Nope, they were awarded 3 billion dollars to develop the Human Landing System, which is the Starship they’re supposed to use for the moon landing.

Why 3 billion dollars?

Because Kathy Lueders, the interim director at NASA at the time, called SpaceX and told them if they could get their proposal down to 3 billion, it would be approved. No other contractor was given this call. When SpaceX submitted the revised proposal, Lueders unilaterally approved SpaceX for the contract.

Kathy Lueders is now the manager of Starbase Texas, SpaceX’s private launch facility. She was hired six months after she approved the contract.

Oh, and recently the Government Accountability Office released a report that the Raptor engine, which powers starship, does not have the performance required to do the mission anyway. But this has largely gone unmentioned, because the GAO is largely a toothless organization.

You’re right in that the contract is Fixed-cost, so if SpaceX blows up too many rockets and burns through that 3 billion, they are left holding the bag. But SpaceX did receive that money and are spending it to develop Starship.

I love Space, it’s been a passion of mine since I was a kid. I love learning about space, and learning how all these launch vehicles work. Rockets are really fucking cool. I want the Starship to be everything they say it is, it would be a powerful tool for making Spaceflight cheaper and easier. But the more I’ve learned about the history of spacecraft development, and the more I’ve learned about Starship in particular, the more concerned I’ve been. Starship is ludicrously complicated, even compared to a similar vehicle like the Space Shuttle. And the fact that it looks like SpaceX was awarded the contract to make Starship not on merit but though a corrupt deal where the director of nasa called and told them the price tag, and then took a job from SpaceX less than a year later, just makes me incredibly jaded with the whole project. The develop approach is concerning given they are spending US tax dollars, the design of the craft is concerning given the complexity it adds to an already complex mission. Everything comes together to make me think that because of this, we may not have humans back on the moon anytime soon. We need someone at the GAO or NASA to take a serious look at what SpaceX is doing to develop this lander, why it’s failing to test all of the hardware needed for the Artemis mission, and why they are now several years behind schedule on a multi-billion dollar contract.

It’s not about converting the car.

I have a 2009 Chevy with an automatic transmission. I’m order to convert it to electric, the ECU would have to be replaced so the car knows when to shift to a higher gear without a combustion engine.

Because of environmental reasons, ECUs are pretty tightly controlled by the government. I don’t know if any company even exists that can sell an aftermarket ECU. There’s plenty that can hack or reprogram ECUs, but even that is becoming increasingly regulated and legally questionable.

I would love to convert my car to an electric, but it’s an automatic so I’d have to spend as much as a new car to convert it.

A drop in ECU replacement and motor/battery would be great, but I doubt the auto industry or the government is going to allow the sale of third party drop in ECUs.

Idk why, but the red coloring of his eyes make him look really demonic

Oh they definitely did.

Before the pandemic, I’d see one or 2 highly questionable moves in a drive.

Now it’s like a dozen.

I see people making lefts on red, cutting off semi trucks, weaving in and out of traffic, driving with absolutely no lights at night, and my god the speeding.

A few years ago it was normal to see people doing like 5 miles an hour over the limit, now it feels like half the people want to do 10 or 15, even on surface streets.

I wonder if it’s that most people drove less during the pandemic, the fact that cops around here were told to only pull people over if they were a direct threat to the public, or if the social isolation just made some people way more self centered. But driving has definitely gotten worse since the pandemic.

The kind where science communicators have to account for the lowest common denominator of reader that may not have payed attention in high school when the teacher was talking about photons being the reason for light.

The manhattan project originally start as a way to defeat Germany, it just wasn’t ready in time.

I honestly don’t consider starlink to be a SpaceX product.

I’d technically owned and operated by them because SpaceX owns starlink LLC, but they did it that way to boost their launch contracts for their one viable product: falcon 9 launches.

So since they wanted to split starlink off into its own company, that just so happens to rely 100% on SpaceX for all contracts, then I’ll give it to them. Starlink is its own company. Which means SpaceX still only has one product.

The worst part is we could definitely have a mars base with today’s technology.

It’s just not economically or scientifically necessary to set up. Robots can do 99% of what a human can on mars, scientifically speaking, and if they break we can just build another one. If someone dies on mars, it’s gonna global news for weeks.

And mars doesn’t exactly have a huge open pit of platinum or something we want to mine, so there’s no economic incentive to set up a colony.

Musk just wants to sell the sci-fi vaporware fantasy to shareholders because SpaceX has one viable product and he’s desperate for no one to notice that.

You are correct

But these chuckle fucks want to save money.

They don’t flood a whole room with nitrogen, they just use an oxygen mask that’s flowing a lot if nitrogen.

The person is still breathing in a lot of what they exhale, which makes it very painful for them

The fact that they didn’t scout the location at all just kills me.

Like someone went there ahead of time to setup the podium and speakers, for a White House press conference, and didn’t call their boss and say “are you sure I’m supposed to set this up at a landscaping company?”

I can be a little apathetic at my job, but I’ve never been that apathetic.

And then when they showed up, they could have redirected the reporters to like a nearby park or something, but they just stuck to it.

EV infrastructure would be better if it was actually standardized and regulated to be like gas stations.

Right now, we have legacy charging ports and the new, now standard, Tesla port. So you have to make sure the charger will even fit your car. And, because we live in the future, everything is enshitified. Different charging companies have different apps that you need to download to pay for charging, many chargers are down for maintenance, but even with the app, there’s no guarantee you’ll be warned about the charger being down.

Chargers should be like gas pumps. Put in a card, put the plug in your car, and then wait for it to charge. Every plug should fit every car. The system that sprang up without government intervention is clearly insufficient, and needs to be standardized from the ground up.

I think the fact that it’s really far away, in a circular orbit, and doesn’t have a big chunk missing is still a good sign that mars isn’t theia

As has been said, the blue dot in the photo is earth, not the crescent.

But you also have to remember that earth is about twice the size of mars, so when they’re the same distance apart, earth will appear twice the size in the Martian sky then mars does for us.

His engines have already powered a new launch vehicle to orbit.

That also makes the BE-4 the first US methane fueled engine to achieve orbit, and the second in the world.

Real work in space flight actually takes time, because real engineering takes time.

SpaceX has duped everyone into thinking that the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” strategy should apply to rockets. But look at Blue Origin: they’re already selling commercially viable engines, they’ve conducted many static fires to verify and test the capabilities of their engine, and unlike SpaceX , they haven’t blown up 2 entire rockets to do it, which saves my tax dollars.

Spaceflight is hard, the engineering is complicated, it takes time and money. I’d rather a private space company, which I don’t even think should exist, be at least careful when it comes to such a dangerous thing. I’m almost certain that SpaceX is going to get people killed with the starship, just like OceanGate did.

If you’re trying to sow doubt in the election process from the ground up, it’s a great place to start.

“Look Montana had an issue with absentee votes, where else do we have issues”

Becomes

“Montana had absentee voting issues, we can’t trust anything from absentee votes at all, they don’t count”

There have been several incidents where warning systems glitched out, and only the quick thinking of a handful of individuals stopped an actual launch from happening.

“Mistake”

“Whoopsie daisy, I forgot to add 1 of the 2 candidates to the voting system, I’m such a silly goose”

Authoritarianism is cool when you’re the one being an authoritarian.

Really sucks when someone you don’t agree with decides what is allowed or not.

If you give a government power to decide who is allowed in the government, even if you think it’s for the right reasons, you’ve now created a system where all it takes is one or a few people to turn a utopia into a grueling dictatorship.

That’s not really a good gamble

I live right next to one of the largest airports in the world.

I see 5-10 parallel lines in the sky multiple times a day.

I also live next to one of the largest airports in the world, which is a few miles from a national guard base located right outside one of the largest cities in America.

I’m probably in the fireball radius of a nuke, assuming the Russians haven’t been embezzling their government money and are still fueling their hydrogen bombs, so if the big red button gets pushed, I’ll just get vaporized about half an hour later.

Don’t shoot yourself just because you see lines in the sky. You’re either close enough to civilization for planes to make lines in the sky, in which case the bombs will probably get you anyway, or you’re so far out in the sticks that you’ll have plenty of time to make a decision.