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Comment by O5vYtytb | Hacker News Reader

I have to wonder what you mean we're no longer making cool spacecraft? The SpaceX starship is about to launch in an hour, it's very cool.

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Watching the countdown now! T-00:28:12! Will be spectacular no matter what happens! Yes, I'm excited. Not sure how the parent comment has missed what SpaceX has been doing with Dragon, Starship, Starlink, and all the rockets! Amazing.

It exploded when trying to orient for the first stage separation. And it appeared to have 5 of the 33 engines out during the first stage flight. This launch gave me very "Don't Look Up" ending vibes.

Just the opposite. This is engineer-driven testing.

it's amazing how well this works for them. I think this is the main reason they can crank through development so fast. Wish this sort of development was more common.

The grand applause when they blew it up showed that it was a success.

Well to be faaaaaair, they were properly "primed" to applaud and call it a success, no matter what happened. But yeah, infinite money does that to you: you can operate in "fail fast" mode and obtain results you could not otherwise.

Yep. But you'd expect that we'd have more given how much technology has advanced and how bigger the economies are now. The recent progress is mostly due to Billionaires now.

Another possibility is: Space is too hard. So instead the focus is to analyze (ie: James Webb) instead of sending a human there.

The incentives for going to space are limited to more economic sensibility when you don't have a dick measuring contest going on between great powers.

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