13 ms·

Don’t stage off Starship

126 points by davedx 7y ago

ForHackernews 7y ago
Is 'Starship' even a real thing? Last I heard, it was an empty stainless steel can ('aerodynamic model') that blew over in a strong wind. Has that changed? Are they actually going to try and make this a real launch vehicle?
- maccam94 7y ago
  The Starship Hopper flew a couple hundred meters up into the air using the new Raptor engine, hovered, and then landed. A full size prototype had a fuel tank fail a pressure test due to some bad welding. The most recent fuel tank pressure test succeeded, so it's looking like a 20km altitude test flight will happen in the next few months.
_Microft 7y ago
If you are still unsure about the scale of SpaceX' plans for Mars, here is a very concise summary by Robert Zubrin (president of the Mars Society): It's not Apollo. It's D-Day. It is from an interview with Zubrin who, among other things, discussed mini-Starship with Elon Musk at the Boca Chica job day recently. It can be found here [0], with an automated transcription at [1]. Discussed in /r/spacex at [2]. [0] https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459-dr.-robert-zubrin https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459... [1] https://hastebin.com/raw/ozimiqenop https://hastebin.com/raw/ozimiqenop [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/f34fqm/zubrin_shares_new_info_about_starship/ https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/f34fqm/zubrin_share...
mechhacker 7y ago
This is by far the most interesting aviation/rocketry development I've ever seen. After watching the two Falcon 9 lower stages come back simultaneously from the first Falcon Heavy launch, I realized how different things were going to be. Starship, even if Musk is off by quite a large factor on the cost to launch, is still going to be extremely cheap to fly compared to everything else out there. Other people copycatting the ideas off of Starship will drastically improve the space industry costs, regardless if the Mars venture is successful or not (and I want it to be). This will literally put us in a different era. It wouldn't surprise me if Starship spins off other industries for vehicles not focused on Mars, but elsewhere in the solar system, or based on much longer space voyages. The next hurdle for deep space, aside from shielding, will be power. Lower solar flux in deep space and the interest to save weight will likely see the use of more nuclear power. Regardless, I'm much more hopeful about the space industry that I was in early February, 2003...
- moneytide1 7y ago
  > The next hurdle for deep space, aside from shielding, Zinc Bromide for radiation protection?
  - mechhacker 7y ago
    Probably not. It looks like that's primarily for gamma. In space, cosmic rays are much much more powerful and catastrophic for cells. Water is actually probably the best shield, because you'll need it to support humans along the way. Gamma still is a risk but I think the concern has mainly been higher speed subatomic particles. Anything with heavy nuclei actually produces significant and also highly damaging secondary radiation when hit by fast moving, heavy nuclei, cosmic rays. Another interesting thing: Apollo astronauts could see sparkles in their eyes from the radiation effects of getting hit by cosmic rays travelling through their skulls. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena
    - moneytide1 7y ago
      Can we combine both Zn Br 2 and water? https://youtu.be/yB2v4_7UhLA?t=665 https://youtu.be/yB2v4_7UhLA?t=665
    - moneytide1 7y ago
      < sparkles in their eyes Does the iron core of Earth imply magnetic repellent of the sight of these Cosmic ray retina inducing sparkles?
      - mechhacker 7y ago
        No, the atmosphere blocks almost all of it. If it weren't for that, we'd be hit constantly. Their influence on weather/cloud formation is an active area of research https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/cosmic-rays-clouds https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/cosmic-rays-clouds
        7y ago
altcognito 7y ago
The 5 million per starship must be the cargo ship only. The engines alone are going to be half that cost.
- rtsil 7y ago
  I assume that's the cost when taking into account the reuses, not the construction cost.
  - nkoren 7y ago
    Your assumption is totally reasonable, but wrong. That's the construction cost Musk has said he's aiming for.
drenginian 7y ago
Im no less a science fiction fan than the next person but the whole “colonize Mars” thing is stupid and wasteful and arrogant and really pounds the message that billionaires are deeply deeply out of touch with the rest of society. Not only will colonizing Mars never work, there’s no reason at all to want to. What a dead, barren place. And in the meantime back down to earth people are really starting to care about inequality. Meanwhile billionaires pour resources into childish flights of fancy when the world is literally burning. Ugh. I really think billionaires have a place in our society but these sorts of projects make me understand why others question whether some people should have such huge control of resources. No one is even visiting Mars, let alone colonizing it.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Yes, we aren't colonizing the Gobi Desert and we're supposed to colonize Mars? What a silly idea.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    We did colonize Dubai, that was a desert... Israel was a pretty deserty place too a while ago...
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    Running out of room on Earth isn't the issue here. And as the other comment notes, we are pretty good at colonizing deserts if we want to (we are also good at making deserts, but that's another problem).
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert#European_exploration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert#European_explorati... > The Gobi had a long history of human habitation, mostly by nomadic peoples. By the early 20th century, the region was under the nominal control of Manchu-China, and inhabited mostly by Mongols, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs.
- bobcostas55 7y ago
MayeulC 7y ago
> while storage tanks can be built from local materials Just use the starships themselves. Actually,to further reduce cost, I would design starship to be useable as a Mars habitat: even fuel tanks could conceivably be converted into living quarters,I guess. Further the efficiency by recycling other parts of the starship as building materials. Also, most of the reasoning in this article revolves around power plant mass. I wonder how a nuclear power plant would affect the outcome.
- sp332 7y ago
  The trouble is that the Starships need to refuel very quickly after landing to hit their return launch window. If you need to generate all the fuel right then, you need a much larger fuel plant. If you can store the fuel ahead of time,before the Starship has arrived, you can use a much smaller fuel plant, but you need storage space.
  - fit2rule 7y ago
    You build a version of Starship which produces fuel. You launch a fleet of them to Mars and have them operate for a year or so. Then, you send the human-carrying version. I think the way this is going to work, is when there are 1000 Starships on the surface, some of them with workshops, some with power plants, others with science labs, human quarters, and so on .. and they land in a big field. Humans arrive, string them all together.
    - projektfu 7y ago
      Similar to the approach seen in "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson.
GuB-42 7y ago
When talking about big rockets, it is hard not to talk about Sea Dragon. It was a rocket where the entire design is based on the "bigger is better" philosophy. The design was simple. No need for lightweight, high-tech materials, because it is big. No need for highly efficient high pressure engines, just make one that is bigger. That thing would have dwarved the Saturn V. The name "Sea Dragon" comes from the fact it would have been launched from the sea, it would have been too big for a ground-based launchpad. It would have been built in a shipyard like a submarine that can stand upright. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)
- ekianjo 7y ago
  The Orion interplanetary ship would also have been huge - it was planned to be able to reach Jupiter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
  - api 7y ago
    An early draft of 2001 A Space Odyssey had Discovery as an Orion, but apparently Kubrick having just done Dr. Strangelove didn't want to do another film with nukes.
- mLuby 7y ago
  Awesome 1min clip of Sea Dragon launching from the ocean from "For All Mankind." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMDcC0QvFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMDcC0QvFQ Really gives you the sense of scale.
credit_guy 7y ago
Two aspects in favor of mini-starships 1. economies of scale: if you manufacture 12 engines smaller by a factor of 10, the total manufacturing cost is not going to be 20% higher, but most likely 2-3 times lower. 2. engineering knowledge: more smaller engines means more engineers. Some of whom would leave to start their own startups, or to join Blue Origin, or Skunkworks, or some other aerospace company. That's not necessarily good for SpaceX, but it's good for humankind. Maybe some would go and fix Boeing's problems :)
- tigershark 7y ago
  Yeah, right, it must be a child game to scale by an order of magnitude the only full flow engine that ever flew in Human history...
- justinclift 7y ago
  > 2. engineering knowledge: more smaller engines means more engineers. Not necessarily (by much). Automated production is a thing.
smoyer 7y ago
I have a few interesting questions ... to be fair, I've done no science or math to make a conclusion but there would certainly be a sense of irony involved. 1. Could the green-house gases produced to launch a civilization to Mars be the final straw that breaks our eco-system's back? 2. What are the moral implications of terra-forming Mars and moving a small population there, knowing that the population remaining on Earth is doomed? 3. If you're willing to allow an epic depopulation of the Earth, why not stay here and let it happen? 4. If any of the above are true, why would you expect the (current) larger population of the Earth to fund the colonization of Mars? I realize this is a very dystopian view ... and that I read/watch too much science fiction, but if this is a novel (or a Netflix original), the Mars population moves back to Earth after it's "recovered" EDIT: I'm not against the StarShip, SpaceX or Musk at all - in fact I'm a big fan as I was in elementary school during the Apollo missions and believe that SpaceX in particular has reinvigorated the passion for engineering and tackling big problems. This is only a Gedankenerfahrung.
- hughes 7y ago
  Methane-oxygen propellant can be near carbon-neutral when using huge solar farms to produce it from CO2 and water in the surrounding air. No net increase in greenhouse gasses. However, the ingredients of this process would be redistributed to the upper atmosphere - the effects of this should be carefully studied.
- perlgeek 7y ago
  > 1. Could the green-house gases produced to launch a civilization to Mars be the final straw that breaks our eco-system's back? That seems very unlikely to me. > 2. What are the moral implications of terra-forming Mars and moving a small population there, knowing that the population remaining on Earth is doomed? Even if we spent half of our resources on sending people to mars and hurting Earth's biosphere in the process, Earth would still be much more habitable than Mars. Heck, even worst-case scenarios for man-made climate change "just" reduce the areas where humans can live on earth (and that's a huge catastrophe for everybody), but there's literally NO PLACE on Mars where you can survive at all without pressurized residence etc.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
russdill 7y ago
This seems to completely miss the point of the Starship architecture. With orbital refueling, staging as discussed in the article, or a smaller Starship isn't something that would provide a big savings anyway. Big Starship or small Starship, you get the same Delta-V assuming both are fully fueled. In fact, you'd probably get more Delta-V out of a large Starship since you might be able to get a better mass fraction.
ppaattrriicckk 7y ago
Personally I think it'd be interesting to compare the expected price/weight to how much it cost to cross the Atlantic back in the 1600s. Does anyone happen to have any good references for goods/people crossing back then? For instance, one person writes on Quora[0] that between 1600 and 1800 one could cross the Atlantic from Europe by becoming an indentured servant, working 4-7 years for someone. By looking at the average US income, this corresponds to roughly $2-300,000 per one-way "ticket". This is somewhat comparable to Musk's aspirational price for a one-way ticket to Mars, no? On another note, I'm sure there were discussions back then about why bother to spend months crossing the Atlantic..! [0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-in-today%E2%80%99s-currency-to-travel-from-America-to-London-in-the-1600s-the-1700s-and-the-1800s https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-in-today%E2%80%99...
- setr 7y ago
  I imagine indentured servitude path should be dramatically more expensive by the end of it than paying straight up -- it's like taking money from a loan shark; it's not actually a good deal -- but you don't have the resources to get anything better. I imagine the actual cost of buying a ticket would probably be like 50÷ the cost of indentured servitude
  - swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
    The slavers businesses gotta make up their money somehow /s
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    > like taking money from a loan shark A loan shark that owns the air you breathe.
    - setr 7y ago
      Yes, a bad deal. But if it's the only offer on the table...
- mLuby 7y ago
ben_w 7y ago
> Synthesizing that much fuel would require about 1 MW of electricity for 500 days, requiring in turn 5 hectares of solar panels. Per Starship, per launch window. At 50 kg/kWe, the solar farm would weigh 50 T. Given those power and mass requirements, would it make sense to deploy the PV in earth orbit and use it to power an ion drive? Those things need a lot of electricity to be useful, but 1 MW is a lot of electricity — not the 200 MW for the VASIMR 39-days-to Mars proposal, I’m still thinking of a standard “slow” journey, but this could also mean only one LEO refuel (for powered landing) required.
Haga 7y ago
I still think company's and privat persons shouldn't own nukes. Everyone in orbit by virtue of location has the power any warlord dreams about. Don't make tech advances for the best people, make them against the background of the worst people.
rbanffy 7y ago
Since it seems we are on the verge of having an off-planet colony, I'd like to launch a couple questions: 1- What are the colonists' fundamental rights and who protects them? 2- Under what jurisdiction will they be? 3- Who owns the air? 4- If someone can't pay for their air or food, what happens?
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >Since it seems we are on the verge of having an off-planet colony Has SpaceX even had a successful manned space flight yet? I don't think we're quite on the "verge" of colonizing space...
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    I'm almost certain we'll need to think about this before the century is out.
  - woodandsteel 7y ago
    If things go moderately well for SpaceX, the colony will be started within 15 years. In the larger span of history, that is just a blink of the eye from now. And most of the people reading this discussion thread will still be alive, some would like to go. We better start thinking about the legal issues now, as they are complicated, rather than just doing it in a rush when it starts happening.
  - maccam94 7y ago
    > Has SpaceX even had a successful manned space flight yet? That flight will likely happen in the next quarter. Meanwhile, while SpaceX has been wading through NASA design reviews and red tape (some of which is probably good for them!) for Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon, they've been hard at work on this next-gen rocket for years (the engines since 2009, the rocket itself since 2014). We will likely see a SpaceX Starship reach Low-Earth Orbit within a year, so it's time to start considering what other requirements for getting to Mars might take longer to build.
  - nwallin 7y ago
    Apollo 11 was a little less than twelve years after Sputnik-1. The rush to get people into space and men on the moon was because of politics. If Musk wants people on Mars, he doesn't need bodies in orbit, he needs ships capable of carrying bodies in orbit. It's fine (and unnecessary) if they're unmanned. Which SpaceX has already done, docking with the ISS. NASA and the USSR were hasty putting people into orbit because it was a political necessity, not because it was important to the goal of developing ICBMs, surveillance satellites, or whatever else. They each needed to be the first to put an object in orbit, a human in orbit, a human on the moon, etc. Musk needed cheap, reusable spaceflight as an intermediate goal and a maned Martian capable profile as goal number 2. He doesn't need to take his picture at all the road signs along the way. Musk at some point said he wanted to launch a human toward Mars by the 2024 launch window. I think this is optimistic, but it's not that far off. I would be surprised if they don't launch in time for the 2029-ish launch window.

126 points by davedx 7y ago

Is 'Starship' even a real thing? Last I heard, it was an empty stainless steel can ('aerodynamic model') that blew over in a strong wind. Has that changed? Are they actually going to try and make this a real launch vehicle?

maccam94 7y ago
The Starship Hopper flew a couple hundred meters up into the air using the new Raptor engine, hovered, and then landed. A full size prototype had a fuel tank fail a pressure test due to some bad welding. The most recent fuel tank pressure test succeeded, so it's looking like a 20km altitude test flight will happen in the next few months.

_Microft 7y ago

If you are still unsure about the scale of SpaceX' plans for Mars, here is a very concise summary by Robert Zubrin (president of the Mars Society): It's not Apollo. It's D-Day. It is from an interview with Zubrin who, among other things, discussed mini-Starship with Elon Musk at the Boca Chica job day recently. It can be found here [0], with an automated transcription at [1]. Discussed in /r/spacex at [2]. [0] https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459-dr.-robert-zubrin https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459... [1] https://hastebin.com/raw/ozimiqenop https://hastebin.com/raw/ozimiqenop [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/f34fqm/zubrin_shares_new_info_about_starship/ https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/f34fqm/zubrin_share...

mechhacker 7y ago

This is by far the most interesting aviation/rocketry development I've ever seen. After watching the two Falcon 9 lower stages come back simultaneously from the first Falcon Heavy launch, I realized how different things were going to be. Starship, even if Musk is off by quite a large factor on the cost to launch, is still going to be extremely cheap to fly compared to everything else out there. Other people copycatting the ideas off of Starship will drastically improve the space industry costs, regardless if the Mars venture is successful or not (and I want it to be). This will literally put us in a different era. It wouldn't surprise me if Starship spins off other industries for vehicles not focused on Mars, but elsewhere in the solar system, or based on much longer space voyages. The next hurdle for deep space, aside from shielding, will be power. Lower solar flux in deep space and the interest to save weight will likely see the use of more nuclear power. Regardless, I'm much more hopeful about the space industry that I was in early February, 2003...

moneytide1 7y ago
> The next hurdle for deep space, aside from shielding, Zinc Bromide for radiation protection?
- mechhacker 7y ago
  Probably not. It looks like that's primarily for gamma. In space, cosmic rays are much much more powerful and catastrophic for cells. Water is actually probably the best shield, because you'll need it to support humans along the way. Gamma still is a risk but I think the concern has mainly been higher speed subatomic particles. Anything with heavy nuclei actually produces significant and also highly damaging secondary radiation when hit by fast moving, heavy nuclei, cosmic rays. Another interesting thing: Apollo astronauts could see sparkles in their eyes from the radiation effects of getting hit by cosmic rays travelling through their skulls. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena
  - moneytide1 7y ago
    Can we combine both Zn Br 2 and water? https://youtu.be/yB2v4_7UhLA?t=665 https://youtu.be/yB2v4_7UhLA?t=665
  - moneytide1 7y ago
    < sparkles in their eyes Does the iron core of Earth imply magnetic repellent of the sight of these Cosmic ray retina inducing sparkles?
    - mechhacker 7y ago
      No, the atmosphere blocks almost all of it. If it weren't for that, we'd be hit constantly. Their influence on weather/cloud formation is an active area of research https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/cosmic-rays-clouds https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/cosmic-rays-clouds
      - 7y ago

altcognito 7y ago

The 5 million per starship must be the cargo ship only. The engines alone are going to be half that cost.

rtsil 7y ago
I assume that's the cost when taking into account the reuses, not the construction cost.
- nkoren 7y ago
  Your assumption is totally reasonable, but wrong. That's the construction cost Musk has said he's aiming for.

drenginian 7y ago

Im no less a science fiction fan than the next person but the whole “colonize Mars” thing is stupid and wasteful and arrogant and really pounds the message that billionaires are deeply deeply out of touch with the rest of society. Not only will colonizing Mars never work, there’s no reason at all to want to. What a dead, barren place. And in the meantime back down to earth people are really starting to care about inequality. Meanwhile billionaires pour resources into childish flights of fancy when the world is literally burning. Ugh. I really think billionaires have a place in our society but these sorts of projects make me understand why others question whether some people should have such huge control of resources. No one is even visiting Mars, let alone colonizing it.

zozbot234 7y ago
Yes, we aren't colonizing the Gobi Desert and we're supposed to colonize Mars? What a silly idea.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  We did colonize Dubai, that was a desert... Israel was a pretty deserty place too a while ago...
- wongarsu 7y ago
  Running out of room on Earth isn't the issue here. And as the other comment notes, we are pretty good at colonizing deserts if we want to (we are also good at making deserts, but that's another problem).
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert#European_exploration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert#European_explorati... > The Gobi had a long history of human habitation, mostly by nomadic peoples. By the early 20th century, the region was under the nominal control of Manchu-China, and inhabited mostly by Mongols, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs.
bobcostas55 7y ago

MayeulC 7y ago

> while storage tanks can be built from local materials Just use the starships themselves. Actually,to further reduce cost, I would design starship to be useable as a Mars habitat: even fuel tanks could conceivably be converted into living quarters,I guess. Further the efficiency by recycling other parts of the starship as building materials. Also, most of the reasoning in this article revolves around power plant mass. I wonder how a nuclear power plant would affect the outcome.

sp332 7y ago
The trouble is that the Starships need to refuel very quickly after landing to hit their return launch window. If you need to generate all the fuel right then, you need a much larger fuel plant. If you can store the fuel ahead of time,before the Starship has arrived, you can use a much smaller fuel plant, but you need storage space.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  You build a version of Starship which produces fuel. You launch a fleet of them to Mars and have them operate for a year or so. Then, you send the human-carrying version. I think the way this is going to work, is when there are 1000 Starships on the surface, some of them with workshops, some with power plants, others with science labs, human quarters, and so on .. and they land in a big field. Humans arrive, string them all together.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    Similar to the approach seen in "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

GuB-42 7y ago

When talking about big rockets, it is hard not to talk about Sea Dragon. It was a rocket where the entire design is based on the "bigger is better" philosophy. The design was simple. No need for lightweight, high-tech materials, because it is big. No need for highly efficient high pressure engines, just make one that is bigger. That thing would have dwarved the Saturn V. The name "Sea Dragon" comes from the fact it would have been launched from the sea, it would have been too big for a ground-based launchpad. It would have been built in a shipyard like a submarine that can stand upright. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

ekianjo 7y ago
The Orion interplanetary ship would also have been huge - it was planned to be able to reach Jupiter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
- api 7y ago
  An early draft of 2001 A Space Odyssey had Discovery as an Orion, but apparently Kubrick having just done Dr. Strangelove didn't want to do another film with nukes.
mLuby 7y ago
Awesome 1min clip of Sea Dragon launching from the ocean from "For All Mankind." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMDcC0QvFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMDcC0QvFQ Really gives you the sense of scale.

credit_guy 7y ago

Two aspects in favor of mini-starships 1. economies of scale: if you manufacture 12 engines smaller by a factor of 10, the total manufacturing cost is not going to be 20% higher, but most likely 2-3 times lower. 2. engineering knowledge: more smaller engines means more engineers. Some of whom would leave to start their own startups, or to join Blue Origin, or Skunkworks, or some other aerospace company. That's not necessarily good for SpaceX, but it's good for humankind. Maybe some would go and fix Boeing's problems :)

tigershark 7y ago
Yeah, right, it must be a child game to scale by an order of magnitude the only full flow engine that ever flew in Human history...
justinclift 7y ago
> 2. engineering knowledge: more smaller engines means more engineers. Not necessarily (by much). Automated production is a thing.

smoyer 7y ago

I have a few interesting questions ... to be fair, I've done no science or math to make a conclusion but there would certainly be a sense of irony involved. 1. Could the green-house gases produced to launch a civilization to Mars be the final straw that breaks our eco-system's back? 2. What are the moral implications of terra-forming Mars and moving a small population there, knowing that the population remaining on Earth is doomed? 3. If you're willing to allow an epic depopulation of the Earth, why not stay here and let it happen? 4. If any of the above are true, why would you expect the (current) larger population of the Earth to fund the colonization of Mars? I realize this is a very dystopian view ... and that I read/watch too much science fiction, but if this is a novel (or a Netflix original), the Mars population moves back to Earth after it's "recovered" EDIT: I'm not against the StarShip, SpaceX or Musk at all - in fact I'm a big fan as I was in elementary school during the Apollo missions and believe that SpaceX in particular has reinvigorated the passion for engineering and tackling big problems. This is only a Gedankenerfahrung.

hughes 7y ago
Methane-oxygen propellant can be near carbon-neutral when using huge solar farms to produce it from CO2 and water in the surrounding air. No net increase in greenhouse gasses. However, the ingredients of this process would be redistributed to the upper atmosphere - the effects of this should be carefully studied.
perlgeek 7y ago
> 1. Could the green-house gases produced to launch a civilization to Mars be the final straw that breaks our eco-system's back? That seems very unlikely to me. > 2. What are the moral implications of terra-forming Mars and moving a small population there, knowing that the population remaining on Earth is doomed? Even if we spent half of our resources on sending people to mars and hurting Earth's biosphere in the process, Earth would still be much more habitable than Mars. Heck, even worst-case scenarios for man-made climate change "just" reduce the areas where humans can live on earth (and that's a huge catastrophe for everybody), but there's literally NO PLACE on Mars where you can survive at all without pressurized residence etc.
PaulHoule 7y ago

russdill 7y ago

This seems to completely miss the point of the Starship architecture. With orbital refueling, staging as discussed in the article, or a smaller Starship isn't something that would provide a big savings anyway. Big Starship or small Starship, you get the same Delta-V assuming both are fully fueled. In fact, you'd probably get more Delta-V out of a large Starship since you might be able to get a better mass fraction.

ppaattrriicckk 7y ago

Personally I think it'd be interesting to compare the expected price/weight to how much it cost to cross the Atlantic back in the 1600s. Does anyone happen to have any good references for goods/people crossing back then? For instance, one person writes on Quora[0] that between 1600 and 1800 one could cross the Atlantic from Europe by becoming an indentured servant, working 4-7 years for someone. By looking at the average US income, this corresponds to roughly $2-300,000 per one-way "ticket". This is somewhat comparable to Musk's aspirational price for a one-way ticket to Mars, no? On another note, I'm sure there were discussions back then about why bother to spend months crossing the Atlantic..! [0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-in-today%E2%80%99s-currency-to-travel-from-America-to-London-in-the-1600s-the-1700s-and-the-1800s https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-in-today%E2%80%99...

setr 7y ago
I imagine indentured servitude path should be dramatically more expensive by the end of it than paying straight up -- it's like taking money from a loan shark; it's not actually a good deal -- but you don't have the resources to get anything better. I imagine the actual cost of buying a ticket would probably be like 50÷ the cost of indentured servitude
- swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
  The slavers businesses gotta make up their money somehow /s
- rbanffy 7y ago
  > like taking money from a loan shark A loan shark that owns the air you breathe.
  - setr 7y ago
    Yes, a bad deal. But if it's the only offer on the table...
mLuby 7y ago

ben_w 7y ago

> Synthesizing that much fuel would require about 1 MW of electricity for 500 days, requiring in turn 5 hectares of solar panels. Per Starship, per launch window. At 50 kg/kWe, the solar farm would weigh 50 T. Given those power and mass requirements, would it make sense to deploy the PV in earth orbit and use it to power an ion drive? Those things need a lot of electricity to be useful, but 1 MW is a lot of electricity — not the 200 MW for the VASIMR 39-days-to Mars proposal, I’m still thinking of a standard “slow” journey, but this could also mean only one LEO refuel (for powered landing) required.

Haga 7y ago

I still think company's and privat persons shouldn't own nukes. Everyone in orbit by virtue of location has the power any warlord dreams about. Don't make tech advances for the best people, make them against the background of the worst people.

rbanffy 7y ago

Since it seems we are on the verge of having an off-planet colony, I'd like to launch a couple questions: 1- What are the colonists' fundamental rights and who protects them? 2- Under what jurisdiction will they be? 3- Who owns the air? 4- If someone can't pay for their air or food, what happens?

aguyfromnb 7y ago
>Since it seems we are on the verge of having an off-planet colony Has SpaceX even had a successful manned space flight yet? I don't think we're quite on the "verge" of colonizing space...
- rbanffy 7y ago
  I'm almost certain we'll need to think about this before the century is out.
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  If things go moderately well for SpaceX, the colony will be started within 15 years. In the larger span of history, that is just a blink of the eye from now. And most of the people reading this discussion thread will still be alive, some would like to go. We better start thinking about the legal issues now, as they are complicated, rather than just doing it in a rush when it starts happening.
- maccam94 7y ago
  > Has SpaceX even had a successful manned space flight yet? That flight will likely happen in the next quarter. Meanwhile, while SpaceX has been wading through NASA design reviews and red tape (some of which is probably good for them!) for Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon, they've been hard at work on this next-gen rocket for years (the engines since 2009, the rocket itself since 2014). We will likely see a SpaceX Starship reach Low-Earth Orbit within a year, so it's time to start considering what other requirements for getting to Mars might take longer to build.
- nwallin 7y ago
  Apollo 11 was a little less than twelve years after Sputnik-1. The rush to get people into space and men on the moon was because of politics. If Musk wants people on Mars, he doesn't need bodies in orbit, he needs ships capable of carrying bodies in orbit. It's fine (and unnecessary) if they're unmanned. Which SpaceX has already done, docking with the ISS. NASA and the USSR were hasty putting people into orbit because it was a political necessity, not because it was important to the goal of developing ICBMs, surveillance satellites, or whatever else. They each needed to be the first to put an object in orbit, a human in orbit, a human on the moon, etc. Musk needed cheap, reusable spaceflight as an intermediate goal and a maned Martian capable profile as goal number 2. He doesn't need to take his picture at all the road signs along the way. Musk at some point said he wanted to launch a human toward Mars by the 2024 launch window. I think this is optimistic, but it's not that far off. I would be surprised if they don't launch in time for the 2029-ish launch window.