Walt Disney and Werner von Braun teamed up to tell us how we were going to get to the moon…in 1955. There’s a certain familiar esthetic to the exercise — shiny, long pointy spaceships with fins, a huge multilevel rotating wheel a 50-man (literally, there are no women) space station, swarms of robotic-looking construction suits. They ditch the fins for their lunar vehicle, since you don’t need them in space…but they do keep the sleek pointy shape.
Every bit of it is wrong, in hindsight. I’m impressed with the elaborate models and the chiseled, handsome men who are floating about in the excessively roomy cabin, but von Braun’s vision of the future was all hype and glitz and was as ridiculous as anything Elon Musk proposes.
Whatever happened to that “Atomic Powered Rocketship” that was supposedly already under construction?
By contrast, Klushantsev’s Soviet space films were prescient – Kubrick was inspired by them.
And, for the horror films- Mario Bava’s Planet of Vampires inspired Alien. And had a marvellous cinematography.
And yet,…
von Braun was instrumental in putting actual Americans on the actual Moon less then 15 years later.
Probably a better scorecard than your average visionary dreamer.
(von Braun was technical director of the successful Apollo Moon landing program.)
Contra PZ, watching this today it’s mind-blowingly visionary. Remember this was not only before the space shuttle and the ISS, this was before Skylab, before the first spacewalk, before the first human in space, before even the first satellite!
So much of the animation and artwork here prefigured actual footage in space decades later. Astonishing stuff.
@3. Silentbob : “And yet,…Von Braun was instrumental in putting actual Americans on the actual Moon less then 15 years later.”
Exactly. For once we are in complete agreement here.
Also FWIW Musk may also be a nazi but his SpaceX compapny have proven they are capable of delivering and achiveing what they claim and silencing the doubters -0 for all icannot stand Musk as a person and a nazi.
Compare to the actual real life lunar flyby mission in 1968. Sure it’s different in detail – how could it not be? – but astonishingly reminiscent of von Braun’s vision.
Reflecting on how much space hype there was over my childhood and how excited I was. Now I’m a “space bastard” who thinks space colonies are likely not viable. And if anything, I think we’re losing progress towards that goal if it actually attainable. We need environmental science to understand the ecology we live in. Can’t create a new controlled ecology if we don’t know how.
These days I’m wondering if colonies on earth are viable.
The one I live in is rapidly falling apart.
The current leadership is actively destroying it.
Meh. Liked the Simpson’s version better
https://youtu.be/8wPH4MEK4tk?si=bwrewwUsrDLqlWlU
Long story short, the Cuban missile crisis really put a lid on the whole nukes in space thing.
@ ^ Dauphni : Project Orion do you mean?
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Or another one – think one was mentioned in one of Stephen Baxter’s alternative universe novels?
@6 StevoR
Uh, no, he really hasn’t. He is operating under a delusion that you can just keep scaling up a rocket to make it work, and ever since he “scaled up” to the new designs its been, “Whoops! It blew up. That is fine though, because its just testing.” Except its not. The math doesn’t math, and literally everyone outside of his company says so, because, funny enough, NASA also tried similar things and concluded that, “Beyond a certain point, no fuel we have, or can currently imagine, which isn’t so volatile that it would tend to spontaneously explode on the pad, can produce enough thrust to let us make these things bigger.” The literally only alternative solution anyone ever came up with, ironically, was, “Heh, I know it kind of causes radiation and stuff, but… what if we like, throw pellets of something radioactive out of back, and set them off, to create mini-atomic explosions? That would solve it, right?”
You have a very odd perspective on “delivery”, when a) he literally hasn’t done anything that NASA hadn’t already done, and could have kept doing, if their funding hadn’t got cut, and b) his space projects are the only ones that actually “work”, with a rather broad definition of, “They worked.” But, like I said, the funny thing is, his, “Big rockets to throw bigger stuff into orbit.”, projects have wasted immense amounts of money, much of it from tax payers, trying to “fix” a problem that everyone else has already determined, “You can’t fix by just making the thing bigger, and hoping that it works.”, and has done so by rehashing prior failures, over and over again. Based on all existing evidence, this is NOT solvable, using the methods his team are trying.
Also.. I kind of wish people would stop saying “he” did these things. Everything he has ever gotten directly involved in, and has not been “existing technology”, like satellites, has been a dismal disaster, which just fed his ego, when it barely worked (Tesla’s self driving, for example, which many are trying to ban because, yeah, it doesn’t really work well enough to use as intended, and everyone knows it, even him). He even flat out admitted, in several cases, that projects where only there to make “short term money, so I can use that for my true goal of having people die horribly on a badly designed Mars colony.” Well, not those exact words, but, we are talking about a real life version of Justin Hammer here. Its probably a good thing, for the lives of our military, that he never tried making a flying suit… Just like Trump, its all about his ego, and his credit, and his name, and his success. Why else do you think we hear absolutely nothing any more about the stupid underground car BS that he sort of built in Los Vegas, or his self compressing, implosion prone, “magic tunnel, that will zoom you across the country inside a vacuum, which is ‘faster’, but weirdly never worked, at all.”? His most successful thing, literally, has been Tesla, and his far right insanity, support of neo-Nazi parties in Germany, and other crap, has tarnished that so badly its ruining them. And – He was brought on as eye candy, to promote them, not as a freaking engineer, or idea man. The greatest real success, and he did nothing to invent it, just demanded, if they wanted his money, and face on the box (more or less), that they give him the credit for “founding it”.
The man is a joke. If Van Braun has been a women, Musk would be the modern equivalent of the professor who took credit for all her work, by putting his own name on all the freaking papers, and telling Braun to shut her mouth, and stop complaining.
12 Soviet Sci-Fi Deep Cuts Americans Overlook (1960–1980) (sequel/expanded)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=vRca2Sn0TgA
@13 Kagehi Right on!
Cue the late great Tom Lehrer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
How far we’ve fallen, having a Nazi wannabe like Musk when we used to have a real card-holding Nazi in charge of the space program.
Recursive Rabbit@8 I stopped caring about humans in space a long time ago. I would like to see a lot more probes. It’s amazing what we are getting from Mars, and any human mission would be too preoccupied with survival to get more than a little over a short period of time. I wish they could return samples though.
At some point (well, unless the world goes to shit and it’s looking more and more likely) we will have autonomous self-replicating machines. If we want to use off-world resources (e.g. asteroid minerals) at scale, we’re going to need them anyway. Once we have that, it will be worth considering the construction of human habitats whether on Mars or in space stations.
The idea of a million people on Mars (one of Musk’s goals) is ridiculous when there are not even quite one million in South Dakota, and room for many more. You could probably colonize the sea floor more cheaply than Mars.
Billionaires only talk about Mars because they think they can set up a fief to rule without being subject to the consent of the governed. And they’re also very foolish. The idea that Mars is somehow safe from earth politics is ridiculous. If you can settle Mars from earth, you can nuke the same settlements a lot more easily.
I think we could have humans in space, but by the time we have the capability of going there in large numbers, I’m not sure anyone will see a reason for doing so.
The next men to go to the moon will very likely speak Chinese. They have plans for crewed lunar landings by 2030. Our own Artemis project is in meltdown. It’s fallen woefully behind schedule and vastly over budget. NASA was hoping to use a variant of SpaceX’s Starship to deliver a crew from lunar orbit to the surface during the 2027 mission. That 2027 timeline is a fantasy. This is especially true when considering Trump’s massive NASA budget cuts.
Perhaps having the Chinese get to the moon before us will be a godsend. Nothing spurs America into action more than falling behind in a “race” with a communist nation. We got to the moon in 1969, the USSR never did. Except for a feel-good moment, what did that get us? I’ve read that we can’t even build the Saturn 5 rocket again because the engineering plans have been lost and the engineers who built it are long dead.
Some interesting “maths made simple” by Feynman about the ultimate speed various rocket motors can achieve here (skip to 3–3The fundamental rocket equation and following). Long story short. Chemical engines, even if only made of propellant and perfect, have a maximum possible velocity. Which isn’t much. Staging helps you get to the moon, but… it’s a tiny payload for a massive rocket. von Braun’s initial vision, which was too expensive was Earth Orbit Rendevouz (as per PZ’s link) but this changed to Lunar Orbit Rendevous ~ 1962. Further reading here
@ Kagehi – 21st September 2025 at 10:55 am :
SpaceX the company NOT Felon Musk the individual person. Note my specific use of “they” as in the Company in my #6 above. Which, okay, he owns the company, but he is NOT the entire company nor the engineers and people responsible for directly building and flying their spacecraft and rockets
False.
I presume you intend to refer to Starship and I guess you just haven’t been paying attention because many of their flights including the most recent (Flight 10) were successful.
Oh & previously :
In addition to :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Launch_history
.
So, no, it is simply false to say the Starship test flights all just blew up and failed rather than succeeding in all or most of their planned flights..
Nope. I’m not part of SpaceX and I don’t say so thus your “literally” is literally disproven. I am not alone in this BTW. Worth noting that those who support SpaceX include NASA who are, y’know actual rocket scientists not say, frex, some rando boat-builder blogger with an axe to grind.
Starship is the largest and most impressive rocket to fly by many metrics. For example :
Plus being reusable unlike the Saturn V with the astounding chopsticks catches already one demonstrably ground-breaking success of the Starship program :
As well as :
Source : https://orbitaltoday.com/2022/09/05/starship-vs-saturn-v-choosing-a-winner/
BTW the author of that piece is another disproof of your contention that “literally everyone outside of SpaceX” thinks the “maths don’t maths” when they demonstrably now have proven to do so.
Huh? Care to rephrase that word salad? Is that actually a claim that’s being made? I don’t get what you are trying to say with that line.
No, Space aren’t the only private space company – they do however have the record of being the most successful e.g. compare and contrast with the Boeing Starliner & size and scope of the Blue Origin craft and look at the scale comparison here – Rocket Size Comparison 2022 – by Red Side ( 3 mins approx) noting the final Sea Dragon was purely a planned concept that was never constructed.
Based on the most recent (#10) Starship flight already cited above; you have already been proven wrong and I have no doubt that future Starship flights will make you look even wronger there relatively soon.
Er, I have (if I ever did say that) and I don’t – note, yet again, SpaceX NOT Musk.
Nope. SpaceX has been an astonishing success doing things like becoming the first private space agency to fly humans over our planet’s poles, land reusable rockets on barges at sea, have the chopsticks catches, have simultaneous landings, deliver cargo and crew to the ISS, put a Tesla into heliocentric orbit, et cetera
Maybe – as an individual man, Musk sure is at times. But the SpaceX company and what its people -engineers, workers, rocket scientists etc.. have done is NOT. I’m talking about SpaceX here NOT Musk.
If so then.. we may well NOT have reached the Moon and sent a dozen humans there with the Apollo program as the USA actually did given Von Braun wasn’t and hypothetical questions like that are moot counter-factuals.
Von Braun was Von Braun and SpaceX is SpaceX and you are denying observed reality when you make the sort of claims I have shown already here are wrong.
The captured Nazi rocket scientists did an utterly epic trolling job on the USA. Having done all their engineering calculations in the kilograms, metres, Newtons and Kelvin they were used to, they finally converted everything back to US units to make it look as though they had used those units throughout. Every subsequent attempt to do rocket science using measuring units that were barely suited to horses and carts has, unsurprisingly, failed spectacularly.
In most of the world, force is mass times acceleration, and the acceleration due to gravity is 10m/s² on Earth, or 1.6m/s² on the moon; so one kilogram of mass has a weight on Earth of 10 Newtons and a weight on the Moon of 1.6 Newtons.
So a pound of mass must have a weight that needs about 30 pounds of thrust to balance it on Earth, and just 5 pounds on the moon, right?
@16:
And less humorously: Von Braun’s past Nazism was downplayed for PR purposes, while Musk displays his at every opportunity, and continues to be lauded.
Aside: It seems like Lehrer never forgave the Germans for WWII; see also “MLF Lullaby”. (During a recent long road trip, we had a bit of a Lehrer marathon in his honour, since I happen to have virtually our entire audio collection on my phone).
At the risk of expressing my stupid opinions in subjects beyond my comprehension…
False, only because you said “Every”. It was a fairly accurate guess of what a trip to the Moon would entail with 1955 technology. Did they anticipate technology that didn’t exist? I’m with SilentBob on this one: yes! They foresaw space telescopes. The orbital mechanics were spot-on, even if the visuals of what was happening were a tad unrealistic sometimes to allow everything to be filmed in frame. Where it diverged from actual moon trips was a series of political decisions, with the occasional truly unforeseen tech advance or Apollo 1 engineering disaster.
The only thing this video got completely wrong was the rather optimistic conclusion that we would continue to have the political will and the financial backing to explore space with humans. That was put on hold after the Apollo program, the U.S. hasn’t pulled off anything quite as impressive since. We’re descending down the slippery slope from giving up on putting humans on another planet to giving up on Earth observation from space altogether.
@21 bluerizlagirl
Standard earth gravity is about 32.17 ft/s², if you’re converting units for use with the same formulae you would be using the slug-foot-second system. One slug requires 32.17 lbf of thrust to balance it on Earth.
I certainly hope they aren’t powered by LLMs at that point.
The architecture of GAIs would have to be much closer to that of existing biological brains. LLMs only mimic a subset of the ways brains filter and process input.
And they would need analogs for emotions- including the empathy Musk and a certain dead troll despised so much.
.
And for fictional treatments of robots and ethics I strongly recommend Stanislaw Lem’s Star Diaries. He was waaay ahead of the curve.
Well, a bit of a flimflammer Von Braun may have been, but he delivered. Plus, his Mars plans were based on wrong estimates for the Martian atmosphere – when the actual density became known it put a real damper on those beautiful winged landing craft.
And concerning nuclear rockets, no one really took Orion seriously, it was too much even for cold war times.
More serious was project NERVA and that one would have worked, if not for a raaaather reasonable wariness about nuc engines floating all over. But it could have delivered a specific impulse three times larger (>900 N*sec/kg !) than chem rockets, which is a dang lot.
I am sorry I cannot produce any links here, as the fabulous docs I found about nuclear rocketry were published in the long-defunct journal “Nucleonics” in the 60s. And for some reason the copyright holders are simply not letting go of anything, even after more than half a century. Sticky as limpets.
stevewatson@22
While it was certainly pushing boundaries to refer to widows of the Blitz in that song, the real Wernher von Braun oversaw factories that used human beings as disposable slave labor, working them to death. So it’s still whitewashing. It’s shocking that someone who very clearly should have been brought to justice was instead turned into an avuncular figure to inspire youth (e.g. Homer Hickam in Rocket Boys/October Sky — great movie, never read the book).
bluerizlagirl@21
I never heard this but it reminds me of my Reagan-worshipping friend in college in the 80s. I thought I might at least find some common ground on the stupidity of ending the metric board. His retort was that by doing all our defense contracting in English units, we are able to fool the Russkies. Really? I think they can probably convert units pretty easily. What a bizarre bit of motivated reasoning.
One very real and major achievement of SpaceX has been to develop fully reusable rocket boosters that return and land under their own power. Even if they accomplish nothing else, that is a huge innovation that has made them the premier rocket launcher in the world and has made access to orbit easier. I’m sure other companies and national space programs will duplicate the technology in the future, but no else has yet.
Do you want a genuinely silly (but fun) film? This 1970 “masterpiece” has two monsters (plus a very questionable depiction of an African gentleman)
“Gamera VS Jiger Review”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=tsW3cM9C02A&
Meanwhile in Vodkastan, Ruskii engineers are designing ultrasonic missiles. To sling warheads at Kiev. Wheeeeee!
@27: Yes, by rights von Braun should have been tried for…war crimes? (Not sure what charge would have been applicable, but something for sure). But he had very useful information, so he (and I believe others) was rehabilitated and his past buried, and Lehrer was right to remind us of that.The Russians managed to reverse engineer his rockets by picking the brains of his former slaves.
However, the MLF Lullaby does not mention von Braun, and suggests that Lehrer’s animus was a bit wider than that.
I see some names in the credits that would go on to further sci-fi glory. Con Peterson, who did many vfx jobs, including being a crew lead on 2001, and Dick Tufeld , the voice of the robot in Lost In Space.
Me @ 29
We also get review input from the tentacled Chibtulhu puppet (like Ctulhu, but from the Tokyo neighborhood Chibi).
Cheerfulcharlie@ 30
Would make as much sense as anything else King Vodka has done since 2022.
Springa73@ 28
I am told the Chinese are working on making reusable launchers along a similar principle. Once the stuff becomes ubiquituous Musk risks being remembered as just “the straigt-arm salute nut”. A good argument for sticking to the work you do best.
King Vodka = Putin
King in Yellow wannabee = Trump
Bigears = the real king, the one who cheated on his wife.
Kagehi asks
Ahem:
The Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid
birgerjohansson@34
Trolling, middle school humor, and Nazi salutes now seem to be what Musk does best.
Having known a number of very good artists that were refugees from the disney saccharine sweatshops, I can easily see how von Braun’s very precise ideas were disneyized into foolish fantasy images. Compare the sensible, functional designs of the v-1 and v-2 and von Braun’s early drawings and sketches of rockets and space vehicles to the disneyized movie and you will see what I mean. An aerospace historian I knew gave me many technical insights into von Braun and Wiley Ley’s technical innovations and the historian told of how they were threatened to work with the hitler regime or have their families sent to concentration camps.
If von Braun was so ‘off the mark’, how is it that Silent Bob is very correct when he says:
@3 Silentbob 21 September 2025 at 8:32 am
And yet,… von Braun was instrumental in putting actual Americans on the actual Moon less then 15 years later.
If you read some accurate history, you will see that the american rocketry effort for decades after wwII was all based on prior German technological advancements.
As a side note: it’s sad that the the stupid u.s. government ignored Robert H. Goddard’s pioneering liquid fuel rockets.
@35 Trickster Goddess writes in response to:
@13 Kagehi: Why else do you think we hear absolutely nothing any more about the stupid underground car BS that he sort of built in Los Vegas
Let us not forget that the muskrat has engaged in more failed businesses and destruction, not to mention indentured women bearing his offspring that grow up to hate him, than anything else.
As one example of many, the boring project is a short dead tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif.
A slide rule.
A rotary dial.
Models!
The moonscapes were very well done, I thought.
shemanj@37
I remember browsing a book in a used bookstore long ago. It was either an autobiography or hagiography. I wish I could track down the source, but it made it clear that he courted the Nazi government for funding to build rockets. True, his goal may have been space travel, but he made a Faustian deal.
Don’t try to convince me that he and his family couldn’t have left German long before the war. I’m sure he would have had little trouble emigrating but he chose to stay.
Dumping on von Braun’s politics or whatever is weak, PaulBC, in the context of competence at rocketry.
Different domains.
The consideration at hand is his expertise at rocketry and his management of the space program, not his politics. And, you know, he was quite suited to the USA in that manner.
(PS — moon landing was in 1969. With rockets. von Braun was central to that)
von Braun was using a slide rule as a prompt!
Love it.
John Morales@43 Right, because we’re only allowed to talk about one topic at a time, and because “politics” is synonymous with “basic human decency.”
PaulBC, you reduce his life to his Nazi and then USAnian opportunism, and thereby try to decry his actual scientific and technical achievements. For him, it was a pragmatic decision to advance his rocketry.
The OP, on the other hand, sticks to his rocketry expectations. He was not wrongity-wrong there.
Both are true. But the OP is only about one. And it’s not about basic human decency.
So, you are the one who only wants to talk about one topic; I addressed that.
He was useful to the Nazis and to the USA, they were useful to him. In the spacegoing context, which is independent of his politics, such as they were or might have been.
(‘because we’re only allowed to talk about one topic at a time’ is rather funny, BTW)
@26. outis :
Ah! That’s the one Iwa thinking of back in #12 and was mentioned in Step[hen Baxter’s Voyage novel; :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_(novel)
Thanks!
A British group also had the Deadalus project similar to the Orion one as well.
@42 PaulBC wrote: I remember browsing a book in a used bookstore long ago. . . I wish I could track down the source . . .Don’t try to convince me that he and his family couldn’t have left German long before the war.
I reply: Four members of my family, including me, worked in aerospace from 1938 to 1992 in engineering, manufacturing, technical writing, and other responsible technical-professional positions. I spent a lot of time learning about aerospace and got the information you question from our company historian who first hand experience, had a doctorate degree and was highly respected throughout the industry. Do you really think my info is less accurate than (and I don’t mean to insult you) a vaguely remembered book you browsed long ago? I’m not trying to make any excuses, I’m just providing the most factual info I have. And, to apply an analogy, don’t tell me that we and our families can’t get out of this country before it completely turns into a murderous fascist militarized plutocracy?
And, in regard to that analogy, don’t we have a responsibility to care for our fellow decent citizens and try to thwart the destruction of this country for as long as we can?
@ shermanj
Von Braun built the V2 with the intent of obliterating London. He was not,”thwarting the destruction of his country”. You’re making yourself look ridiculous.
Also maybe you and Morales can organise your own remedial class on blockquoting so you can knock off this extremely annoying “I reply” shit.
Ahem. The most lethal aspect of the V2 / A4 rocket was the concentration camp segment of the underground factory Mittelbau Dora. But von Braun was not in charge of that.
-In a roundsbout way the rocket engineers contributed to the German defeat, as the resources spent did not result in the same level of destruction if they had been used for effective weapons, a detail that was immediately obvious to Freeman Dyson and other military ‘bean counters’ in Britain.
I am not trying to excuse Germans working for Nazi Germany. Most of them got away much too lightly.
@20 “I presume you intend to refer to Starship and I guess you just haven’t been paying attention because many of their flights including the most recent (Flight 10) were successful.”
They claim they where “all” successful. It still misses the point though, Musk has an agenda, which is mad, and, much like the GOP, the companies he runs are either so enamored with him, scared of him killing their funding, or beholden to him, that they call everything a success, even when its a disaster, and their successes are literally, “Heh, we are getting closer to managing to do what NASA did, at the same size, payload, and efficiency in the 60s. Yeah!” This does not impress me.
Also, if you want to refer to “them”, do so by the project name, not the lunatic in charge of it. At the very least, then, when/if he falls, they can distance themselves from his legacy of hate.
@50 Silentbob wrote: Von Braun built the V2 with the intent of obliterating London.
I reply: That is as absurd as saying Oppenheimer had the singular intent of destroying Hiroshima! hitler had the intent of obliterating London. And, if we are going to talk about intent of atrocities, let’s examine the fire bombing destruction of Dresden and its citizens.
I can’t excuse any of the destruction of war.
And now for something completely different:
Let’s look at what disney has for us in the future
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/09/dutch-comedy-show-reminds-us-what-free
To be clear, Von Braun was only in charge of the Marshall Space Flight Center which designed the big rockets, He was never NASA administrator or in charge of the space program. Prominent and influential to be sure, but don’t overstate it.
Well, drivenb4u, here is the hagiography: https://www.nasa.gov/people/wernher-von-braun/
From that, here is part of the ‘only’ — but then, what would NASA know? ;)
“In 1960, President Eisenhower transferred his rocket development group at Redstone Arsenal from the Army to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its primary objective was to develop giant Saturn rockets. Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon. At Marshall, the group also worked on the Mercury-Redstone, the rocket that sent the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. Shortly after Shepard’s successful flight, President John F. Kennedy challenged America to send a man to the Moon by the end of the decade. With the July 20, 1969 moon landing, the Apollo 11 mission fulfilled both Kennedy’s mission.
In 1970, NASA leadership asked von Braun to move to Washington, D.C., to head up the strategic planning effort for the agency. He left his home in Huntsville, Alabama, but in 1972 he decided to retire from NASA and work for Fairchild Industries of Germantown, Maryland. He died in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 16, 1977.”
@ 52. Kagehi :
First, FWIW reminder folks that you get
By using the word Blockquote (and then /Blockquote) inside grrater than / lesser than symbols < & > aka angled brackets in hope this helps.
Nope.I don’t think that;’s actually true esp given things like their bargelanding clips and their famous line abouyt “Rapid Unscheduled disassembly”” etc..
One thing is for sure – they certainly aren’t all failures!
False again for the exact same reason cited in my #20 – Starship is bigger, cherper and more powerful than the Saturn V and other previous rockets.
Nope. The specific pointisn’t abouyt Musk her eiit si abpout space travel and rocketry and the vision and goals and projects being worked on. That Musk is a nazi and eevil is as relevant there as the fact that Von Braun was. I think youare focusing on the wrong things. I spose you probly thinklikewise about me..
@57 Yeah, no, I think the point here is that Musk himself isn’t a genius, isn’t a good engineer, and the people working for him could easily do all this stuff without him, so its insane that we, never mind the companies he is involved in, are letting a freaking Nazi pretend to run them, and do science. This is vastly different than Von Braun, who was actually a good engineer, and had a legitimate grounds to be involved in the projects, not just as a popular figure head, or an “idea guy”, but someone who actually “designed things”, and knew what the F he was doing. Hammer, err.. I mean Musk, isn’t, and his disappearance might actually “help” the projects, since it wouldn’t be headed by a narcissistic creep, who much like Trump, only gives a crap about, “Do it my way.”, and, “Give me all the credit, when it works, otherwise, its always someone else’s fault.” That is the core point here. Not whether or not its “technically” a bit bigger, any maybe less expensive, if you ignore the vast amount of money wasted by it “mostly working” – unlike a projects which looks are things in terms of, “Lets try to get this right the first damn time, so we don’t keep blowing the thing up, over and over, multiple times, due to stupid mistakes, which people bloody told us wouldn’t work, but ‘some of us’ refused to listen to – repeatedly.”
StevoR @57:
Jumping the gun there a bit. Saturn V could carry 130 tons to low earth orbit. Block 2 of Starship could supposedly carry 35 tons, and 3/4 launches were failures. Did any of them actually carry 35 tons, and did any of them actually reach LEO?
You claims are predicated on eventual success. Not going that great as yet. But as long as you have faith…
@ ^ Rob Grigjanis : See facts lisetd in my #20 above.
My fiath is an assessment baed onthe precendet of thngs such as theiur eventual success with ladingreusable rocket boosters on a barge at sea as entertainingly shown here (2 mins long) which also shows that SpaceX unlike Musk is happy to have fun at their own expense at times,.
Landing reusuable boosters and simultaneous landings and the chopsticks cathing of rocket boosters are all of course things ONLY SpaceCX have suceeded in doing.
@ ^ That linked yt video is the one Ireferred to in my #57 last night.
Clarity fix : My “faith” is an assessment based on the precedent of SpaceX’s remarkable record of accomplishments of things people once said couldn’t be done such as their eventual success with landing reusable rocket boosters on a barge at sea as..
@ 52. Kagehi :
Project name? Or company name? Like using SpaceX and Starship as I’ve already been doing and pointing out here throughout?
Will keep doing.
Gues sthast ausr e worked for Volkswagon didn’t it? (Porsche / Mercedes too memory serving?)