7 ms·

Lol. I can't imaging the figures from a Musk venture not holding up.

• maxlin 22d ago
  Many said that about Starlink too. Impossible to send so many rockets up. Till it isn't.
  • estearum 22d ago
    Could you find a source of someone saying this?
    • TMWNN 22d ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W676Kk9LSYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W676Kk9LSYw
      • estearum 22d ago
        Did you watch the video? This person didn't say it was impossible to launch enough satellites for Starlink. He said the Falcon 1 launch price of $5MM was unrealistic, which ended up being correct. At the time, Falcon 1 was supposed to launch 600kg for $5MM. It ended up launching 420kg for $9MM. $8k/kg to $21k/kg. Now obviously there's always a lot of doubt and skepticism around SpaceX, but you can just say "people said this would be really hard but they did it." Or you can say "Musk set a goal to 4x performance and got to an also-remarkable 3x" or whatever. Even in this video, the smug Ariane guy heaps a decent amount of praise upon SpaceX and what they've achieved. He just said a $5MM launch will not be one of those things, and he was correct.
        • TMWNN 21d ago
          >Did you watch the video? Yes, thus my posting it. His underlying tone is that reusability is "a dream" (his words). Without reusability, Starlink as a network of tens of thousands of satellites would not be practical. He said this in 2013, two years before the first Falcon 9 booster landing.
          • estearum 21d ago
            Calling reusability "a dream" is different from saying "Starlink is impossible." You can try to read the tea leaves on tone and some creative interpretation of implicature (despite Starlink actually needing fewer than 1000 satellites for its public launch), but they're different claims. Not sure why there's a need to exaggerate the victimhood of SpaceX lol, super strange. The Ariane guy was quite clear about what he thought was practical and not. He said $5MM launch won't happen (it didn't). He said reusability is a dream (he was wrong). He said nothing about the impossibility of Starlink, either implicitly or explicitly.
            • inemesitaffia 21d ago
              Without reusability, SpaceX wouldn't achieve profitability in its connectivity segment. Especially not by 2024
              • estearum 21d ago
                Maybe so, but that wasn't the claim the Ariane guy was making at all.
    • maxlin 21d ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/9tgrzp/why_starlink_is_impossible/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/9tgrzp/why_...
      • estearum 21d ago
        ... a Reddit comment? I guess I assumed you meant "people who should have a pretty good idea said it was impossible" since that could be interesting, and not "a random person on the Internet said X", since that's not interesting for any value of X.
        • inemesitaffia 21d ago
          It's not particularly hard to find other ones. Add one more and it's people.
          • estearum 21d ago
            Oh sure, I bet you can find plenty of random people on the Internet who said it's impossible. You can also find plenty of people on the Internet who say that humanoid reptiles live in the earth's core. Is either one interesting when/if they're wrong?
            • inemesitaffia 18d ago
              There's a thread covering this topic on the NASASpaceflight forum