that one day they can have a competing heavy lift/human certified spacecraft.
However, it's nigh impossible to ignore how much SpaceX alone has reshaped the space industry and is basically forcing everybody else to step up.
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SpaceX launched about 429,125 kg of spacecraft upmass in Q1, followed by CASC with about 29,426 kg
Smaller satellites (<1,200 kg) represented 96% of spacecraft launched in Q1, 76% of total upmass
So the way I'm personally reading this is 2/3 of this is starlink launches
And launching space junk and making viewing the stars less and less clear at an historic rate.
People pay good money for that ‘junk’. A quality internet connection basically anywhere in the world, including at sea and in very remote areas, is far from junk.
Yeah I'm going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I've had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.
Really Starlink should be absorbed into and ran by the UN. We only have so much LEO to use, one company is bound to become a monopoly and LEO is the world's not any nation's property.
The UN has no teeth by design and there's a lot of money to be made privately, what makes you think it would happen?
pipe dream
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Stop supporting Elon.
SpaceX is more than just Elon.
As with X, I'll support it as soon as he's out.
If we stop doing business with SpaceX, we immediately demolish most of our capability to reach space, including the ISS until Starliner quits failing. Perhaps instead of trying to treat this as a matter of the free market we should recognize it as what it is - a matter of supreme economic and military importance - and force the Nazi fucker out.
Sure. As long as he goes, I'll support it all day long.
People really under estimate how important he is to SpaceX.
Reusing f9 1st stage - His initiative
Landing f9 on a barge - His initiative.
Making Starship Stainless Steel - His initiative
Catching Starship booster on chopsticks - His initiative.
The list goes on and on.
Without someone like him pushing for these radical things that everyone else thinks is impossible or a bad idea we wouldn't recognize what SpaceX would be.
Instead we have things like starliner which is a disaster, and blue origin which started before SpaceX and has never reached orbit.
SpaceX would slowly transform back into 'old space' if he was forced out as there are very few people willing to take the risks he takes.
Edit: and it's even very possible that the wrong CEO takes SpaceX public too soon which would make all the risk taking and fail fast development cycle they use impossible. Think of the stock crashing when a test flight fails and the pressure from investors around that.
Are those examples actually his initiative, or him championing someone else's idea?
Reusing f9, landing F9 on barge, and Stainless steel were his initiatives. The SS one was a particularly hard win for him with a lot of internal push back.
Catching Starship on the chopsticks might have been an idea he heard outside of SpaceX, but that he then championed, again to a lot of internal push back, I'm not 100% about it being an external to spacex idea though.
Edit clarity and below
Those are just examples though. And I'm sure there are times as you suggest that people suggest a difficult idea that he then champions as well.
That he can champion these radical things, his idea or not, is still the key point of his leadership that will be lost.
For example, someone must have suggested they use a full-flow staged combustion fuel cycle for raptor. He had to sign off on that. No one had ever designed and flown a engine like this before. The russians came closest making one, but never flew it. The predecessor to this engine in the 60s or whenever, NASA didn't even think it was physically possible to make until the Russians made it.
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I don't think his personal accomplishments really matter in the face of his support for the far right, crushing hatred of trans people, calling people pedophiles and the absurd amount of misinformation and bigotry that he promotes on xitter.
If SpaceX needs an absolute piece of shit like him in order to succeed, then there shouldn't be a SpaceX.
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Thankfully SpaceX is MORE than just Elon. Unlike Twitter, where he's removed everyone and turned it to slop. He makes no money from it, so why shouldn't he fuck with it?
SpaceX actually makes money. Elon won't fuck it up. (Or he will, but atleast we will have learned an insane amount of things thanks to them.)
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Ya, it's also massive ecological damage so we can all go "ooooh ahhh!"
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Out of curiosity - how many megatons of carbon has that produced, and how many billionaires will all the starships carry when they've exploited the earth's resources and left all it's living creatures to die and escape to mars?
SpaceX launches in 2023 were about 0.02 megatons of CO2 directly. I don't know how fugitive emissions from fueling and defueling, especially on starship with methane.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-falcon-9-co2-emissions
200,000kg/launch, 100 launches.
The carbon is not the problem.
I watched the recent test of catching the returning second stage booster in the chopsticks, and had a lump in my throat. Absolutely fucking amazing, nobody is in the same league as that crew.
The chart says companies/space agency, so I am assuming that NASA stopped launching rockets? It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
Indeed, NASA stopped launching rockets with the space shuttle. But that was the single best decision that NASA ever made. The space shuttle was an extremely expensive death trap. (It was damn cool, but a terrible way to get to space)
It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
You can blame the trump administration for that, with their commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. But the truth is, NASA has always heavily relied upon private companies, it's just that in the past they were all defense contractors (Boeing, Northrop, lockheed, rocketdyne, ULA). The other annoying truth, these commercial programs have actually been wildly successful (except in the case of Boeing's participation).
But it's been wildly successful in a few respects, one of which is that nasa has been able to focus on exploration again. Without having to support the huge costs of the shuttle program, they've been able to put a lot of their money into landers, interplanetary probes and space telescopes. I think we have more ongoing exploration missions than ever before. The Europa clipper mission launched just yesterday (on a SpaceX Rocket coincidentally). https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/
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put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.
Kind of the opposite - instead of the one rocket program NASA could have done, we have ULA, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. There’s multiple baskets now
Damn, the absolute collapse of the European space industry...
image licensed under cc by-sa!
edit: wrong! cc by-nd!
All those launches being subsidized and facilitated with US tax dollars while he used it to put telecom satellites up.
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With ISRO coming on strong, and Russia alienating most of the world, I’m fascinated by what this could turn into in the next couple years
I wonder if elon has been testing all these rockets in a desperate attempt to escape the planet with a bunch of other billionaires now that global warming is on track to destroy us. It would help me understand why the wealthy all seem so hell bent on accelerating the destruction.
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In the meantime Arianespace divided by 3 their number of rocket launches
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