But SpaceX has literally lowered the cost of a launch by an order of magnitude. They also are flying one of the most successful rockets ever flown.

I don’t know if I quite agree with that being a morale issue. But that same logic nuclear reactors are immoral because if they blow up they can cause a lot of harm.

I do agree that it is a little sketchy for human flight, but they wouldn’t use it if there was a significant chance of it harming the people on board.

Going to the moon was a fantasy at one point. I just don’t see any downsides to trying to become multi-planetary. Even if it fails there would still be technology developed in pursuit of that goal that helps life on earth.

That wouldn’t happen for an extremely long time. It will be many generations before Mars would be self sufficient enough that they could wage war on Earth. I don’t feel like that’s enough of a possibility to not even try colonizing another planet.

I’m not aware of any reason on why we’d want to colonize the bottom of the ocean, but there’s many reasons to want to become a multi-planetary species. Space exploration has also lead to many technologies being used in everyday life today.

What’s morally questionable about fission fragment drives?

Fair enough. I’ve just been jaded from reading people bash on SpaceX anytime anything in space “fails”. But yeah, those events are similar in the sense that on the surface it looks like a failure, but they met their main mission goal and learned a lot from it. It sounds like the engine issue might’ve happened for them before, so hopefully they got a lot of good data from this and are able to fix the issue.

It’s important to keep in mind that going to space is very hard. Landing on another celestial body is order of magnitudes harder.

I don’t know why people insist on trying to diss SpaceX anytime there’s space news… Anyway, last time they missed the Autonomous Drone Ship was years ago when they were first trying to land. So I’m not exactly sure what you are referring to.

Plus, with space missions there are usually many different mission objectives, and with this mission the main mission was to “demonstrate its highly precise navigation and landing system” which they determined to be a success. The extra credit mission would be if it landed properly and they were able to do more science with it.

I read aggressive as in accelerating aggressively. Possibly to get around people?

While that is true, it’s not fair to say “see they lied! In completely different circumstances you only get a fraction of the range!” Even for ICE vehicles they use ideal conditions to measure their MPG/range even though most people aren’t driving in ideal conditions.

Looks like the plan is for it to eventually reach speeds over 4000 mph.

As someone who has floored it in a Tesla with no racing experience, it really isn’t hard to stay in the lane.

I get your point, but isn’t that essentially what any rocket is? Lol

Fair enough. Starship is still in its infancy though so I wouldn’t completely give up hope yet.

Apparently you don’t know how to have a conversation… Doing a quick search it seems like Starlink is around the break even point for operating costs and revenue, so if you’d like to provide sources to refute that, that’d be great.

What makes you think Starship isn’t going to Mars?

You have yet to actually provide any counter points other than plugging your ears and saying “Nu uh!”

What? 😂 This flight wasn’t supposed to go to the moon. It’s a test flight. They’re developing the most powerful rocket to have ever flown and recover every part of it. They’re also using a power cycle for the engine that has never been used before. So no, what SpaceX is doing has never been done before.

A reused rocket mission from SpaceX is at least an order of magnitude cheaper than any other major launch provider. And to this date SpaceX has flown 216 reused rockets, and at least one of those was used for a manned mission.

There’s only 8 (or 9 depending on who you ask) planets in the solar system. So Musk would have 2 fingers to spare. And we haven’t even “landed” on all of them (not sure how you’d land on a gas giant…)

Also to make it clear, it was never planned to even make it to LEO. SpaceX has made it very clear that they wanted to get close to the energy experienced during an actual reentry without actually making it to orbit.