https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

Even the modern supermarket was a tool in American anti-Soviet propaganda:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's no need to use the same recovery system for every stage either. That includes the space-based ones. SpaceX's plans for Starship are really based on their goal of going to Mars the first time, and that might work with some tweaks for a few trips to the moon too. The design of the super heavy booster is dictated by the need to refuel Starship in orbit.

The net is more efficient for the first stage and probably a second stage as well. Landing on the moon is best done with a lander designed for that, and if you're serious about regular tirps the transit in between would be best in a space-only vehicle. Eventually you're going to want to build a return booster that runs on stuff you make on the moon too.

I doubt the Chinese will use a reusable booster at all for their first few moon trips, just like the Artemis astronauts aren't going to be launching on Starship.

No but I uh understand the human English language and you mean to imply that is what I am suggesting

You might want to study the English language a bit more. Maybe some history too. The revolutionary US is often held up as an attempt to build a classless society, in contrast to Europe's aristocracy. That's not entirely accurate, the US founders had a bunch of different ideas about classism, and, uh, there's slavery of course, but people like John Adams purposely tried to structure the new government to prevent the class tyranny that the old aristocratic systems suffered from.

TLDR: I was agreeing with you.

It's even funnier when you know that the Russians did the same thing in the 90s.

This is a demonstration. 60 feet is pretty modest, the Russians did 20 m in the 90s and planned 60 m. These guys are aiming for 180 ft (~60 m). Even that is fairly modest by what you could potentially do. The US has 100 m dish antennas in orbit.

Little late for that. Like 35 years late.

The booster doesn't go to the moon anyway.

You make a question answering web service and then people pay you to have it answer their questions. How unfair. Oh the humanity.

Did I say you did?

The ESA even famously poo-poo'd the idea, exactly like you guys are doing here.

Sure, and SpaceX is going to cure cancer and let us all live forever for free. The fact that they once did something that somebody somewhere thought they couldn't do doesn't mean they can automatically do anything. Note that SpaceX themselves say they don't really have any idea whether datacentres in space will work.

unlike you and apparently most others on slashdot, I'm not going to try to stop it,

I didn't say anything about stopping it. There are good arguments for proceeding carefully though. A million satellites in one of our most valuable orbits comes with a bunch of problems.

Besides, I'm not seeing the argument for fraud, which is what GP asserted

I didn't reply to the OP, I replied to you:

If that was the intent, it wouldn't really work due to Elon himself having more downside exposure than anybody,

Elon doesn't have any downside. He's never going to sell his shares unless he absolutely has to. He wants to go to Mars, which means SpaceX wants to go to Mars. SpaceX made $75 billion dollars off the IPO, possibly at quite an inflated price. He also gets his Twitter investors off his back as they can now cash out their formerly underwater shares at a significant gain.

Whether any of it is fraud or not is for lawyers to figure out. Every company is going to hype their stock before an IPO. SpaceX says, buried deep in the prospectus, that they really have no idea whether datacentres in space are going to work or not, and they have a few very compelling reasons to push highly speculative, AI-related ideas even if they don't think they're going to work.

Wait, what? They're *making* money now? Last I heard they were still playing shell games with pretend money in a financial merry-go-round of pinky swear deals to make it seem like they are somehow not haemorrhaging quite so many hundreds of billions of dollars as they actually are to try and keep the VC funding flowing in.

The AI endgame, sure. That's totally going to be the kind of bait and switch that Google pulled when they transitioned from a search provider into an ad provider; get everyone hooked on your services, then monetise all the data you've captured and start cranking up the token fees until your customers (only they are actually more your "product" now) squeal, then turn it up some more while offering a rent-seeking subscription model that looks like a good deal until you realise (too late) what they've buried in the small print.

Drug pushers are probably looking at the tech industry in awe at this point.

Don't judge a book by it's cover. The "top" journals have always been mostly hype. Even more so now that they can charge $13,000 to publish an article in them.

Right. And Starfish Prime was launched into an orbit where it remained for days before it was detona....

Oh wait no, it was a regular old ICBM that was set to detonate early.

That's a very nice classless society you have there.

Coca-cola contains Kola nut extract.

Does it? You seem very sure considering the recipe is a famous secret. And the Internet disagrees:

https://www.bbc.com/future/art...

https://fox8.com/news/it-used-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...