Frankly, after the Epstein files, I welcome some fire and brimstone to clean things up a bit. (Of course, you probably think Epstein was a Russian agent)
>Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease. They would like to treat disease
This is nonsense. Pharma are never in a position where they can choose between curing and treating. 90% of clinical trials fail. Pharma is throwing things at the wall and picking whatever sticks.
Then explain the herd mentality if they were truly all trying all posibilities. No, same old same old. Pharma is not removed from the usual incentives of capitalism. FWIW the line about treatments not cures is pretty much a direct quote from a product manager at a major pharma company I heard speak at an internal presentation. Straight from the horses mouth.
Many of the biggest medical innovations have come from publicly funded university researchers, which then license or give away their findings to private businesses.
I have noticed that there are two radically different approaches to assessing Starship.
One is based on boring old analysis, hard numbers, and, worst of all, continually updating the analysis as more information (e.g., Raptor’s severe expectations vs reality shortfall) becomes available. People who use this approach don’t seem to have an opinion of Starship that is trending upward.
The other approach seems to be based on vibes, and trusting that Starship will meet its original design goals despite the fact that no rocket project has ever come close to such an achievement. If there’s ever any introspection about why Starship should be the exceptional project that actually does meet its performance goals, the conclusion tends to be something about how Starship is special because it’s being developed by a private company. And I’ve noticed that, if the conversation does get to this point, you can send it in all sorts of unpredictable and fascinating directions by saying words like “OTRAG” and “Conestoga.”
No, that's not how any of this works. Try to think for a moment why we still overwhelmingly use non-jumbo jets for aviation in a world where jumbo jets exist.
Not to mention that making the upper stage and payload fairing much bigger and heavier juat so you can recover them is not an automatic win. You can recover it, but you’ve also made it much more expensive in the first place. And the booster needs to be bigger, heavier and more expensive, too.
It’s not an automatic deal breaker, of course. Falcon 9 is obviously a promising success. But Starship is also working with some new challenges that Falcon 9 didn’t have to worry about.
Many of these stem from design compromises that were forced by Starship’s secondary goal of being capable of a trip to Mars. In that respect, it very much resembles another major project to produce a heavy launch vehicle with a reusable combination payload fairing and upper stage that is also capable of carrying a human crew: the Space Shuttle.
I think their point might have been more that there just wasn’t as much need for jets that big in the first place. The jumbo jets are meant for a business model that pushes consumers into making extra compromises on their plans (like more and longer layovers) to accommodate the operator’s need to fill bigger planes with more people to make things economical. It turns out that many consumers are happy to spend a bit more on a direct flight instead of a 3 leg journey with one long flight on an widebody sandwiched between two “last mile” hops on a CRJ700.
The rocketry analogy would be choosing between (possibly - we can’t know numbers until Starship is commercially operational) paying a bit more but waiting less time for a Falcon 9 launch that puts you right into the orbit you want, or waiting for a bus ride on a Starship launch that only gets everyone to a compromise orbit in the general area of where they want to be and requires them to pack an extra motor and fuel for transferring the spacecraft to its final destination.
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