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Fortunately there is tremendous innovation in aerospace, just outside of Boeing Starship will be better for international flights (30 minutes to anywhere), and
by paulsutter 6y ago
Fortunately there is tremendous innovation in aerospace, just outside of Boeing
Starship will be better for international flights (30 minutes to anywhere), and Boom Supersonic for shorter flights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
EDIT: Willing to make a bet with naysayers, email in profile (just fixed it, thanks)
- Someone1234 6y agoThis issue isn't about lack of innovation, if anything the inverse: Lack of safety during innovation.
- hinkley 6y agoI had a thought the other day that if Musk got in a time machine with a pile of money, how far back in time could he go and still build SpaceX? SpaceX can only do what they do because there is no human pilot on those test flights. I know that the Navy pilots argued and argued that you need a human on board but is that really true, or did that end up destroying the space program by making the cost of failure so impossibly high?
- di4na 6y agoThey had no pilot on board for most of the equivalent. Ariane had no pilot on board either for the whole program. So no. That is not the reason. Try again.
- kube-system 6y agoThe space race of the 60s had plenty of unmanned tests before they started manning them. Humans were not the first Earth creatures in space. If Musk wanted to go back further than maybe the 70s or 80s, his issues would have been: 1. the science hadn't been fully developed ahead of time 2. he would have had a harder time getting other people on board with his idea -- he would have been labelled a complete crackpot 3. governments may have not have been so willing to allow him to do it
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe issue is really actually landing rockets vertically without humans. NASA had the concept of reusable rockets that landed vertically, but didn't action it because landing without a human didn't seem feasible. So pretty much, not before computers were good enough to autonomously land, so at best the 2000s.
- babesh 6y ago1993? Friction stir welding was invented in 1991. Full flow staged combustion was tried out in the 1960s. GPS was available 1993. Not sure how much computing power it needs. SpaceX was founded in 2002.
- hinkley 6y agoLooks like there may have been an inflection point for CAD and CNC hardware around 1990 as well that might have informed the sort of iterative process that his team likes to use.
- ipnon 6y agoI already have anxiety when my airliner takes off. I think if I started hearing "T minus 10, 9 ..." every time I traveled internationally I would need to have a pacemaker installed.
- bostonsre 6y agoWould the starship do the belly flop maneuver for passenger flights? That part would scare me the most.. playing chicken with the ground and hoping the engines fire up well and you don't just pancake and explode.
- Cerium 6y agoI don't think the design has any other choice. I have heard that since it is large and it is a 90 degree turn it could be worked out so you go from falling back first to sitting upon landing. I think that an escape system would be fitted to the passenger capsule as in Falcon 9 [1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhrkdHshb3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhrkdHshb3E
- gspr 6y agoLol. Let's not bring Musk's fantasies into this! The Starship as a competitor to long haul flights is about as ludicrous as the Hyperloop as a competitor to short haul flights. It's all Musk bullshitting.
- mschuster91 6y agoFor some people, time is worth a lot of money, even enough money to make a trip across space worthwile. Not to mention selling the "experience" of no/low gravity, or the opportunity for extremely time critical transports (organs, spare parts for factories).
- lm28469 6y agoAt some point humanity will have to come to the conclusion that "money" and "experiences" are worth nothing if the planet is destroyed. I don't give a damn if Bezos wants to save 3 hours of his life or if some random dude has a hard on for Musk
- topkeks 6y agoOk boomer, how much did you lose on your Tesla shorts?
- orwin 6y agoTangent, but i just had this discussion. The hyperloop, despite all the flaws, is overall a good idea. And unlike fusion and supraconductivity at 250+K, the flaws are actually solvables! I thought i couldn't be done before 2070 or something, but someone just recently showed me the flwas left, the tech we have at teh moment, and he convinced me that a commercial Hyperloop could be available on SOME short haul flight before 2040. -
- gscott 6y agoNo one really wants Musk to build tunnels below their homes and putting in a HyperLoop above ground to anywhere would be near impossible as well. So no HyperLoop. Musk should take the idea to China they would do it, maybe Mexico above ground.
- twostorytower 6y agoEven if the risk of death is 1/1000 it wouldn't be worth it to save 12-20 hours.
- starpilot 6y agoYour email is not in your profile. I will bet.
- porb121 6y agoi would take literally unlimited action on the other side of that bet
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- carabiner 6y agoWould you? Why don't you?
- some0x80070005 6y agoI can’t tell if this is satirical, but rockets have not proven their reliability much better than 94% for an unmanned rocket and 99% for manned. Airplanes have reliabilities on a per journey basis around 99.9999%. Even if SpaceX is full of 10x engineers who can produce rockets 10x safer than before, that gets them to 99.9% reliability. The airline industry, for all of its faults, is multiple orders of magnitude safer than rockets. Perhaps rocket based vehicles are the future, but rocket failures must first become drastically more rare or at least less prone to everyone dying onboard in the case of a failure to be used in lieu of traditional airplanes. Rockets - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-success-failure-ratio-of-space-bound-rockets https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-s... 2020 Airline safety - https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-airlines-safety/aviation-deaths-rise-worldwide-in-2020-even-as-fatal-incidents-flights-fall-idUKKBN2962OA https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-airlines-safety/aviation-...
- paulsutter 6y agoSpaceX scheduled to make a new Starship every 2.5 days by 2025 You might want to look at the early days of airplane safety, not the 2020 numbers. Look up reliablity learning curve, safety comes from doing a huge volume of flights. All existing rockets have a small number of flights EDIT: am a SpaceX shareholder and I’ve met with Elon more than once, so not sure what you mean by parasocial
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- staticman2 6y agoWhenever something related to Elon Musk comes up it becomes hard to sort out what is a reasonable claim versus an unreasonable one fueled by a parasocial relationship with Elon Musk.
- chrononaut 6y agoAs an aside, I do get amused when Person A makes an argument that may not have explicit references, Person B rebuttals with explicit references, and Person A responds by instructing Person B to go look up their own references for Person A's own argument. Reminds me of the "All Birds are Cats" sketch by Clarke and Dave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIl1VuGTk3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIl1VuGTk3g (Relevant bit starts at 51s)
- kube-system 6y agoDepends on your definition of "better", if you mean quicker, then sure. The Concorde was also quicker, but it was nonetheless not successful. People typically make decisions on a cost/benefit basis whenever they can, and the cost of going fast is very high ... both monetarily and otherwise.
- dralley 6y agoFor as much environmental good as Tesla has done with pushing forwards electric cars, moronic schemes like this would totally wipe away the gains in 6 months. The tiny amount of work being accomplished for the ludicrous amount of fuel being used is just silly.
- jve 6y agoIf anyone wants some insights into rocket pollution: https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/ https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/ Even compares Starship and airplane.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThree to six times worse, ouch. Also, the article is full of baloney, like assuming rocket fuel will be made using renewable energy - it won't, because it's magnitudes cheaper to just extract it from fossil fuels, and if it was viable you could do the same for airplanes, but at an even lower cost.
- m4rtink 6y agoActually, I wonder how it compares when you consider 12 hours of fighting the air resistance versus a sub orbital hop covering the same distance in 30 minutes with only a couple minutes of draggy atmospheric flight time. Also the methane used by Starship could be synthetised possibly used captured CO2 if you had enough power available for that.