It did the thing!!
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Lunar landing next week?
I love how the Musk circlejerk is basically absent on Lemmy compared to Reddit. The NASA contract funding (that they never should have gotten) has already been burned through, and HLS doesn’t even EXIST yet. No Mockup, no plans, and the barebones basic can barely limp into orbit.
SpaceX is at zero out 20(ish) required launches for the first demo, and they require two of those before Artemis 3.
Idk why you’re being down-voted. It really is a breath of fresh air not to have people calling Musk a god (twitter is heckin WEIRD).
That being said, saying that SpaceX shouldn’t have gotten the contract is an unusual take. Care to explain?
As for the funding, not only is it milestone-based (so they absolutely have not used it all up), but it’s pretty easy to see that the majority of the investment is coming from SpaceX itself. Honestly NASA got a pretty sweet deal if you ask me!
The lawsuit files by Blue Origin is public, and the judge basically said “well, the terms of the contract were technically not violated, so there is no crime”, but it was highly unethical.
In brief: there were quite a few dubious claims in the reasoning behind giving SpaceX the contract, but the main reason SpaceX was granted the HLS because they were the only company who came in under the (originally undisclosed) 2.9 billion budget.
The reason for this is that the person in charge of the program at NASA, Kathy Leuders, took it upon herself to give SpaceX a call to inform them of the available budget. SpaceX then decided to amend their bid to come in just under budget, when the other parties were over budget since they didn’t get a call. She did this very briefly before quitting NASA, and I’ll give you a single guess which company now employs her.
The judge said this was fine, because the contract allowed “negotiations” with the parties. Blue Origin has offered to meet the price of SpaceX as well, but since they didn’t receive a highly unethical call too, it came in after the contract was awarded.
SpaceX has since received all the funding NASA had available, has missed every milestone in its schedule so far. So I feel fine saying they shouldn’t have been awarded the contract.
Some reading: https://washingtontechnology.com/2021/08/was-spacexs-lunar-lander-win-a-fait-accompli/359576/
Has anyone seen one of these go off?
I think one day I’ll make the trip to see one.
The assessment noted that SpaceX did not plan to recover any Starship debris or have any boats or aircraft in the area to monitor the reentry and splashdown. It added that “any debris is expected to have sufficient mass to sink to the seafloor.”
Great for the environment
It’s mostly steel. Nothing toxic, not even kerosene or solid propellant.
I’m sure there are some electronics or materials there that you wouldn’t want in a bathtub with you, but I agree with your point. This is literally a drop in the ocean compared to the mass amounts of other pollution sources. Honestly, the diesel the retrieval boats would need to burn to retrieve the debris is probably worse for the environment.
I agree that its not great to dump items in the ocean. But given that it is rather hard to predict exactly where it will drop, and how fast if would sink after hitting the ocean surface with significant velocity, it would take an army of boats to recover anything.
For rockets i feel you have two large impacts to the environment, the production cost and the burned propellant. For starship the construction does not require too much harmful material i geuss. And the fuel is methane and oxygen. Methane will convert to CO2, but it does not have any nitrogen. Not as good as hydrogen + oxygen in the combustion product which only leaves water.
Looking at environmental impact is always hard, because you need to look at the whole lifecycle. Which frankly i am too lazy to compute here. Perhaps they have performed some research into it required by some legislation.
That is the fate of pretty much every rocket booster with the exception of Falcon 9. Starship is designed to be a fully reusable launch system (booster and upper stage) and these tests are stepping stones towards that goal.
