Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Depends on your jurisdiction.

The New Hampshire Constitution guarantees that the only purpose of prison is reform.

I know, in some self-proclaimed "Christian" states they love to talk about gay rape as a purpose of prison.

Those are psychopaths, Donnie.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.

I don't have the time to go to another county far away from me for that, nor the lawyer money. Welcome to America.

"Oh, you're in Dallas, what part? That's very interesting. I'll be there next month - what's a good restaurant there that you like? I always like to ask locals where to eat when I'm visiting get the real scoop."

The North Koreans get tripped up and stammer something irrelevant. Buh-bye, stop wasting our time.

The Feds took down one instance of the racket. It's like busting Epstein and Diddy but not the other twelve.

"From 2021 until 2024, the co-conspirators allegedly impersonated more than 80 U.S. individuals"

It's called identity theft. Are you new?

I've had my identity stolen, the problem is that courts don't punish corruption. In fact, they enable it.

Someone bought a car using my identity. Their proof of identity was my social written on a check cashing card. They had my same name, all three names. But the DOB didn't match so the person who sold them the car was in on the scam. Then a court (in Nevada City, CA) awarded a judgement against me based on my social being written in pen on a check cashing card. This does not meet any reasonable standard for SSN verification, but they got the judgement anyway.

That courthouse should be sold and the funds distributed between the court's victims.

The identities of people who mod posts should be public. That's the single most broken by design thing about the Slashdot moderation system.

That wouldn't make sense if everyone had modpoints and comment scores could be higher, but they don't and they can't.

This isn't a community, and this is a big part of why.

Who's "we", the USA? Or do you imagine that all nations which aren't China are on the same page when it comes to... anything?

The only thing they're good at is breaking the law.

Sending them "there" is just as good, Starship is already adequate to get the real job done.

The senate lunch system was designed as a jobs and wealth redistribution scheme first and a space craft development project second.

> Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?

"Everybody is stupid and lazy now" isn't the most parsimonious explanation.

Especially from the Gulf of Tonkin/MK Ultra era.

To add to what you said there wasn't a bright line between the Apollo Program and the ICBM program.

Though SpaceX is being funded to build a war-fighting duplicate of Starlink and a weapons-deployment copy of Starship for the Air Force.

Whether or not Armstrong walked on a moon or a set at Elgin Air Force Base wasn't important to the ICBM program, just to TV and politicians. And he refused any TV interviews for decades.

For that matter, you can already get WiFi 7 equipment... you can get m.2 modules for 20 or 30 bucks, even with master mode. I spent under $30 for a complete MT7925 kit, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be 2T2R 2.4/5G/6GHz. It's only a 160 MHz chip but it was cheap and has pretty snazzy bluetooth as well. Anyway, oh well, at least it does all those other things. Anyway, can't vendors "solve" this (except for the customers being pissed off part) with firmware which prevents selecting 6 GHz? That seems like a pretty simple patch.

At the time I had no credit due to being a victim of identity theft.

Now my credit is fixed but I just like not having a contract, and it's $35/mo. I only get I think about a dozen GB of internet, but that is fine for my purposes since I don't stream video.