He is a front for the DoD, why can't the media just admit it?
I couldn't read the entire article due to the paywall. But you have to hand it to the WSJ for publishing such an opinion piece when the entire world is suffering from an energy crunch caused by the ill-concieved misadventures of some bloodlusting mad men. Don't they have anything more important to worry about? Something like,... I don't know - health care, housing, food, education, child care and pensions for the masses? Do they instead want to provide yet another unsympathetic oligarch with the economic incentive to lobby the government into even more bloody and destructive wars?
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 explicitly prohibits stationing of nuclear weapons and other WMD in space. While it doesn't prevent conventional weapons from being fielded, what is the threshold for what is considered as mass destruction, given the lethality of today's conventional weapons? (Consider thermobaric weapons, for instance.) But the bigger question is, do we even want to go that route, given the genocides and the massacres of children that's happening around the world now? The current warfare isn't revolutionary enough?
Forget wars and fantasies like space datacenters. How far along are we to landing a starship on Mars or even just the Moon for which they were contracted and paid in bulk by NASA? You can accuse me of being an armchair critic (I was involved in the development of a mid heavy launcher). But I don't care. I haven't seen another launcher that hasn't entered orbit after ten development missions. The 'fix as you go' approach can be stretched only so far in any development, much less for a space launcher.
The lunar launch plan for Starship is frankly quite ridiculous, given how many Starships have to be launched for just one mission - the fuel depot, dozens of refueling flights and finally the lander! How did the nation that landed humans on the moon forget to ask fundamental engineering questions like payload capacity and cryogenic boil off rates in space? And that isn't even the hard part. They're talking about in-space refueling as if it's like going to a gas station. Even the cryo liquids floating around under micro-g inside the tank pose its own challenges. And on top of that, you have to worry about purging, chilling and sealing the transfer lines. Meanwhile even after seeing how the Apollo and Artemis missions work, how did anybody think that it's a great idea to propel the entire second stage of a two stage rocket into the moon's orbit?
I think everybody is reluctant to ask such questions fearing the ridicule "What do you know more than the smart guys at SpaceX?" But history keeps proving that convincing explanations matter more than credentials or authority. So far, that silence has enabled the transfer of public funds into private coffers. But now it threatens to disrupt the peace and stability of the world, as they try to repurpose an underperforming project to do what they like the most - bomb innocent civilians. Are we not ready to draw a line for what these oligarchs are allowed to do to pocket public money?
The working and poor population of the world are under enormous stress of unaffordability of every necessity including food and energy. Children are dying like flies due to famines and wars. And WSJ goes promoting war hawks who are scouting the world for the next country to bomb, invade and massacre. This is extremely disgraceful in my opinion. At some stage, we're going to have to define hard limits on this oligarchic greed.
