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   goatsarah (goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 21:26:47 JST goatsarah
   So Musk is a charlatan and a bullshit merchant, and often does not know what he's talking about, as well as a threat to democracy.
   
   However, the number of people gleefully proclaiming this and then proceeding to write utter uniformed bollocks themselves about the Starship/Super Heavy test flight is ... aggravating. I find hypocrisy annoying.
   
   In particular, the " People said he knew what he was doing with rockets, but look at that, lol!" take.
   
   The reality is that SpaceX does know what it is doing. Do not confuse production launch services, their bread and butter, in which they are literally more capable than the entire rest of the planet put together, with a research and development facility blowing up test flight articles.
   
   I get it, it's funny ti laugh at the arsehole because his rocket blew up and his launch pad got destroyed, but the idea that building stuff deliberately to test to destruction is somehow bad engineering practice is simply wrong. We've done it before with spaceflight (there was far more of it during the race to the moon than most people realise), we deliberately crash cars to see how they survive in accidents, we deliberately crash trains, we deliberately fire chickens into jet engines, we deliberately crash planes, we deliberately sink boats, and so on and so on and so on.
   
   Sometimes the only way to get good data about how and when stuff fails is to destroy it and see what happens.
   • Embed this notice
     goatsarah (goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 21:34:38 JST goatsarah

     in reply to
     I would draw particular attention to the Soviet N1 programme, under Sergei Korolev, who is literally regarded as perhaps the greatest rocket engineer who ever lived.
     
     And it took him 3 attempts to get an N1 not quite as far as SpaceX managed to get last week...
     
     ...the second of which also destroyed the launch pad, in what is still the largest rocket explosion of all time.
     
     So they rebuilt the pad and launched a third one.
     
     Then the Americans landed on the moon, and they gave up.
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     goatsarah (goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 21:35:34 JST goatsarah

     in reply to
     Also worth noting that until last week, the N1 still held the record for the most powerful rocket ever launched. Literally nobody has tried to launch a rocket this big before, ever.
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     Alisdair Calder McGregor (a_c_mcgregor@topspicy.social)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 22:39:23 JST Alisdair Calder McGregor

     in reply to

     @goatsarah I'm frankly glad the the emerald mine heir fascist billionaire is preoccupied with running his social media company into the ground, because it probably lets the competent people in his space company work more efficiently.

     goatsarah likes this.