Somehow I have a tough time believing Boeing, SpaceX where X of course means Musk, and Amazon have any interest in helping ordinary people like you or me see space. Maybe with enough public funds, but by now they’re pretty good at making sure real value goes to shareholders not the general public. Our role so far has been to choke on their ashes and wonder when the night sky will be stolen by their vanity constellations. That’s what modern corporations do, they financialize and enshittify things…and sorry, but none of these sound likely to be exceptions to me.
And frankly, if you’re waiting on the ground either way, I like the idea that space is reserved to elite military pilots and researchers more than the idea that it’s a playground for idiots who’ve happened to steal enough wages from workers. They ruin everything.
the idea of privatization itself seems to have swept the ground out from under actual public space exploration; at least here, where after apollo we should have had a leg up
rich individuals capture society’s successes, and make us cleanup their defeats. if they didn’t exist, we’d all be much further ahead
The real exploration has been continuing apace with uncrewed spacecraft. The longest time any crewed mission spent on the lunar surface during the Apollo era was about 75 hours, and only a fraction of that time was actually dedicated to gathering data. By contrast, we’ve had orbiters and rovers and other probes continuously gathering data on Mars for decades.
It’s true that private industry seems to have captured the astronaut program, but that’s not where most of the real space science has been happening.
You do know that quite a few of the people who flew in planes were “ordinary people” right? Smart, talented people who got where they were via hardwork and talent? Ordinary people join the military all the time. It’s made up of ordinary people.
Plenty of non-military people have gone into space…
But… my larger point is that privatized, for-profit space “travel” is not going to end up in space travel being democratized… It’s more likely that space travel stays something for the rich, unless they find a way to export capitalism to space and force people to work for low-wages, in high risk jobs in space… That’s literally how corporations work and how capitalism works. If you want space to be democratized, then you push for more public control of space travel, with government funding providing the bulk of the funding. That is how perfectly ordinary humans (not rich ass billionaires like Musk and Bezos) ended up being the first people in space… Because governments on earth made it possible for people not born to wealth and privilege to do that - in everything from the education they received to the training they got.
Depends on what the reason was. They got cleared again pretty fast the last time.
However…
Falcon9 is a remarkable reliable system, ~300 launches without a glitch.
Now, two malfunctions in relatively short succession. On a mature, proven system.
Could it be that they have started to test fixes for stuff that doesn’t work on Starship?
Bad idea if they did, but that’s the sort of brainwave their in-house genius comes up with.
In this instance the launch still succeeded in getting the payload to orbit, but the booster did not land successfully on the drone ship. (Until relatively recently any successful recovery of the boosters would be considered a bonus, but not a requirement for a successful mission.)
This was this specific booster’s 23rd flight, and the Falcon 9 boosters had been running a streak of 267 consecutive successfull landings, which is honestly pretty amazing regardless of what other well-deserved criticisms are due for Musk and SpaceX.
Edit to add:
Scott Manley did an analysis of the video and noted that unlike typical booster landings this one did not show zero vertical speed at the moment of touchdown, and the strut for one of the landing legs visibility buckled just after landing, followed by the booster tipping over. So for whatever reason it landed a little faster than it was typically supposed to. Other boosters have occasionally had landings at similar speeds though, so his best guess is that it was a combination of that plus the fact that this was SpaceX’s oldest booster, so maybe they’re finding out what the useful life fot these things is.
