The Internet is full of people who post really stupid stuff
about NASA, about SpaceX, about Elon Musk.
And I want to draw your attention to one of them today.
Now, if you're this person, I apologize, but what you said was
absolutely absurd. And I want to draw some
attention to it because if there's anybody out there that
thinks the same way, if you think the same way that this
user thinks, and this is a Reddit post, so you know it's
going to be really good. If you think like them, you're
completely wrong. And it's a weird, really weird
thing to think. So let's look at what was the
beginning of this. NASA and SpaceX have a
partnership, and they've had a partnership for a long time, but
now they have a different partnership.
SpaceX is going to deorbit the International Space Station.
Now, a few accounts, including Eric Berger, have mentioned
something about Dragon XL. And if you're not familiar with
Dragon XL is it's kind of like a Dragon capsule, but it's a big
tube basically. And what they may be doing with
this is using it as sort of a, a tugboat to push the space
station into the deorbit maneuvers.
And then it will burn up in the atmosphere, over the ocean,
someplace where there's no people, where there's no cars,
where there's no cities, over the ocean somewhere.
Avoid risk of the populated areas now.
Selecting AUSD Orbit Vehicle for the International Space Station
will help NASA and its international partners ensure a
safe and responsible transition in low Earth orbit at the end of
the station's operations. And it's a sad day.
It's a 20-30. It's going to happen.
It's a sad day because it's been going on for a long time.
And we'd love to see people working and living in space.
Now, the space station will be run by private entities.
Different space stations will be in orbit.
And you can pick and choose whatever space station you want
to go to with whatever vehicle you want to go to that with.
You can pick a, a SpaceX Dragon. You can pick whatever Blue
Origin's going to send up there if they ever get anything to
orbit a ULA rocket where however you want to get up there, you
can get up there. You go with Russia, wherever,
who cares? But there's going to be numerous
space stations, private space stations, in the future.
Now SpaceX will be deorbiting this.
Will they be using a Starship? The answer is absolutely not.
There's no reason to use a Starship though.
The space station is about the size of a American football
field. There's no need to use a
Starship. Plus, the Starship isn't built
yet, so they can't really depend on it to do these maneuvers.
They've had Dragon XL in the works forever, you know, years.
So and it's going to be used for this.
Basically, that's what that's used for.
This is used for transport into for cargo, things like that.
That was on the drawing board before.
It's been on the board since and they're going to continue using
this vehicle. Now.
If you want to hear something really stupid, stay tuned
because this is this is a really silly thing that somebody posted
on Reddit. Could SpaceX deorbit the ISS by
filling Starship with scrap metal, launching it into a head
on orbit, and then simply ramming the space station?
So think about that for a little bit.
Could it be a ram machine? A Starship?
Something that's like 150 feet
tall or more, depending on what version you use of a Starship,
and they just want to ram it into the International Space
Station. Now, this is a really dumb idea.
One, it's a really dumb idea because you destroy the
Starship. It's made out of metal.
Of course, it's made out of steel, which is really durable,
but you're going to destroy the Starship in this process by
ramming it into a space station, which is also it's made out of
composites, it's made out of metal.
There's all sorts of electronics in there.
Things will catch on, you know, catch on fire interiorly,
interiorly. Is that a word?
Inside the space station, there'll be sparking all sorts
of things. There's no oxygen on the
outside, but things can happen on the inside.
Ram it. It breaks apart and that's what
they want. They just kind of want to ram
into it, launch it into head on orbit, and then simply ramming
the ISS. No, that's not how things are
done in space. That's not how things are done.
You're going to gently tug this thing or gently nudge it into
the orbit that it needs to go. Because when you ram a space
station, millions of particles of metal and debris would fly
wherever they fly, whether that's towards other satellites,
where if that's, if there's a rocket launch going on with
people on board, you're going to possibly hurt those people.
Of course, it'll be zoned off, so nobody can fly in that area
in that time, including spacecraft and aircraft, boats,
things like that. There's going to be an exclusion
zone for miles. I don't know how how many miles
that you haven't really set any standards yet.
But The thing is as big as a football field, it's 100 yards
long. So it's it's a big piece of
machinery. And if you ram it, there's going
to be pieces everywhere. Shrapnel.
They could RIP through the side of a spacecraft and destroy
everything on board. We've all seen those stupid
movies about, you know, people getting stuck on a space station
or on a space shuttle or something like that.
And you know, some, some micro meteorite burst through the
station. It destroys everything.
Well, that's kind of what would happen here.
Millions of pieces of this would go everywhere and possibly
destroy, you know, other satellites.
And it could possibly make sort of like a ring, an orbital ring
of debris in the same orbit that this space station is a little
bit different because it'll get nudged out of the way.
But this is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
Why would you smash into the space station and risk
everything and the original post Let me go back to this this this
post right here whoops Let me go back to this because they
deleted the post of the the mods deleted it and I have to find
there we go. This is the reasoning for this.
This is how stupid this is. It would be super cheap and
super quick though. They could even use one of the
old Starship prototypes that are too obsolete even for testing
purposes and that are earmarked for dismantling.
Fill one of them with a bunch of old car and truck bodies from
the scrap yard and then send it. It could be done for not much
more than the cost of the propellant.
Oh my God, Oh my God, old car and truck bodies.
Why would you send old car and truck bodies from a scrap yard
space? I mean this is a this is like
next level troll. If they're not serious, if
they're just joking, but this is a great troll.
Like think about how great that would be.
You just send some old car bodies in there, buddy.
Old truck bodies from the scrap yard and they had to mention
that it's from the scrap yard too, not just old truck car and
truck body. They mentioned it was from the
scrap. So it's brilliant.
It's brilliant. And then of course, lucky nil
says no, it wouldn't be super quick and that's the reason why
it would be a bad idea. ISS is far too fragile to
significantly reduce its speed when being rammed and that's a
little bit lower than touring wheel here.
So touring wheel, I'm giving you a shout out because if you're
trolling, this is a good troll. And if you're joking, they
actually deleted the post so I had to like go the the troll is
basically this comment right here is what their original post
was, but let me know in the comments if you think this is
really stupid. And then time traveling, Chris
says, OK, OP, please stay away from the space industry, but by
all means, consider entering this supervillain industry.
Yeah, there's all sorts of comments on here.
This this started out pretty good.
But I wish the the mods on SpaceX launch would have left
this for a little bit because it would have been pretty good to
see people freak out about it for a while.
Because I think like one, it's funny.
It's also really stupid to think like, if that's what you really
thought, you have to have some sort of like some, some way to
discern between something that's right, something that's going to
work and something that's going to be a horrible idea.
You got to have that. You got to have that in your
brain. Some people don't.
This person might not have touring wheel.
Shout out to you for making this post because it was really
funny. It's like one day ago and I saw
and I was like, Oh my God, and I posted.
That's ridiculously irresponsible.
Of course, of course, trog doors beefy arm on Reddit, if you
will, And there's a discord link in the description too.
So that's it for that. But there's another thing that I
want to talk about because not only is there a stupid post like
this on Reddit, but there's a great post on Reddit about the
next steps for Starship. And this is Kathy Leaders.
She did a little summit as she's the general manager of Starbase,
and she did a summit near Starbase recently.
And it says SpaceX is planning to establish a permanent orbital
fuel depot to support missions to the moon and Mars.
According to Cathy Leaders, the general manager of Starbase.
That makes more sense, doesn't it?
One depot, orbital fuel depot, send the fuel up, depot it up.
It's just kind of like a gas station, right?
The gas station has tanks underneath it.
If you don't know how a gas station works, there's, there's
tanks underneath the gas station that trucks pull in.
And then they use a hose and they oop, I gotta hit my space
bar, use a hose and they put the gas in the tanker underneath the
gas station. And then you go fill your car at
the gas tanks. Pretty cool.
That's exactly what's gonna happen with SpaceX.
Like it's the smartest idea to have one place with one big
tanker. Now how are they going to get
this tanker into space? And is one SpaceX Starship going
to be big enough? No, it's not going to be big
enough to refuel something that's going to be going to
Mars. And Elon and Kathy and some NASA
administrator people said that it's going to take about 10 of
Starships to refuel 1 Starship to get to the moon.
So imagine going to Mars or any place else out in the solar
system. You're going to have to have
depots along the way. I mean, unless you do gravity
assists, which is totally possible too.
You could fling yourself from planet to planet.
If you want to get further out or celestial body, you can fling
yourself from the moon or from Earth's orbit and use the
gravity assist to go out there. But fuel depot on the way to
Mars would be pretty cool and they could just blast yourself
as fast as possible. Of course you have to slow down
for a depot. That's another whole thing that
that's why I'm not a rocket scientist, because I'm not an
engineer for that reason, because I can't figure out those
computations, can't figure that out.
The calculations to get to a certain spot, slow down, do some
sort of flip maneuver, slow down and then refuel.
That's incredibly hard math to do.
So SpaceX will figure that out. But this is what Elon said
about. And there's there's another
thing too that I got to show you.
Elon said about this, that if they want to get this view of
Starship, the next time that it lands on the chopsticks, whether
it's going to be the next flight or the flight after that or the
flight after that, we're not 100% sure.
So it's going to be an interesting time.
And I think the thing that we have to think about is that
SpaceX will do this eventually, right?
They're going to do this eventually.
They're going to catch it. But during this talk with Kathy,
she kind of alluded that they might not catch this at the next
time. And that could be due to FAA
regulations. It could be due to the flight
just not being ready for that, could be the booster not being
ready for that. Elon, of course, is the biggest
hype man. So there's a possibility that he
was like, yeah, I want to do it. And then it caught on.
He's like, oh, yeah, we should do it.
Can we do it? Engineers, Hey, can we do it?
Did we do this right? You know?
And then the engineers were like, yeah, I think we could do
it. But there's a lot of other
moving parts to this that SpaceX isn't in control of.
The FAA has to sign off on it. And they haven't proven, SpaceX
hasn't proven yet that they can fly over land safely inland, a
booster back on land. So that's a little bit of red
tape, but there are a few things that if you go back to here this
planning here there's a few other things other info info
from this close community talk thanks to may help.
Oh now user on Reddit three months to completion of star
factory, which is great Then they'll be able to crank out
starships in a fast, faster fashion.
Working with the Texas Department of transportation on
expanding Hwy. 4 to a four lane Rd. eventually.
Right now it's a 2 lane Rd. and it's, it's really dangerous to
be honest with you. I've driven it hundreds of times
when I was living at Star Base and there's just big trucks
everywhere back and forth all the time.
Just a ton of traffic going down there.
So 4 lane Rd. would be really nice.
Star Base, commercial retail space on hold.
Basically they had some retail space there that they were going
to use for restaurants and place to buy things, things like that.
Everything's on hold because they're like, well, we have to
make some rockets, so let's do that.
She talked about residency over 50% local to Brownsville with
about 400 staff living on site. Brownsville's about 25 to 30
minutes away, depending on where you are.
And it could be, if you're on the other side, 45 minutes to an
hour away from Starbase. So it would be nice if they were
closer by a permanent orbital fuel depot for Moon and Mars
missions. We already talked about that.
SpaceX monitoring sound levels for Port Isabel, SPI and
Brownsville during testing. Texas Park and wildlife
environmental mitigation teams in place before and after
launches and monthly Emergency Management meetings with Cameron
County, which is where Star Base is located, and local hospitals
for catastrophe scenarios. So when she says maybe not this
flight, the monthly Emergency Management meeting with Cameron
County and local hospitals for catastrophe scenarios, those go
hand in hand. What if something bad happens?
Well, emergency meetings with Cameron County local hospitals
have to have to come into play. Those Cameron County hospitals
might be the best way to mitigate the circumstances if a
booster goes wild and flies into Starbase.
And I mean, there's bunkers where people do their work, but
it's not all safe. You know, it's they're not like
bunker bunkers, right? And it's kind of close, like a
mile away from launch site. So I mean, they did take all the
precautions that they needed to, but who knows what can happen,
right? So if you're waiting for an IFT
5 catch, you might be out of luck.
And unfortunately, I would love to have seen that.
But I, I'm not trying to be negative.
I just know that it's a really hard task.
It's a really hard engineering problem to figure out.
And if they could figure it out with these current tests that
they're doing, that'd be great. But I don't think they're going
to do a fry of T5. Also, let me know in the
comments down below what you think about this stuff.
Because permanent orbital fuel depot for Moon and Mars.
They'll be like this one depot. I think that would solve so many
problems. Instead of launching numerous
depots and having numerous depots in orbit, just one one
depot that you fly starships and fuel ships to.
So yeah, let me note down the comments and also if you're new
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one. Oop, goodbye.