So far, I've made it through an hour of
the Starship stream and we haven't even got to the launch yet because I'm having so much fun pausing to write down everything he gets wrong.
10:53 – "The only thing Starship could possibly be useful for is launching Starlink satellites."
He jeers that the Starship's second stage can't get out of low earth orbit without refuelling. But all SpaceX would need to do is put an expendable third stage inside the payload bay, and any orbit will be possible on a single launch.
This would actually be my preferred method of reaching the moon, even if it means developing a small lander and using that instead of the entire second stage. It'd be a shame to expend a vehicle on this, but any rocket sent beyond LEO is going to be expendable for the foreseeable future anyway.
LEO has plenty of other uses though. Most of the satellite market uses it.
An entire space station (
archive) is being planned around Starship's unique capabilities for low earth orbit. The reason there isn't more of a market for
large (>100t) payloads in this orbit is that no rocket has been able to serve this market economically. Until now.
11:14 - "The Saturn V may have been a 'smaller rocket' but it could get 20-odd tonnes to the moon's surface."
The lander used for Apollo weighed, at most, 16.4 tonnes - and probably closer to its dry mass (4.9 tonnes) by the time it reached the lunar surface and burned more than half its fuel.
18:54 – "This will never be the gateway to Mars. I can give you a gazillion reasons why we're not going to Mars, or even why going to the moon is not so smart."
His argument is that astronauts can't stay in orbit more than 6 months at a time because of the health effects of
zero gravity. He assumes the moon, with roughly
a sixth of the earth's gravity (which is
infinity times more than zero), will be habitable for about
twice as long (i.e. a year) before the health effects become unbearable. He plucks this number out of his arse and calls it "linear extrapolation" before realising this
isn't linear and moving on before anyone notices.
In case it's not obvious:
no one has researched the long-term effects of living on the moon because no mission to the moon ever lasted that long. Anyone claiming to know for a fact is a charlatan.
He repeats the soundbite about
"3 billion dollars of taxpayer money" at 22:30 and at 24:00 and
again at 25:00. See my previous post on this thread.
After the first half hour, he runs out of reasons to say
Elon bad while desperately trying to fill time with off-the-cuff remarks.
33:00 - "How exactly are you going to [chill down the engines] in space? It's quite easy to do that on the ground. You just blow liquid nitrogen through them or something."
You do this by running methane and oxygen through them... which the rocket has in its fuel tanks. It is
not necessary to do this on the ground. Dude has never paid attention to a Falcon 9 launch, because if he did, he'd know they always do this to the second stage engine
while the first stage is inflight. Someone at mission control usually announces it.
41:00 "I think this thing in total was 30 tonnes." (referring to the Apollo spacecraft)
That would be about right for the Command and Service Module
without the lander. But the entire thing, lander included, was between 44 and 53 tonnes. I can understand not wanting to slow down his utterance by googling but it's hard to take him seriously when he doesn't even bother to do stream prep.
"And the amount that comes back to earth, the Command Module, the little triangle bit, I think that was either 3 or 6 tonnes. I forget what. 3 tonnes, I think"
Reader, it was 6 tonnes (5.6 if we're being pedantic).
42:35 – "So, the thing is with Starship, it's 100 tonnes to low earth orbit. And the actual vehicle weight itself, I forget, like 200 tonnes or something?"
Nope. Other way round. Starship can transport
200 tonnes to low earth orbit (300 if it's expended) and the vehicle weighs
100 tonnes without fuel.
47:05 – "They've achieved 5% of what they need to achieve with 70% of the money."
Literally just making up a number based on how
he feels the project is going. The 70% is according to Common Sense Skeptic, who he shouts out during the stream, which is wrong again because SpaceX aren't just relying on NASA money to develop this rocket. And the 5% is such an arse pull, I can almost smell Phil's shit on it.
48:45 - "I'm not cynical because I don't want people to achieve things. It's that Artemis – I first came across Artemis in 1982, I think, in the film Superman 2. And in the film Superman 2, in 1980, Artemis was landing on the moon."
Leaving aside that he gives two different years, he is conflating NASA's real-life Artemis program with the
fictional space program of the same name. A rookie error.
He goes on to talk about
2001: A Space Odyssey, which was written at the height of the 1960s space race. But his rant can be summarised as "Real engineering doesn't proceed on the timescale that sci-fi writers thought might be possible during a brief era of maximum progress. Therefore we are behind schedule."
50:25 – "So they were launching [Apollo missions] about 3 a year, which is not far off the cadence that SpaceX is launching them here. But of course, they all worked. Every single one of the Saturn V rockets worked. The only one that... I mean, they had the odd engine out here and there and... And they had... You know, once there was... Most of the Apollo rockets came pretty close to disaster at some point."
He then proceeds to spend several more minutes undermining his own point with Apollo facts, thereby giving several good reasons why real engineers
don't proceed on that timescale.
Note here that SpaceX is worth criticising because they're
not going as fast as NASA did in the 60s. They're also at fault for going
too fast and ignoring safety. Possibly both at the same time. But it seems Phil will rag on Elon no matter what they do.
And in the second hour, he's confusing the Indian Ocean with the Pacific. I'm not even joking.
There really is no hope for this man.
