10 ms·

SpaceX's effort to take first-stage reuse from moonshot to mundane is nothing short of extraordinary. It still makes me smile to think of how breathlessly excit

• Buttons840 5y ago
  Agreed. I barely knew who Elon Musk was until reading his biography, which was written years ago. The biography ended with Elon's dream of colonizing Mars and doing verticle rocket landings, and talked about the challenges and shared some skepticism. So from my perspective the first of his "dreams" has become a common reality, and I'm left thinking that colonizing Mars is next.
  • hackeraccount 5y ago
    It can't be done. Technically you can do it but it's not practical. It is possible and practical but there's no reason to. Oh, look here we are. Well, sure anybody could have seen that this was where we would end up - we just didn't agree on when we'd be here.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • gameswithgo 5y ago
      Electric cars and vertical rocket landings were ideas you could show would work eventually with a little napkin math. It is a good critique of humanity that so many "experts" neglected to do that napkin math and just declare it impossible. Getting starship to work reliably still involves some never done before procedures that remain to be proven. But SpaceX has a plan that might work, if it doesn't there are many ways to adjust the plan. With enough time and money, they can do it. Colonizing mars is not so easy to show as feasible. Certainly we can launch a bunch of cans and digging equipment and get a few people living there. But anything like a self sustaining population? Don't know, we don't really have a concrete plan of how to do that. People often say, if you think you can colonize mars, colonize the Gobi Desert first, as it is 10,000 times easier.
      • bob33212 5y ago
        Uninhabitable parts of Arizona have been made habitable already.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • gameswithgo 5y ago
          I think the aim would be to show you can have a self sustaining colony in arizona. Which, probably not too hard since there are aquifers.
          • xfitm3 5y ago
            Biosphere and biosphere 2 were attempts at this. Track record isn't great
      • anticristi 5y ago
        It's called Terraforming. Make a big fire to release enough CO2 until Mars gets warm. That will melt the ice caps, so you have water. Finally, plant plants and let them oxidize the atmosphere. Estimated 500 to 5000 years. Professor Dave Explains has a nicw YouTube video about it. I can totally imagine that Elin's dynasty will try it.
        • gameswithgo 5y ago
          A big fire burning what? How much ice is in the ice caps? will that be enough water? How do you keep the atmosphere there, given that mars has no magnetic field and less gravity keeping it in? How do things live on the surface without a magnetic field protecting them from radiation? I have of course read/seen many pie in the sky plans for how to make mars habitable, but they are not concrete plans with even napkin math backing them up.
          • capitainenemo 5y ago
            https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe/ https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmos... A NASA proposal that seemed rather cool to generate an artificial magnetosphere umbrella. It doesn't require any superscience to do, just willingness to build a really enormous generator. Which might be worth doing if the result is a 2nd Earth?
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      "It always seems impossible until it's done."
      • kirubakaran 5y ago
        "Then it seems obvious"
    • DecoPerson 5y ago
      If a large meteor hits Earth, the humanity organism will be glad it spread itself to Mars.
      • vkou 5y ago
        The humanity organism does not have feelings. People have feelings. Humanity does not. But if you're going to give it feelings, a far more likely outcome is that a life-ending meteor will not hit the earth, and that the humanity organism would be much happier if it didn't waste its efforts on chasing a fairy tale, instead of fixing problems here, on Earth. It boggles the mind that people worry about planet-killing meteors arriving over geological timescales, when the real danger - sustainability - is staring us in the face today, and needs action now.
        • tobmlt 5y ago
          Earth is a space ship and we have been mismanaging the resources on said ship. When we build our own spaceships, we rapidly develop in miniature the sustainable tech needed to really fix earth. We already have carbon dioxide scrubbers, we just need a vast clean source of energy in order to clean things up, and stop the pollution on net. Probably fission is a good enough stop gap. This will happen as soon as the incentive structures are there. Engineering progress is helping, even if indirectly. Who knows what more energy efficient environment cleansing tech will he developed for spacecraft next. Or power sources, batteries, etc. Technology development is cumulative and crosses over domains. Spacex is a spearhead rapidly innovating technology. Government mechanisms are a sort of discombobulated rising tide/ pasture of cows, or herd of scared sheep trying to stay on the grazing turf. Assuming gov’s do not get very much more organized, the better the tech, the easier choices the sheep have to make — win wins get things done. We could benefit greatly from tech advances such that gov gets win wins by making green choices. That way the incentives can tilt more favorably more quickly.
        • triceratops 5y ago
          You're being shortsighted. For all you know these Mars colonization efforts might throw off some sort of miracle discovery or technology - like cheap energy or cheap carbon capture. The problems of sustainability or climate change are about political will and priorities. They aren't something a single billionaire can solve. Focus on mobilizing, organizing, and educating voters if you want to do something about sustainability.
    • jsight 5y ago
      Ha, that's a common pattern with Musk companies. EVs are impractical. Charging fast can't be done and the network won't exist until the cars get built anyway. But noone would buy them without the network so its impossible. Oh, you built EVs, 100KW+ chargers and the network yourself? Well, obviously that was inevitable if we had just given General Motors and Ford enough time. Its not a falsifiable position, so its interesting to think about too.
      • m463 5y ago
        I had a friend who worked at GM around the volt time and it was "common knowledge" that it was all just a boondoggle/joke/exercise. I think a HUGE force for innovation in silicon valley was simply the graph of moores law. The practical and financial considerations had a "common knowledge" roadmap to reduce risk and people would race to keep up instead of plod along.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      The moon is rotten with metal oxides. Powdered metal oxides. If you can work out how to do smelting and metallurgy in low G, then the moon as a manufacturing base for a stellar civilization has its attractions. We can't manage a Mars Colony (like capital C colony, not camping trip) from Earth. But from the moon? The physics is certainly better, but I'm not so sure about the logistics. Does anyone know if convection is a net positive or negative when smelting metal? I know that one way to remove impurities is to cast a billet and then saw off the bottom and top edge, where the heavy and the light contaminants tend to come out of suspension. But is that a boon or just making the most of a bad situation?
  • the_duke 5y ago
    I can also recommend Liftoff by Eric Berger. It chronicles the early days of SpaceX, including how the company almost failed.
    • bryanlarsen 5y ago
      Despite having Elon Musk in the subtitle it's as much about several other key SpaceX personnel as it is about Musk. It's awesome.
    • fsloth 5y ago
      Seconded. The failings are especially good - they give you a meaty, fleshy hands on on the sharp edges the Falcon-1 project had. And make the eventual triumph so much more spectacular. And - not to denigrate the original effort in any way - the book also demonstrates how amazing it was they scaled from "run-of-the mill" light Falcon-1 booster to a pure sci-fi reusable Falcon-9 platform in a matter of few years.
      • chasd00 5y ago
        there's also a recipe for Turkish Goulash in the back :) I just finished it last week, pretty amazing. Man, i feel for those kids stuck on Omelek tring to get Falcon1 in the air with Musk tearing into them on each failure. In my 20s I would have been naive enough to do it too though. Heh, thank god for youth.
        • fsloth 5y ago
          It remained a complete mystery to me how they implemented all of the control systems without flying the vehicle single time. Now I know a thing called 'dynamic control' exists but still feels unfathomable - you build a rocket - and then without any testflights - it actually flies where you program it to?
          • chasd00 5y ago
            The book mentioned "simulations" a couple times. I would love to know who wrote the simulation. edit: maybe "simulation" was ksp and the wrote their flight controller as a plugin haha
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Azrael3000 5y ago
  I still remember reading all the Readers Digest books my mom gave me to read in the 90s that were from the 70s. The amount of excitement in these articles about colonies all around the solar system in the early 2000s captivated me. While reality proofed all of these predictions wrong the current Starship development brings back these fond memories and the exciting outlook on unparalleled developments in space in the somewhat near future.
  • mabbo 5y ago
    > While reality proofed all of these predictions wrong the current Starship development brings back these fond memories and the exciting outlook on unparalleled developments in space in the somewhat near future Here's a fun question: how much of what Starship is doing would have been impossible in the 70s? In my view, the reason we don't have space colonies already is because we decided not to. Nothing we're doing now was strictly impossible then, just a little bit harder. No one was trying, was the problem. It reminds me a bit of Brian May. In the early 70s he was getting a PhD in astrophysics, studying interplanetary dust. He stopped because his band, Queen, was doing pretty well. In 2006, he realized no one else had ever picked up his particular avenue of research. He resumed his PhD research and completed it.
    • dale_glass 5y ago
      > Here's a fun question: how much of what Starship is doing would have been impossible in the 70s? Probably a lot. The Raptor engine uses 3D printing, which I don't think was a thing in the 70s. Modern CNC machining wasn't a thing either. Nor modern design and simulation software. Or computers. I mean, maybe if you really wanted to and money was no object, something Starship-like would be doable, but it'd be more expensive, harder to design, harder to build, carry less weight and likely uneconomical. But the very point of Starship is saving money.
      • bryanlarsen 5y ago
        > more expensive, harder to design, harder to build, carry less weight and likely uneconomical. Compared to Starship, sure. But compared to the Shuttle? That's a pretty low bar that's pretty easy to beat. Starship is basically the Shuttle done right. major differences: Methalox instead of hydrolox & solids. Stainless steel. Uniform tiles. Vertical landing. No cross-range capability. Any or all of those changes would have made the shuttle better. Full-flow staged combustion might be impossible without modern metallurgy. The Soviets had that in the 70s but the Americans didn't. OTOH the Americans had the F1 in the 60s and a new version of that would certainly provide suitable thrust to weight ratios. Kerosene means more frequent refurbishment, but still better than the Shuttle. Vertical landing would be tough with 70s computing but certainly would be possible with 80s computing.
• hinkley 5y ago
  When they were talking about the Starship launch the other day, it hit home for me how much more practical knowledge you can learn about your device when it survives use and you can disassemble it to study. Especially in these days where a device that can analyze metal for microscopic cracks is cheap enough that every airline maintenance hub has one on hand. This fact essentially, and I think somewhat ironically, makes single use rockets harder to do design iteration on than ones meant to last for years. Presumably the newest rockets will have higher thrust to weight ratios, or lower risk of failure, so the older ones will be priced as the cheap seats for as long as they last and the opportunity costs aren’t too high. Then they’ll either be parted out or put on display - land an EOL stage at every new spaceport and put that out front as a billboard.
  • rbanffy 5y ago
    > makes single use rockets harder to do design iteration on than ones meant to last for years. This is why they do so many tests on components, then subsystems, then on real flight hardware for a very long time before they attempt to fly: because once it leaves the pad, they'll never see it again.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      And Ariane 5 exploded because they can’t simulate everything...
      • rbanffy 5y ago
        With reusables it’s a lot simpler to do a static fire, then a hover, a hop, a suborbital flight…
• irrational 5y ago
  Didn't they successfully land a Starship last week?
  • legutierr 5y ago
    A smaller prototype, yes, although it didn't reach orbit first. Still impressive, to say the least.
    • bryananderson 5y ago
      This was not a smaller prototype. It was a full-size Starship. Starship is the second stage of the full system. The first stage, Super Heavy, has not been tested yet.
• m463 5y ago
  After seeing all these landings, more and more of them successful... I wonder if spaceships in the future will have that elongated football shape with 3 tail fins to land on vertically... Just like early scifi.