Ice on the Moon

Back in 2013 Chomsky talked about jobs being the critical issue to the population yet ignored by powers that be. Plenty of work to be done but not enough profit to make it worth the while of the ultra-rich. We are kept “atomized” to keep us from interfering.

99 out of 100 have never heard of the Knights of Labor. Security forces destroyed them in the 1890’s. And Jews were among the most prominent leaders. There were German immigrant and Italian immigrant anarchist movements, but they had been mostly crushed by the late 1920’s. Europeans were appalled at the way America treated labor activists. The civil war never really ended as race and immigrant antagonisms were used to keep labor from organizing.

“People may accept obedience and deference and following orders but not very far below the surface; they don’t like it. And when people can express themselves, you see it.”

“So, (they) have to block democracy, that’s a real threat.”

“In the United States, for example, we are a very free country by comparative standards, roughly seventy percent of the population has no influence on policy at all.”

“You take a look at popular opinion; the public thinks the deficit is not a major problem. The major problem is jobs.”

“But that’s not what the financial institutions want, that’s not what the wealthy want, so therefore it doesn’t enter into political discussion.”

“It’s a business-run flawed democracy.”

“Functioning democracy, would mean, for example, that stakeholders, workforce, and community, take over enterprises and run them themselves. They say it is impossible.”

“Impossible is their term, reality is what we want to construct.”

Projected Increase in Space Travel May Damage Ozone Layer

The propellant mix that produces water; hydrogen and oxygen, is most hated by NewSpace. The automatic demonization of hydrogen whenever mentioned goes back to the hobby rocket fanatics of a decade ago who insisted the falcon 9 could do everything and anything else was from satan.

The only likely path to expanding humankind off-world, Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, is most hated by NewSpace. That rocket jesus declared Space Solar Power “a stupid idea” is absolutely about his inability to completely own such a massive undertaking- only the resources of the state, and international pooling of resources, can enable powering civilization from space.

The ideology most likely to result in a fascist takeover of America, Neoliberalism, is most loved by NewSpace. Consider hydrogen hatred and Space Solar Power as stupid and it is clear Neoliberalism is the common factor.

While it was stupidity that made the dinosaurs extinct, it is simple greed that may end our species.

MagellanTV Original Documentary “Killer Asteroid: Defending Earth” to Make Impact Thursday, June 30 on the Global Streaming Service

The only comment so far on the killer asteroid article is a spacex fanboy promoting the idea of asteroid mining with several idiotic upvotes. An affirmation, an “Amen!”, to the ideology that holds Mammon as the lord of their world. Even possible extinction takes second place to profit. Unbelievable.

While it can be argued this blog is in itself an opinion column, I have been contacting some websites soliciting an opinion column about Human Space Flight. Considering the intense harassment and criticism I get when simply trying to comment on forums it might just catch on.

Anthea Butler: “They cannot come to grips with the fact that the Christianity of America is just like any other fundamentalist religion that gets weaponized in order to hold on to power. Therefore, they have to continue to tell themselves that everything that happened on Jan. 6 was an aberration and not something religious in nature. Those people are not “Christians” like us.

As a matter of public policy, Christian nationalists, dominionists and other Christian fascists are trying to impose their End Times eschatological fantasies onto secular America in opposition to the Constitution and the separation of church and state. These are fantasies of death and destruction. These white right-wing Christians literally seem to be seeking out death.

They do in fact appear to be seeking out death. They have this huge desire to live the way they want to live without restraint. At some point it is death for you, but it is not death for them.

What is the role of white privilege in explaining why so many white Americans are able to deny the serious dangers embodied by white Christian fascist violence?

White privilege convinces many white people that they will not personally have to deal with the violence. They believe that, unlike other people, they will just be able to melt away into the background when the violence happens and nobody is going to shoot people who look like them.

White privilege has convinced them that nobody’s going to take their home away from them. Nobody’s going to kill their kids. Nobody’s going to march them out as an example and shoot them. White privilege has convinced them that they can take some type of loyalty oath or pledge and they will be safe.”

It has become clear to any of us with any critical thinking ability that the elections are going to be a nightmare. The Christians who have not been corrupted better be ready to fight for survival. Nobody will admit that what is almost certain to happen is mass violence.

Rocket jesus is firing people and whining about the economy.

Could be a sign his house of cards is collapsing, and the Enron of space is about to crash and burn.

Real space enthusiasts can only hope and pray the ten-year NewSpace nightmare is about to end.

We also have “Klan gone Hiel HItler” commenting and resident sociopath se jones and full-tilt psychopath TomDPerkins down the page. Along with a long list of second-string trolls.

This is the story of NewSpace: a bunch of fascist freaks that have harassed those really interested in space and chased them away from these forums for over a decade.

Maybe John Oliver will do an expose about how all these forums have been hijacked.

And that obviously hit a nerve.

I was going to post a reply to my cyberstalker, se jones, who had trolled me with “I’ve known Musk for many years, ever since he joined The Mars Society. We disagree about a lot of things, including SPSP. I keep an open mind about it, and follow the tech advancements. But for f-sake, it’s not fing RELIGION, and Elon isn’t some kind of sacred profit or something.”

Oh…but it is a religion. And se jones does not want anyone to know that.

I usually feel bad about being banned, but not this time. I am just so sick of them all…the Musk worshipers, the Trumpists, the Ayn-Rand-in-Space libertarian whackjobs and their endless harassment. Good riddance. I did my duty to expose them for ten years. The SpaceX Review, The SpaceX News, and all the other infomercials completely hijacked by Muskrats, will not be forgotten. Like Fox News and other assorted trash, they will be thrown into that larger trash bin of history, along with the rest of the NewSpace garbage.

But we have other things to worry about as Americans. As Adam Kinzinger said,  “There is violence in the future.”

Peter Weber wrote:

How Jack Welch helped create the America of Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk

The gap between America’s rich and the poor — or really, the rich and everyone else — has stretched into a chasm. That’s fairly indisputable. The current divergence between the wealthiest Americans and the lower 90 percent of earners began in the late 1970s, after a post-World War II era of rising wages and not-outlandish differences in pay between workers and management.

Who was Welch, and why single him out?

Welch joined GE’s plastics division in 1960, just after earning his doctorate in chemical engineering, and he rose quickly through the management chain until he was elevated to chairman and CEO in 1981. 

“GE was an industrial company when he took over — making most of its money selling appliances, light bulbs, power turbines, and jet engines,” Gelles writes in The New York Times. By the time he left, dozens of acquisitions later, it was a hydra-like conglomerate encompassing everything from medical devices to aviation and NBC, buoyed by profits from GE Capital, “which was essentially a giant unregulated bank.”

Soon after becoming CEO, Welch “closed factories and fired employees by the tens of thousands, unleashing a series of mass layoffs that destabilized the American working class,” Gelles writes. “He devised systems like ‘stack ranking,’ which mandated that the bottom 10 percent of workers be fired each year,” and “he embraced offshoring and outsourcing.”

“Up until this point, people who had a job at a company like GE or IBM basically figured that they had a job for life,” Gelles told NPR. “But he explicitly said that this notion was going to be a thing of the past under his watch.”

Welch certainly wasn’t working in a vacuum. By the time he was elevated to CEO, economist Milton Friedman had been arguing for years that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Welch also took the reins at GE just months after President Ronald Reagan, whose devotion to supply-side “trickle-down” economics was in many ways a federal policy analog to Welch’s management revolution. 

“Jack Welch was unquestionably an important and emblematic figure in America’s paradigm shift, but Gelles takes his book title too literally, pushes it too strenuously,” Kurt Andersen writes at The New York Times. “Whenever he refers to the post-1980 economic regime,” for example, “he uses his own word, ‘Welchism,’ instead of libertarianism or neoliberalism or any of the other familiar terms” that might broaden the blame to, say, all the presidents from Reagan on who “bought into libertarian economics.”

Does Gelles have a response to that critique?

Yes. Other figures — Reagan, Friedman, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell — had laid an intellectual and political groundwork for Welch’s corporate revolution, “but it was only when Jack took over GE that we actually saw what that ideology looked like in practice,” Gelles told Just Capital. “He was the one with his singular mix of ambition and a sense of impunity, and control of one of the largest and arguably the most influential company in the country. He was able to not only radically transform and reset norms at GE, which was this standard-bearer, but because of that influence, also bring the rest of the economy along for the ride, essentially setting a new standard by which CEOs and executives were evaluated.”

“This was one of those moments when an exceptional individual at a critical moment really goes on to shape the world,” he told Leonhardt.

Is Welch’s management style still ascendant?

It actually hasn’t aged very well. Welch did grow GE from a $14 billion corporate titan to the most valuable company in the world in 2001, worth $600 billion. And “for a time in the early 2000s, five of the top 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average were run by men who had worked for Mr. Welch,” Gelles writes in the Times. But “the Welch protégés who struck out on their own rarely fared well.” And neither did GE. 

Soon after Welch retired, “GE fell to the point of essential irrelevance in the American economy,” Gelles tells NPR. “In 2018, with all of Welch’s bad decisions catching up with the company, GE was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the bluest of blue-chip indexes and a real bellwether of the American economy.” The company broke itself apart last year.

After decades of corporate belief that “greed, for lack of a better word, was good for the country,” Christiaan Hetzner writes at Fortune, “an increasing number of boardrooms are discovering that being a good corporate citizen can be its own reward,” a movement called stakeholder capitalism. “The move away from the Reagan era of unfettered free markets toward an emphasis on prudent and proportionate regulation has, however, spooked prominent Republicans, who are now retaliating by labeling the shift ‘woke,'” he adds.

They needn’t worry too much: Welch established “a powerful and lasting influence on American business, informing how workers are treated, how shareholders are rewarded, and how CEOs comport themselves in an increasingly divisive age,” Gelles writes in the Times. “When Donald J. Trump is elected president, when Jeff Bezos argues about inflation with the White House, when Elon Musk negotiates his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter by using the poop emoji — this is the world that Jack Welch helped create.”

And now I know who actually wrecked the planet.

NASA has stated that between 2 and 3 RPM are the likely limits for humans to be able to function in an artificial gravity environment. I would go conservative and just call it 1RPM as the best place to start.

Using the easy-to-find “SpinCalc” website we get a tether length of 5868 feet to generate 1G rotating at 1RPM. I believe this over-one-mile tether system is what will eventually be used to generate artificial gravity for astronauts. This seems impractical but actually it is space with all the room needed and tether materials like Spectra are light and strong.

Debilitation is the lesser evil though and the more difficult problem is Dosing. That will, for a small crew with a small living area, require well over 1000 tons of water shielding. And this gives us some idea what a “true” Spaceship will look like: a “Bola” over a mile long spinning at 1 RPM with an over-one-thousand-ton-mass at either end. On the plus side the water shield will facilitate closed-loop life support.

The tether system will likely be several tethers with “elevators” used to transport mass and fine tune and dampen out oscillations. Astronauts would ride these elevators a half a mile to the center of the tether to and from a zero gravity “mast” and docking station.

Starting with a basic mass of 2000 tons, which is about 4 times that of the ISS, add the structures which must take the loads associated with spinning and also the tether system. Everything necessary for Space Station, Lunar Cycler, or Spaceship operation may or may not come in under the 1000-ton mass budget opposite the water shield/crew section.

Start with a basic Space Station and then add propulsion systems for Lunar Cyclers and eventually Nuclear Spaceships. The two options for a Spaceship are some new form of Nuclear Electric or Nuclear Pulse. A Nuclear Pulse system would require reeling in the tether system and configuring the Spaceship for propulsion and then, after the necessary number of pulses, “splitting the ship” and going back to artificial gravity cruise mode.

Mars is a “dead end” for colonization for several reasons. Musk has led humankind away from the path envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill and has done humankind a great disservice. A sci-fi meme and its proximity are the sources of much of the attention, time, and resources directed at Mars. Its gravity well and lack of oceans should cancel this attraction out but does not simply because scientists are not willing to tell the truth. Oceans are where life will be found. Not a radiation blasted desert in a partial vacuum. Icy bodies with oceans have shallow gravity wells and ice resources for conversion into fuel which make them the places to land and send submarines. Mars seems like it can be reached with chemical propulsion but due to the need for radiation shielding this is false and misleading. A deception. Nuclear energy will be required for any Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO). With some form of nuclear propulsion other than nuclear thermal the just-close-enough Mars reasoning disappears. Ceres should be the first human mission destination. Not Mars.

In 2008 the scientific community had an opportunity to join together in solidarity and promote a path for America and allies to pursue in space. The discovery of ice on the Moon should have completely changed the course of NASA in regard to Human Space Flight and made the pure research community beneficiaries of a new focus on space. A certain entrepreneur and a lack of cooperation within the science community squandered that golden moment. If acted upon fourteen years ago we could have been seeing humans landing on the Moon and occupying a permanent base by now. Sidemount was the Super Heavy Lift Vehicle capable of sending payloads to the Moon. NewSpace and “the flexible path” was the end of the dream.

We now have a second opportunity, but the window is closing again. Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources is the solution to the Climate Change Crisis but, like the ice on the Moon, not a single word is being said about it. Nothing. The trillions of dollars of international funding in a Space Solar Power infrastructure would empower the research community and enable them to accomplish missions they cannot even dream of now. Wake up….Human Space Flight is the path to more science missions, not in competition with them.

“I strongly believe that the right to bear arms is an important safeguard against potential tyranny of government. Historically, maintaining their power over the people is why those in power did not allow public ownership of guns,” Musk told CNBC on May 25.

The billionaire then told the outlet that he supports “tight background checks” for all gun sales and limiting sales of assault weapons to people in special circumstances, like gun range owners, or people who live in a “high risk location, like gang warfare.”

A few hours later, Musk reiterated his position with a very clear tweet:

“Assault rifles should at minimum require a special permit, where the recipient is extremely well vetted imo,” he said on Twitter, responding to a question from a user.

First….A flintlock Musket required close to a minute to load and fire one shot. A modern hi-capacity semi-automatic rifle or carbine, modeled after military assault weapons, with a moderate amount of operator proficiency, can kill one hundred people per minute. A hi-capacity semi-automatic pistol is capable of close to the same performance, though requiring more training and proficiency.

Second…”Well-regulated” means restrictions on who could possess firearms. Weapons that can kill one hundred people per minute should not be available for purchase over the counter to 18 year olds.

Third…The idea that personal firearms can somehow keep a modern military from subjugating the population may have had some validity at the end of the 18th century but has zero validity early in the 21st century.

As a systems troubleshooter with a mind conditioned to think critically, I have observed how cognitive dissonance takes over people. I have seen it dozens of times at every level, in my work on aircraft and up the ladder to higher rungs in the chain of command. What is bizarre is that when it is over people conveniently forget they were so stupid and make excuses…and often make the same mistakes in the future. Those involved in space have unfortunately always conflated two very different arenas and continue to do so. There is “Space Flight” and there is “Human Space Flight.” They are, besides the common attribute of space travel, almost completely different fields of endeavor. The Space Shuttle is perhaps the ultimate example of this dissonance, as it combined, against all logic, human and cargo missions. This was probably the best feature of the cancelled Constellation program- the separation of crew and cargo launch vehicles.

A Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity environment (NSLR1G) is the prerequisite.

Birchbark canoes were never going to cross the North Atlantic.

Sending astronauts Beyond Low Earth Orbit has significant risk attached to it due to solar events. Seven Apollo missions carried humans Beyond Earth Orbit and there was a very close call avoiding one solar storm during that less than 4 year space age.

Dosing and debilitation is the elephant in the room NASA will not discuss. There is a “career dose” that once reached means no more space missions. This makes for very short careers for astronauts as without massive shielding humans are not going to live and work in space for twenty or thirty years like they do on Earth. It is likely that a Mars mission cannot be accomplished without exceeding this career dose.

The plan for a lunar return should have been to preposition a shielded habitat and not send astronauts until it was ready. Until that happens there is not going to be a permanent human presence in cislunar space like there has been in LEO.

Not only am I running out of time, it may be humankind is also.

Well….it is possible, at some point, the scientific community is going to have a “don’t look up” intervention and say that at least, at the very least, several billion people are going to die when our fragile civilization begins to unravel due to the accelerating effects of climate change. The DOD already knows this is going to happen and are not hiding it, though they are also not taking action like they should. Too many important people have invested in fossil fuels, and they see no way to cash out…..yet.

A couple of experiments validating Space Solar are coming up and if all the weird little coincidences that drive events in history just happen to line up, like they did with Apollo, then it won’t be “someone” willing to spend the money.
It will be everyone.
And not just billions, but trillions from every nation on Earth.
God willing.

I have commented several times before that prepositioning a radiation sanctuary either in Lunar Orbit or on/beneath the surface should have been the plan from the start. But like I just said, when you are trying to go cheap and complete a plan that has a start and finish within a budget, what makes sense goes out the window. Remember the ISS was never meant to just go on and on. But people are invested in so many ways now that it has a life of its own. If it was a Moonbase that would of course be justified but it is not in any way some kind of permanent base with millions of tons of resources at hand. It is essentially a bunch of tin cans flying in circles a couple hundred miles up.

I prefer the idea of a fat workshop in Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) filled with a thousand or more tons of lunar water to start with for several reasons, but there are other options. The ideal is an immense lava tube we could just move into and they possibly exist. However, we know where all the craters are. We pick one the right size, use robots to frame over and cover the top and then bulldoze regolith on top. With a couple trashcan nuclear reactors and some inflatable structures in the crater I would say that is a safe place to stay for a long time. Connect to another crater with a covered over and regolith shielded trench and then more inflatables. And so on.

SIS: Sphere-Inside-Sphere.

The key to expanding humankind off-world is NOT a cheap rocket. The key is a construct that will allow humans to live and work in space without the permanent damage caused by Dosing and Debilitation. This construct, minus radiation shielding, was proposed at the beginning of the space age as the “wet workshop.” That is, an upper stage that after expending its propellants is converted into a crew compartment. Incorporating a shield would make this a “Fat Workshop.”

The baseline, the “Parker Minimum”, is the 16 feet of water required to stop cosmic radiation and this space between the inner and outer sphere to contain the shielding is the main feature. Such a stage would of course be very large. Water to fill the shield can be brought up from the Moon with 20 to 23 times less energy than from Earth. An electromagnetic rail gun, to send water slugs into space from the Moon, may be an “order of magnitude” more efficient.

By attaching two S-I-S workshops together with a several thousand foot tether system, this “bola” can be spun to provide artificial gravity. The large water shield would be used in a closed loop life support system to provide air and food and solar panels attached to the tether system would provide electricity. This construct would provide a near Earth environment, independent of outside support, for several years. A true Space Station. By docking a nuclear propulsion system it would be the first true Spaceship.

The concept is a spherical Super Heavy Lift Vehicle with two “doughnuts” of engines and a central Earth departure engine. The larger doughnut would mount the first stage engines and the smaller inner doughnut the second stage engines which would detach with small tanks, and a heat shield for the second stage doughnut, to land back with. The center engine would detach after burning and make a free return around the Moon to reenter and possibly be helo-captured.

The ISS days are numbered and when it goes LEO is going to be left to others. Forever.
LEO is a dead end. The Chinese may operate a platform for a few years and then splash it. There is nothing left to be learned there with humans that is worth paying billions a year for.

For humans to undertake long duration missions Beyond Earth Orbit will require massive radiation shielding on the order of 500 tons even for a small capsule that may or may not enable a couple of astronauts to go on 6 month tours. Probably not enough room. Realistically, well over a thousand tons for a small crew will be the requirement. For multi-year interplanetary missions that figure doubles. At least. With larger crews it gets bigger fast.

This “Parker Minimum” (after the 500 ton figure specified by Eugene Parker to shield space travelers from cosmic radiation) has always been the elephant in the room. Nobody, especially NASA, wants to address this issue. And the issue is quite clear; for humans to live and work in space they must be provided an environment that does not cause permanent damage. It gets worse because it is a two part problem with Dosing AND low-gravity Debilitation going hand in hand. Addressing Debilitation requires an artifiical gravity system and relatively heavy structures able to handle the rotation and loads. Dosing and Debilitation can only be addressed by providing a Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G) crew compartment with enough interior space to prevent negative psychological effects on the crew.

For a short mission of a couple weeks, perhaps on a shielded Lunar Cycler, the required interior space may be relatively small, and if the one gravity is waived the structural weight can be greatly reduced. This is probably where the Boeing and SpaceX taxis will be going if they are around long enough- intercepting Lunar Cyclers. They will likely launch and to minimize dosing intercept the Cycler at it’s closest approach within an hour or at most two. The astronauts coming from the Moon and those going to the Moon will transfer in a few minutes and those returning to Earth will be reentering within an hour or so. Those going on to the Moon may be on board for a couple weeks as Lunar Cycler trajectories are convoluted.

The other possibility is the exchanges taking place on large shielded Space Stations in GEO and others in some kind of Lunar Orbit, with some kind of cislunar nuclear electric Spaceship transporting astronauts across the cislunar sea.

Musk did influence, if not determine, NASA policy concerning a lunar return. Anybody can see the facts supporting that. Shotwell even publicly stated, “we are not Moon people.” Reading between the lines of Obama’s infamous “been there” speech makes it obvious. Except to spacex fanboys of course. They love to do the Orwellian/Firehose of Falsehood misinformation thing and call the truth a lie. It works for Trump, why not Musk?

So far this week my comments have now been connected to the Unabomber and Q-Anon by spacex fanboys.

SpaceX did not get in the way of any O’Neill like projects. NASA, nor the US government were going to do any of that within our lifetimes.

I just wrote a long couple replies to someone about that. I will cut and paste for you. I think he really did “get in the way.” In my view he has set us back more than a decade. And the damage is accumulating.

Ukraine is changing the nature of mil-space right in front of our eyes.

I spent 23 years in two different branches of the military doing several different jobs and then retired and was a military contractor. The Military Industrial Complex is a real thing and what you are seeing is clever marketing. Don’t be fooled. Everything up there will get turned into junk in one afternoon in a real war. It is a scam. Like missile defense. Megaconstellaitons are a disaster unfolding before our eyes.
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The truth is evidence for ice on the Moon should have shifted NASA’s focus to a lunar return as ice makes a permanent human presence, and many other projects, possible. Why did this not happen?

NASA did not immediately make plans to end the ISS and return to the Moon because Elon and that guy I voted into the white house decided we had been there and done that. His hobby rocket could not take anyone to the Moon so what could, Sidemount, was strangled in the cradle and here we are. Over ten years later and after one person finally threw the B.S. flag on the Moon being verboten (Jim Bridenstine) rocket jesus is still keeping us from expanding into the solar system with bizarre Martian fantasies and a shiny redux of the space shuttle that will require a whole fleet of tankers. And of course his cult of worshipers have done immense unrealized damage to public perceptions of space.

Again, the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

“Here are the high points of Obama’s 2010 speech and he NEVER said what you said he did. Typical spacex fanboy misstatement and misrepresentation.”

– in striking contrast to the Falcon 9 rocket we just saw on the launch pad, which will be tested for the very first time in the coming weeks.

And we will extend the life of the International Space Station likely by more than five years,-

And in order to reach the space station, we will work with a growing array of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable. (Applause.)

Next, we will invest more than $3 billion to conduct research on an advanced “heavy lift rocket” —

How do we shield astronauts from radiation on longer missions?

So the point is what we’re looking for is not just to continue on the same path — we want to leap into the future; we want major breakthroughs; a transformative agenda for NASA. (Applause.)

Now, yes, pursuing this new strategy will require that we revise the old strategy.

And by 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. (Applause.) So we’ll start — we’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. (Applause.) By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it. (Applause.)

Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.

It is proof of the adage that truth is stranger than fiction Andrew. We have this bizarro Tony Stark character all over the map, that has done tremendous damage to space exploration and, incidentally, delayed any insurance policy for our species, by portraying himself as rocket jesus.

He took a NASA engine design (Merlin) and put it on essentially a clone of a Saturn 1, and has had great success launching satellites with that, but as to how much cheaper he is doing that than others….he is not letting the numbers be known. He built spacex with tax dollars by promising a cheap ride to the ISS which was needed after Columbia. He has hyped reusability, which was also old NASA technology, and made himself a celebrity. And his Cult of Ayn-Rand-in-Space whackjob followers are well known as the THE most toxic creeps on the internet.

Now we have his latest project, Starlink and Starship, which go together, since the success of Starlink is going to depend on Starship. But he is not working off taxpayer paid for technology anymore. His “genius” is now facing a real test. The numbers say not enough customers. We will see.

I am a follower of Gerard K. O’Neill whose legacy Musk has thoroughly trashed with his statements about Space Solar Power and by promoting NewSpace ideology, which works directly against any state sponsored megaproject like Space Solar.

So I freely admit I am NOT a spacex fanboy and have suffered their harassment for years because, unlike most others trolled into oblivion, I keep criticizing NewSpace. In my view Starship is….really beautiful, I will give it that, but it is actually just a different version of the space shuttle with many of the same problems and some new ones. I hope it fails. I hope Musk no longer has the power to screw up space exploration any worse than he has already.