I would’ve been inclined to agree with you as of 10 minutes ago, until I read this Wikipedia article saying Starship refueling will require 10 or more launches. Damn, that means at least $1b to leave LEO assuming each launch is around $100m, so not really all that much cheaper than expendable stages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Propellant_Transfer_Demonstration
I had assumed the propellant would be a single additional launch, but this Wikipedia article says 10. $1B+ to leave LEO definitely makes the narrative that Starship is going to revolutionize space travel sound like a load of bullshit, unless there are realistic plans I am not aware of to reduce the number of launches significantly.
Edit:
This article has more details. It takes 7.5 tanker launches to fill a Starship, but Elon insists 4 should be enough for the Moon, whereas NASA estimates up to 16 due to boil off.
It really sounds like Elon has been overselling the value of Starship, but the saddest part is that other reusable rockets in development will likely have the same problem.
Edit 2:
Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles
This seems plausible, whereas Starship shuttling between Earth and Mars to “build a colony” does not. More like Starship is a shuttle to LEO and then something like the Hermes spacecraft in The Martian that remains in space and uses ion drive would be what actually transfers humans to Mars orbit, with perhaps Starship also doing the shuttling between the surface and low orbit. It seems we are a really long way off from what The Martian depicts, though it’s possible the first human may step foot on Mars in the next couple decades.
AFAIK, the service module is European, built by the ESA, so this is not 100% an American accomplishment.
While Whitey’s on the moon
At least the crew for this mission includes a black guy and a woman, unlike the 24 white dudes who crewed the Apollo missions.
SLS has gotten a lot of well-deserved hate for being an expendable money pit. All that aside, damn, it lifted off with humans in it and off to the moon! There’s no other currently available rocket that can do that, including Starship.
It makes sense to distrust the American for-profit healthcare system where treatments that might work don’t get funded if they can’t be patented and monetized. Cancer is also a huge cash cow.
At the same time, taking unproven treatments is a risk. My father had stage 3 cancer and tried alternative treatments while getting periodic PET scans. When nothing decreased the tumor size, he finally got chemo and radiation. He’s still kicking almost 20 years later, but the radiation caused a lot of issues. He’s lucky it didn’t metastasize.
Yeah, Bazzite is great for anyone already using Steam. My main personal reason for not using Bazzite is the fact that Steam can’t be easily uninstalled.
I run k3s and use Argo CD at work, but it always seemed overkill for my home server. I also would want to use self-hosted Forgejo instead of an external service, but I don’t care to spend time on a setup that bootstraps Forgejo, PostgreSQL and Argo CD, then has all of the above managed by Argo CD.
We are planning to join the Plasma release schedule starting with Plasma 6.7 (in June), which will make it possible for distributions to ship it in their repositories.
Yeah, didn’t realize this myself. Android TV is just something I’ve been tolerating. I also have a Linux living room gaming PC running Pegasus Frontend and it’s annoying that I often have to break out a mouse and keyboard. Linux HTPCs and couch gaming PCs haven’t really been a great UX so far, so I’m excited to see Bigscreen finally release.
I did previously try Steam gaming mode, but it doesn’t work with a USB remote from my tests. It also treats non-Steam games as 2nd class citizens that can’t be cleanly organized and categorized. Another huge downside is it’s proprietary and collects data.
The equivalent of the Epstein class has committed horrid human rights violations throughout history for their own profit and pleasure. Mainly the rich owned slaves, but taxpayers are expected to foot the bill for reparations? It would make more sense if the current human rights violators like billionaire Zionists paid the reparations for both past and current crimes against humanity.
Looks good, and love the idea of it, but YouTube download clients don’t work worth a damn on a VPN any longer in my experience.
Yep, it will run SteamOS and will have Valve’s Lepton (fork of Waydroid) to support Android games. It’s also an ARM device and will use Valve’s FEX to run x86 games. Supposedly, Half Life Alyx runs pretty decently on it.
I hope Valve’s Steam Frame is the last nail in their coffin. Unlike the Meta Quest, which is a locked down, privacy nightmare and the Miiverse that is beyond pointless, Valve has actually innovated in this space. Also, devices purchased from Valve actually belong to you and you can do whatever you want with them.
I have expensive software that only works on Windows, so the only thing that I care about is that it won’t get locked down to the point where I can no longer remove all the cruft.
Yeah, like Anthropic’s leaked code that was converted to Python and open sourced. It seems proprietary to open source is a bigger opportunity than open source to proprietary. If there’s already a FOSS version, why would anyone bother with a proprietary bastardization of it?