This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

A day after the DeSantis Disaster on Twitter, the company’s engineering head quits. Right quits, just up and quits his good paying job. I’ll leave it to you to sus out that scenario. I’m sure it had nothing to do with his boss Elon, the man who put the Twit in Twitter. The Twitter platform crashed just as Ronnie DeSantis the fly who thought he could boy, was about to make his long-awaited Presidential announcement.

This is becoming typical for Elon of the lost. His recent launch of his Starship was prefaced with “if it clears the tower, it will be considered a success.” Funny story, the Starship booster looks strangely identical to a Soviet era booster the N-1. The N-1 booster was going to carry Cosmonauts to the moon, but then exploded on the launch pad. I repeat, “If it clears the tower.”

Did you ever hear Werner Von Braun say anything like that? The launch severely damaged the launch pad and hurled chunks of concrete as far as half a mile. This is what you hire engineers for. To do the mathematics laymen like myself can’t do. You take the anticipated force of all those engines and oppose them against the strength of the concrete. Factor in the heat and the stress and the length of time involved, and you have your formula for how strong the launch pad needs to be.

Obviously, this wasn’t done or was done poorly. It is supposed that flying concrete projectiles knocked out several engines and the hydraulic power unit at launch, which led to eventual loss of control of the rocket. Brother Elon, sat stoically at the mission control console as the rocket began to tumble out of control thinking to himself who might be held responsible. To me that’s obvious, whoever decided on the launch date of a rocket and launch facility that weren’t ready.

Now, they announced before the launch, “If it clears the tower.” Thus setting a real low bar for success. “if she holds together even ten seconds. Eureka, we’ve done it!”

The SpaceX employees cheered like underlings at Stalin’s birthday Party! “Boy, did you see that? Flipping end over end and out of control! Wow, that’s way better than just clearing the tower! Mission accomplished!” Who in their right mind calls pushing the self-destruct button a success? Elon promises they will try again in thirty days and then drops back to sixty days. Which almost guarantees more failures.

With the loss of the hydraulic power unit, controllers could no longer vector the engines. Which meant the rocket was out of control within seconds of lift off. Yet Elon is in a rush to try again, before they’ve even had a chance to determine all the factors which caused the failure. Was the cause of failure a defective power unit? Was it damaged on lift off? Or was it maybe underpowered to begin with and unable to handle the stresses it was placed under?

The same folks who did the math on the launch pad probably did the math for the hydraulic unit. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars per launch. So, the motto, “if it clears the tower”, is ridiculously naive. Can you imagine Robert Fulton’s steamboat? “If we clear the dock before she explodes, we will call it a success!”

Twitter has been a money losing proposition from the very beginning. But Elon was going to fix that. He was going to expose the Democrats. He was going to charge to have your account verified, but that’s gone about as well as the Starship launch. The platform that limits the number of characters also limits the amount of advertising revenue.

Elon’s polarization and politicization of Twitter limits the audience. If you can’t break even with the audience, you once had. How will you break even with the half of that audience? So, Elon tries changing the platform to a longer form trying to imitate Tic-toc and You-Tube.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and failure. Coming soon, Tucker Carlson! And Ron DeSantis plus all your Reich Wing favorites. Trying to take the Fox News cast offs and broken toys and build his brand and business on imitation.

The price of unbridled success is eventual failure. Believing the success comes from your smarts alone and everyone else don’t know nothing. Henry Ford built a rubber plantation in South America and was going to order the rubber plants to grow on command. But the plants refused to listen. After Hitler’s early military successes, he stopped listening to his generals. The generals couldn’t see or understand that Hitler considered himself to be a military genius.

In the film “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane wanted to use his wealth to build a media empire. But as Kane’s empire grew so did his megalomania and narcissism. Life imitating art or the other way around? In the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News the clock had struck thirteen and Charles Foster Kane, I mean, Rupert Murdoch was going to be forced to testify. Instead, they decided to write a check. You see, everyone is accountable except the boss.

But someone must be made to pay. Someone must be dispensed with as a fall guy to cover the bosses’ errors. “Flintstone! You’re Fired!” So, they fired Tucker Fucker for doing just what they had gladly paid him for doing. Because Tucker had a large audience, but few sponsors. Tucker was just jerking his Gherkin and not bringing in any jack to the bank.  “Fire him!”

Before NASA had plans for the Saturn Five rocket, they had plans for another giant rocket. The Nova was going to be even larger in the ten to twenty million pounds of thrust range, like Starship. NASA scrapped the plan. As the bigger you make something the more complicated it becomes to develop. The railroads found that out many years ago, that building giant locomotives didn’t pay. It was better to use two standard locomotives working together.

The entire Starship program smacks of grandiosity. We’re going to mine asteroids and live on Mars. Oh sure, it’s going to be great. But no one has figured out yet how to make it pay. No one is even certain if chemical rockets are the answer. The program has all the earmarks of the flying cars and atomic lawnmowers of the 1950s.

I wouldn’t put any weight in a program that launches before it’s ready and destroys its own launch pad due to faulty calculations. It sounds like this generations Henry Ford ordering rubber plants to grow on command again. A narcissistic Charles Foster Kane vanity scheme which will come to naught.  Building a Xanadu rocket, “And I want it ready by Thursday!”

The Starship is 30% larger than the Soviet N-1. Like the N-1 it uses clusters of engines. The very problem that caused all four Soviet attempts to fail. The starship uses 42 engines to the N-1’s 30 thirty engines. It makes the complications massive. All 42 engines must work correctly and be steered correctly. All 42 must have fuel pipes and mounting brackets and hydraulic power units until maybe it would just be better to launch two conventional rockets and assemble once in orbit.

Is this a case of a big man who wants to build a giant rocket for outer space? Or a little man, trying to build a big man? Rosebud.

“Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles

I’m feeling very still

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go

Tell my wife I love her very much she knows?

Ground Control to Major Tom

Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you hear me, Major Tom?”

-David Bowie