The Musk Ox - the other stable genius

Well... here's a report which makes The Musk Ox look the charlatan that he really is, Batshit J. Moron fellow traveler. You've no doubt heard, insistently, that The Musk Ox is a once in a millennium genius and that he's built the most powerful rocket in the history of mankind. And that this rocket will take humans back to the moon, and thence to mars. How could he not be a true genius?

Well... that report contains the fatal flaw in this wonderful new rocket. And, by the way, it's by no means the first to try liquid methane as fuel. Didn't work out before. Now, we humans got to the moon boosted by the Saturn V rocket, at the time the most powerful, and such. And, also just by the way, all this yapping about returning booster shells to earth for reuse isn't anything new, either. We did the same for SRBs on the space shuttle. Plopped them in the Atlantic and ferried them back; cheaper to do, I expect. And, as to that landing of the spent booster feet first, not so new either, but is said to burn 700 tons of fuel. Makes for a cool photo-op, but not much else. The Musk Ox wasn't even born yet when we landed on the moon. The LEM's landing was accomplished with compute equivalent to almost nothing of today: 2K Ram and 36K of ROM. I'll guess that a current digital watch (not smartwatch) has more oomph. Landed feet first on the moon and came back. So there.

Most critically, it needs to show that it can move liquid oxygen and methane propellants from one Starship to another. That procedure is key to allowing a Starship to accumulate enough fuel to go to the moon or Mars.

Say, whaaaaaaaat!!! This most powerful rocket ever made doesn't have enough ooomph to get just to the moon like Saturn V did more than 50 years ago? What the fuck? And we're supposed to think this piece of expensive shit will get to mars? Yeah, right.

Turns out, and this being the first report I've seen (as you likely guessed by now), Starship needs trips to the gas station to get anywhere of consequence.

Mr. Musk has asserted that propellant transfer is a straightforward exercise. But pumping that much liquid that quickly while floating in orbit has never been attempted, and no one knows yet how many Starship launches — perhaps as many as 20 — will be needed for a single moon mission.

So, instead of a single competent rocket, which doesn't waste its fuel on its landing feat, we need 20 (may be more) additional launches to get the gas tanks filled, just to get to the moon? This is cost effective, how?

Mr. Dumbacher even proposed that NASA switch to a smaller, simpler lander to improve the chances that NASA can win the 21st-century moon race with China. As SpaceX is supposed to conduct a demonstration of its Starship lander without any astronauts aboard before Artemis III, a successful astronaut landing on the moon using Starship could require as many as 40 launches.

He did not regard the chances of that many successful launches as high. "I need to get that number of launches dramatically reduced," Mr. Dumbacher said during the hearing. "I need to go simple."

Expect him to be attacked by The Musk Ox and his merry band of Fascists, any day now. Telling us that Emporer Elon is naked? Can't have that.

What was it Barnum (denizen of my current state of CT) may have said (somebody did and P.T. is close enough): "There's a sucker born every minute."

The Musk Ox sure has found one in Batshit J. Moron. Gotta get rid of all them dumb Damn Gummint workers; we rich folk just ain't rich enough.