Whats the fucking point?

Actually we will send commies, liberals and niggers to Mars to slave away while they think they're being revolutionary or whatever. Feminists are easy to attract for example, we need strong women on Mars! Commies we will attract with promises of being able to build a society away from capitalism. Blacks will be easily baited with talk of being spacefaring kangz again, free from whitey in their own colony.

Then we will have you work as hard as you can, because if you don't we won't send you the necessities you need for survival. We can always send new workers you know. Finally, once it's terraformed we will come to rule over you.

Space no longer inspires a sense of wonder, this is a self referential nerd humor joke from 2011. It's not awe inspiring, it's shareable. Capitalism has managed to banalise even space exploration

...

Don't blame capitalism, if we could keep it magical we would. It's just human nature to get used to things or ideas and they lose their novelty. I'd say what really killed the interest in space was learning more about it. It's just floating rocks.

...

elaborate ruse by US government to try to silence the reality of the Flat Earth. Flat earth and marxism are inseparable

Honestly it is not cool anymroe because capitalism "won" the cold war…

so now there's just capitalists colonizing space. What made space "cool" before was that commies were discovering it, beating americans at their own game of technological advancement and their obsession with "hard work" and "efficiency". At that time, communists getting into space was a landmark kind of "checkmate" for ideological hegemony. Now, there's nothing to "win," it just looks like a waste of fucking money to the average normie,.. and imo at this point they are not wrong given all the other problems we have on earth.

that isnt to say we should totally slash nasa, i would love to allocate MORE money for science altogether, but i don't trust any "budget deficit" for any kind of grand narrative so long as it is done by a capitalist government. it seems the "benefits"of said spending always benefit the rulers and not the workers.

and on that note, i just want to add that anyone who circlejerks about space is most likely a liberal nationalist / anti-communist.

so their "wonder" and "awe" at space is likely just some weird patriotism boner due to cold war propaganda. I would bet that is at least half the reason they care, and it isn't always just about "science". For them its a kind of nostalgic throwback to the days of the cold war and when anti communism was at one of its peaks.

this is killing the one part of my childhood I had left… my love of space.
fuck me

The Soviets had a sense of romanticism and cosmic destiny RE: Space that is totally missing from Musk's exploits. Have you heard of Fyodorov and the Russian Cosmists?

iep.utm.edu/fedorov/

no i haven't, ill check it out.

you are right they did. musk and the whole liberal nationalist / anti-communist tech circlejerk really are a match made in heaven imo.

anyone who doesn't explicitly self identify as a commie and jerks off to that much tech shit is probably a closeted McCarthy-ite is all I was really getting at

Mukesh Ambani is pretty fucking rich.

alibaba hellooo

Why the scare quotes? We won.
What a bunch of hogwash. Sure it was hyped because of the space race but we won that. It was romanticised because people would care about us winning it.

woops. i guess theyre chinese. fuck im retarded

hi porky
i put scare quotes bc you guys didnt really "win"
if you really won the cold war people wouldnt
be joining and forming commie orgs in 2018 in first world countries

However, I could see sus losing some red liberals to this, and that will truly be a great time. Also, I used to be against sending rich people to Mars, but we could always just, y'know, come get them later.

Haha yes a win for Capitalist antidemocratic pressure on a socialist state, great victory, much ebin.

It's good to give people the illusion of free choice. Do you actually think they are capable of challenging the system at all? We run everything.

This is actually what North Koreans believe.
It was a win for the free market and the American way of life. Honestly the commies were just as bad as the nazis with their plans of world domination.

Hahaha, imagine being this high on ideology. Nazis literally equal guys who want to own their own work. Can't relate.
I'm incapable.

The obscenity and childishness of this stunt disgust me on levels I previously thought impossible.
At first I thought it was just that it was obscene, but the more I dwell on it the worse it seems. It's not just obscene, there are obscene alternatives that would bother me less, because they would be mature obscenity. This, instead, comes across more as someone being rich and realising that the limits of taste that would've once stood in the way of doing something like this are now gone - if you've got the money, you're free to enjoy as you please. Even by those standards it's disgusting because of the permanence of the act. This isn't just throwing a car into space - fair enough, just a novel marketing stunt provided it was going to come down again. Sure, you've burned money but that's your right. No, this is much worse. This is a car that isn't going to come down, this is a car that is going to be floating around in orbit long after you and any relative or descendant you could bring yourself to care about is long deceased. This is a car that is going to be floating around in space long beyond the lifespan of even a rogue Google AI that took over Earth and exterminated mankind after a Google Doodle gone wrong. assuming said AI doesn't go to space, obviously. That is an obscene period of time, for the greatest obscenity mankind has ever committed to physical form.
It almost feels Holla Forums to tie it into the general realisation you don't have to give up childish things as you age - and I don't necessarily oppose that in the small scale. If adults care more about Sonic 2 than they do about newspapers, so be it. But this takes it to another level.

I spent an unreasonable amount of time hoping the rocket would explode on the pad, or crash after launch, or even suffer some kind of failure that would mean it would be stuck in earth orbit and decay over thousands of years. I even considered praying, briefly. But no. We've put a sports car around The Sun. It's like Kerbal Space Program, but finally an enterprising man has demonstrated that we can actually do that in real life. What a great guy, how cool. Humanity has done it, We've done it,. We did it Reddit!
The only thing worse than imagining this as mankind's tombstone is imagining the species that produced such spectacle continuing to exist.

I briefly thought we had reprieve as I typed that the vehicle would orbit Mars - perhaps in such circumstances it would still decay and basically be forgotten after a few thousand years, but upon checking it seems to be a solar orbit around the same distance as Mars, which of course means that we've got to wait until Sol wakes up and decides to swallow up her greatest mistake in a blaze of science

that's a tripfag you double nigger

The space shuttle was cooler

Adults shouldn't care about newspapers though.

Test.
t. knower.

I don't care about cars in space in general, as a matter of childishness. If we lived in The Culture and some people wanted to launch cars into space, it doesn't seem like an issue. There is plenty of it, after all.

It's still just that this is all tied to the brand of a man and his group of companies, and it doesn't feel "inspiring" to me. It feels like there are multiple odious implications. If you have an ungodly amount of money you can do whatever you want, including have your name attached to a collective effort people temporarily revere as though it's another moon landing. It is removing our collective ability to do things for ourselves, it's still just "musk saving the world, dragging us to mars". And if it wasn't enough that his brand was already all over it, he sent a car up as advertisement. And he rigged it with pop cultural references. People were tweeting how we are in the future because a car is in space. We could've launched a Rolls Royce into space in the golden days of the space program. The impressive thing was the reusable rockets landing, and now I'm not sure if people would have been excited about NASA doing that because they prefer Musk's brand and his sports car.

And aside from all of that, maybe I'm wrong but the obsession with escaping the planet like we can escape our problems seems like some kind of insanity. 7 billion people live here, are we going to build a space elevator to get them all off the earth and onto mars? What are we going to do on Mars, an inhospitable wasteland? That is our saving grace, a rocky desert with no oxygen? Are we supposed to fly out of the solar system in giant life boats, frozen like Alien? I could understand if we were trying to pull energy from space, or manufacture in space, or mine asteroids or whatever. But we're going to colonize Mars as a hedge against global instability on Earth? Jesus Christ. It's the whole "we can imagine the end of the world before the end of capitalism", except we can imagine escaping earth before we can imagine living on it sustainably.

It's like the lotto or capitalism in general. People think they're going to win when they never do. Likewise, they think they'll be on Musk's ark to Mars.

...

fixed

youtube.com/watch?v=fbBWODsBzdo

Space shuttle was also the most lethal launch vehicle in history. Buran or Black Arrow would've been cheaper, safer, and much cooler

At the risk of getting banned, I’m not on board with the hate for Elon Musk. The things his companies (particularly SpaceX) are accomplishing transcend politics.

I suppose I care about our species more than the proletariat.

All the old futurists are rolling in their graves. They fucking went to the moon and here we are a half century later thinking launching a car into space is a big deal. They thought we would colonize our solar system and leave the cradle we call Earth but nope we are still here not taking space seriously.

learn materialism.
if everyone associated with SpaceX died tomorrow the future would be negligibly different 10 years from now, we'd just have BlueOrigin logos on our nightmares instead of SpaceX ones.

also please slap yourself for saying anything can "transcend politics" like some boyish democrat senator from a flyover state. I know I can't slap you, so my best hope is asking you to slap yourself, so please give me that, slap yourself.

The Tesla advertisement in the playload was not the point of the launch.
In order to accomplish any of that stuff in the photos you posted, we would need reusable rockets, which is what SpaceX is making progress on.

Space elevators and orbital rings are far more efficient in the long run.

Might as well push for a Dyson sphere while you are at it.

what makes you say that

How are you going to get all that mass into orbit?
Efficient rockets are a vital intermediate step.

What is wrong is a dyson swarm? We have a free massive fusion reactor just pumping out energy in our solar system so why now harness the energy it is wasting?

Currently all attempts to build reusable rockets haven't been cheaper then simply mass producing disposable rockets which is why the Space Shuttle was such a massive white elephant since even though it could reuse its boosters after being fished out of the water, the cost of rebuilding was far more costly then simply building new.

I am a materialist.
I fear the material effects of a 25km piece of matter intersecting earth‘s orbit.

too bad we have too many of both

without newspapers what will puppies piss all over? the carpet?

I object not since space is finite, but because there's so much space. There's never going to come a point where we say "yeah, that was obscene, let's take it down and put something better up", so you'd think adults would think long and hard about whether they really want whatever they've put into space to stay there forever, rather than playing silly buggers for upvotes. The personal branding and individualisation of collective endeavour are annoying and disgusting, but they don't have the same permanence. Musk will one day, mercifully, die. If we're lucky, he may even fade into the footnotes of history.

I think going to space and broadening humanity out has basically valid purpose, even if it required double the resources it presently does there's merit to having a man on Mars just to have a man on Mars, particularly if that leads in the desirable direction of improving the chances of human survival. At least, that's what I thought back when my conception of such a program was NASA doing it. Americans doing it can be tolerated, the private sector doing it in a livestream I'm much more dubious about. Perhaps locking ourselves on earth and forcing ourselves to fix that first would be desirable. Either we'll become a species that deserves to live, or we'll die.

i daresay a useful reusable spacecraft was probably technologically possible in the 1970s, if funding had been provided for one of the fully re-usable space shuttle designs.

alternatively if you just took all the money from the space shuttle and threw it at single use designs, you could've thrown a lot more stuff into space with the same budget. (since you wouldn't be launching 7 people and a big aeroplane with every satellite you put up.)

this seems like a reddit-y talking point
oh wow they made a rocket that can land, it's not like SpaceX already did this several times before.
i'm sure someone could go on about how it's a bigger rocket or a different design but frankly once you've proven the concept of a rocket that vertically lands itself the rest is just boring development nobody cares about or ought to care about. that makes the car the novel part for now.

big dumb boosters tbh.

i fear the material effects of your hand intersecting your face haven't occurred in line with my request.
in valuing Musk in particular and SpaceX in general you deviate from materialism by assuming the given individual, or even the specific company is what's important, instead of the overall material conditions at play. Which is why we can point to other companies doing essentially the same thing, why the Telephone has between 1 and 40 inventors, why Americans use the wrong Television standard, and so on and so forth.

Are you excluding spacex?

Yes because you are they are not currently being mass produced also with reusable rockets you can't simply use spent Single Stage To Orbit rockets as materials to build infrastructure in orbit that futurists in the 1960's thought would be the most logical way to build colonies in Low Earth Orbit as you simply have astronauts cut up the rocket and weld it into a hull for a colony.

"And when the last of Pork is gone, I will personally throw your beloved Rocket Jesus into the Sun!"

This was the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy. This is the same rocket that would lift a payload that would go to mars.

Are you seriously shilling for non-reusable rockets because you don’t like some Porky? That is pure ideology my friend.
Besides, big boosters are shit anyway. Google the tyranny of the rocket equation. There are rapidly diminishing returns in Delta V per amount of fuel. Also this isn’t Kerbal Space Program. Budgets are not unlimited.

They are all in the beginning stages. None of them have gotten anything into orbit. The cult of personality around Musk is shit, but the fact is, his company is making incredible progress.

or to translate, it's a different design that isn't interesting at all because we've already built a big rocket and we've already built a rocket that can land itself and having a big rocket that can land itself is exponentially less impressive than the first big rocket or the first rocket that can land itself.

ah yes pointing out a viable (and in rocket circlejerk circles, well known) route to placing things in orbit cost-efficiently certainly constitutes shilling.
the dumb in big dumb booster is very important. the point is to mass-produce a single design of rocket (in the general idea, a big one.) on the cheap. Fuel isn't the expensive part, so any fuel wasted on unnecessary mass because lol rocket equation is offset by the fact the rocket itself had design costs amortized over a production run of 5000 and is made out of old washing machines. End result, it's very very cheap. Bonus: If it explodes, you just buy another cheap rocket rather than losing your fancy re-usable toy. (Soz about the payload lol)

Point 1: We limit them by choice since we're comically villainous. (See: NERVA)
Point 2: An argument in favour of mass production to cut unit costs.

Progress that any company would've made given the same material conditions.
In a raffle there is always a winner. The specific merits of the winner (oh, they chose their number specially…) pale in comparison to the fact that the starting conditions guaranteed that a ticket someone held was going to be drawn from a hat. unless the person with the winning ticket has left, but don't overthink the metaphor. Not bound by the social conventions of politeness that apply to literal raffles, I see no reason whatsoever to clap the winner.

muh space car is legit retarded and i'm already sick of normie libs posting about it.

However it is good that we're finally seriously looking at making space travel an actual thing again in much the same way it was a good thing for porkies to whip the proletariat into making transcontinental railroads.

I don't see the big issue, sending a car into space playing Space Oddity is amusing, and compared to the price of the rocket in the first place the car is peanuts. Quit having a stick up your asses.

The thing reeks of advertising, it would be like if General Motors or Ford sponsored Apollo 11 and made the Lunar Roving Vehicle look like their hot sports model of 1969.

My God that would basically be the fucking coolest and most American thing ever. Besides, you're showing up almost 50 years late to this fight, GM gave the Apollo astronauts Corvettes basically as a publicity stunt.