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Report concludes former Spaceport America director violated state law

“Entrepreneurs” attract corruption and criminality while state sponsored projects generally deliver without that if they have oversight committees doing their jobs. The best example being the draconian oversight imposed by NASA on contractors after the Apollo 1 fire. That was actually the death of the space age before it even began as Aerospace concerns realized Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) was going to be hard money. They chose the easy money of cold war weapons. I have seen comments to that effect for years and I completely agree with them. Choosing to make spaceships instead of submarines carrying enough warheads to incinerate millions of human beings is something corporations and “entrepreneurs” will never do. We have to do it with letters and votes. Mothers against drunk drivers changed an entire culture and we just voted a super-cult leader out of office so there is no excuse.
A Green New Space Deal is the hope of humankind.

China pushes ahead with super-heavy-lift Long March 9

Compared to military programs it is not throwing much away- just expending hardware that would require a great deal more money to reuse for small savings and a sacrifice in payload. It is simply an aluminum can vs a glass bottle choice. That has always been the argument that NewSpace proponents refuse to acknowledge. I recently commented on the Shuttle expending one component of the Space Transportation System, the external tank, as the necessary sacrifice to the rocket equation. Because of other design decisions this of course did not work out- but it was the best feature of the STS.
So with that in mind it is not hard to see why the shiny starship is not exciting me.

(Reply to Ron) You accuse me of being “strange” and “swayed by emotion” with zero evidence- which, as you also accuse others of, is pushing an “unsubstantiated rumor.”

“SpaceX has shown that reusability can be done, and that it is economically beneficial.”

Actually, the Shuttle showed that reusability could be done first in 1981 with spacex doing it over 30 years later- not that great an accomplishment. And spacex has yet to reveal exactly how “beneficial” their reuse has been. The falcon expends the upperstage engine while the Shuttle only expended a tank. The Shuttle was a Saturn V class vehicle (that wasted much of it’s payload on the Orbiter) that in a cargo version would have lifted much more than the FH.

It seems to me you have the strange emotions concerning a private profit-driven company as a “game-changer for humanity.” And you should not cred-brag about your “background” here. I could do the same but I try not to. Hope you had a good thanksgiving Ron.

(Reply to Ron) “Humanity” cannot afford to trust the future to “entrepreneurs” who don’t think a lethal virus should stop factory workers from risking their lives for the bottom line. See how that works?

And it is pretty obvious what you are dragging into this conversation. Toxic borderline insults again Ron?

Try and improve. Things need to get better.

The Chinese are on the way to having their own Saturn V and it seems many people commenting here are not taking that very seriously. The SpaceX promotion on this forum frequently devolves into half-truth and blandishment. It really needs to be called out so as to discourage this becoming a cult of wishful thinking. Probably too late for that.

“No, the Shuttle was “refurbish-able”, not reusable.”

Not according to everybody else.

“For the Falcon 9 1st stage all they do is clean and inspect.”

What about the second stage?

“Even the low costs of the partially reusable Falcon 9/H are not yet low enough, which is why the fully reusable Starship is so important.”

Demanding everything be dirt cheap is not going to expand humankind into space. The opposite is true and the proof of that is the truth about the next comment:

“We built the 450mT ISS out of components that Falcon 9 can lift, which is proof that it doesn’t matter how much a single launch can lift, but HOW MANY launches can be done.”

At 150 billion and 4 billion dollars a year to maintain, the ISS is the example NOT to use. If China sends up a wet workshop upper stage (Skylab was a “dry workshop” that with a few more million dollars spent to make it wet would have been larger than the ISS) they will have done it an order of magnitude cheaper than what the NewSpace formula of private companies with small rockets can.

As for the shiny starship..while the Falcon 9 is really a modernized 1961 Saturn I rocket with a 1993 Delta Clipper land back feature and some soviet propellent super-cooling thrown in, the Starship is going to require much more than NASA knock-offs and will never be as cheap as promised (in my opinion). The Concorde and American SST come to mind.

Launchspace Technologies proposes debris mitigation and collection constellations

My opinion on the entire smallsat constellation concept is it never should have been allowed. The way to go was in the opposite direction- up into GEO with large shielded human-crewed platforms. The low-latency gamer addicts would just have to suffer or move to some better internet. The GEO platform was what Arthur C. Clarke envisioned in his classic work, “The Promise of Space.” That would not be possible of course without an over-arching government sponsored project which most NewSpace proponents consider straight-up satanic. Smallsats are straight-up greed. Streaming cat videos from 42,000 pieces of junk is not what was promised.

The best solution to space junk has always been the “laser broom” in a high orbit pushing it down.

SES to provide satellite connectivity for U.S. military ‘internet of things’

“A large group of vendors from across the defense, aerospace and tech industries have been selected so far to compete for up to $950 million worth of individual task orders the Air Force plans to award as it continues to test and develop the ABMS.”

A billion more dollars down the MIC rathole. The problem with this weaponization of Earth orbit is the smart first move in a conflict with the U.S. is for any adversary with launch capability (and that is proliferating also) is to send up as many tungsten pellets as possible at once to destroy everything in orbit. The force that has trained to fight without overhead assets and communications will have a tremendous advantage.

Unfortunately this would likely lead to a far higher likelihood of nuclear weapons being launched. With everybody launching everything they have in the blind, civilization would take a hit that would result in a breakdown of a very fragile global infrastructure- with billions dying of starvation and radiation poisoning. A new dark age with cannibal armies roaming the Earth. Ever seen the movie “The Road”?

But the billion dollars for the ABMS is worth the risk.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to leave agency in January

I can dream Biden will appoint someone to kill the smallsat constellation concept before it turns Earth orbit into a strip-mined nightmare of space junk. But…sadly, that disaster is probably going to happen no matter what considering the past Obama/Biden support of spacex. No win. Glad anyone having to do with Trump is leaving (except Bridenstine, I wish he would reconsider staying on) but I am not a supporter of LEO broadband.