Okay I sent an ask to my mutual about this because we’re both Aerospace Engineering students, myself specializing in Astronautics, but y'know what fuck it I got nothing better to do and I just wanna go over some of SpaceX’s…design choices.
So completely ignoring the whole issue with privatizing space travel and Night Sky Clutter with the whole OneWeb/Starlink issue, SpaceX makes very questionable and sometimes outright idiotic design choices. With the Dragon Capsule alone, the decision to remove virtually any form of manual control and to have all of your inputs be done via touchscreen is just…not smart. At all. The suits they wear are purely designed for aesthetic and lack any form of personal protection and seemingly lack any form of life support or survival equipment. For comparison, the LES and ACES suits all include some form of limited life support in the event that your mode of transportation has a critical failure while also being pressure suits or at the very least partial-pressure suits and carry multiple survival aspects such as parachutes, inflatable life rafts, and other tools to help an astronaut survive and be recovered from emergency landing sites that will usually be in the wilderness. The SpaceX suits, well, we don’t KNOW what’s in the suit because Musky boy won’t tell us. It’s privatized, what do you expect, they care more about keeping their tech to themselves than safety or transparency. It’s claimed to survive a “vacuum chamber” just fine but no actual test results have been shown. Musk himself claimed that the suits are an improvement from the old LES and it’s replacement the ACES suits because it’s sleeker and with a cool white design. Now lemme say something on this, there is a fucking reason that the old suits are bulky and orange. Why? Because they’re pressure suits with survival equipment and life support built in. They’re not sleek because how the fuck are you gonna fit air bladders, a parachute, survival kits, aid kits, and air systems on a sleek suit? That’s why the old suits were bulky because they worried about the SAFETY of the wearer not how fucking cool they look. Also the orange? Y'know why they’re orange? So we can fucking seem them if they end up stranded in the ocean or wilderness after an emergency landing. In fact, one veteran astronaut who flew on missions STS-129 and STS-135 compared the suits to the old Soviet Sokol suits. Now I don’t know how many of you know about Sokol suits, but these are basically backup “everything has gone to shit” suits. However even the Sokol suit contains some form of life support which is more than can confidently be said about the SpaceX suits.
And beyond just this photo we also have Elon insisting that satellite casings and thermal control systems be painted BLACK because it makes them look cooler but here’s the thing, the reason satellites typically have white, beige, or gaudy ass chrome foil covering is because the sun is a hot motherfucker and electronics, and well electronics my friends, don’t like heat. Guess what black does? It absorbs heat, well technically visible light but whatever. So we put light colors and reflective covering on satellites and components designed for space so they can reflect heat and try to keep them cool. SpaceX on the other hand has to include more intense cooling measures because their idiot leader follows the rule of cool which ironically makes things less cool. Oh and there’s also the whole issue with the first rocket blowing up due to fuel sloshing which, I should add, is the first thing you learn not to do and how to AVOID in any form of aerospace engineering so, y'know, the fact that their rocket suffered from that is, well, telling.
Anyway this got a lot longer than I intended but fuck it man and fuck Elon, and fuck SpaceX for thinking Star Trek aesthetics are more important than, idk, the entire collective knowledge we’ve gained about space travel and flight safety.
