Enough Musk Spam
For those that have had enough of the Elon Musk worship online.
No flaming, baiting, etc. This community is intended for those opposed to the influx of Elon Musk-related advertising online. Coming here to defend Musk or his companies will not get you banned, but it likely will result in downvotes. Please use the reporting feature if you see a rule violation.
Opinions from all sides of the political spectrum are welcome here. However, we kindly ask that off-topic political discussion be kept to a minimum, so as to focus on the goal of this sub. This community is minimally moderated, so discussion and the power of upvotes/downvotes are allowed, provided lemmy.world rules are not broken.
Post links to instances of obvious Elon Musk fanboy brigading in default subreddits, lemmy/kbin communities/instances, astroturfing from Tesla/SpaceX/etc., or any articles critical of Musk, his ideas, unrealistic promises and timelines, or the working conditions at his companies.
Tesla-specific discussion can be posted here as well as our sister community /c/RealTesla.
view the rest of the comments
Two words: Dynamic load
Also Falcon =/= Starship. They demonstrated true excellence with that one, it's even more amazing they're floundering on this one, and by such a low bar.
Dynamic load on the plumbing connections, where loads will be dominated by hydrostatic pressure, leading to a failure near the end of a burn when there weren't any engines starting or stopping to generate transient pressures? Not likely.
And they really aren't foundering. They're trying to do something very difficult, which nobody has ever achieved before, and losing the some of the first handful of rockets each time they try to crack a major new milestone is entirely within expectations. They've been deliberately weakening parts of the vehicle specifically to push it to the very limit, which doesn't sound like the strategy of a team which is worried about blowing a few of them up.
Since someone is likely to point out the space shuttle, I'll point out in return that people at the time were proudly proclaiming that it was the most complex machine ever to fly (by which they meant, "most distinct parts") as if that were an achievement rather than a monumental failure of engineering. It tried to do what Starship is trying to do, and it failed.
Goalposts cannot contain him!
I've moved no goalposts.
You claimed they were floundering, and I responded with an argument that the rockets exploding isn't evidence of floundering, it's an engineering choice to find the limits of their design by pushing a real rocket until it reaches those limits (rather than spending a decade analysing the problem to oblivion).
It's quite instructive to compare spacex to blue origin in that regard, actually. Both companies are about the same age, but blue origin spent that time designing while spacex spent it flying. The result is that blue origin reached orbit for the first time just this week, after about a decade of effort, but their first launch went pretty well (although not perfectly, since the booster crashed rather than landing the way it was supposed to). Spacex, meanwhile, blew up their first few rockets trying to reach space (I'm referring to the early falcons now, not starship), and blew up quite a few more trying to master landing them again, but they spent most of that decade developing experience in actual flight as a result (not to mention having a sustainable income, and totally dominating the launch industry).
I think it's difficult to make a good argument that spacex blowing up rockets means that what they're working on isn't going to work