good point, it's certainly more of a trend with the younger generation and in the west.
But even living in a country that is perceived as "beer centric", i noticed that people are starting to be much more conscious of their alcohol consumption after covid. For the young generation, alcohol does not seem to play as big a role anymore and i would expect that this carries over to their work-life once they enter the work force.
I come from a country where heavy drinking was extremely normalized and common. Then the society completely shifted. Bringing vodka used to be the default thing to do when invited anywhere, nowadays you can't get people to drink a beer with you.
I looked into statistics, and turns out, people didn't stop drinking, they actually drink much more, what changed is that drinking stopped being a social activity, and now is a solo introvert home activity. I think that's the real societal shift.
That's a unfair comparison towards President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Didn't he give up his position in the end towards the more qualified main character of the movie?
The taxpayer money is for r&d. We should be very tolerant of failure. Aggressively testing with real hardware is a key part of how we learn to make a more robust systems. Fear of failure and waste will slow down progress.
The savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI.
Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.
Sorry, Artemis carried more than one banana and actually made it to orbit. SpaceX has not provided any ROI yet. You can't compare the (very optimistic) promises of SpaceX against the actual returns of the rest of the industry.
*Starship has zero ROI and has sucked up a lot of federal funds.
Falcon 9 has had plenty of "ROI" but it wasn't really federally funded. Let's not get carried away though about "more than the entire US space industry combined," though.
This has been SpaceX’s methodology for a long time now and has gotten them to the point where they have the most reliable western launch vehicles ever launching record amounts of mass to orbit each year at record low prices.
I truly hope that if you ever design a rocket yourself, that you will test it. I have no idea why you'd think testing is a terrible thing to do if it has to do with rockets.
I think we all agree that you need to test eventually. I do think most of us would already be double checking for leaks. It just seems one of the obvious things that may go wrong when putting it all together.
They likely did test it, and it passed. The leak was probably caused by the somewhat violent environment of the launch, and that can’t be entirely replicated on the ground.
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