Why do his rockets keep blowing up?

Simple. He doesn't know how to build rockets.

>2016
>Only thing that gets you to space reliably is a Soviet rocket

I guess this is what victory feels like.

Capitalist classcucks can't even compare! Communism master race

One of NASA's mottos has always been "Failure is not an option", but with that attitude they usually went way over budget, had to cut from 50 shuttle launches a year to 12; and two of them still blew up.

A quote from Musk is “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough".

Losing a rocket is super expensive, but so is having a huge team of engineers spend years bringing the chance of failure down 1%.

Delta IV is fine

If you mean spacecraft, well, the US is working on an interplanetary one that can also do Earth orbit

You can't take a Soyuz to Mars

can't go to mars in an orion either

DSHM strap-on goes with it

Hi NASA.

How is this guy post possibly reflective of NASA's opinions? NASA has consistently been sucking SpaceX off for years, with both funding and prestigeous launch pads. Even after the explosion, NASA praised SpaceX for starting an investigation quickly.

Probably guessing the rocket blew up due to either human error (big time) or an act of god. Rockets don't usually blow up on the pad while being fueled, so it was probably caused by some absurdly complicated chain of events that started small but eventually led to the rocket going boom. Like something similar to the four inch flight during the Mercury program.

I am not an engineer but suckling on the penis of Elon Musk is an attractive thought T B H

/thread

That's what happens when you put a billionaire physicist in charge of an engineering team. He'll say that if something isn't physically impossible then there's a way to do it, and he can afford to have his team try again and again and again until they find the way.

NASA's not all one thing. When people talk about NASA, they mostly mean MSFC (the traditional manned program, though most of the work is done by corporate for-profit defense contractors) and JPL (the robotic probe program; though technically "JPL" refers to a closely-affiliated academic-led organization and not the NASA people who approve and fund their projects), but it's a big, bureaucratic agency and there's also a lot of other stuff going on.

MSFC management does not like SpaceX and wants it to fail entirely. They failed to achieve cost-effective reusability with the shuttle, and failed to produce a successor vehicle to it in a reasonable time and budget, while SpaceX looks like it's going to do everything MSFC was supposed to do and reveal that MSFC's whining about not having Apollo-size budgets was not a legitimate excuse.

JPL management is more ambivalent. On the one hand, they don't make launch vehicles or manned capsules, so SpaceX isn't direct competition. On the other hand, the whole way they do things is organized around, and their established value is based on, launches being very scarce and expensive. They make multi-hundred-million-dollar probes to maximize the value of launches that have to be ordered a year or more in advance and cost no less than $50 million for even a ton. What are they going to be doing when launches cost under $10 million for tens of tons and can be ordered less than a week in advance? What do they do when SpaceX offers a range of high-capacity standard landers and solar-electric-propulsion probe busses? Lots of JPL academics are very enthusiastic for SpaceX, but lots of their careerists are uneasy with the disruptive potential.

The people championing SpaceX in NASA leadership are mostly the central management, the US President's appointees and their staff. The space program makes the President look good when it's doing things the public understands and respects.

Not that guy, but I read that book about him. He rides his employees into the dirt. I will post a link to the book in a sec.

Link is stupidly long. Google
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future

Its an ok read too.

>>can't go to mars in an orion either
>DSHM strap-on goes with it
Oh my god, a deep-space habitation module isn't something you "strap on" to Orion. At most, Orion is something you strap on to a DSHM, for the sole purpose of returning crew to Earth, and it's an awful design for that.

Dragon's better in every way for interplanetary missions. It's much smaller and lighter. It can land on Mars (at a targetted landing site). It can land at a targetted landing site on Earth, rather than being dumped in the ocean and needing a search and rescue. With its more advanced heat shield, it can withstand higher re-entry temperatures.

Orion's not designed for interplanetary missions at all. Nor does it happen to be suitable by some wacky coincidence. It's a clunky, overweight, design-by-committee LEO capsule originally intended primarily to replace the space shuttle's crew-rotation duties to the ISS, with a secondary function of short-duration moon missions, serving as a mass-inefficient replacement for the Apollo capsule.

As in the Ares and SLS launch vehicle designs, they used obsolete tech hoping this would make it easier to throw it together quickly: the intended benefit was not gained, while the expected cost was more than expected, since the Apollo-era technology is unfamiliar to modern engineers and many of the materials and labor skills it relied on are no longer on the market.

Orion is just irredeemably bad.

To match the superior quality of his cars.

He skipped his Applied Mathematics course.