By David Glenn Cox
These are the voyages of the Starship Elon. His five-year mission to seek out new stockholders and new investors. To boldly shill what no man has shilled before. Space-X is about to launch Starship mission 14. The search for orbit. Fourteen missions and now an orbital flight? Holy John Glenn! Another five or six years and they’ll be ready to put a man in space. But Elon is a man filled with …promises, which never seem to find fruition.
The Cyber truck was going to cost 40K and sell half a million units the first year. The Starship was going to Mars and build a city of one million humans to make humanity an interplanetary species. Elon was going to spit out those Starships just like Henry Ford built Model T’s, and space travel would become so inexpensive that any Joe Sixpack or Sally Lunchpail with a couple million extra dollars in their pocket could take up residence on Mars. Sure, it’ll be easy!
My spidey senses began to tingle when the first Starship destroyed the launch pad. I was raised by an engineer to whom all things were knowable. Engine thrust could be measured. Concrete has a tensile strength, and heat can be factored in. For the Starship to destroy its launch pad was the acme of incompetence. These things were knowable beforehand.
Elon predicted each Starship would carry 100 brave souls. Then NASA looked at Elon’s plans and said, “Applesauce” to them. Starship could carry twenty persons maximum. With 100 persons, the payload would have to be 40% water. Not including food or passengers. So increase the number of starships needed by a factor of five. Each Starship mission to Mars would require five or six other Starships loaded with fuel to dock while you wait patiently in Earth orbit. A feat that has never been accomplished even once, let alone five or six times. Dangerous? Ha, ha, you bet!
But aside from the technical limitations there was another overriding question: why? I could go to Peoria or Emporia, Kansas, if I want to. If golden nuggets laid plentiful on the ground. If I had a reason to go, I could go. But I don’t have a reason to go, and neither did Elon. Unmanned rovers have been searching Mars for over a decade only to rediscover what we already knew. Mars has a poisonous atmosphere and no protection from the sun’s radiation. Elon said that’s no problem. His boring machines would hollow out giant caves for us to live in. And robot machines would do all the heavy lifting. If robots are doing all the work, what are the people there for?
Food would be grown under lights in those giant caverns, and water would come from the theoretical water we think is on Mars, but as of yet, no one has found the first droplet of it. It could be water or it could be frozen carbon dioxide. All aboard! Chances are if Elon ever tried to pull it off it would end up like the Donner Party. You see, we could also make oxygen from the water no one has found yet, and rocket fuel too! Just in case anyone should ever decide to leave this Martian oasis in the cosmos.
As saner voices began speaking up, Elon’s plans for the Starship grift morphed. We’re going to the moon, everybody! You too, Alice! And we’re going to stay! Same scam, different venue. Now get this! They are going to land a 171 foot-tall twenty seven foot in diameter Starship on the unprepared lunar soil. Empty the Starship weighs in 600,000 pounds and loaded close to one million pounds. Imagine landing a water tower on the moon or standing a pencil on its end on your desk. Brave astronauts would exit the ship by means of a crane elevator. And if that crane breaks down, the astronauts will be stuck forever wherever they are. Houston, we have a problem!
It was on Starship eleven or twelve it was discovered the entire heat shield was defective. Once again, you knew the temperatures involved. You knew the duration involved. You have sixty years of manned space flight heat shield data available. But gosh, we didn’t know the heat shield would fail. The ship returned a crispy critter and had it been occupied the crew would have been cremated. So a new heat shield design was proposed, and Space-X will try again on Mission 14!
Space-X had also developed a clever catch system for Starship and tested it just once. It nearly ended in disaster. How do I know? Because they only tried it once. Instead, they have reverted to water landings. On the moon, they will use landing legs. Now get out your calculators. How big will the landing legs need to be on a 171 foot tall, one million pound Starship to stabilize it on the unprepared lunar soil? Recent attempts by the Japanese found it quite difficult to land on the moon without things falling over. “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.” – Sir Isaac Newton
Nearly every new Idea Space-X has proposed for the lunar Starship had been considered and abandoned in the late 1950s. The idea of landing a rocket on its end or lowering the astronauts by crane or a hundred-foot ladder are the stuff of 1950s sci-fi. We’ve been to the moon and know how to do it. Only this time, Elon’s going to do it better! And at this rate of accomplishment, Space-X will place humans back on the moon by 2050 on Starship mission 147. Meanwhile, Elon bathes himself in government contracts.
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.” – John F. Kennedy
The Trump regime recently announced the presence of nuclear weapons in orbit around the earth. Repeating the mistakes that man has made and voiding treaties and protocols honored throughout the decades. The Trump regime declares full speed ahead on artificial intelligence, oblivious. “For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own.” Bill Gates, philanthropist and philandering pedophile of the Epstein ilk, warns that AI could kill a billion persons. But think of the money that could be made!
Elon the grifter is today’s Major Tom.
“Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuits dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you-“ -David Bowie
Leave a comment