Why would media matters do this https://t.co/vbGJWh9c76
— Amanda ?? (@noturtlesoup17) November 18, 2023
Per Space.com:
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — SpaceX’s giant Starship has met another explosive end.
SpaceX’s next-generation megarocket — the largest ever built — launched on its second-ever test flight today (Nov. 18), a highly anticipated jaunt that took the giant vehicle to space for the first time, but it didn’t last long. Shortly after stage separation, the rocket’s massive Super Heavy booster exploded, with the Starship upper-stage vehicle itself detonating before reaching its target altitude in what SpaceX called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
“What we do believe right now is that the automated flight termination system on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn, as we were headed downrange out over the Gulf of Mexico,” said John Insprucker, SpaceX’s principal integration engineer, during a live webcast today.
The massive Starship and Super Heavy booster took off today at about 8 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT; 7 a.m. local Texas time) from SpaceX’s Starbase test and manufacturing facility in Boca Chica…
This was the second test flight for the fully integrated Starship, which consists of the Super Heavy first-stage booster and Starship upper-stage spacecraft. The first liftoff, which occurred on April 20 of this year, did not go as well as this one did. April’s Starship launch ended with a self-destruct command about four minutes into flight, turning the tumbling rocket into a smoldering fireball.
One reason for April’s unscheduled disassembly was the failure of Starship’s two stages to separate. To prevent a recurrence of this problem on the second flight, SpaceX decided to go with a new strategy: “hot staging,” in which the upper stage’s engines begin firing before Starship and Super Heavy have fully separated. This concept isn’t new; it has been used on vehicles like the Titan II from NASA’s Gemini program in the 1960s and Russia’s venerable Soyuz rocket, which is still in operation.
Starship’s stage separation occurred on time today, about 2 minutes and 41 seconds after liftoff, and appeared to go smoothly, but the Super Heavy booster exploded shortly afterward….
It’s worth nothing [*] that Starship’s second test mission did fly longer and higher than its first test flight on April 20, which failed at stage separation and exploded. So SpaceX still considered the second try a success. The last telemetry signal from today’s launch pegged Starship’s altitude at 148 kilometers, or 91 miles, well above the 62-mile (100 km) boundary of space…
Backstory on the top tweet: Musk announces he’s gonna sue Media Matters for committing investigative reporting…
When you get deep into a KHole on a Friday night https://t.co/O2UoEVyuNr
— chekovian jubilee (@CollieYimby) November 18, 2023
You don’t have to venture as far as Urban Dictionary — K-hole has a Wikipedia entry. (Musk says he only ‘microdoses’ ketamine for his medical issues.)
imagine immediately undermining your “my site isn’t purposely placing ads next to Nazi content” argument by with the classic “only one of the nine Nazi posts in question actually break our rules” counterpoint
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) November 18, 2023
why would we ever make anything up. fascists physically cannot stop incriminating themselves
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) November 18, 2023
https://t.co/zWQZaZCTUU pic.twitter.com/SJrvWqSDkH
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) November 18, 2023
rikyrah
Why am I supposed to care about anything with Apartheid Clyde🤔😒
Chetan Murthy
I’m no rocket scientist, but …. wouldn’t “hot staging” get in the way of *reusing* the SuperHeavy first stage? That is to say, this is a transparent ploy to not have yet another failed flight, at the price of actually, y’know, advancing the program ?
sdhays
@rikyrah: Unfortunately, because he’s massively wealthy and happens to control more influential-than-average corporations.
I’m not happy about it either.
MobiusKlein
It’s odd SpaceX would call this a success. If people were on the rocket, nobody would dare.
West of the Cascades
Muskrocket go boom.
Musk’s tweet (xit?) is doubly-dumb since his attorneys could have filed their “lawsuit” electronically any time this weekend without waiting until the “split second” the courts open on Monday.
dmsilev
@Chetan Murthy: They put some stuff on the top of the first stage, flame diverters basically, that were supposed to prevent damage.
I’m guessing that didn’t work quite as well as hoped for.
I’m actually more curious about what happened to the second stage. It failed catastrophically, without the excuse of someone pointing a large hot stream of rocket exhaust at it.
Timill
@Chetan Murthy: Shouldn’t. You could, for example, have a consumable heat shield as part of the joining ring.
Having watched the video, the booster appears to go into a tumble shortly after separation and then explodes (possibly a detonation by the range master). I’m guessing it was something to do with the exhaust wash of the upper stage destabilising the booster beyond recovery.
Marmot
Am I wrong in reading Xitter’s rebuttal as saying, “Sure, Nazi stuff can appear next to your ad, it’s just not hugely likely”?
Seems like a crap defense.
Lyrebird
Thank you for your vigilance Anne Laurie.
I clicked over onto a Media Matters story about one of the hatemongers X has promoted, and it makes me so angry. Content warning: anti-migrant hate and incitement to violence.
The demagogue wants his listeners to hate on Catholic Charities workers. I know a lot of commenters are… less than fans of religion, so I just wanna say, in our area, those are the folks not only bringing hot meals to people who would not have one, they are the ones finding ways to help little old people not fall through the holes in the social safety net, getting help to families with disabled kids… ya gotta be among the lowest of the low to hate on them and that creep qualifies.
ETA: To begin with I should admit that imnsho anyone who isn’t enrolled in a tribe or descended from people who were brought here (to USA) as captives should STFU about immigrants. Unless they wanna just talk about their shared immigrant background. Big thanks to whoever (Anne Laurie?) posted Lincoln Project’s reposting of the protester at the 1939 Nazi speech in NYC.
sdhays
@MobiusKlein: I can accept that it’s a test flight and they, basically, expect it to blow up at some point because there are kinks to be worked out, but it’s still odd to call it “a success”.
Marmot
@sdhays:
Yeah, I don’t recall the early US space program’s many explosions getting lauded, “Yet another success!”
RaflW
@West of the Cascades: One wag (or well informed person, who can tell?) on Bsky said the lawyers Musty uses aren’t admitted to that particular court, so have to wait till Monday to file some papers related to that before the extremely meretricious and not at all SLAPP-y complaint can go in.
Alison Rose
Actually, the SpaceX kaboom makes me really sad…
…that Musk wasn’t on board.
MobiusKlein
@Marmot: Blowing up the rocket does not show up on my yearly self review, let’s say.
Anne Laurie
Odds would seem that there’s not gonna be a lawsuit, if his lawyers have anything to say about it… Musk’s worst enemies are salivating over the ‘discovery’ issues already.
Most likely, this is just Angry Apartheid Baby throwing a tantrum to get more ego-boosting from his fanbois. He (theoretically) has more money than is good for any single human, but you know what they say about bankruptcy: Gradually, then all at once…
Dan B
@Alison Rose: I’m sad because Space X’s CEO is a woman and she manages to keep the Muskrat out of the business quite well.
Timill
@sdhays: As far as I can tell, the objectives were to not destroy the launch pad, to get a clean separation and to get Starship above 62 km. They got all 3 this time, rather than none on the first attempt.
Looks like a success to me.
mrmoshpotato
@Alison Rose:
Same.
piratedan
while he can do what he wants on X, after all, he owns it.
I do have an issue with a fucking Nazi having control of an important DoD investment like Starlink and with SpaceX which I am quite sure that the American taxpayers have subsidized significantly.
I would just as soon, remove him from the decision making process with those two agencies/products because he is a fucking Nazi.
West of the Rockies
@Alison Rose:
Rimshot!
Hoppie
@Timill: Yes, my understanding as well. Limited, hoped-to-be-achievable goals that were actually met. Also I believe the next one is almost ready to go, so not destroying the launch pad is a positive!
kalakal
@Marmot: I don’t remember the media mincing their words either. After one particularly spectacular display of unscheduled pyrotechnics the headline was “Flopnik!”
pacem appellant
Rocket go boom. Hagiography at 11.
NotMax
Well, it ain’t rocket science.
Oh wait; never mind.
/ Emily Litella
:)
HumboldtBlue
The Germans can put on a parade, and who doesn’t love a parade?
Marmot
@kalakal: For sure. The press was brutal about those early rocket explosions. I doubt it was “Flopnik!” with a deck like “But landing pad still there!”
Keith P.
It’s not good when your lawsuit announcement is formatted like a political fundraising flyer.
Marmot
@pacem appellant: Man there’s funny people on here late at night!
waspuppet
Come on people. Focus.
Congratulations to him, I guess, for achieving (checks notes) what was achieved 60 years ago.
patrick II
Win or lose, Musk will get Media Matters to spend money on legal fees.
wjca
Those were PR disasters, certainly. But from an engineering view, every new bit of technology has “growing pains”. New stuff where all of the parts work and work together, first time out is vanishingly rare. (The closest I ever came was something where the initial, and only, glitch was small enough, and easy enough to fix, that I could retry the same morning. Never come close otherwise.)
There’s a reason why new stuff goes thru testing (which is what these launches are). You find problems and try to fix them. If the fixes work during the next test, that’s a successful test . . . and you find new problems. Eventually, you get everything apparently working, at which point you do “beta testing” — trying it out in real life situations. Where, typically, you stumble across situations and problems you didn’t know to test for earlier.
The thing about rocket technology is, when you are testing, the problems light up the sky. The same level of problem in a new car or a new stove or a new piece of software just isn’t as publicly unmissable. Even though they still happen.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@wjca: There’s also the issue that back in the day, the Soviets seemed to be piling success on top of success (although it later turned out that they were taking dangerous shortcuts to achieve propaganda goals, which put crews at risk and ultimately led to a cosmonaut being killed on reentry). The Space Race was a big worry back then, regardless of its true meaning.
cain
In less than two hours, cricket world cup starts and it will be India vs Australia. It’s been a hell of a season. India has been undefeated.
In less than two hours, the entire country of India is going to close. Shops will close. The streets will be empty as the entire country focuses on world cup. Villagers will gather around tvs, families will be making food as the 2 billion people watch a sports match!
Jay
@Lyrebird:
SWMBO is Metis.
My BC Services Card say’s I am Metis.
I am her primary caregiver so that what it says I am not.
I am not. I am white bread as much as white bread could be.
1/2 English grandmothers, one an orphan, one not,
1/4 Scottish,
1/4 Slovak, (Austro Hungarian WWI refugee who may ot may not be Slovakian, he was 12)
Martin
@wjca: Exactly.
There are different philosophies for engineering design. One approach is what NASA tends to do, which is run the numbers a million times, hope they accounted for all contingencies, and only then build hardware. SpaceX is doing a different approach (a more common approach) – build cheap prototypes and run the design/build/test loop a lot. I mean, SpaceX can blow up an estimated 40 Starships before they hit what NASA paid for the first SLS rocket. And FAA prohibitions due to environmental issues aside, SpaceX has 6 more fully constructed SLSs with 3 more after that under construction so they can presumably iterate and launch every few weeks to identify these problems and sort them out. Meanwhile, we’re a year away from when the next SLS will have been constructed and ready for launch, which would afford SpaceX another dozen or so launches for the same price.
The ultimate question is ‘if it’s going to take 5 years and $2B to get to first successful launch, does it really matter which approach you take if the time and cost are the same?’
HumboldtBlue
@cain:
And here we are, rockets an’ stuff.
TriassicSands
Obviously, because you are communist-socialist-fascist-woke monsters. Naturally.
Occam’s Razor says the simplest answer is that Elon Musk is an incompetent asshole who has wrecked something many people relied on. Why? Because he can. It’s called Billionaire’s Privilege.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: i’m not a rocket scientist; So I don’t know if what I’m about to write is actually correct. I remember reading Feynman’s annex to the Challenger disaster report, where he described how NASA used to build rockets (Prior to the space shuttle ). They didn’t run the numbers a million times; rather they built and tested to destruction the smallest sub assemblies until they understood them completely, then put them together into larger assemblies which again they tested to destruction making sure they understood again completely all behavior, Until finally they had complete systems. Only then did they launch them. at any point in the process if they saw behavior via internal instrumentation that did not match Already seen and understood behavior from previous testing, they backed up to figure out what it was that was going differently.
Maybe this is what SpaceX is doing also. But from the outside it looks like they’re doing what NASA did with the space shuttle: put it all together and try it out, to see if it works. Feynman was pretty scathing in his condemnation of that approach. It is true that for somewhat simple systems, this approach can work: you just run a lot of tests of entire systems and hope that you’ll shake out all the bugs. But for complex systems that just doesn’t work: There are too many bugs and too many interesting interactions for you to hope that you can shake them all out in full system tests.
Feynman also discussed the approach of of exhaustive testing of sub assemblies as applied to software — in the space shuttle software — And from reading Spector and Gifford’s description of that software (from CACM in the mid-1980s) It’s clear that they were pioneers in what today we call test driven development.
Again, I’m not a rocket scientist. Maybe SpaceX is doing things correctly. I sure hope they are.
TEL
Didn’t SpaceX call the previous launch a huge success as well? And what they “learned” it turned out, was that if you don’t bother to build a launch pad that can keep the heat and explosive power from fatally damaging the rocket, the launch will fail. At this point I’ll wait for the real experts to actually weigh in before believing that this launch was in any way a success.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
“Once it goes up who cares where it
comes downgoes boom. That’s not my department, ” says Werner von Musk.//
Balconesfault
Many many Trump rallies have taken place where his supporters didn’t march to the Capitol to create insurrectionist mayhem. Clearly there’s a bias in focusing so much attention on January 6.
Randal Sexton
@Martin: Word. Which is to say the spacex approach to figuring out this stuff works. Yes Exlong Minsk is a terrible person, but there is some fine engineering going on at SpaceX . That monkey torture place – I suspect not.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
At lest Huges had the excuse he was addicted to morphine because the pain from his crash injuries.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s because it was government and has to be perfect. This is libertarian space flight so can be half assed and a dangerous to everyone.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Chetan Murthy:
I hope so too, but it really depends on how much influence the Chief Twit has at the various levels of operation. I know he’s supposed to be a lot more isolated from the nuts and bolts at SpaceX than he is at Twitter, but given his recent behavior with Twitter, he’s burned through just about all the credibility and residual trust and good will he’d built up over the years with SpaceX and Tesla.
Adam Lang
…help… dying…
WereBear
@piratedan: You gotta admit the history still rhymes. Rockets, Nazis, who hasn’t explored that pool before?
BethanyAnne
@patrick II: If California’s anti-SLAPP laws get applied, Fony Stark gets to pay Media Matter’s legal fees. And it looks to me (not a lawyer) like a fairly straightfoward win on the anti-SLAPP grounds.
WereBear
@BethanyAnne: This is the 21st Century. We could do class actions on fascists to shut them down, like the KKK got handled.
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: It’s not like SpaceX isn’t doing that. The Raptor engine has been in development since 2009 – so we’re in year 14, and it’s undergone countless stand tests.
As for the rest of the rocket, most of what you see is pretty cut and dry. It employs a ton of digital systems that have their own testing process. And you have a bunch of other systems that require high g force testing, low g testing, vacuum testing – and are larger than any facility in the world except possibly ones owned by NASA. Some of these things are just cheaper to launch and test than they are to ship across the country to test. Remember, NASA has put $12B into SLS for one launch. Each Starship is about $100M. They can yeet a LOT of these things before they start getting close to NASAs budget.
When Falcon 9 started trying to land, NASA scientists had no idea if you could even light an engine for supersonic retropropulsion – they had no way to even test that. You just had to try it. And that it turns out was a big reason why nobody previously tried to make a reusable rocket in this way – they weren’t willing to blow a few up figuring it out because of the optics. So developmentally we stalled out due to PR concerns. I mean, kudos to Musk for not giving a shit and plowing ahead there – he did the world a service on that one. And they also didn’t think you could glide/RCS to a target as small as a barge and land on it while it was pitching. Turns out you can, and pretty reliably once you iterate on it.
Again, there’s noting wrong with this approach. Falcon 9 was developed the same way and it’s the most reliable rocket ever made. Some of that is that you couldn’t really develop rockets in this way in the 70s and 80s. You didn’t have the sensors, the small scale compute, the telemetry. Sure you could blow some some up in testing, but you couldn’t get the data for why it blew up. Now you can. You can put a sensor on every goddamn thing, they’re cheap, power efficient, and guzzling all that data is pretty easy. It does enable a somewhat different approach.
I mean, sure, if the rocket is intended to complete a certain mission and it fails – laugh away, but these aren’t. They’re cheap prototypes made in a shed, using older design engines that they’ve already moved on from. They’re designed to fail. Engineering companies produce prototypes all the time. I’ve got a bunch in my house. I’ve made them myself.
But there are a lot of ways to skin this cat – and what is right or wrong is pretty situational. But you can also come up with a development process so rigorous that you can never actually produce the product. You can make it so expensive to build that you can’t afford to actually commercialize it. NASA has a bit of a poor track record with that, as we were really badly reminded of when India successfully sent an orbiter to Mars for $73M. They use a design approach which is closer to SpaceXs than to NASAs. SLS, which was designed ‘right’ is so expensive that we are struggling to justify using it.
Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: No, government does use this process. We used it a fair bit during the space race. But those failed launches people are referring to weren’t prototypes. They weren’t launched with a 50/50 expectation of success. These are – pretty clearly stated ahead of time. SpaceX doesn’t expect them to work. They hope they will, but they expect them to fail.
One reason you don’t see this in this way is that rockets, unlike most engineering tasks, have TERRIBLE failure modes. If you design a car and it doesn’t work properly 3 minutes in, usually that just means that it loses power and coasts to a stop and then sits there doing nothing. If your rocket does that, you have to blow it up so it doesn’t hurt someone. One is very visible, even though it’s the same degree of failure.
And SpaceX is unusually open about their stuff. Boeing tests their stuff to failure too, but they don’t put that on Youtube. SpaceX does. But this is what design-build-test is – you design it, you build it, you test it to failure, you take those lessons back to the next design, build the next prototype, test that to failure, take those lessons for the 3rd design, and so on until you fully understand the system. This is hardly new.
And frankly, it’s really not good to shame responsible risk taking because that’s how we learn this stuff, and not just in engineering but art, etc. We should be somewhat tolerant of trying things with the intent of learning from them, which again, SpaceX is very up front about. That’s why they have 6 more starships already built, 3 more being built, and NONE of these are intended for an actual mission. They are all prototypes. They are all expected to be destroyed and they all improve upon the ones before them, in terms of refining manufacturing processes, components, integration, etc.
Honestly, has nobody here ever tried to make a new recipe and it took a dozen tries before it fully came together? Or tried to draw or write or sing and your first few efforts weren’t great? Or build something out of wood? We do learn by doing – it’s the best way to learn. We’re just not accustomed to it being done on this scale, but it’s still a valid way to do it. In a decade nobody has matched what the Falcon 9 can do – in terms of reliability, in terms of capability (lift/cost) and in terms of reusability. Look, I hate Musk as much as the next guy – go check my previous posts – but SpaceX engineers are pretty goddamn good. If I had my druthers the feds would declare Musk a national security risk and force the company be turned over to Gwynne Shotwell. Yeah, there’s still some dumb shit going on which you can see Musks fingerprints all over (the launchpad debacle), but I’ve also given explanations for how that shit happens from former students of mine that worked for him.
kalakal
@wjca: Absolutely, the problem for rocket designers is test flights are very visible. Space X very publicly state these are tests*. My FIL worked for NASA from time to time. mostly on telemetry for the Mariner probes. 3 out of the 10 were failures, 2 of them blowing up, including the first. I was a Chemical Engineer where you really don’t want pyrotechnics, then software design where no matter how much you test it a user will break on under 5 minutes
*blowing up a launch pad however…
NorthLeft
I particularly liked the part in Musk’s response where he said that of the nine racist/Nazi posts identified, only one of them violated Twitter’s policy. A failure on two levels.
“See, the system works!……..kinda.”
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@cain: that’s kinda cool to picture! Thank you
Kay
Strike expanding:
Tesla is bragging that they’ll just bring the cars thru Denmark so I hope Danish workers join the strike.
Toys R Us, another poorly managed company, tried this and the Swedish unions won. They forced Toys R Us to follow the laws. Tesla will lose too.
Uncle Cosmo
I recall “Kaputnik” which IIRC referred to the famous Vanguard TV-3 launch of 6 Dec 1957, The rocket aimed to put a grapefruit-size 3.3-lb satellite in orbit as a response to the much larger Soviet Sputniks launched the previous October and November. It attained a height of ~4 ft before falling back onto the launch pad to explode spectacularly.
In that context, even the first Superheavy/Starship test (NB the first time the Superheavy first stage had been flown) was more successful than Vanguard, and the second was even more successful in that all 33 Superheavy engines functioned nominally (suggesting that the problem in the first test was debris blasted up from the launch pad into the engines, and that the deluge system had fixed that) and the Starship stage functioned nominally for nearly all its designated burn.
So, a partial success. Are there still problems? Absolutely.
So the SpaceX team will search through all the data for root causes of the various failures, then design and implement fixes. But based on the history of experimental devices that have all sorts of ways to go KABOOM, I’d expect still more issues to surface after the next flight test. Lather, rinse, repeat. IMO, if they manage a 90% successful near-orbit flight by the fifth try, even if it leaves the reentered Starship a mass of twisted metal, and a full orbit with a refurbishable craft after reentry by say flight 8, that would be a significant achievement for the SpaceX techies (and not so much for its Lone Skum bazillionaire owner).
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kay: Good. Musk and Tesla think they can ignore other countries (and the U.S.) labor laws, unions and safety procedures, I hope he comes to under you piss off the longshoremen and Teamsters at your peril. Here’s hoping Denmark holds the line against Tesla too.
Uncle Cosmo
FTR, “what was achieved 60 years ago” was with throwaway lower stages. And if SpaceX were satisfied with that, the technique was successful. It’s quite another thing to hot-stage leaving the lower stage in sound enough condition to be flown back to a soft landing for reuse. That part needs work – but it’s by no means trivial.
Another Scott
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: +1
The US Navy ran a lot of the pre-NASA rocket stuff. After Sputnik, there was huge pressure to get something similar up quickly. So much pressure that people were working too hard, not getting enough sleep, rushing, making mistakes, and pushing the schedule for the wrong reasons.
Similar to Challenger.
Similar to Starship #1.
Project managers are human and it’s really hard to tell bosses, “No, we’re not ready.”
Lots of mistakes build on each other, and you get a spectacular failure. Or, if you get really lucky, you get a success like Vanguard 1 – which is still up there.
Cheers,
Scott.
artem1s
@waspuppet:
And spending (and keeping) billions more to do it. The fanboyz at NASA who decided this upwardly failing white boy was the answer to all their funding duels with Congress need to step back and reassess where they want the US taxpayer’s money to go. Focus on the missions that have lead to real scientific discovery and advanced knowledge in robotics, rocketry and potential space industry. And stop focusing on this ridiculous notion that a human (one way) trip and landing on Mars can be achieved in a decade or two.
Timill
@artem1s: IIRC, SpaceX bid about 2/3 the cost of Boeing’s Starliner to build Crew Dragon.
One of these is flying and one is eating even more money.
wjca
With luck, he’s spending all his time on Twitter. So SpaceX, and maybe even Tesla, can get on with what they are doing without his interference.
Ruckus
I’m not on muskies side. But. Sure we have launched a lot of rockets that have gone places and done things. But. A lot of stuff was destroyed at the very early stages of the early period of the learning curve then. And this is a huge step up, which brings on a whole lot of new issues that have to be worked out in real time. IOW we are in new territory here and the size and power and heat are of another level. And yes the cost is far higher now than it was decades ago. And while they think they can make this work, it will take time and cost far more than it did decades ago. This is the learning curve of new, in a field that works 99.9% perfect or fails dramatically. They are still at the fails dramatically level.
All that said musky is a fully grown child, with a flare for the “I’ve got more money than anyone else so I must be smarter!” concept of humanity. He might be just a tad full of himself. I don’t believe that I’ve ever used might be so callously.
Bill Arnold
@wjca:
Counterexample: NASA (and some other orgs) space probes. The deployment of the Webb telescope. The various landings on Mars involving complex approaches to achieving a soft landing. The Mars helicopter. Deep space probes in general.
The scientists and engineers involved generally get one shot. If they fail, they’ve personally lost 10 years of their career.
SpaceX, on the other hand, takes risks. It fails, often, and this is by choice.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@artem1s: I have no real knowledge of what NASA or Musks aims are with this particular space craft. But what are the points of putting people on the moon never mind Mars? Are they going to bring all their water with them? Are there going to be periodic resupply flights? Are women who go going to be expected to be verifiably sterile? What happens to a pregnancy on the Moon?