>SpaceX rockets failed repeatedly before getting it right

They didn't, though. There is a HUGE difference between test flights and production flights.

Falcon 1 scheduled several test flights. This where test flights, designed as such, and carrying accordingly mass-simulators, broken satellites, or a bloody wheel of cheese. Their first few failed, which was expected, and not a concern, as this are test flights. Then they reached orbit succesfully, and so they went into production. Their next flight was a production flight, and worked flawlessly too.

Then Falcon 9 came, which worked flawlessly on their first flight, and flew flawlessly for 5 straight years. They had ONE in-flight failure with 1.1, then absolutely none since FT. So 8 years of flawless launches, almost 200 of them too.

Virgin Orbit offers expensive, inconvenient, unreliable launches.

For instance, Electron costs *half* of what a LauncherOne will cost you, and RocketLab is more reliable, has more launches under their belt, and offers a fantastic truly customer-oriented system.

The supposed advantages of air-launch aren't such. First of all, it's for the most part a lie. "It's just a plane, so we can launch anywhere". Well, except you do need pretty much all facilities except for a launch tower at your airport. And you need authorizations from everyone, from the FAA to the airport itself, local authorities, etc. Launching from another country? Even more bureaucracy. And it'll only be ok if it's a NATO country and the US gives the Ok for it (because ITAR). So all of those advantages evaporate fairly quickly.

If you want cheaper, and your orbit allows it, you can get on a SpaceX ridesharing mission. Anywhere from 300k to around 2 to 3 million for the max payload capacity that LauncherOne can handle. And you're launching on the most reliable rocket in history.

The problem with their last launch is a fundamental flaw, not necessarily on design, but on how they do things. Their processes are horrible. Sure, they aren't the same company as Virgin Galactic now, but they used to be, and they obviously inherited the same culture.

VO was already not very appealing, but now there are even more options, and more are coming. VO hasn't gone the way of Astra yet for the same reason BO isn't out of business: A big ego with big pockets behind it.

Ban stuff, steal from you, and generally stand in the way of progress. People seem to have forgotten now, but they shut down a whole lot more than just the internet in 2020, and the sheep seemed ok with it.

Generally, I agree with your sentiment, but also "letting them get away with it" is a bad precedent. We've already seen similar efforts from microsoft, and from other manufacturers. Apple isn't the first, nor will be the last, to try and lock down a platform.

Breaking whatever BS protection they throw at it and doing what you want with the platform is exercising your right to use your own stuff however the hell you want. It's like the US flying over what China claims as the South China Sea. Basically, use it or lose it.

That is correct. The first mission to carry humans for NASA wasn't a production mission, and so it was called Demo-2 (after Demo-1, which did everything but without people onboard). After that, Crew 1 through 6. So it's the 7th mission *for NASA*. In addition, they also flew Axiom 1 and Inspiration 4.

So, 1 manned demo mission, 6 missions for NASA in the main contract, "Crew" series, 1 for Axiom, 1 private, for a grand total of 9 missions with crew onboard so far.

Well, that's all leftists, isn't it? They loved Musk when their mind overlords told him he was ok because EV = Woke. Then they hated him when they were told to.

99% of all commie-shitposts on the internet say "Sent from my iPhone" below.

Hi, I'm from Argentina. You know what else China does here? Not cause coups that kill thousands of people, or keep their boots on our throats for decades.
At least for now.

But as you say, money talks, and that's definitely the main reason.

And will there be any detectable emissions?

Well, burning up a single satellite would be equivalent to setting fire to something like a large motorbike , when you look at at mass and components used.

Burning up 40 of them a week in the upper atmosphere is basically undetectable compared to the sheer quantity of general materials we set fire to on Earth each week.

Now if instead of satellites you burnt 40 cargo ships a week, that would be detectable.

It seems they had some unexpected new learnings about some corner cases and failure modes.

Chain of events seems to be:

1. Lots of drag from raised atmosphere -> put sats in edge-on "safe mode" for minimal drag.

2. Go to take sats out of "safe mode" -> can't for some reason*.

3. Sats de-orbit.

* Reasons could be along the lines of:

- Couldn't unfold solar panel again because drag on panel stops them getting to normal operating position for thrust,
- Can't activate thruster while panel is folded because of software interlocks to prevent power issues when panels aren't pointed at the sun.
- Unfolding panel to give more power increases the drag to greater than thruster ability, etc. etc.

A bit unfortunate, but that amount of sats is going to deorbit every week if the full constellation gets installed. The scale of it all, from the production line of sats to launch rate to on-orbit management, is quite mind-boggling,

have no problem with helping other countries. Hell, if you look at past track records of the US with catastrophic events, we are often the first people there helping (Hati and those fairly recent tsunamis that struck somewhere come to mind).

But geez, like a family in troubled times, you take care of your own first and THEN help others.

What if retards in your country don't want your help and you've got excess resources as a result? Should you force your help on them? Or give resources to others that need them?
What if your government doesn't want to spend money on its own citizens, arguing endlessly about a paltry $2000?
Let's not forget the absolute shitshow of privatised healthcare. That arguably killed a lot of people in the US last year when they didn't go to hospital because they were worried about the cost of treatment.

India's fucked it up, but the USA and it's constituents also suffer a lot from "fuck-you-got-mine" syndrome, and it would be nice to see that change a little one day.

"No. We don't need your power right now."

And when they're begging for power, you can set your sell price too, right?

I copy the second or third most upvoted answer, simply because the first is (usually) a pedantically-long-winded way of doing something that takes into account every single possibility, and all I need right now is the quick'n'dirty hack that I can run to massage a bit of data from *over here* into what I need *over there*.

Sure if I'm writing something that will last 5 years and have the general public banging on it's inputs, then I'm going to look into things properly and do it the right way.

But when it's internal, using data from another program or source that I wrote, and will be tossed into the bitbucket next week, then yep, here comes the 95% solution.

This modification didn't behave as expected - pressure dropped below a threshold they set for this test.

Huh, I would have assumed that a non-trivial change to an APU design would involve performance and flow-rate testing on a test bench somewhere, and someone signing off on it as being up to the task.

I would have then thought that they would have done numerous tests with the APUs in their proposed configuration, spinning them up and then gimballing the hell out of the engines in situ until they were happy with their performance.

To light the whole stack and then have an APU / gimballing issue is a little bit embarrassing. Weren't they originally going to fly the first one without the whole mission-duration hot fire?

Are you unaware of how ROM is updated, changed, worked-around?

You mean the permanently-programmed boot ROM in the phone's processor?

Are you unaware of Intel's fixes for security and other problems in many of their CPUs and of their collaboration with M$ and other OS publishers?

You mean those CPUs with rewriteable microcode, auxiliary processors, and flashable ROMs, unlike the ROM in Apple's A5 to A11 series CPUs that this exploit affects?

This ROM is the very first thing to run on those CPUs. It's (unfortunately for Apple) actual, masked Read Only Memory, and it is not rewriteable. Break this ROM and it's a CPU replacement to fix.