South African fascist and Afrikaner white supremacist Elon "Leon" Musk is having problems not only at his failing Tesla car company, but his SpaceX rockets aren't cooperating with his geeky vision of space flight to Mars. From Reuters:
"SpaceX's Tuesday night Starship launch went further than previous attempts.
But in the end it lost control and is believed to have disintegrated on reentry, marking another setback for Elon Musk's promise to put humans on Mars.
The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship vessel mounted atop a towering SpaceX Super Heavy rocket booster, blasted off at about 7:36 p.m. EDT (2336 GMT) from the company's Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast of Texas near Brownsville.
SpaceX launched the Starship system with a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time, aiming to achieve a key demonstration of its reusability.
As expected, the 232-foot (71-m) first-stage rocket separated from the upper-stage Starship vehicle several minutes after launch and headed back toward Earth.
But SpaceX controllers lost contact with the booster during its descent before it presumably plunged into the sea instead of making the controlled splashdown the company planned." (our emphasis)
Musk, like his cult leader, can't accept losing, so he portrayed the setback as a "big improvement" over the last couple of launches, which also ended in disaster. In their announcement, SpaceX called the failure a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," the same silly jargon that was used in the previous failures.
It's past time for the U.S. to wean itself off of SpaceX's monopoly, which in itself is a national security problem given the dangerously mercurial and radical head of the company. That won't happen in the Malignant Fascist's regime, since he's a MAGA icon and can hold his political contributions hostage, but it has to be done eventually.
In an age of advanced robotics and AI, somebody needs to explain to me why ships to Mars need to have living beings that eat, breath, and go potty. It's nuts.
ReplyDeleteThe problem Elon faces with Space-X is simple: His optimism and confidence; his ability to seem trendy, modern, and get people to buy into the hype, failed to impress the laws of physics.
ReplyDeleteHis team designed a new engine. A good one by most accounts. But instead of testing it to see what it could do, incorporating reasonable safety margins, and designing his rocket around those specifications Elon made a very unreasonable, and very optimistic, guess as to the ultimate thrust is would provide.
In a nutshell: the engines are simply not powerful enough to get even a fraction of the design payload into orbit. They are presently trying to strip every ounce of weight they can from the rocket and run the engines hotter than what is safe or reliable. The air-frame is becoming more delicate as the engines are vibrating more. The rockets are coming apart at the seams.
The problem is that the falsity was introduced early in the design and the entire ship needs redesign. He needs more or better engines, some place to hold the extra fuel to feed them, increased attitude and positioning thruster power to steer the heavier beast, and even more thrust to lift this ever heavier rocket.
The present design can't handle the upgrades. This is literally; rocket science. Elon is not an engineer. He is a venture capitalist and carnival barker that stays one step ahead of financial reality by using hype, hyperbole, and spectacle to sell pie-in-the-sky to the rubes. Physical reality is not so easily fooled.
The same thing is happening with Tesla and FSD, Robo-taxi, his robot, Spacelink, and, by some whispers, Neurolink. He promises the sky in a month or two but delivers an unimpressive product years (sometimes decades) late.