At some point, the only people who subscribe to cable (or satellite) will only be those who flat out aren't interested in having an internet connection along with it. Either way, cable is for old people.

Non-sequitor. GP was specifically talking about going beyond LEO with a two stage rocket and at a low cost. So you came in and put the cart before the horse.

Actually I take back a prior comment I stated about you -- I doubt you understand any engineering at all. If you had, you'd be capable of mentally compartmentalizing problems into their respective domains.

As for why it didn't work in this particular case, I have no idea. I imagine they did the math and determined that it would work, but it obviously didn't. That's why you gather telemetry and iterate on your design. As far as I know, this was their first attempt.

Somewhere in that void you call a head, you concluded that if at first you don't succeed, then it's obviously impossible. This is probably why you never made it anywhere in life, and rather than fixing yourself, you sit here and complain about those who did.

And when did either of these places take away a yacht?

By the way, do you know why Francois Hollande end up lobbying against his own tax hike that was a key part of his campaign platform and promise?

Regardless, if you think the grass is greener, feel free to move there. I tell everybody this -- it doesn't matter where you live -- if you're unhappy there, then why would you stay?

If you already are in your preferred place, then...what are you complaining about?

You guys keep saying that it will work with democracy, but we've already observed exactly how that pans out: After the masses start to realize that this isn't such a hot idea after all, they vote you out. What happens from there depends.

In the case of Croatia, you guys just overthrow democracy under the reasoning (as argued by Karl Marx) this is all inevitable anyways, and you may as well get the red tape out of the way of progress.

In the case of Hungary, the tankies roll in from across the border, and those who still live under democracy and benefit from it cheer them on because they haven't yet had to live under the system they so desire.

The fact is, collectivism, in all of its forms, is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Collectivism is about surviving. Individualism is about thriving. A case can be made for the former in times of war or famine where the main objective of the day is to live another day. But outside of that, it's not living.

You'll find nothing of value in his head, nor anything to drink. Your brain is the only one made of brown matter.

Heat dissipates passively in the form of infrared energy, space or not, it happens regardless. See also the second law of thermodynamics. So yeah, it's free.

The problem you're dealing with is dissipating it faster than you're creating it. Infrared alone is slow, but there are non-passive ways of radiating heat beyond normal infrared.

And because you're obviously confused enough to have such a dumb take, I feel I need to clarify something: When I'm talking about space, I'm not talking about the inside of your skull.

Bleh not "only", but you get the idea

And you're the simpleton I had to school yesterday about why SpaceX isn't concerned about an exploded rocket. So let's add more perspective for you to chew on:

- The numbers you're putting out here are barely a rounding error compared to just one day of global usage. And, this might come as a surprise to you, but there's no plan to build this in a single day.
- SpaceX is currently developing the technology to synthesize methane only from atmospheric CO2 at an industrial scale, and it's not just for this either, it's for SpaceX's broader mission.

You clearly have zero understanding of where the money for this is coming from. Here's a little factoid for you: Elon doesn't have a trillion dollars sitting around. He doesn't even have a billion. The money for this is not coming from Elon, and it's not coming from investor money either. It's coming from Starlink.

I hope you got a fork, because you're about to eat crow:

https://press.uchicago.edu/Mis...

After that, you'll need a spoon to eat my ass.

Umm...ok...Look, I don't care if you want to go full fascist and decide all by yourself what people should and shouldn't do, just don't do it in my country. Not only for my sake, but for yours -- my country has a history of killing you guys.

In the long term, this is only going to be a matter of which uses less energy: The launch, or the terrestrial datacenter.

Mind you, I'm not saying this is going to work. I really have no idea. I've seen a few ideas float around that look like they could work. The one thing I do know for certain is that SpaceX routinely does shit that people say is impossible or will never work, and then it works anyway. The main thing I object to is little Stalins like you who think they deserve to tell other people a bunch of "thou shalt" or "thou shall not"s just because of your stupid ideas about how economies should work, which don't align with how they actually work.

That's different from this...how? Anyway, allow me to introduce you to the "laser":

https://press.uchicago.edu/Mis...

In case you didn't notice, GP was upset over the idea that somebody owns a yacht, which is fairly common and not just a driveby analogy. So while they're potentially thousands of miles away at sea, he's steaming about the fact that they exist, because he has his own ideas about how somebody else's money must be spent.

What he is after is not what a free society looks like. Though some of you are of the opinion that a free society can't have rich people in it, so I may be speaking to deaf ears on this, but trust me, there are many very good reasons why socialism not only doesn't work, but makes people much worse off. Some of you guys argue "well if only it was tried!" but it has been, dozens of times, and every single time, as in 100%, the outcome was the same: Institutional poverty for all but the politburo and their inner circle. Hence why so few of them survived after the fall of the USSR, including the ones that weren't even in the USSR.

So that Sandra Bullock movie you saw is fiction, by the way. Some of you guys are arguing that Starlink is pushing us there, only it's not, and in fact it can't. Below a certain altitude, smaller mass objects are easily countered by the atmosphere, which is where the real concern for Kessler Syndrome lies. The "kissing atmosphere" in that movie was stupid primarily because the atmosphere extends well beyond the altitude of the ISS, which also puts it well beyond where they were at in that movie. Entertaining sure, but that's all that it is. A lot of other problems with that movie as well, but you get the idea.

And guess what? Nobody is.

I don't know about you, but I've been watching the Ukraine war more than any other topic over the last few years. And to that extent, I've been watching what's going on with the Rusian economy. Sure, they're not free -- Gorbachev handed that to them on a silver platter, and in return they spat in his face. Russia does not want democracy. Russian culture is fundamentally incompatible with it. They longed for another Tsar, and they got one. Western values will never work there, nor should we try to force that on them. Russians are as Russians do. However, Russia for a long time didn't want to go back to socialism. Likely most of them still don't. But their government is pulling them into that direction. Private enterprise there is largely being taxed out of existence, and they're rapidly returning to pretend work for pretend pay. The private sector hasn't been nationalized completely there, but at this point, the private sector no longer has any autonomy from the government, making it just short of de-facto socialism. The only reason it's just short of it is that people are still allowed to go into business for themselves there, even though it's basically impossible without breaking the law by evading taxes.

In space, electrons are free.

Things like nuclear magnetic resonance, lasers, quantum mechanics, and the fundamental mathematics we base encryption in today were all thought to be "stupid" or "solution in search of a problem" and yet pretty much everything you rely on today depends on them.

We live in a free society. You're free to do whatever you want with your own time and money. If this causes you to lose sleep at night, you might prefer Cuba, North Korea or (as of recently) Russia. They all agree with you that the government is the best and only arbiter of what is "stupid" to spend money on, so it must be taxed away from those less enlightened. Sit in awe at how awesome life is in those places, what with their advanced technology and all.

If that was the intent, it wouldn't really work due to Elon himself having more downside exposure than anybody, including all institutional investors combined.

Besides, some of this argument is over engineering problems that have already been solved.

That's where starship comes in.

There are a few things at play here:

- There isn't one single system or subsystem that's being tested on each starship flight, there are dozens. What you're seeing is the broader objective of mission control, which is after liftoff.
- All flights so far have included new components that have never been tested and never been proven to work. In some cases, the concept itself hasn't been proven. You may recall a while back when a falcon rocket exploded on the launch pad. That itself was the first use of an unproven propellant concept, which has been in use in every SpaceX flight since.
- All systems and components are being tested well beyond their intended operational limits. Failures WILL happen. That's why it's a test flight. Nominal failures on the very last test flight before commercial payload to orbit won't stop the commercial payload from going to orbit as long as the failure mode is well understood.

I'll grant that you understand the need for destructive testing, what you obviously don't understand is how SpaceX iterates. You're thinking of how the ESA and Blue Origin work:

Hash out a design, don't test until it's 100% done 15 year and 100 billion dollars later, even though you never really reach 100% until the design is obsoleted, and SpaceX outclassed your design by the time of your first launch.

Or Roscosmos:

Design a rocket, keep using the same design 60 years later, never taking advantage of new technology, and then wonder why a private launch company without any taxpayer funding suddenly put you out of business even though you saw obvious signs they were going to do so 10 years prior.

Or NASA:

Build a really complex launch system with an insanely high per-launch cost, and then assume that the unnecessary complexity will fix itself over time.

Here's how SpaceX does it:

Begin building your first design, learn from it while you plan building the next iteration. Launch the first if it's viable, learn from that launch, failure or not. Integrate what you learned down the pipeline while you're building the next. Keep flying and building, iterating as you go. Don't stop until the launch system is obsoleted and a fundamentally new design is called for.

And you know what? That's precisely how SpaceX advances so much faster than everybody else, and still has much lower costs. Each launch you see, failure or not, there are three more in the pipe. Nobody else does it this way. If a launch fails for the others, it's a pretty big deal because they have to build a whole new one from scratch or cancel or seriously delay another mission. For SpaceX, this is nothing. In fact, by far the biggest delays between test flights are just pure regulatory red tape -- the FAA moves very slowly, and they still end up Boeing anyway.

It's unlikely you've ever done prototyping before, otherwise you'd already understand the method behind the madness here. In software development, we do this often. SpaceX does it with rockets. Whether you or rsilverderp understand that or not isn't going to change how SpaceX views failures.

It's not even a big expense either. These rockets aren't just reusable, they're inexpensive.

So it's your argument that the pipes, seals, and other materials used to build all of this are best left with unknown tolerances and unknown failure modes, because they've never gone through destructive testing.

I see you're another graduate from the Stockton Rush school of engineering.