John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

NASA "can't afford to blow up a rocket" because it answers directly to Congress, which insists on perfection while also insisting on holding the purse strings. This is because Congress isn't interested in scientific advancement or commercial viability; it's interested in grandiose gestures and getting money for big constituents.

Also, NASA has blown up plenty of rockets during its history. There was a period of rapid advancement in the mid-20th century during which launch failure rates exceeded 50 percent. Look up Apollo 1: the crew died in a pad fire. If we count astronaut casualties only, NASA's body count is 17 (IIRC) while SpaceX's is zero.

Rockets blowing up during development is normal and expected. The point of this is to learn all of the failure modes so that they are as safe as possible once they enter full operation. If a few Starships go boom, SpaceX has a half-dozen more ready to fly. But SLS has to fly perfectly because we can only launch it once every two years. If one of them fails, we can forget about returning to the Moon (on Congress' dime, at least).

Falcon 1 had three launch failures, then two successes before being retired. Falcon 9 has had two failures over 283 missions, and 254 consecutive successes. (Falcon Heavy is eight for eight.) Starship will reach that point as well, but it is by far the most ambitious rocket development program since Saturn V, arguably even more so.

The media loves to make hay over rocket explosions. They're good for ratings. If they can poke jabs at Elon Musk along the way, it's a bonus. Technical accuracy and historical balance are irrelevant.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 21st 2023 at 1:22:44 PM

There's really no justification for having an unsafe factory and denying safety inspectors for three months, though. That's not takings risks for progress, that's treating your workers like they're expendable.

Sure, those are worth looking into, as long as we remember to apply our criteria in a fair manner. Absolute count of injuries is less important than the rate of injuries, and you have to compare similar industries. Accident rates at construction sites are generally much higher than at operational factories, for example, and Tesla is building/expanding most of its facilities at any given time.

I've seen a lot of these news stories and they often fail to establish vital comparative factors, meaning that they aren't worth much to the regulators whose job it is to ensure safety. They can also be actively harmful by diverting attention to whichever issue makes the headlines this week. Anecdotes are not data.

Recent articles in European media (that I linked in the Space Thread [cough]) lambasted the European Space Agency (ESA) for a work culture in which temporary employees and contractors are/were subject to harsh, debasing treatment by permanent staff. Italian company Avio recently lost a set of fuel tanks that it needed for the final launch of its Vega rocket, finding them months later in a dumpster, and allegedly failed to report the incident to ESA.

I'm sure we've all seen news items about the lax engineering culture at Boeing, resulting in such lapses as the fatal 737 MAX 8 crashes, delays on tanker aircraft for the USAF, delays in the Starliner crew capsule program, etc.

I'm not saying that any of these things are good, nor that we should tolerate them. I'm saying that we shouldn't allow our biases to govern how we consume this information by making it seem as if Musk's companies are uniquely or abnormally dangerous. (If they actually are, then they should be investigated, of course.)

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 21st 2023 at 2:05:17 PM

There is a Space thread.

Okay, here's a fair criterium: I very much doubt "literally doesn't want yellow warning markers" is a common problem in the manufacturing sector. That's not even the usual "company wants to skip out on safety measures out of sheer greed", that's somebody eshewing safety because of some weird aesthetics hang-up.

I was thinking about bringing up his rabid anti-union stance, but that's just par for the course with American corporations (Walmart ran their head into a bloody wall when they tried pulling their usual shit in Germany and actually had to abandon that market entirely as a result, for example).

And I'm pretty sure every time people bring up Musk as a person (you know, the focus of this recent episode) there or in any other thread where his companies come up, they get told that's not the focus of the respective thread.

So to move it back to Musk - I honestly think that when his companies succeed, it tends to be not because, but in spite of him - heck, John brought up how Musk was involved in early PayPal, but not how the other people involved bought him out after he wanted to turn it into some kind of "does everything" website (sounds familiar, doesn't it).

There've been reports about how some of his other companies basically try to keep him as uninvolved with the ground floor business as possible because him actually getting involved tends to mess things up for the people working there.

And Twitter's the prime example of what happens when Musk is allowed to get personally involved constantly.

Honestly, I think his companies would probably do much better in general, if they weren't run by, you know, Elon Musk.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Dec 21st 2023 at 9:08:15 PM

There are also reports that he is essential to his companies and they could not exist (or be successful) without him. Which of those one believes appears to be determined by one's preexisting beliefs.

As far as Tesla, batteries (thanks to cell phones) had made enough progress for an electric car to be viable. Someone was going to make the move, even if it wasn't Musk. He did do a lot of things right, like shedding the "slow golf cart" image and building out the charging network. But I don't think Musk is the only person that could have done it.

Sometimes the time is right for something new. If Elisha Gray was just a little faster getting to the patent office (and/or had better lawyers) we'd have the Gray Telephone system.

People probably thought that of Walt Disney, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs too, and yet their companies survived and thrived without them. Sure, these people meant a lot to their respective companies, but we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that they are indispensable, that these companies will simply roll over and die without them. They never do.

And legally, or economically, it's wild that Musk has so much power over stuff like Starlink that it influences the invasion of Ukraine.

And he absolutely should not be above accountability to the laws of the US or any other nation. Nobody should be above accountability.

The initial use of Starlink was subject to Musk’s whims because he just gave out its use for free.

The current use of Starlink is a result of an actual contract between Space X and the government. As such that is no longer something he can just do.

Edited by CheapMarzipan on Dec 21st 2023 at 4:53:57 AM

Could the government not just seize Starlink? Or does that require a state of war?

The US government has no power to seize private businesses or business assets, even during war, without a civil or criminal judgment.

The Defense Production Act can be invoked to force businesses to produce certain goods or services at the demand of the government, but that's as far as it goes.

Anyway, the problem has been solved already:

1. The US Department of Defense purchased the right to operate Starlink services for Ukraine's military from SpaceX.
2. The DoD is paying SpaceX to develop, manufacture, and launch "Starshield" satellites, which are a militarized variant of Starlink that will be wholly owned and operated by the government.

If anyone else wants to build and launch LEO Internet megaconstellations, they're welcome to. It's a free world.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 21st 2023 at 7:56:23 AM

It really, really isn't.

OneWeb already did it, albeit at a smaller scale. Amazon is trying to do it. China is planning its own megaconstellation, as are several other nations (although China is the only one with a realistic chance of keeping up in launch cadence).

I meant what I said: if you can build rockets and satellites, you can put yours in orbit and do whatever you want with them. But the US government didn't think it was worth the effort to do what SpaceX did until suddenly the capability appeared — like magic! uwu — and now everyone wants a say in how it's used.

This is a "skin in the game" situation.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 21st 2023 at 8:07:02 AM

I would agree with Fighteer that a reasonable amount of risk for those willing to do so while being as safe as possible too would probably be the right way to go with anything.

The Starlink thing also only came about because the US government is unwilling (due the WW3 concerns) to let Ukraine use the Do D network of communication satellites for military operations but is willing to let Space "X" sell satellite capability to Ukraine.

A country not as close to the US government would never have gotten permission to use the satellites of a US based company for military activity, a country any closer aligned would probably just be using the Do D network because the US would be directly involved in the conflict.

If the US government is afraid of starting World War III by supporting Ukraine, it has an odd way of showing that. Also, that would validate Elon's decision not to allow Starlink to be used in Crimea - if the Pentagon thinks that antagonizing Russia might lead to nuclear war, who is he to argue?

No, the main thing with Starlink is that it's fast, cheap, and easy. Military satellite communications are low-bandwidth, high-latency, require bulky equipment, and can be jammed. Starlink can be set up in minutes from a $500 terminal, consumes relatively little power (~100 Watts), gives high bandwidth (>100 Mbps) with low latency (<50 ms), and is very hard to jam or interfere with.

As good a product as it is for people in the boonies to get Netflix, it couldn't have been designed as a more ideal solution for field military comms if they'd set out to achieve that goal from the start.

SpaceX initially donated thousands of terminals to Ukraine as part of its general policy of supporting disaster relief efforts. USAID bought a substantial additional quantity. When the Ukrainian military started getting its hands on them and realized the capability, they rushed to put them in service, and SpaceX's management team was unprepared for the political tailwinds of deciding in real-time where to turn on service.

I can't think of any other time in history when a civilian product became so immediately useful to a war effort without any clear structure for political oversight. We can criticize Musk's actions from our armchairs — and there's plenty to criticize! — but this was a unique situation.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 22nd 2023 at 11:29:36 AM

I guess that's fair enough, though it does demonstrate just how influential billionaires can be these days.

It’s not worries that supporting Ukraine would cause WW3, but it is worried that the Do D actively fighting alongside the Ukrainians might cause issues.

The difference between selling someone equipment (what the US is doing) and having someone use your equipment while keeping ownership (what it’d be to have Ukraine use Do D satellites) is subtle but legally import.

US military satellite communications are going to be designed specifically to be used in a war against Russia, I find it very hard to believe that they’d be worse than something designed for civilian use.

We also shouldn’t act like we know the exact capabilities of Do D satellite communication systems, such information isn’t going to be in the public domain.

As much as Vladimir Putin observes any laws, nations not going to war over providing them equipment is a long historically established matter.

Very different from US going to war with Ukraine.

In case I didn't say already, from what I absorbed, the show on the Israel-Hamas War was really informative.

Ha, this week's upload is a web exclusive for the sub-40 demo as an alternative to the HOA episode, seeing as none of us would know how it feels like to own a house anyway.

Wait, that's not new content. They did that bit ages ago! This is the HOA episode it was attached to, from nine months ago!

Oh, I think I get it. They didn't want to pay for the domainname of lastsqueektonight, so they uploaded the web-exclusive vid to the Youtube channel instead.

Yeah I saw it on either another YT account or on the actual website back when it first came out. Glad they finally got it on the actual channel finally though.

They never did post the Trinidad segment from 2015 aimed at FIFA on their channel. That said, The Mittens of Disapproval Are On is on other YT channels though. Haha.

Hey look, another rat who would rather be a mouse.

Also... What are you talking about, John? Mickey Mouse wasn't all that sweet and harmless in his early years. He had some actual edge to him before Disney made him the mascot of the company and sanded all the edges off until he turned into Dad Mickey reading the newspaper in his office shirt while ordering Pluto around like a bad office manager.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 5th 2024 at 10:27:35 AM