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Starship is cool but it ain’t magic. They haven’t changed the rocket equation. It’s still going to be extraordinarily expensive to ship stuff to mars.
by empath75 7y ago
Starship is cool but it ain’t magic. They haven’t changed the rocket equation. It’s still going to be extraordinarily expensive to ship stuff to mars.
- jiofih 7y agoYou’re gonna have to provide a bit more context for that challenge, considering all the information already available about it. Which figure do you think is wrong?
- empath75 7y agoThe completely absurd suggestion that we’re going to be shipping millions of tons of cargo to mars in this century, let alone this decade.
- theothermkn 7y agoThe actual fuel cost to put things into orbit is quite small, on the order of $30/lb of payload. I've done this analysis on HN before, but the gist is that LOX and kerosene are about the cost of milk, and roughly as dense on average, and you need about 20-30 lbs of propellant for each lb of payload. The rest of the cost comes from labor and amortizing the launch vehicle and infrastructure. The cost floor is <stick wet finger in breeze> probably around $100 (2019 dollars) or so per pound. Not great, but not "extraordinarily expensive." This is without going to gun-assisted schemes for durable raw materials and the like. (Incidentally, this seems insane to me. It seems like you want rockets for people and fragile goods, and guns for anything that can take a few hundred to a few thousand gees or more, like steel or aluminum or water (ice) or.... But, this is just a SWAG. There could be hiccups there preventing a gun-assist cost floor much lower than that for rockets.)