It’s a reference to something Musk himself tweeted.

I totally agree and it is always a bit of an eyeroll for me. They need data and these are very high risk goals so yes spend a lot of money on tests they know won’t be successful, but they are testing some other aspect.

But also idc, it’s fun to laugh at cuz fuck Elon. I’ve hated him for ages especially when he was put on trumps council. That was the giant red flag he was just another capitalist greedy vain fuck who doesn’t give a shit about saving the planet and just smart and lucky enough to realize that’s where the money and acclaim was going eventually.

Also wanna preface with I’m definitely not a fanboy, but most of those explosions were caused deliberately by remote. Every rocket, SpaceX or otherwise, has a Flight Termination System. Every launch, there is a Range Safety officer sitting in a bunker, watching a live feed with a ‘big red button’ in front of them. It’s their job to self-destruct the rocket if there’s any chance it will crash down on land, or unrestricted areas at sea, to protect people on the ground. They’re also generally more trigger happy when there aren’t people aboard. Most of the problems rockets have don’t actually cause them to immediately explode from arse to end simultaneously.

Edit: I should add, for completeness, that the flight computer aboard the rocket can also trigger the FTS if it decides a crash is unavoidable.

No. They were not a success.

So far they have been merely replicating what smarter people did back in the 60’s with a ruler instead of a computer and they didn’t need to blow up rocket after rocket to get it right. Yes, a few blew up in accidents but again, they didn’t have computers and perfect production techniques, they had rulers and unique engines that were built by hand and couldn’t even sawp parts because of loose tolerances of the time.

They made it work without blowing through rockets like a Michael Bay movie. Moreso, and I cannot stress this enough, they would NOT FUCKING APPLAUD when their rockets blew up. Blow up == Failure.

Let me please add to this that the big 30 something engine rocket they launched pretty much failed because Elon in his infinite wisdom decided they didn’t need a fucking flame diverter on the launch pad, something they figured out 60 years ago already.

Even the “rocket that can come back” was done without blowing up crap all the time 30 years ago, and even back then they saw that it was NOT A GOOD IDEA.

This entire “quick turn around, have a rocket ready to fly again like an airplane” had been bullshit from the start and will continue to be because of how rockets works. Buildings? Don’t move, weight usually matters not too much. Trucks? Relatively very slow, weight matters only for fuel efficiency. You can tow well over 70% in weight, you can build trucks to really last long, heavy strong pieces.

Airplanes? Fast, but weight really starts to matter. So you build airplanes out of lightweight materials. It’s still super safe, but airplanes are quite wobbly, require a lot of checks and maintenance and you cannot take on as much freight, typically in the 30-40%

Rockets? We’re at the limit of what is mechanically possible. Rockets require about 90% of their weight in fuel, leaving 10 for the rocket itself and it’s cargo. That leaves VERY little for cargo and every single kg matters so engines (heavy) are built to -on the one hand- be as light as possible and on the other hand run shit tonnes of fuel through them in a matter of minutes. Basically rocket engines are like airplane engines but they need to dump through the same amount of fuel in minutes instead of hours, with temperatures twice as high.

Basically, once a rocket engine is finished working, it needs days, weeks of repairs and maintenance. Doing your little “fly back” trick is nice but the repairs and time needed is more than just dumping that rocket and building a new one from scratch.

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