There is no justice but what we make. Instead of wishing for some deity that likely doesn't exist, or is at best indifferent, work to turn them out of power. Donate to the groups that support net neutrality like the Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/, and support candidates who will work on net neutrality and sane gun laws. Right now, approximately most Americans support background checks for buying guns http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/374692-poll-97-percent-support-background-checks-for-all-gun-buyers. You can help out with both these issues by donating to Conor Lamb's election https://conorlamb.com/. Lamb is running as the Democrat in Pennsylvania's 18th district for the upcoming special election to replace Tim Murphy. Lamb is in favor of net neutrality and is in favor sensible gun restrictions. He's a former Marine, and a former prosecutor, which gives him a healthy appreciation for guns (and let's be honest many Dems probably can't tell the difference between different guns other than that if they look scary they must be an "assault weapon"). He's a reasonable moderate and is running in a close election. Don't hope for hell, work to put better people in charge.
Yeah, it seems like fitting in the BA-330 will require such a much larger fairing that they'd have to fundamentally change a lot of their machine tooling, and it would also drastically change the aerodynamics during Max Q (the second detail I haven't seen in any written source but I've heard people say that who seemed to know what they were talking about). Launching the BA-330 or any of the other fun Bigelow stuff may have to wait until the BFR is functional, or until a specific customer is willing to pay SpaceX a lot to develop a much bigger fairing.
Even the fuel tanks cost a lot- everything in a rocket is subject to very high stresses. The fuel tanks are subject to the same high acceleration stresses as well as having to deal with extremely cold temperatures and a broad range of pressure conditions. The fairings are not only subject to the same high acceleration stresses, they need to also deal with a massive amount of air hitting them at a variety of different angles. Moreover, the fairing need to easily separate into two parts at just the right moment. None of this easy. There's good reason why we use "rocket science" as short-hand for something very difficult.
PAZ is a radar satellite for both governments and commercial contractors. Note that satellites like PAZ help level the playing field for small governments that can't afford their own radar satellites. Making sure that everyone has access to this sort of thing actually has a stabilizing effect: If a government can see where a potentially hostile power's military resources are they will be less worried about a surprise attack or needing to launch a preemptive attack of their own. By the same token, if the potentially hostile power has a good view of their military, a surprise attack is less likely to achieve surprise and so make them less tempting. Giving everyone basic access to this makes for a more peaceful planet.
This launch was also the first launch of the new fairing https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/02/spacex-falcon-9-paz-launch-starlink-demo-new-fairing/. The fairing is the two halves of the nose-cone which protect the payload from wind when the payload is going up in the atmosphere (as well as helping keep the overall rocket have less drag). Once the rocket hits the upper atmosphere (generally about the same time or shortly after 2nd stage cut off, depending on the specific rocket), the fairing breaks off since it is extra, unnecessarily mass at that point. SpaceX has been very interested in recovering the fairings and the upgraded fairing is both slightly larger (which is good because volume limitations are an issue for the Falcon 9 and even more so for the Falcon Heavy), and is also aimed at trying to make fairing recovery possible. If they can get fairing recovery and reuse to work then SpaceX will have another way of reducing the cost of launches since the fairings cost a few million to manufacture. The fact that this fairing was used without any apparent major glitches is very promising.
This should be more evidence that there are real and substantial differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. Yes, there are a small number of Democrat senators who aren't in favor of net neutrality, and there are a small number of Republican senators who are in favor, but the vast majority of each group have taken positions exactly as expected. There are real differences between the major political parties.
And you thinking the merger would be good just because of "Trump" does not speak well of your ability to think.
Hmm? Absolutely nowhere did I say that. The merger is unambiguously bad. But I really, really also don't want a precedent where the President (whether Trump or anyone else) can easily use selective enforcement anti-trust law for political goals. We're in a situation where there's really no good result. The best case scenario would have been that the White House turned over everything relevant and it became clear from the documentation that there was no inappropriate influence, and then the merger gets blocked. But in order for that to happen, that material needs to become available.
This seems very close to a blank check to the White House to engage in selective enforcement of anti-trust rules whenever they please. This ruling says that it is close to impossible to establish a clear line of political influence even when the circumstantial evidence for political retribution influencing it is pretty heavy. I'm in general in favor of stronger enforcement of anti-trust laws, but not if it is going to be done in a capricious fashion for political and personal goals.
. Conservatives derisively refer to judges that do that sort of thing as "activist judges", progressives applaud those judges for "doing the right thing", and the result is at some point the judicial branch will no longer respect its role as a co-equal branch of government and instead think it is superior to the others.
Almost- both ends of the political spectrum get very angry when judges do this when it in the direction they don't like. The right just doesn't label those as "activist judges." Complicating matters even further, the most prominent cases we notice are cases going to the Supreme Court. And the easy cases don't get there which means that generally the cases people notice are the cases that involve vague wording or trying to use very old precedents to understand new technologies, or otherwise somehow unique, and so by nature the justices have substantially less to go on than simply interpreting a narrowly written law.
I'm trying to figure out what this means and the best I can get is that they mean that entanglement is preserved for longer? If so, that will certainly be a useful thing for doing any serious quantum computing. At this point though, it seems like we have a lot of different promising architectures for quantum computing but none of them are anywhere near implementation to do the things we seriously care about, like simulating quantum systems or running Shor's algorithm on a serious scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm.
Center core is heavier than a regular Falcon 9 first stage, so it has a higher terminal velocity. So it may take more TEA-TEB to reliably ignite the engines when they are coming down that way.
The ignition fluid in question is TEA-TEB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane#Rocket, a mixture of triethylborane and triethylaluminium. This is a common ignition fluid for rockets which burn RP-1 (rocket grade kerosene), since RP-1 is hard to ignite. The two are mixed because one of the two has really dependable ignition while the other one burns more cleanly. This sort of ignition system has been in use since the 1960s, but SpaceX is the first to use the TEA-TEB ignition system to ignite a rocket engine while the rocket engine is moving quickly *downwards* into the atmosphere. Experiments will sometimes work, and sometimes won't. They are obviously figuring out just how much TEA-TEB they need.
If he meant, men his age in Finland, then that has very little to do with the people generally posting about Trump; pro-Trump posting on Facebook is going to have a lot more people from the US than Finland for a whole bunch of reasons. These include simply differences in the size of the populations of each country, US people more likely to focus on their own politics, and Trump being generally unpopular almost everywhere outside the US http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/26/u-s-image-suffers-as-publics-around-world-question-trumps-leadership/ (That data set doesn't include Finland but it does show a broad general pattern through a whole variety of countries, including Sweden).
As for the issue of their age, it isn't just the 18-29 bracket. The same data set I linked to earlier shows also more support for Clinton among the 30-44 bracket, although not as extreme as in the younger age bracket. It is possible that they are older, but the phrasing doesn't really suggest that.
Third, people tend to self-segregate into groups with similar belief structures. Odds are you're going to be friends with a people who are more similar to you on average than dissimilar. That's not to say that you can't have friends with differences, just that if you're a strong Clinton/Trump supporter, most of your friends are probably the same.
Sure! But this is precisely why anecdote is not a good source of data, and why data is more important than anecdote. It is precisely because self-segregation occurs that actually asking what the data shows is important.
For some classes of catastrophic failure yes, but one of the more common failure modes involve loss of an engine or two. For most flight profiles the F9 has engine-out capability so it can fill most mission criteria (or at least with people abort to orbit) with an engine out. The Falcon Heavy though has more redundancy and so has an engine-out capability as high as 6 engines. That said, this probably doesn't matter much because there are very few situations where one is going to lose more than 1 engine and not have a highly catastrophic failure event.
Yes, I'm in complete agreement that his announcements (both the first and the second one) were reasonable given the irregularity surrounding the situation. My point wasn't that his behavior wasn't reasonable, just that it makes it very hard to argue that there was some sort of pro-Clinton conspiracy in the FBI given his decision.
Thank you for demonstrating fake news in a nutshell. Even in the Nunes memo acknowledges that the Steele dossier wasn't the only input in question. Moreover, Carter Page was under US law enforcement surveillance before the Steele dossier even reached the attention of the FBI. Facts matters. The idea that the FBI and DOJ were somehow biased in favor of Clinton is simply silly when James Comey, a Republican appointee, was the one who announced a few days before the election that he was reoppening the Clinton email investigation when he has no legal requirement to make such an announcement.
I agree that the fact that many environmentalists have an overly negative view of nuclear power. Heck, this even extends to the point that many major environmental groups are actually even against fusion power research, which is absolutely nuts. As for where things were 30 years ago, I was a bit too young then to have much of an opinion about anything related to the environment then.
Mostly agreement. One point: The main reason to not man-rate the FH that I was thinking of was that the primary customer for it would be NASA using the Dragon, and the Dragon can get to the ISS fine on a Falcon 9. I agree that if they want to do other stuff, then manrating it makes sense, and in that context, the fact that they think BFR is going to be very soon coming down the pipeline is a good reason not to, but the location of the primary destination is also pretty important.
It is hard to make a rocket nozzle that works well in the atmosphere and in space.
Yes! This is one of the reasons for staging. The first stage engines are optimized for atmospheric use and the upper stage for vacuum or near vacuum conditions. In the case of the Falcon Heavy, the first stage uses 27 Merlin 1D engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D, and the upper stage uses a single vacuum optimized Merlin 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D_Vacuum. This isn't the only reason for staging (all that extra mass from carrying extra storage tanks for empty fuel and oxygen is another big one) but it is a major one.
With that many engines to steer, I wonder if there is some way to use the extra degrees of freedom to shape the plume to get a bit more thrust?
I don't have a source for this off-hand, but given my understanding my guess is going to be no. Almost all the things that happen to alter the thrust profile occur in the engine itself or immediately outside the engine. Anything you would do that could have any chance at this would end up having to have multiple outer engines pointing somewhat inwards which would mean you'd have some thrust canceling out from the outer engines. Anything you could gain by somehow altering the profile of the inner engines wouldn't be remotely worth losing thrust that way. If more containment would give more thrust in some range, you'd just build your engine with a longer nozzle.
Even if the center core turned out to not land correctly, this is still absolutely amazing. The simultaneous landing of both the side boosters was literally awe-inspiring. SpaceX had initially said they might stagger their landings by a little in case one went wrong, but it looks like they had the hubris to land them both literally at the same time. And lesson there is hubris is fucking awesome, and those obnoxious Greek gods can go suck it.
More seriously, this is going to have a massive impact on the heavy end of the launch market. Even without reuse, it looks like Falcon Heavy is going to be cheaper for almost all big payloads than any of the other heavy launchers, especially Ariane 5 and Delta Heavy. The only issue right now limiting its use are twofold: First, it has a relatively small fairing, so it is possible that some payloads will have volume issues- but that will be rare, and making a new fairing is something SpaceX may do if a customer is interested in it. Second, the Falcon Heavy is for pretty obvious reasons not man-rated. That may change in the future, and the current plan right now is to just man-rate the Falcon 9, but if the Falcon Heavy does get man-rated then there will be almost no market for anything else. If Grey Dragon or others can go on a Falcon Heavy it will be a very different situation. And of course, the Falcon Heavy doesn't have the same lift capability as the SLS, but the SLS still hasn't flown yet, and will cost literally a billion dollars or so a launch.
It is really tiresome to see people use "virtue signaling" to mean just "Doing something for a moral reason I don't sympathize with." Yes, it does make sense to say people are engaging in virtue signaling when they engage in conspicuous environmentalism that doesn't really help much and doesn't cost them much. But this is a massive investment and reflects that people are genuinely serious about trying to help the environmental issues. As for "inflated housing, electricity, and transportation costs" cost of living in areas like NY are high precisely because so many people want to live there. If people didn't want to, the cost would go down. Since you self-identify as a "Rightwing Nutjob" you should have some minimal appreciate for how supply and demand work.
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There is no justice but what we make. Instead of wishing for some deity that likely doesn't exist, or is at best indifferent, work to turn them out of power. Donate to the groups that support net neutrality like the Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/, and support candidates who will work on net neutrality and sane gun laws. Right now, approximately most Americans support background checks for buying guns http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/374692-poll-97-percent-support-background-checks-for-all-gun-buyers. You can help out with both these issues by donating to Conor Lamb's election https://conorlamb.com/. Lamb is running as the Democrat in Pennsylvania's 18th district for the upcoming special election to replace Tim Murphy. Lamb is in favor of net neutrality and is in favor sensible gun restrictions. He's a former Marine, and a former prosecutor, which gives him a healthy appreciation for guns (and let's be honest many Dems probably can't tell the difference between different guns other than that if they look scary they must be an "assault weapon"). He's a reasonable moderate and is running in a close election. Don't hope for hell, work to put better people in charge.
Yeah, it seems like fitting in the BA-330 will require such a much larger fairing that they'd have to fundamentally change a lot of their machine tooling, and it would also drastically change the aerodynamics during Max Q (the second detail I haven't seen in any written source but I've heard people say that who seemed to know what they were talking about). Launching the BA-330 or any of the other fun Bigelow stuff may have to wait until the BFR is functional, or until a specific customer is willing to pay SpaceX a lot to develop a much bigger fairing.
Even the fuel tanks cost a lot- everything in a rocket is subject to very high stresses. The fuel tanks are subject to the same high acceleration stresses as well as having to deal with extremely cold temperatures and a broad range of pressure conditions. The fairings are not only subject to the same high acceleration stresses, they need to also deal with a massive amount of air hitting them at a variety of different angles. Moreover, the fairing need to easily separate into two parts at just the right moment. None of this easy. There's good reason why we use "rocket science" as short-hand for something very difficult.
PAZ is a radar satellite for both governments and commercial contractors. Note that satellites like PAZ help level the playing field for small governments that can't afford their own radar satellites. Making sure that everyone has access to this sort of thing actually has a stabilizing effect: If a government can see where a potentially hostile power's military resources are they will be less worried about a surprise attack or needing to launch a preemptive attack of their own. By the same token, if the potentially hostile power has a good view of their military, a surprise attack is less likely to achieve surprise and so make them less tempting. Giving everyone basic access to this makes for a more peaceful planet.
This launch was also the first launch of the new fairing https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/02/spacex-falcon-9-paz-launch-starlink-demo-new-fairing/. The fairing is the two halves of the nose-cone which protect the payload from wind when the payload is going up in the atmosphere (as well as helping keep the overall rocket have less drag). Once the rocket hits the upper atmosphere (generally about the same time or shortly after 2nd stage cut off, depending on the specific rocket), the fairing breaks off since it is extra, unnecessarily mass at that point. SpaceX has been very interested in recovering the fairings and the upgraded fairing is both slightly larger (which is good because volume limitations are an issue for the Falcon 9 and even more so for the Falcon Heavy), and is also aimed at trying to make fairing recovery possible. If they can get fairing recovery and reuse to work then SpaceX will have another way of reducing the cost of launches since the fairings cost a few million to manufacture. The fact that this fairing was used without any apparent major glitches is very promising.
This should be more evidence that there are real and substantial differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. Yes, there are a small number of Democrat senators who aren't in favor of net neutrality, and there are a small number of Republican senators who are in favor, but the vast majority of each group have taken positions exactly as expected. There are real differences between the major political parties.
And you thinking the merger would be good just because of "Trump" does not speak well of your ability to think.
Hmm? Absolutely nowhere did I say that. The merger is unambiguously bad. But I really, really also don't want a precedent where the President (whether Trump or anyone else) can easily use selective enforcement anti-trust law for political goals. We're in a situation where there's really no good result. The best case scenario would have been that the White House turned over everything relevant and it became clear from the documentation that there was no inappropriate influence, and then the merger gets blocked. But in order for that to happen, that material needs to become available.
This seems very close to a blank check to the White House to engage in selective enforcement of anti-trust rules whenever they please. This ruling says that it is close to impossible to establish a clear line of political influence even when the circumstantial evidence for political retribution influencing it is pretty heavy. I'm in general in favor of stronger enforcement of anti-trust laws, but not if it is going to be done in a capricious fashion for political and personal goals.
This should be an easy issue. Libertarian publications like Reason https://reason.com/archives/2018/01/19/barber-cops-bust-high-school-dropouts, and center-left publications like The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-obama-occupational-licensing/536619/ agree that this is a problem. Heck as The Atlantic article points out, this is even an issue where Donald Trump and Obama seem to agree. Unfortunately, as long as lobbying can occur by licensing groups and professional association at state capitals, they'll do an effective job of protecting themselves from the sort of serious reform that is needed.
. Conservatives derisively refer to judges that do that sort of thing as "activist judges", progressives applaud those judges for "doing the right thing", and the result is at some point the judicial branch will no longer respect its role as a co-equal branch of government and instead think it is superior to the others.
Almost- both ends of the political spectrum get very angry when judges do this when it in the direction they don't like. The right just doesn't label those as "activist judges." Complicating matters even further, the most prominent cases we notice are cases going to the Supreme Court. And the easy cases don't get there which means that generally the cases people notice are the cases that involve vague wording or trying to use very old precedents to understand new technologies, or otherwise somehow unique, and so by nature the justices have substantially less to go on than simply interpreting a narrowly written law.
I'm trying to figure out what this means and the best I can get is that they mean that entanglement is preserved for longer? If so, that will certainly be a useful thing for doing any serious quantum computing. At this point though, it seems like we have a lot of different promising architectures for quantum computing but none of them are anywhere near implementation to do the things we seriously care about, like simulating quantum systems or running Shor's algorithm on a serious scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm.
This is wrong. In fact, China's CO2 production has gone down https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28022017/chinas-co2-reduction-clean-energy-trump-us, and this is in part because they've managed to do exactly what you think would trigger a revolution, namely by reducing their coal burning amount http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal-consumption-drives-global-slowdown-emissions.
Center core is heavier than a regular Falcon 9 first stage, so it has a higher terminal velocity. So it may take more TEA-TEB to reliably ignite the engines when they are coming down that way.
The ignition fluid in question is TEA-TEB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane#Rocket, a mixture of triethylborane and triethylaluminium. This is a common ignition fluid for rockets which burn RP-1 (rocket grade kerosene), since RP-1 is hard to ignite. The two are mixed because one of the two has really dependable ignition while the other one burns more cleanly. This sort of ignition system has been in use since the 1960s, but SpaceX is the first to use the TEA-TEB ignition system to ignite a rocket engine while the rocket engine is moving quickly *downwards* into the atmosphere. Experiments will sometimes work, and sometimes won't. They are obviously figuring out just how much TEA-TEB they need.
I never understood the appeal of lithium for grid storage, since weight of a stationary battery is not an issue.
The appeal is purely the economies of scale; the hope is that if one is only manufacturing a single type of battery then everything's cost goes down.
If he meant, men his age in Finland, then that has very little to do with the people generally posting about Trump; pro-Trump posting on Facebook is going to have a lot more people from the US than Finland for a whole bunch of reasons. These include simply differences in the size of the populations of each country, US people more likely to focus on their own politics, and Trump being generally unpopular almost everywhere outside the US http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/26/u-s-image-suffers-as-publics-around-world-question-trumps-leadership/ (That data set doesn't include Finland but it does show a broad general pattern through a whole variety of countries, including Sweden).
As for the issue of their age, it isn't just the 18-29 bracket. The same data set I linked to earlier shows also more support for Clinton among the 30-44 bracket, although not as extreme as in the younger age bracket. It is possible that they are older, but the phrasing doesn't really suggest that.
Third, people tend to self-segregate into groups with similar belief structures. Odds are you're going to be friends with a people who are more similar to you on average than dissimilar. That's not to say that you can't have friends with differences, just that if you're a strong Clinton/Trump supporter, most of your friends are probably the same.
Sure! But this is precisely why anecdote is not a good source of data, and why data is more important than anecdote. It is precisely because self-segregation occurs that actually asking what the data shows is important.
The data doesn't support your anecdote: Young people of both genders were both more likely to vote for Clinton than the general population. See e.g. http://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/09/how-we-voted-by-age-education-race-and-sexual-orientation/
For some classes of catastrophic failure yes, but one of the more common failure modes involve loss of an engine or two. For most flight profiles the F9 has engine-out capability so it can fill most mission criteria (or at least with people abort to orbit) with an engine out. The Falcon Heavy though has more redundancy and so has an engine-out capability as high as 6 engines. That said, this probably doesn't matter much because there are very few situations where one is going to lose more than 1 engine and not have a highly catastrophic failure event.
Yes, I'm in complete agreement that his announcements (both the first and the second one) were reasonable given the irregularity surrounding the situation. My point wasn't that his behavior wasn't reasonable, just that it makes it very hard to argue that there was some sort of pro-Clinton conspiracy in the FBI given his decision.
Thank you for demonstrating fake news in a nutshell. Even in the Nunes memo acknowledges that the Steele dossier wasn't the only input in question. Moreover, Carter Page was under US law enforcement surveillance before the Steele dossier even reached the attention of the FBI. Facts matters. The idea that the FBI and DOJ were somehow biased in favor of Clinton is simply silly when James Comey, a Republican appointee, was the one who announced a few days before the election that he was reoppening the Clinton email investigation when he has no legal requirement to make such an announcement.
I agree that the fact that many environmentalists have an overly negative view of nuclear power. Heck, this even extends to the point that many major environmental groups are actually even against fusion power research, which is absolutely nuts. As for where things were 30 years ago, I was a bit too young then to have much of an opinion about anything related to the environment then.
Mostly agreement. One point: The main reason to not man-rate the FH that I was thinking of was that the primary customer for it would be NASA using the Dragon, and the Dragon can get to the ISS fine on a Falcon 9. I agree that if they want to do other stuff, then manrating it makes sense, and in that context, the fact that they think BFR is going to be very soon coming down the pipeline is a good reason not to, but the location of the primary destination is also pretty important.
It is hard to make a rocket nozzle that works well in the atmosphere and in space.
Yes! This is one of the reasons for staging. The first stage engines are optimized for atmospheric use and the upper stage for vacuum or near vacuum conditions. In the case of the Falcon Heavy, the first stage uses 27 Merlin 1D engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D, and the upper stage uses a single vacuum optimized Merlin 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D_Vacuum. This isn't the only reason for staging (all that extra mass from carrying extra storage tanks for empty fuel and oxygen is another big one) but it is a major one.
With that many engines to steer, I wonder if there is some way to use the extra degrees of freedom to shape the plume to get a bit more thrust?
I don't have a source for this off-hand, but given my understanding my guess is going to be no. Almost all the things that happen to alter the thrust profile occur in the engine itself or immediately outside the engine. Anything you would do that could have any chance at this would end up having to have multiple outer engines pointing somewhat inwards which would mean you'd have some thrust canceling out from the outer engines. Anything you could gain by somehow altering the profile of the inner engines wouldn't be remotely worth losing thrust that way. If more containment would give more thrust in some range, you'd just build your engine with a longer nozzle.
Even if the center core turned out to not land correctly, this is still absolutely amazing. The simultaneous landing of both the side boosters was literally awe-inspiring. SpaceX had initially said they might stagger their landings by a little in case one went wrong, but it looks like they had the hubris to land them both literally at the same time. And lesson there is hubris is fucking awesome, and those obnoxious Greek gods can go suck it.
More seriously, this is going to have a massive impact on the heavy end of the launch market. Even without reuse, it looks like Falcon Heavy is going to be cheaper for almost all big payloads than any of the other heavy launchers, especially Ariane 5 and Delta Heavy. The only issue right now limiting its use are twofold: First, it has a relatively small fairing, so it is possible that some payloads will have volume issues- but that will be rare, and making a new fairing is something SpaceX may do if a customer is interested in it. Second, the Falcon Heavy is for pretty obvious reasons not man-rated. That may change in the future, and the current plan right now is to just man-rate the Falcon 9, but if the Falcon Heavy does get man-rated then there will be almost no market for anything else. If Grey Dragon or others can go on a Falcon Heavy it will be a very different situation. And of course, the Falcon Heavy doesn't have the same lift capability as the SLS, but the SLS still hasn't flown yet, and will cost literally a billion dollars or so a launch.
It is really tiresome to see people use "virtue signaling" to mean just "Doing something for a moral reason I don't sympathize with." Yes, it does make sense to say people are engaging in virtue signaling when they engage in conspicuous environmentalism that doesn't really help much and doesn't cost them much. But this is a massive investment and reflects that people are genuinely serious about trying to help the environmental issues. As for "inflated housing, electricity, and transportation costs" cost of living in areas like NY are high precisely because so many people want to live there. If people didn't want to, the cost would go down. Since you self-identify as a "Rightwing Nutjob" you should have some minimal appreciate for how supply and demand work.