> went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.

Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right, but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?

What does Elon get credibility yet? Climate scientists don’t? It’s because we choose who we give credibility to. And as a species, we are stupidly optimistic or willing fully blind.

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boxed 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right

Because it is, and he's shown that pretty clearly. Look at mass to orbit numbers of SpaceX compared to the rest of the human race put together. It's not even close.

> but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?

The claim is that the sign didn't use the word "maybe".

Not to mention the fact that these things are not connected in any way. Your credibility by dismissing the most dramatic revolution in rockets since the invention of the rocket shows that you are doing the exact thing you complain about.

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ButlerianJihad 5 hours ago | parent [-]

My mother is involved in environmentalism, and she grimaces and tsks, every time me and Dad get in an outer space conversation, because she considers launches to be wasteful. Well, that much is true, but it's also exciting and inspiring for me.

But I was scrolling through the list of SpaceX recovery successes yesterday, and they've had hundreds, hundreds of safe booster landings. I mean, the Apollo mission discarded every last component of the spacecraft to make a round trip, and the Space Shuttle began conserving the most important part, the orbiter, but SpaceX is downright parsimonious in pioneering recoverable flight components. They don't hesitate to go after those fairing halves wherever they landed. Sadly it is just not practical to recover higher stages or obsolete satellites--yet.

	▲	boxed 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yea I hear that thing a lot. Or the common "why can't we all just cooperate" in the context of yet another rocket company. But of course, if we had pooled our resources we'd still have super shitty rockets.