I think it’s pretty reasonable to say we should have a societal conversation about whether the pollution and energy costs of these test flights, and commercial space flight in general, are worth it, not up to one billionaire to decide for the planet
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Agreed on the billionaire thing but commercial space flight releases a tiny amount of pollution and has immense benefits (communication, weather prediction, etc.) that clearly outweigh the costs.
Sure that's up for discussion. But the progress is aligned with NASA's direction. Hence all the contracts SpaceX won prior to Musk's political shit show. It was about time the great United States stopped relying on Russian rockets to put their astronauts on the ISS? F9 is cheap to fly and reusable.
NASA could have independently developed a new reusable space ship if they were allowed to blow up as many prototypes as they wanted (and also a national wildlife preserve or two)
They had one, called the Space Shuttle. It costed $25k/kg of payload and it killed a bunch of people. Starship is gonna cost under $500/kg of payload and if we're considering F9's success rate, the risk of humans getting killed is much lower. And liquid methane is polluting significantly less too
NASA could have developed a NEW reusable space ship after the shuttle was scrapped if they were allowed to explode prototype after prototype after prototype while sucking down billions in taxpayer dollars
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Read what I wrote
NASA could have developed a NEW reusable space ship after the shuttle was scrapped if they were allowed to explode prototype after prototype after prototype while sucking down billions in taxpayer dollars