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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Also Falcon 9 launches were both profitable and undercutting the competition

From what I understand we don't actually know that. Do we have any audited numbers on their launch costs?

The thing is, if it's not the case, we have to consider that SpaceX is putting down more launches than the rest of the market put together as some sort of stunt or fraud, which starts to edge into conspiracy theory. Either Musk is a machiavellian genius running a massive misinformation campaign using billion dollars of hardware, or F9 launches are profitable and more launches are more profitable, which would explain why SpaceX literally started a separate company to justify being able to make more launches.

The thing is, if it's not the case, we have to consider that SpaceX is putting down more launches than the rest of the market put together as some sort of stunt or fraud, which starts to edge into conspiracy theory.

Not if you realize the overwhelming majority of those launches are for Starlink, than it becomes a straight-forward application of using hype to generate more hype to extract as much money from investors as possible.

Either Musk is a machiavellian genius running a massive misinformation campaign using billion dollars of hardware

I unironically believe that this is closer to the truth than the alternative, and that we'll see it soon enough (I'll go with Thunderf00t's 5 year clock, starting last year, though like I said the vibes are telling me it might happen a lot sooner).

Even before Starlink launches began, SpaceX was launching roughly three times as many rockets as ULA per year

That still massively diminishes the size of the "conspiracy theory", and doesn't change the fact we don't have any audited numbers. Like I said, we'll see soon enough.

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