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by panick21_ 609 days ago
Please for the love of god don't look at ThunderF00t. He is literally just a guy who made a job out of farming money from uniformed people who dislikes Musk.

He has no credibility at all, like literally 0. Nobody that follows this topics, even if they don't like Musk or SpaceX consider him reputable.

He is literally a professional hater. He just continually moves the goal-posts to always present himself as 'the reasonable skeptic'.

> Currently, around 80% of SpaceX's rockets are dedicated to launching Starlink satellites.

And the other 20% are still more launches then the whole of the Western world would have had before SpaceX.

SpaceX is simply so fucking successful that you have to totally reconsider how you look at the numbers.

> and things like starship don't really have a reason for existing

And if Starship is cheaper, then Falcon 9, and that's literally the whole reason it exists, then making Starlink and other launches cheaper still makes sense. Stopping innovating because of market share is an idiotic thing to do. Its what people argue who don't understand the difference between absolutes and %.

The market for space launch and space economy will be much bigger in 10-30 years. Now we can argue how much bigger, but its defiantly gone be bigger.

And also, Starship literally needs to exists because the government want's to land on the moon. And using Starship and sharing lots of technology with a launch vehicle that is needed for Starlink anyway just makes a whole lot of sense.

> Also, in spite of massive improvements in technology since the 1960s, they're vastly underperforming the track record of the Apollo program.

What an absurd criticism is this? In the 1960 they basically had no regulation, 100% political support and literally unlimited money.

SpaceX had barley any money at all until like 2020 for this project and even then they could only invest a fraction of that into Starship.

If you compare Apollo, the NASA budget was around 20-40 billion $ per year compare to SpaceX who only crossed the 1 billion $ per year in like 2022.

So this is exactly what I mean when I say ThunderF00t has 0 credibiltiy. Nobody should talk arguments like this seriously. Its just arguments from bad faith. I suspect he knows that he is fully of shit, but he has makes a lot of money from continually telling everybody what they want to hear.

> My view is that Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are just cults of personality. Sure, they've produced a non-zero amount of technological progress, but for the most part they're leading us to dead ends.

ThunderF00t is closer to a cult of personality. He has achieved absolutely nothing, he can't even edit videos as well as most 13 year old on tictac. He is a man in his 40 and his humor is even more childish then that of Elon Musk.

And your claim is simply bananas. Calling landing rockets and Starlink 'non-zero' is the understatement of the century. Starship has literally revolutionized space internet and global connectivity, and literally everybody, including all their competitors and every government in the world understands and reconizes that.

And literally some of the largest cooperations on earth, plus major nations are trying to replicate it. Amazon is investing 10+ billion $. Europe, China, Russia all will try to replicate even part of it, but they all know they can't match it.

Lower LEO internet will basically not go away for the rest of human history, unless civilization crashes or somebody comes up with something even better, but we have no idea what that would even be. But somehow you call it a 'dead end'. What are you even talking about.

I mean seriously, please break out of your bubble and look at the world with objective eyes.

1 comments

Your claims about the dollar amounts the US government has paid to SpaceX are false. The numbers are much higher than that. Just do a quick search.

It’s completely nonobvious to me what value there will be in massively increased amounts of junk being launched into space in the next 10-30 years as you say.

Maybe Starlink is a good idea, maybe not. I don’t really have an opinion on that, and it’s hard for me to picture why and how they have 4 million subscribers.

But even if it is a good idea, what are the next 10 good ideas? And what use is there in sending stuff and people to the moon and mars? It’s all delusional nonsense.

> Your claims about the dollar amounts the US government has paid to SpaceX are false. The numbers are much higher than that. Just do a quick search.

Can you please be exact on what I am wrong about? I didn't even metion a praticular number, the numbers I mention have nothing to do with how much the US pays SpaceX. The numbers I mention was investment in to moon rocket program.

Total amount paid to SpaceX overall is anyway completely irrelevant. Typical Thunderf00t style obfuscation and confusing spreading.

The Apollo program also didn't include how much money was spent on military payloads, so its again, completely irrelevant in the comparison.

And in your typical fashion, you competently ignored the overall point. Appollo had a far, far, far larger budget then SpaceX ever had and it had if for far longer. Arguing with you is utterly frustrating.

> value there will be in massively increased amounts of junk

Ah the old Thunderf00t moving the goalpost move. I guess humans should never have invented ships, because it massive increases the amount of debris in the ocean.

Also please study orbital dynamics. Starlink itself will leave zero orbital debirs.

> Maybe Starlink is a good idea, maybe not. I don’t really have an opinion on that, and it’s hard for me to picture why and how they have 4 million subscribers.

So because you don't understand how the world works, its everybody else that is wrong. Great attitude to have.

> But even if it is a good idea, what are the next 10 good ideas?

Ah we are moving the goal posts again. I really don't want to have a discussion with you, because whatever I say, you will simply move the goal post again anyway.

There are tons of things humanity already does from space. And we can do those things more and better now. That is already good enough. If you personally don't see the value of any of the things humanity has done in space in the last 80 years, then I can't really help you at this point.

In addition there are literally 1000s of space startups we can have an argument about each one of them. Any that I bring up, you can come up with a bunch of reasons why they aren't actually go ideas and you might be right. But at least I'm not arrogant enough to claim to know if they will work or not.

I used the word "junk" not to suggest we're putting too much debris in orbit. It was to say that this stuff is borderline useless. I did some research on starlink, and it looks like most of their users live in the US and just signed up because our country is so dysfunctional it can't offer fiber to people living in places like downtown San Francisco (!). I guess I wish we'd solve the actual problems here instead of engaging in weird space fantasies.