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No one has seemed to have mentioned it yet, but the game changer of Starship will be full reusability of both the first and second stage of the rocket. Falcon 9

• llboston 6y ago
  Another significant thing is that Starship is designed to be mass manufactured at a relatively low cost. SpaceX can crank out thousands of Starships, fly them to Mars and build a million people colony. Starship is truly a game changer!
  • eric-hu 6y ago
    Can you recommend resources for reading more about the long term plans of Starship?
    • yreg 6y ago
      Not the parent poster, but there is [0] Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species / Elon's original presentation from IAC 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8 [1] Starship Update / 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOpMrVnjYeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOpMrVnjYeY
  • themgt 6y ago
    Yep, and in addition to both of these, Starship is also designed: * to be fueled / ignited such that it can be refueled in-situ on Mars & then launched back to Earth, without advanced rocket fuels or the TEA-TEB chemical igniter. * to be able to refuel from another Starship in-orbit The combination of all of this, if they pull it off, will be the ability to send truly massive payloads to Mars, faster and cheaper than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. To me it does really show the benefit of taking a systematic approach, working backwards from the goal "get to Mars and stay" in a resource-constrained environment. They've very strategically targeted the technology/engineering required to bring the costs down to something reasonable, while NASA's approach for 50 years has basically been versions of "can you give us one trillion dollars?" (or "we can put a couple humans on Mars for 3 days for $100 billion") Today's Starship hop is getting very near the nail in the coffin for SLS. I still have some concerns about their crazy re-entry flip, but the speed SpaceX is moving is leaving everyone else in the dust.
    • extrapickles 6y ago
      Also, since its mostly made from steel, it will be fairly simple (as far as rockets go) to conduct repairs, you just need a welding rod or two. This is important for early stage bases where you don't have the equipment/materials to make carbon fiber or exotic aluminum alloy replacement parts.
      • paranoidrobot 6y ago
        Given how much difficulty they've had with welds and materials to date, is it really feasible to conduct in-situ repairs without a ton of advanced equipment?
        • ColanR 6y ago
          That's what I was thinking. At the very least, they'll either have to come up with some very fancy welding rod matrials, or train their welders in some interesting techniques. Reminds me of the difficulties in welding aluminum.
        • maxioatic 6y ago
          I feel the same way. Likely not to start but over time I think they would build up capability. I wonder how lesser gravity on Mars would help/hurt their efforts. Easier to heft heavy gear up high? I'm also thinking on the flip side, say a Starship somehow gets irreparably damaged getting to Mars (but successfully gets there). With some basic gear they should be able to part it out and re-use the steel. Like for a new door on all the Cybertrucks rollin' around up there. /s
          • nine_k 6y ago
            The idea of using parts of the landing unit for materials to build local structures and machines is not new. Probably, with proper planning and construction of the lander unit parts, it can be facilitated. But you have to plan for another mission to pick up the crew, unless you're on the Moon where you could use an electromagnetic catapult to achieve orbit, and then slowly ascend to the rocket that would take you home.
  • jacquesm 6y ago
    You write that as if it is a done deal. Mars' atmosphere is roughly .5% of that of Earth and almost exclusively CO2. Temperature ranges are well out of what they are on Earth. It is hard for technology to survive there, it is impossible for people to survive there until there has been an unbelievable investment in infrastructure. If you think there will be a million people colony on Mars in your lifetime than you are not in touch with the physics of this kind of endeavor. All of our GDP for the next 50 years pooled together would likely not be enough to pull off a feat like that. The scale we're talking about here is too large to even contemplate. 10 people in a shitty little dome, maybe. Right up to the moment they die because of some small mishap.
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      To get a sense of the difficulty, imagine sending a million people to the South Pole to set up a self-sustaining colony. That would be much more than 1000 times easier than establishing such a base on Mars.
      • shireboy 6y ago
        I’ve often said the same thing. South Pole and underwater cities would be easier than mars or even moon colony. As much as I want the later to happen- I think 1 million people on Mars or Moon will require something that makes them more appealing than even the worst Earth locations. That has to be something pretty drastic. Elon says motivation will be “it’d be cool”. I don’t think that is enough motivation. Still, I’d rather have the capability developed than not, and hopefully those motivations present themselves without being too dire (like a comet heading our way)
        • hugs 6y ago
          A science outpost, specifically as a place to put telescopes, seems the most compelling. The rest of the population would then grow along side the science outpost to service it (food, transportation, etc.) A looong time until a million people, though.
  • valuearb 6y ago
    This is a very key point. The Falcon 9 isn’t cheap because of reuse (yet). It’s cheap because of mass manufacturing. The Rs-25 engine costs over $100m each, Ariansoace Vulcains around $20M, typical large rocket engines over $10M. SoaceX Merlin costs about $200,000 each to make. The Raptor will be close to that. Thats why SpaceX can pursue the large number of redundant smaller engines design strategy so successfully. Reuse has lowered Falcon 9 costs internally, and increased its private discounts, but not it’s public pricing. When the cost benefits of reuse finally cascade through public pricing and through the entire stack with Starship, you have a SuperHeavy launch system putting 150 tons in orbit even cheaper than a single Falcon 9 launch. For comparison, the Shuttle was over $40,000 per pound to Orbit. The SLS will be around $10,000/lb to orbit if you don’t count developmental costs at least 3x that. The Falcon 9 is $1,500/lb to orbit, and Falcon Heavy $1,100/lb to orbit. Starship will lift more payload to orbit than the SLS, and 4x as much as the Shuttle, for between $100 and $300 per pound.
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      > Reuse has lowered Falcon 9 costs internally, and increased its private discounts, but not it’s public pricing It's not just a discount - it is the reversed equivalent of banks charging interest for a loan due to failure risk. Private customers getting discounts accept the increased risk that some re-used part fails. Essentially SpaceX has managed to have their r&d subsidized by paying customers instead of having to borrow money, launch dummy payloads and pay the money back.
  • zamalek 6y ago
    > mass manufactured at a relatively low cost. ... which also explains Tesla, mass production of Earth-faring machines is one way to prepare for mass production of space-faring machines (and battery tech is going to be important for living in space). When you look at Musk's ventures, they really all end at Mars.
    • laichzeit0 6y ago
      The Boring company. Develop tech to drill deep tunnels on Mars? Electric cars and batteries cause you will need that on Mars? Even the Cybertruck looks like something destined for Mars.
      • ba2plus 6y ago
        And a Starlink network would mean an instant global Martian internet.
• Mizza 6y ago
  I recently read the screenplay to 2001. An interesting thing mentioned in the script, but not shown in the film, is that all of the images of beautiful space ships in the early sequence of the film are in fact space-based nuclear missile launchers, and that there are 27 nuclear nations with space weapons. I sometimes imagine what an alien visitor would think about us if they came to our planet and saw that we had such destructive technology, pointed at _ourselves_.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    Any sources for this? Wikipedia seems to state there are no known operative orbital nuclear weapons systems: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Space-to-Earth_weapons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Space-to-Earth_...
    • nick_kline 6y ago
      They mean missiles on earth just as we have today, not space based ones.
    • samcheng 6y ago
      The poster is describing the future imagined by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in 1968, not reality. We ended up with a lot fewer nukes, and a lot less space. (Also fewer trippy alien wormholes.)
  • octaveguin 6y ago
    They might see their own past. It seems likely that all species that make it to space might have similar pressures because they have a similar environment. See convergent evolution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution That is, if they exist at all. Maybe we all converge to the great filter.
• sabujp 6y ago
  Future of space as presented in shows like the Expanse. controlled by trillionaires and their companies and powerful people in governments all killing each other over space rocks. We're a long way from Star Trek, that's going to take a more fundamental advance not at all related to technology.
  • zhoujianfu 6y ago
    For Star Trek we just need SpaceX + UBI!
    • octaveguin 6y ago
      The Expanse also has UBI on earth. With it, most people still lack opportunity and live a rather destitute, powerless life. Seems like a pretty good perdition of our future, really. UBI recipients with no labor of value to offer won't have power to change their government for long. It's unfortunate that the authoritarian future of Star Trek probably wouldn't lead to paradise. Or at least, that's how our culture's view of the future has changed. Both fictions are a product of their time. I still wish we had the optimism of Star Trek now.
      • zizee 6y ago
        In The Expanse, the main reason for complaint from earthers seems to be caused by overpopulation which leads to difficulty in obtaining realestate and the benefits that landownership brings. If UBI was implemented as in The Expanse (food, shelter, and meds are free), I would expect the population of the earth to plummet. The UBI would allow for more people to pursue learning and educating others. It has been shown that when people feel safe from threat of violence and starvation, and when they are more educated, the desire to breed decreases. On the flip side, perhaps knowing that you are off the hook for paying for the expense of many children would increase the desire to reproduce?
        • TomMarius 6y ago
          Was it really shown? Is there a single country that did not replace stress of violence and starvation with economic stress? Do we have at least one larger example of what would happen if the general population was rich?
• mpweiher 6y ago
  > game changer Absolutely, and the quantitative analysis is just stunning. In 2018 all of humanity launched a total of 111 payloads into space (out of 114 attempts). At around 5t per launch, that would be 555 tons. Starship is supposed to have a payload to LEO of > 100 tons. So 5-6 launches would handle all of that, by weight. But SpaceX says their goal is to fly these up to 3 times a day. So let's assume they can do this 300 days a year, that would be 900 launches per year. If they have a half dozen in operation, that would be 5400 launches per year. Of 100 tons each, or 540 kilotons. That's 1000x what the whole planet launched in 2018! In other words, the entire current launch capacity of the whole planet is 0.1% of the capacity of a fleet of 6 active Starships. And they're building an assembly line for them. "Game changer" is absolutely right, but doesn't really convey the magnitude of the change. It's truly astounding.
  • joakleaf 6y ago
    Indeed these numbers are impressive, but can it even be done? Is it even possible both in terms of climate change/overall environmental impact, and in terms of how much methane (fuel) we actually have. Elon Musk's vision is getting 1 million people to Mars (if I remember correctly) within this century. 100 per starship will require 10000 launches. Distributed over 70 years, that's about 1300 Martian voyages per year. So approximately 3 per day. Each of those launches, however will require launches of refuelling tanks (is it 6 each?)... So we are talking 19 launches per day just _people_ going to Mars!!! Sorry, but isn't that completely impossible!?? Not just for the required fuel and environmental impact, but also given how often they just postpone basic launches due to weather.
    • pacificmint 6y ago
      > we are talking 19 launches per day […] isn't that completely impossible!?? The US uses over 20 million barrels of petroleum every single day. We have 44,000 airline flights every day. I think 19 starship flights won’t even move the needle.
      • Someone 6y ago