Wow…Musk actually has infinite money to buy an impeachment just like he bought the presidency.
Trump killed half a million people with his botched COVID response while Musk has definitely sentenced at least 30,000 to death by cutting off aid. How many are they going to both do in with the possible civil war all this craziness might cause? Because however this turns out it is likely the Republican party is now doomed and will never hold power again in any part of government. They will not go quietly.
If Trump has anyone with half a brain advising him, he will have Musk arrested and shut down SpaceX, deorbit starlink, and feed everything left on the ground into a metal shredder. Musk is an incredibly dangerous threat to national security because of SpaceX.
Musk is now tweeting about a third party and essentially taking over America before Trump completely wrecks it. The problem is that Musk will not do any better.
All this pro-Isaacman commentary seems to ignore the fact that if he had been confirmed it would have been his job to carry out all of Trump’s massive cuts to NASA science. No amount of spin changes that fact. He didn’t pull his name from consideration when faced with this prospect. He would have accepted the position of executioner for the prestige of being a NASA administrator.
Since I have been banned from SpaceNews I will have to just comment on the articles here. My former entourage of blocked cyberstalkers will not come here because they know I can get their Isp. Or they can spend money on a VPN. I will just delete their garbage.
@garychurch9237 2 minutes ago There are some really great comments here…..funny how the fanboys are not hijacking every forum now after Musk wrecked the U.S. democracy and murdered twenty-thousand children.
@misspiggyonrollerskates3744 21 hours ago Elon makes me think of the quote about Teddy Roosevelt, “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.”
@hendrx 6 hours ago Remember guys it’s okay to bully elon since “empathy is a weakness” according to him
@KinnshiSennin 21 hours ago The wisest thing anyone ever said about Elon Musk was, “He wants to save the world, but only if he’s the one to save it.”
@ToniaEmily 21 hours ago Elon Musk is everything Ayn Rand wanted to be. Libertarianism is Narcissism.
@johnabbott138 17 hours ago I saw a podcast interview with Kara Swisher not too long ago. Kara knows Elon, and she related an interaction she has with Elon a few years ago when Tesla was in deep financial trouble. He was practically in tears saying that humanity was going to end if Tesla went bankrupt.
She also talked about how Elon surrounds himself with a group of young sycophantic acolytes. She said that when these sycophants aren’t around, Elon will make a statement, then pause for everyone to react (which they don’t), and then say “everyone I know thought it was funny”. And, sure enough, if he is accompanied by his posse, they will burst into hysterical laughter at the most mundane quips from Elon.
@classicjones1484 18 hours ago Elon: the perfect encapsulation of the flaws of capitalism. Once youre rich enough, it doesnt matter how delusional, how inept, how self-aggrandizing, or how horrible you are for society. Once you have that capital, youre here to stay. He gets to continually make massive mistakes, commit crimes, and ruin peoples lives, and nothing meaningfully bad ever happens to him. At least we can mock the man-child online I guess.
@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 16 hours ago Too big to fail has got to end.
17 hours ago “Money doesn’t change people, it allows them to be who they always were” Maybe musk finally decided to drop the act?
@thebaccathatchews 2 hours ago He wants the two things money can’t buy: love and adoration. He’ll destroy the entire world in order to get it.
@headerahelix 2 hours ago I’m still annoyed nobody listened right at the beginning. what he did at tesla because he was upset at not being called a co founder. everyone told me i was jealous or delusional, but it was clear as day what he’s been like for what, 15? years.
@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 16 hours ago It’s telling that in the recent Sunday interview & Don Lemon one that the reporters thought they were in comfortable softball territory, & were shocked by how offended & wrathful Elon got over some really gentle questions for The Richest Man In The World. Also Elon is a living Hungry Ghost. He is so desperate to devour everything. He has no business referencing Buddhism.
@tangyferbreze 14 hours ago i think it’s also really important to point out that he is not the one actually building or designing any of these things. he doesn’t have much technical expertise in … anything. he’s just a rich maniac
@ultratog1028 15 hours ago All billionaires think they are God
@MultipleOffenses 6 hours ago Who would have that being called a genius their entire adult life, despite no supporting evidence, would result in someone having an overinflated sense of self/god complex?
@laizerwoolf 4 hours ago He is a god though, God of Cringe
@PaperMario64 50 minutes ago “Call it Main character syndrome”…NO, call it what is actually is, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is clearly dangerous for everyone else. This idea that you can’t call people what their action CLEARLY show they are is ridiculous, when you know that people who have it almost NEVER think anything is their fault. They don’t seek or get evaluated unless they are forced to or they accept that the problem could be them.
@dariamorgendorffer7813 17 hours ago We must take responsibility for this as well. I am always weary of the way we always tend to elevate individuals we believe to be supremely intelligent. Individuals such as Stockton Rush, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes have been platform constants. We have given the mic to say whatever comes out of their mouth. We have elevated them to a status that is like God. The public believes that every time someone claims to be a ‘disrupter’, they should share their opinion on everything. It’s not surprising that they have a tendency to believe they are gods.
@divineglitch9550 14 hours ago (edited) he what? he compared himself to buddha? omg the word cringe doesn’t do that cringe justice.
@no_prisoners1 4 hours ago He found the right country.
All he needed was people who worship money
@ignaciodelgado889 1 hour ago Elon was always like this, just people were willing to tolerate him because of tribalism.
@dayoft6helords 19 hours ago The US government made him a god. It can also take that a way.
@mmlvx 17 hours ago Reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great? Dude. Get help.
@Chase-Conway 16 hours ago billionaires actually do see themselves as gods.
Again, more vast apologetics for NewSpace when it is, as I have said hundreds of times in comments over the last 15 years, The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.
“The implication of the government’s position is that not only noncitizens, but also United States citizens can be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress.”
And I would add after that it is just one more step to that final fascist solution.
The Nazi presence in the Trump regime is not going away. I believe they are a underestimated threat. Tremendously underestimated. They scare hell out of me.
I am still commenting on SpaceNews and The Space Review. Could not stop myself. Hopefully some Musk worshiper does not show up at my door with a gun.
Going to have to stop commenting on SpaceNews. I have a bad feeling about the comments I am getting. One sociopathic MAGA-Musk troll is implying someone should kill me by writing:
David to Endymion If it were to act like this in day to day life, one would have wonder how it lived so long.
At the moment, Trumpism and the Musk cult is melting down and there is a slim chance that one of the half a dozen fanboys that have been cyberstalking me for years just might decide to make their life meaningful and show up on my doorstep. They never stopped me for very long in the over 15 years I have been criticizing the NewSpace Mob…but this does not feel right. It is fitting that it should end commenting about a billionaire promoting space solar power.
Comment reply on SpaceNews:
I did not get anything wrong.
Maintaining a fission nuke in cold shutdown through a launch accident isn’t particularly difficult.
If you think nuclear material contamination after a reactor is blown to pieces is not a big deal then you have a very different worldview than the rest of humankind.
-sometimes you want a lot of delta-v and a lot of acceleration. Giant chemical stages can provide the former, but not the latter.
Again….nuclear thermal, using a reaction, literally, a million times more powerful than chemicals, provides an Isp only about twice that of a chemical rocket and only using the most difficult to store cryogenic propellant. It is an order of magnitude more expensive than chemical propulsion while delivering far less improvement.
-zero boiloff hydrogen. They could obviously fail to deliver, but somebody thinks this is a problem that’s solvable long before an NTP would be ready to go.
What does “solvable” mean? What do you think will be solved?
Nope, still wrong. I agree that it’s impossible to insert fuel. But you’d never do that. That’s what control systems are for.
You can say I am “still wrong” but I am not. You do not want to launch fissionables with fuel loaded in the engine and inserting that fuel in space makes the design much more complex. If you are inferring that humans would manually insert the fuel then what you are doing is actually identifying the problem of how to get the fuel out of the safe transport into space after launch and into the engine. See how that works?
DoD wants systems with a lot of delta-v that are nimble enough to dodge and outrun kinetic attacks in deep space.
You can’t just light off a nuclear reactor like a rocket engine and, again, storing the liquid hydrogen for long periods works against “nimble.” The DOD is not going to get “what they want” with a nuclear reactor super-heating liquid hydrogen.
NTP has the huge advantage that the hot stuff mostly goes out the nozzle.
Actually….that is absurd. The huge disadvantage is that it is hard enough keeping a chemical rocket engine from melting and a bastard combination of a nuclear reactor and a rocket engine is far more difficult to keep from blowing up and why it has such a pathetically low performance using, again, a reaction a million times more powerful than chemicals.
This was the genius of the genius of Stanislaw Ulam, who considered nuclear pulse propulsion his greatest work. Ulam thought outside the box, throwing the box away and envisioning a way to use nuclear energy without having to try and confine it. If a bomb fails to go off in Nuclear Pulse Propulsion then you go to the next bomb. If you melt a hole in your Nuclear Thermal Rocket you will likely die in space.
As Nasa is doomed to be dismantled and sold for parts to Space X it is with sadness I ponder what could have been.
The Shuttle was the penultimate worst wrong turn of the many NASA has made, the worst being Elon Musk of course. I have puzzled for over a decade, since I became interested in space, how the Shuttle Program could have been a success instead of a failure, and a big part of that question is the LEO limitation. The Shuttle was in the class of the Saturn V but wasted most of that lift on a 737-sized glider.
The giant cargo bay of dreams, wings, landing gear, and various systems returned the engines, saved on the previously expended structure around the payload, and also carried a large crew and their life support….and massed over 70 tons, actually about twice as much as a 737. It is interesting to note a single Aerojet M-1 engine could have provided the thrust of the three engines mounted on the Orbiter. The 12 or so tons the triple RS-25 engine section massed was also why the Orbiter was side mounted, which led to the loss of the Columbia.
In hindsight the SRB’s, which caused the loss of the Challenger, should have been liquid fueled and could have used a variant of the same M-1 engine that could have been used on the Orbiter…except putting it on the Orbiter would not have been done in hindsight. Ironically, the configuration of the expendable SLS would have been ideal for the reusable Space Transportation system using liquid fuel boosters and returnable engine module at the bottom of the stack. All hydrogen would also have enabled propellent cross-feed from the boosters to the core engine module.
In regard to reusability and the ISS, the core hydrogen tank could have been the single expendable part and the LOX tank repurposed by leaving it in orbit for use as a wet workshop. Stockpiling these tanks in LEO would have provided crew compartments for approximately 100 space stations similar to the ISS….or an ISS one hundred times larger.
The Orbiter itself, at the top of the stack, without the Air Force cross-range requirement and not carrying the main engines, would have been much lighter. In reality, it would not have been worth it to just bring back a cargo bay and not much of any value was ever brought back. A large “Big Gemini” capsule with a reusable escape tower would have been the best path. And it would have flown far more often and still be flying.
Comments:
Hopefully, whatever I wrote that made this comment repeatedly unacceptable, I have managed to edit out this time:
“Mars-direct advocates correctly emphasize the urgency of becoming multiplanetary.”
Actually…” Multiplanetary”, is in my view a false pretense in that Mars and all natural bodies in the solar system other than Earth are unsuitable for colonization for the simple reason that human bodies require Earth gravity to stay healthy. Artificial habitats as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, miles-in-diameter spinning hollow moons, are likely the only practical path to colonization.
“-space-based solar power for lunar use creates a comprehensive economic ecosystem.”
Space Solar Power FROM lunar resources to power civilization on Earth as the solution to Climate Change will certainly create the necessary economic engine. I doubt anything else will.
“Commercial ventures should take the lead in developing revenue-generating lunar operations and driving innovative technology development.”
Space Solar Power from lunar resources seems to be the only large commercial venture that can eventually generate revenue Beyond Earth Orbit and enable colonization. And this economic engine, like Hoover Dam and the Panama Canal, will require the government to sponsor it. Even before Space Solar becomes a public works project the government must legislate a phasing out of the burning of fossil fuels for Space Solar to become economically viable.
“-the Moon offers real partial gravity, actual deep space radiation,-“
Debilitation and dosing is the elephant in the room nobody will address, not even NASA. The “Parker Minimum” of 4 or 5 hundred tons of shielding is the basic requirement for any long duration deep space missions. The Moon will be a factory site, not a colony, and workers will likely be periodically lifted into lunar orbit to 1G space stations for rehabilitation. Or… circular “sleeper trains” providing 1G beneath the lunar surface may eventually become available. While these constructs are not so difficult to build on icy low gravity bodies, they are far more difficult on the Moon.
“The choice isn’t between lunar presence and Mars development: both are essential for America’s space future.”
Personally, I believe Mars is, like LEO, a dead end, and the Moon is the prize. This is more of a choice between the false promise of Mars and the true path to space colonization from the original prophet, Gerard K. O’Neill.
There has to be a driver, an engine, and a destination. The driver is Climate Change, the engine is Space Solar Power, and the destination is the resources on the Moon that can be exploited without generating greenhouse gases on Earth. This is the Green New Space Deal that can transform the world and create the Next America. Because, in case you have not noticed, the old America ended on election night. Oligarchy is only about enriching oligarchs and unless there is a popular uprising as powerful as the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 60’s, we are entering an ever more oppressive era of autocracy that will be increasingly harder to escape.
There is ice on the Moon…but it is not an ocean of water and that is what is needed. I would say creating “catch shafts” on the Moon, that ice from the outer solar system can fly down into and be captured, is the best path. Using lunar ores to mass produce miles-in-diameter spinning hollow moons will excavate large spaces under the lunar surface that can be filled with this water from the outer solar system. In a century or so there will be large underground reservoirs. In several centuries the hundreds of millions of tons of lunar material will be replaced with these underground living seas.
I would like to see these robot spacecraft designed to send large chunks of ice at the Moon.
It is amazing how NASA took such a great concept, a Saturn V class launch vehicle that only expended a single tank of propellants and executed it in the worst way possible. And how Musk has done essentially the same thing with a two stage VTVL concept. At least it proves that the miracle of entrepreneurship is a myth. Both the government and private entities can mess up a concept equally badly.
1) Some concepts are pursued before the technologies to make them a reality exist. Pursuing them may foster development, but the failures may hinder future progress. For example, it may be that Starship would work fine with Rotating Detonation Rocket Engines with an Isp of over 500 and made out of super-alloys lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel. Both of these are being developed but do not “exist.” Starship does not look like it is going to succeed in it’s present form because the rocket equation says so.
2) Some technologies exist but are not available, not feasible, due to their inherent risk, cost, or effect on the environment. For example, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion is by far the most powerful and efficient technology available to lift immense masses off the Earth and travel to the outer reaches of the solar system and back at fantastic speeds. But lifting off from the Earth is not acceptable. And presently not even operating in deep space is an available option due to cost and lack of vehicles that can send components like multi-thousand-ton plates Beyond Earth Orbit.
3) Some consequences, predicted as a possibility or unintended, even if technology is available, make many goals not worth pursuing due to their problematic nature and near certainty of negative, and in some cases, catastrophic results. For example….Megaconstellations.
In the center, being pulled from these three sides of concepts, technology, and consequences, are the goals in space exploration well worth pursuing. Evaluating these goals are the place to start.
What are these end goals? To get rich? To survive as a species?
We could solve Climate Change and provide a western standard of living to 10 billion human beings. We could remove the nuclear arsenal to months away in deep space on human-crewed spaceships and thus end the launch-on-warning nuclear threat to civilization. We could build miles-in-diameter artificial hollow moons to colonize space with and eventually travel to other stars. We actually have the technology to do this.
It does not appear these first two goals complement each other and in fact are the opposite. This is my problem with NewSpace….it is the wolf pack pleading with the flock of sheep to trust their good intentions.
The best replacement for the SLS-SRB’s, in my view, would be partially pressure-fed boosters using cryo-compressed liquid hydrogen storage and expander-bleed cycle engines. These would be essentially scaled-up versions of the Japanese LE-9 331,000 pound thrust engines, in the 2 million pound thrust range. These boosters, each mounting 2 engines and four per pair, might also offer propellent cross-feed to the SLS core and would be ocean-recovered like the original Shuttle boosters. Along with the RPAM concept at the top of the page, with a dual side mount, this would drop 4 items per launch into the ocean to be recovered by a ship off the coast of Florida. While the RPAM data provided cites a weight of approximately twice the lift of our current heavy lift helicopter (CH-53K), a twin RS-25 derivative RPAM able to be helo-captured might be feasible.
I believe this would make the SLS into what the Space Shuttle was intended to be.
Nobody imagined it would be this bad. They are in a big hurry to destroy the government and if we do not stop them they will. The Trump administration needs to end in the same big hurry, or we will be living in a dictatorship very soon. Privatize means for profit means profit for billionaires. The billionaire belief system is that everything has to make them money. If it does not it is “communism.”
By Sarah Jones, senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor
In filmmaker Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation of Starship Troopers, military service guarantees citizenship in a futuristic — and fascist — regime. The policy is simple: Join the war on the alien bugs or suffer a second-class life. Verhoeven’s satire worked in part because it echoed real-world politics. Although the American government is a mite less radical than the fanatical world government of Verhoeven’s film, our politicians have long promised a form of enhanced citizenship to those who fight. The military welfare state supports active-duty servicemembers and their dependents, and once a person separates, they’re eligible for benefits that aren’t available to anyone else. They can receive affordable health care through the VA or go to college on the GI Bill or apply for a reasonable home loan. If they’re able to work, they might look to the federal government, which offers preferential hiring to veterans.
Veterans’ benefits once seemed like the third rail of American politics, but perhaps no longer. As Elon Musk and his DOGE goons slash away at federal jobs, they’ve laid off thousands of veterans with few repercussions to date. Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former attorney and a White House adviser, told reporters on Tuesday that the veterans they’ve fired might not be “fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work.” She added, “And we can’t, you know, I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say, ‘Sorry, you know, they’re not going to come to work.’ It’s just not acceptable.” A day later, the Associated Press reported that the VA plans to fire about 80,000 workers, a clear threat to veterans’ care. The news hit home: My husband, a Marine veteran, relies on the VA for his health care.
Trump’s patriotism has always been bluster, a way to mobilize his base without much of a material commitment to veterans or servicemembers. That’s not so unusual for an American politician, even if most are not as blunt as Trump’s adviser, Habba. Anyone can campaign on so-called veterans’ issues; it’s much more difficult to reckon with the human cost of our bloody foreign policies. In the absence of moral accountability, the American government offers its youth a fragile bargain instead: Kill the bugs, and we’ll take care of you later.
But there’s no way to trust a promise that recognizes the humanity of some while denying it to others. What we do on the battlefield and in prisons like Guantánamo Bay reflects the domestic values and priorities of the American government. We have always reserved humane treatment for a select few while we force everyone else to struggle for scraps, though we insist the system is based on merit. Dignity is a luxury, meted out on the basis of race and gender and disability status. In such a country, the benefits we offer veterans rest on a shaky foundation. If health care and housing and education are unique privileges, not universal rights, the government can easily go back on its word. Veterans are only special as long as they’re convenient.
In betraying veterans now, the Trump administration merely hastens the inevitable. It has been popular to think of veterans as an exception to centuries of rhetoric and policy that cast people in need as takers and moochers; the uniform has, in theory, distinguished those who bore it from those who belong to a parasitical class. We see now that the uniform never meant all that much and that what’s given can be taken away in a flash. But policy does not exist in a void. In this case it depends on a Praetorian culture that achieved new strength in the post-9/11 era. We honor the troops with parades and flags and discounts at Applebee’s, as if no form of citizenship is entirely separate from consumer identity. Members of both parties brandish the uniform to win office and curry favor not just with veterans themselves but with moderate and conservative voters who say they respect the military.
By definition, American Praetorianism singles out military service for special treatment, almost sanctification. That can be powerful, but for whom? Although millions of people have achieved middle class stability thanks to the military welfare state and veterans’ benefits, their rise always depended on the whims of the government. An administration that is poised to damage Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is an administration that can strip veterans of everything we said they had earned. Habba’s comments are remarkable because she is telling us the truth about the order of things. Veterans remain subject to political forces that prioritize profit margins over human life and dignity. With each week that passes, it becomes harder to deny that Elon Musk’s billions carry more weight than the uniform ever could. It is similarly no coincidence that the administration is purging veterans from the federal workforce while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks of lethality and warfighting. This is a cruel ideology, which treats humanity as a trait it can bestow or rescind. No one is safe, not even the troops.
The Space Review and SpaceNews has, for many years, been a prime promoter of Elon Musk and SpaceX and now is the time for them to be doing the opposite. It is NOT the time to be ignoring what is happening in America. Nobody is talking about the number of children that have died since aid programs were cut by Musk, how many suicides have and will happen because of those who have lost their jobs because they were fired by Musk, how much damage has been caused to America and the reputation of America in the world by Musk.
It would be better if this person had never been born. Somebody else would have built a rocket. Musk’s determination to destroy democracy should have space advocates screaming at the top of their lungs to have SpaceX government contracts cancelled, SpaceX private contracts blocked, and SpaceX assets seized, due to the blatant conflict of interest and attacks on those agencies Musk obviously wants to stop interfering with his ability to do anything he wants.
Now is the time for Americans to stand up to this enemy of democracy, including the press. Now is the time to fight to restore democracy and save America. That Musk called Senator Mark Kelly a traitor, who I voted for, who flew combat missions as a naval aviator and flew the space shuttle is outrageous. Senator Kelly, showing dignity and class that is completely lacking in the Trump/Musk circus, said the richest man in the world should go back to building rockets and stick to that. I think Musk should be exposed by The Space Review and SpaceNews for what he is and by doing so make a clear statement about loyalty to the United States instead of to an oligarch.
Ice on the Moon 