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SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

253 points by _Microft 5y ago

hirundo 5y ago
Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876 The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. The FAA is standing athwart the most effective effort to move in that direction, yelling Stop. The more fragile our environment is, the more protection it needs, the more important it is for them to get out of the way of projects like this.
- Crunsher 5y ago
  How is this project going to protect the environment?
  - CydeWeys 5y ago
    Well it's moving human life outside the environment, so that even if something catastrophic happens to this one's there's backup humans.
    - freeopinion 5y ago
      If you have ever lived next to the incarnation of this philosophy, you might be able to see through its holes. It's the plot of any number of bad scifi movies. Evil aliens travel from solar system to solar system, using up a planet, then moving on. They've now reached Earth. There are plenty of industrial/mining sites that argue they need to be able to create huge hazard dumps for the sake of the future of the human race. It tends to be a very poor argument for those left holding the bag when the owners have taken their money and skipped town. If the danger is so great that we have to get off this planet in the next five years or we all die, well, then we might justify more urgency. If we've got 10 or 20 years to do it, let's take the time to protect the environment while we do it. If you want to argue that none of this bureaucracy is protecting the environment, that's a different argument.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    Off site backup might not save your machine if it burns in a house fire, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    To be honest, I can't tell you what kind of future innovation is going to result from cheaper spaceflight. But there is serious scientific and engineering potential to be unlocked. What SpaceX is doing seems environmentally unfriendly, and I know no-one wants to hear "but xyz is worse". But we really do need to keep such things in mind, because SpaceX's footprint here is completely dwarfed by domestic carbon creation. The Apollo Project lead to all sorts of spinoff technologies that we use today. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect some of the future technological advancements to reduce pollution or carbon emissions.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    By making it cheaper to do things in space instead of in the atmosphere we breathe.
- paxys 5y ago
  The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. I'm as much into spaceships as the next nerd, but people need to get real. The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generations and centuries. Meanwhile our entire species stands no chance against one slight more deadly virus released tomorrow. Criticizing regulators is Elon's MO, whether it is the SEC for his Tweets, various transportation departments for self driving software safety, labor departments for covid restrictions for worker safety, FAA for rocket launches... You'd think there is some national conspiracy against him at this point.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how about doing a bit of critical thinking on this. What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc? They dwarf everything put into space exploration, and are arguably less useful. Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up? And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once. edit: apologies for the first sentence here which was unnecessary to make my point.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      This whole "whatever I don't like and/or understand isn't worth doing" philosophy is just not interesting. Humanity is not a hivemind. We can do more than one thing. History has countless examples of innovation in one area leading to breakthroughs in another. Just make your own contribution to humanity where you can, we will be fine.
      - lucideer 5y ago
        That's true most of the time. Where it falls down is in cases where it's not "we". There's plenty of orgs doing worthwhile and important space exploration. There's a bunch of individuals destroying this planet who want to go to space and are selling a nice colonists fantasy to get backing. You're right that it's not either or: let's continue supporting viable space efforts. But let's not be naive about it.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  It should be remembered that the unspoken rule of any agency or institution is to justify its own continued existence. For be bureaucracy that is the FAA, all the onerous requirements they place on spaceflight is a feature, not a bug.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where they're okay dumping hydrazine on local villages [1]. 1: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-rocket-stage-falls-in-rural-china/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-rock...
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      To be clear, I'm not saying regulatory agencies are bad. What I am saying, though, is that these agencies don't have an incentive to trim down red-tape in the interest of efficiency. On one level, it would be bad for their employees and budget. On another level, something might slip through the cracks so it makes sense for a safety agency to be far more risk averse than what it watches.
      - freeopinion 5y ago
        Better efficiencies with significantly more launches per year and eventually interplanetary travel would be bad for the agencies that regulate it? How do you figure? The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me. When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.
        5y ago
- lttlrck 5y ago
  How is the FAA blocking environmental protection programs? It's important that we explore, but exploring won't fix the mess we've made.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    It could. That's pretty much the entire argument in favor of exploration actually. We are going to need far more advanced technology than we have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate change. If we move heavy industry to space that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other areas like energy generation or storage. I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day. They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and electricity resources.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Strong statement after the 737 MAX debacle.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Can someone explain why the MAX was allowed to re-use the 737 type certificate?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      There's a swath of people who have adopted the position that it's best to let industry be the primary agent of regulation, largely for ideological political reasons. As we saw with the MAX debacle, such a position is foolish, as companies will always be cravenly willing to cut corners in the interest of short term profits. This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two buttress each other against their individual flaws. However in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked this ideal. We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of government we ask for.
      - matmatmatmat 5y ago
        It is unclear to me why anyone would vote this down. It's spot on.
        jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
        There's a subset of this places reader's that are pretty aggressive with the libertarian stuff. If you know the quip about people thinking they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires, I think that's close to the root of it, something more tangible when you work in tech and the possibility of earning truly big money is more near at hand than most other vocations, even if still something of a luck shot.
- kristianp 5y ago
  Clickable tweet (links don't work in preformatted text): https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876
- onion2k 5y ago
  The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. Perhaps that's true, but space launches are important enough that going "slowly"[1] is a good idea. One catastrophic accident with the destruction of a spacecraft leaving a large amount of orbital debris would make space launches much, much harder until we clean up. Rushing to space could slow us down a lot. [1] The space race has only been going for 70 years, and less than 25 years commercially. The idea that anything is happening "too slowly" is quite baffling really.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    Humans went ~11,900 years without flight, then ~60 years later we landed on the moon.
  - sebzim4500 5y ago
    From Musk's perspective, any timeline which does not establish a permanent presence on Mars within his lifetime is too slow. It looked like that would be impossible before the Starship program, now it merely looks unlikely.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one in particular I hear very often and should be debunked. A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket". Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not friendly enough to support us with lower tech. Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars from scratch?
  - boardwaalk 5y ago
    Should be debunked if it’s not true (that a colony could be self-sustaining), but you haven’t debunked it here.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      I'm probably not going to debunk it either, not by any real standards. But... It seems to me that our level of technology has increased, partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of applying those discoveries, but also at least partly through increased specialization. You've got a farmer growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer. You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS satellites in orbit. And the rocket fuel manufacturers. And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated material culture to achieve that level of productivity on the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because the farmers are so productive that we don't have to spend very many people on farming. A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate. (Africa, maybe?) So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000 people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or replace every one of those tools (and any tools they use in the process). And there's a hard cutoff below which they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't just fall back to being hunter-gatherers. So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000 people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of machines?
- nickik 5y ago
  Musk always gets unreasonable angry if he feels something slows him down. They have really not been slowed down that much FAA. So everybody should just chill out. Btw, for people interest, this interview with Ken Davidian FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is interesting: https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/247-ken-davidian-faa https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/2...
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    I have a feeling Musk and the FAA have very different standards around public safety. He has his differences with the SEC and NTSB too, but I feel the FAA hews far closer to the public safety end of the spectrum, and not the "move fast and break things(bones)" end.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Diederich 5y ago
  > The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket. While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I will note another very important thing SpaceX is doing: "The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad." A lot of what SpaceX is doing is extremely inspirational, and I think the world could use more things to look forward to in the future.
  - shakezula 5y ago
    > This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket. It's always presented as a false dichotomy, though. We can have both. People insist we should be spending our money fixing the planet, but we already are, including Musk who just sponsored the largest XPrize in history for a carbon sequestration method. First we must overcome the political hurdles to get people to even recognize that climate change is a problem. Obviously money is only barely starting to trickle in to carbon sequestration tech.
- gridspy 5y ago
  There are a couple of major reasons the FAA is involved: 1. Fuel-air explosions at ground level can injure people or destroy property (even kilometers away) 2. Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day 3. Lots of fuel is toxic, we need to mitigate this. Basically someone has to walk through all the worst case scenarios and ensure that everyone (and nature) remains safe or as safe as it is possible to be.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I am sorry but this is false. Toxicity and polluting aspects of Rockets is of a negligible concern, Everyday Astronaut (Youtube fame) gets this so often that he did an entire hour long video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4 > Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day Well darn.
    - iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
      Hydrazine is highly toxic and Crew Dragon uses a derivative of it.
      - mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
        Neither Crew Dragon, or Hydrazine, is on the rocket in question...
        iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
        So the FAA should hand off regulation of one particular rocket to a different agency because it is not dangerous to the public in one particular aspect? What if they decide to use hydrazine in the maneuvering thrusters? Then it should be handed back?
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  > The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions. For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity. We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention. But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >We can extend modern medical care to the entire world What do you mean by "modern" medical care? Do you think that will make a significant difference in life expectancy? The difference between, say, Rwanda and the USA is less than ten years, I believe. Comparable to the gender gap in some countries like Russia. What about the gap between countries like the USA and UK versus Japan at the top? Is that important to close? (My info from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...)
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      Yes, it makes a substantial difference, particularly in child mortality. Hans Rosling has been dead some years now, but used to do great talks going through the basic data and trends. I'm not sure why you're adopting a tone of debate/rebuttal. Every problem you mention is something I think we should address exactly under what I said originally, whether its inequitable access to healthcare in the US, or straight up lack of modern facilities in low income nations.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  > the more protection it needs, the more important it is for them to get out of the way of projects like this. That's a non sequitur
- jonahbenton 5y ago
  Sorry, this is such an absolutely absurd argument. What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet. The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve.... Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T? For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be. Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time. Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    This is a tiring argument of opportunity cost for Space Exploration. It has been discussed ad-nauseum on HN. It is not a zero sum game - we can explore space and simulatenously do the things that are immediately in need and urgent.
  - ctoth 5y ago
    Almost as if he's thought about the thing he's devoted a good chunk of his life and wealth towards, here's Musk: “The point at which one says the goal is to make life multi-planetary, it means that we need to have a self-sustaining city on Mars,” Musk said. “That city has to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason whatsoever. Doesn’t matter why. If those resupply ships stop coming, does the city die out or not? In order to make something self-sustaining, you can’t be missing anything. You must have all the ingredients. It can’t be like, well this thing is self-sustaining except for this one little thing that we don’t have. It can’t be. That’d be like saying, ‘Well, we went on this long sea voyage, and we had everything except vitamin C.’ OK, great. Now you’re going to get scurvy and die—and painfully, by the way. It’s going to suck. You’re going to die slowly and painfully for lack of vitamin C. So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the vitamin C there on Mars. Then it’s like, OK, rough order of magnitude, what kind of tonnage do you need to make it self-sustaining? It’s probably not less than a million tons.” That’s not a precise number, of course. It’s a rough estimate. But Mars settlers will need vast quantities of stuff. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the Red Planet, and there are many steps in mining. To make consumer products requires a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials. “I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-plan-to-build-one-starship-a-week-and-settle-mars/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-pl...
- throwaway4220 5y ago
  Musk is very good at getting public support on his side. Please, we’ve already lost the public support for so many important institutions in the US. I get they are slow, and this is frustrating but I don’t want the FAA to be on the chopping block because someone didn’t plan ahead. If the FDA gets in the way of vaccine development you bet musk would tweet against it.
ortusdux 5y ago
Musk tweeted an amazing photo of the fuel lines being welded in. This was taken 3 days ago. https://www.space.com/starship-super-heavy-engine-section-photo https://www.space.com/starship-super-heavy-engine-section-ph...
failuser 5y ago
This is like N1 first stage coming back on a new technological level.
- petewailes 5y ago
  Hopefully it works better
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    That seems highly likely. The N1 couldn't be static fired, and they didn't have the benefits of sophisticated modern computer control and design.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  For readers needing a refresher in 1960s Soviet rockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
milansuk 5y ago
In 2019, Elon tweeted[0] that the price of one Raptor engine is under $1M with the goal going under 250K for the next version. Any recent info where there are now? I'm still surprised they moved to this orbital fly so quickly without doing more tests. Going from 3 engines to almost 30 is crazy. Also, If I understand it right, both booster and starship will end up in the ocean. I hope they will be able to reuse at least a few engines. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179107539352313856 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179107539352313856
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  No further word on costs as far as I'm aware, other than that <$1000/ton of thrust is still the goal long-term: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1420826978102435845 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1420826978102435845
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Considering that cost-wise, they're already putting the RS-25 to shame (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-pay-a-staggering-146-million-for-each-sls-rocket-engine/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-pay-a-stag...), this seems more like an icing on the cake.
    - lutorm 5y ago
      Given that you could probably build a Merlin out of solid gold and it would come in cheaper than an RS-25, that's not exactly saying much...
      - piercebot 5y ago
        Maybe not once you consider the R&D costs of figuring out how not to melt a solid gold Merlin engine ;)
        lutorm 5y ago
chasd00 5y ago
With a Democrat in the whitehouse and many establishment players (with politicians in their pocket) unhappy, I can see the FAA dragging things out. There are many powers that be who would love to see the FAA force SpaceX to tear down their launch tower and move it a few feet over because of baby turtles or some other ridiculous excuse.
Scene_Cast2 5y ago
What's the scaling like for rocket engines? How much more efficiency (in various forms) could you get if you made 1 giant engine instead? (Disregarding reliability)
- tksmith151 5y ago
  I'm not a rocket scientist, but my understanding is that efficiency is derived from the exit velocity of matter from the engine. So the faster it can fire matter in the opposite direction the more efficient it is. There are some other factors as well like bell shape, which are generally designed to provide better efficiencies at different atmospheric pressures (ranging from sea level to vacuum of space). The main consideration after these factors is the mass of the engines. If multiple engines and one giant engine had all of these same factors equal, then I don't think there would be much difference in the efficiency of the rocket. Likely though, there are differences and other advantages to multiple small engines. The easiest one for me to think of is modularity. If you want a specific thrust for a payload it's much easier to add more small engines together than to try and throttle down the large engine to the correct amount, if that is possible at all.
- KiwiJohnno 5y ago
  Musk has actually talked about that before, during the early stages of Raptor development. He said they were downsizing Raptor from the originally planned size, because their analysis showed a smaller size was the sweet spot for maximum thrust/weight ratio.
- mlindner 5y ago
  There are a lot of issues you get from scaling an engine up, one of the major issues being combustion instability. The larger the "blob" of fuel and oxidizer mixed together that you're trying to burn, the more you will get things like eddy currents and shockwaves flowing through the material. These disrupt the combustion and make it uneven, possibly leading to feedback cycles where these elements self-reinforce eventually causing vibration or otherwise damage to the engine. The smaller the physical size of your combustion chamber the easier these things are. The largest single engine ever built, the F1 engine that pushed the Saturn V, had massive issues with this that were further made worse because the engines were largely designed without the aid of computers.
sfblah 5y ago
I genuinely don't understand what the point of all this is. Is this all about sending people to Mars? Is it basic research? What is the end goal here? I don't follow this too much, so I'm hoping someone can paste me a link to something I can read to explain the justification for building this thing.
- grammarprofess 5y ago
  one objective is to have affordable and perfomant global connectivity
- mlyle 5y ago
  Starship/Super Heavy have the prospect of dramatically reducing the cost of launch to orbit, the moon, and beyond. NASA has selected the platform for supply to the Lunar Gateway. SpaceX wants to use it to take humans to Mars. But it's also a decent platform for just getting lots and lots of mass into LEO.
- sebzim4500 5y ago
  Elon Musk claims this is all to establish a civilisation on Mars in order to decrease the chance of humanity destroying itself. He might not have an entirely faithful relationship with the truth, but there is really no other rational reason to be so aggressive with the Starship program. SpaceX already does the vast majority of commercial launches using its Falcon 9 rocket, so they don't need to do anything this drastic.
  - perrylaj 5y ago
    My assumption has always been that the first to Mars will have a huge edge in gaining access to any natural resources (ore, salts, etc) that might have commercial value. I imagine the first organization to establish mining and refining capabilities on Mars would stand to make trillions in the production of things like steel and aluminum, as would be needed to build out any sizeable settlements on the planet.
    - ryan93 5y ago
matmatmatmat 5y ago
I'm stunned at the level of "optimism" in these comments. Guys, we're not going to be setting up colonies on Mars, we're not going to setting up heavy industry in space. There is literally no. point. at. all. Mars is less hospitable than even the least hospitable places on Earth. "Heavy" industry, pretty much by definition, means it's way cheaper to do it on Earth than in space (no amount of rocket development will ever overcome those physics.) I'm barely, just barely, partial to the argument that there should be a Mars colony so that humanity could go on even if we wiped ourselves out on Earth, but the challenge of an off-Earth colony is so great, I'm pretty reluctant we'll see anything successful in the next 50 years. Even once you figure out all the mechanics of building something in a high radiation/below freezing/basically no atmosphere environment, you have to figure out how to get a few dozen people to work together for _years_ without interpersonal conflicts destroying the whole mission. Also, uh, why don't we just fix Earth? Oh, that's not sexy? No, of course not, because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas or a colony run by a dictator.
- mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
  Really confused on why you're critiquing the guy who's commercialized and popularized the electric vehicle (Tesla), setting up a crucial switch away from fossil fuel to save earth, for not saving earth? What am I missing here?
- kbenson 5y ago
  > Also, uh, why don't we just fix Earth? Oh, that's not sexy? No, of course not, because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas or a colony run by a dictator. Fixing your run down car will never provide the same level of utility and redundancy that having two cars will. Preferably you do both. If you live in a somewhat remote location, and your wife is pregnant and you know she needs to go to the hospital because of complications, you don't just make sure your somewhat run-down car is in better condition, and gassed up, you also make sure to find someone else in the area that you can rely on for a vehicle because it's that important. When it comes down it it, there are things important enough that you try to reduce thy impact random chance can have on it. Having all humans on Earth is one of those things to many people.
deleted 5y ago
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afterburner 5y ago
I see they've been taking tips from my overdone Kerbal rockets. (Honestly this is cool.)
CalChris 5y ago
Well, I guess Proton is kind of out of the international heavy lift business now. It has had only 2 launches this decade. The Proton-M could do 2.35M lbs of thrust. The Saturn V could do 7.5M lbs. So this Super Heavy + Raptors must be in the range of 15M lbs.
darknavi 5y ago
Reading some of these comments makes me wonder what it was like when explorers were trying to justify exploring the "New World". Humans have been exploring forever. Why stop now?
- gengelbro 5y ago
  I guess you haven't been reading the room lately. In the modern retelling, the explorers that found the "New World" produced only net negatives and we'd have been all much better off had they stayed in western europe.
  - darknavi 5y ago
    > In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
  - taylorlapeyre 5y ago
    Very few make or believe that argument. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wishing that things had gone a little better than they did at the time. We can still believe in a more humane world while still greatly appreciating the benefits that modern society has given us.
  - krastanov 5y ago
    This is nonsense. I am sympathetic to even the most obnoxiously leftist descriptions of the exploration of the New World, but even then, acknowledging that the large scale conquest of the Americas involved multiple genocides is not in conflict with acknowledging that some of the explorers that found new lands (not only the Americas) were brave visionaries. Why is it so difficult to just accept that a single person can have both inspiration qualities that we should try to emulate and also grave moral failings we should learn from? No one is perfect and hardly anyone is purely evil either.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    You can explore and discover new worlds without raping, killing and exploiting the new people you find. The problem wasn't the exploration, and there's nothing inherent about exploration that forces you to murder others.
kaminar 5y ago
Wonder where they parked the 29 Ford Raptors...
allenrb 5y ago
How so many educated, intelligent people seem to think that we (as a species, or even as Americans) are so resource-poor that “space exploration” and “improving the earth” yield an either/or decision absolutely mystifies me. You want to free up resources for either one? Start with global military spending and the financial sector. Both have their place and both have grown far beyond it.
- lumost 5y ago
  The economy isn’t zero sum. Particularly in this case where aerospace innovation has been largely funded by the military for the last 80 years. Rocket engines, hypersonic vehicles, and orbital rockets have a dual use for missile technology ( both conventional and nuclear )
- dchichkov 5y ago
  Using these resources to improve chemical flamethrowers is sub-optimal. A dead end. Nuclear fusion is a more likely answer to spaceflight and Earth's clean energy problem. It likely should be the priority.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >Nuclear fusion is a more likely answer to spaceflight and Earth's clean energy problem. Considering we don't even have fission rockets or airplanes in normal use, making a fusion powerplant that is light enough to get off the ground seems very far fetched. Even if we eventually use fusion for travel beyond earth orbit, I'd bet chemical rockets would still be in use. Don't we already have thrusters that are useful in space, but completely unable to support themselves against 1G and so they can't lift off from the ground? I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category.
    - dmoy 5y ago
      > Don't we already have thrusters that are useful in space, but completely unable to support themselves against 1G and so they can't lift off from the ground? Yes. For example ion thrusters have specific impulse that is like an order of magnitude or two (or three?) better than chemical rockets, but they can't lift anything out of the atmosphere. > I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category. Sorry I have no idea about that.
deleted 5y ago
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bob1029 5y ago
What monstrous weapon system or panopticon could we hoist into orbit on such a machine? With ultra heavy lift prices moving into tourism territory, its hard to comprehend the US military not taking advantage at some point.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  More than one GPS constellation per-launch. Replacement sats for what any get shot down in kinetic war. 100tn tungsten rods, or 100 1tn tungsten rods. 100 tons of cargo anywhere around the world in under an hour? Many nukes, natch. But, really, Starlink is the weapon you're thinking of: world-wide coverage, high-bandwidth, low latency, low cost military communications system. All the air assets, and maritime assets, all the boots on the ground, and all the drones, connected via a bog-standard Internet protocols (probably using VPNs and cryptography, naturally) and soon-to-be-commodity hardware. The U.S. would be insane to not let SpaceX go on. The U.S. air force simply needs this.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  The military seems more interested in the potential for sub-orbital flights. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-starting-to-get-really-interested-in-starship/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-s...
fukmbas 5y ago
The amount of pollution this thing is generating is gross. We need to focus on earth, fuck mars.
JoshTko 5y ago
I really don't understand what benefit space exploration will have for humans. Mars has perchlorate everywhere which is very toxic for humans and that is just the toxins we know about.
iamgopal 5y ago
If we just do not fight with each other, with the amount of money that each country spend on defence, we can probably setup a living base on Mars with a million people before 2040.

253 points by _Microft 5y ago

Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876 The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. The FAA is standing athwart the most effective effort to move in that direction, yelling Stop. The more fragile our environment is, the more protection it needs, the more important it is for them to get out of the way of projects like this.

Crunsher 5y ago
How is this project going to protect the environment?
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  Well it's moving human life outside the environment, so that even if something catastrophic happens to this one's there's backup humans.
  - freeopinion 5y ago
    If you have ever lived next to the incarnation of this philosophy, you might be able to see through its holes. It's the plot of any number of bad scifi movies. Evil aliens travel from solar system to solar system, using up a planet, then moving on. They've now reached Earth. There are plenty of industrial/mining sites that argue they need to be able to create huge hazard dumps for the sake of the future of the human race. It tends to be a very poor argument for those left holding the bag when the owners have taken their money and skipped town. If the danger is so great that we have to get off this planet in the next five years or we all die, well, then we might justify more urgency. If we've got 10 or 20 years to do it, let's take the time to protect the environment while we do it. If you want to argue that none of this bureaucracy is protecting the environment, that's a different argument.
- midasuni 5y ago
  Off site backup might not save your machine if it burns in a house fire, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  To be honest, I can't tell you what kind of future innovation is going to result from cheaper spaceflight. But there is serious scientific and engineering potential to be unlocked. What SpaceX is doing seems environmentally unfriendly, and I know no-one wants to hear "but xyz is worse". But we really do need to keep such things in mind, because SpaceX's footprint here is completely dwarfed by domestic carbon creation. The Apollo Project lead to all sorts of spinoff technologies that we use today. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect some of the future technological advancements to reduce pollution or carbon emissions.
- mulmen 5y ago
  By making it cheaper to do things in space instead of in the atmosphere we breathe.
paxys 5y ago
The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. I'm as much into spaceships as the next nerd, but people need to get real. The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generations and centuries. Meanwhile our entire species stands no chance against one slight more deadly virus released tomorrow. Criticizing regulators is Elon's MO, whether it is the SEC for his Tweets, various transportation departments for self driving software safety, labor departments for covid restrictions for worker safety, FAA for rocket launches... You'd think there is some national conspiracy against him at this point.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how about doing a bit of critical thinking on this. What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc? They dwarf everything put into space exploration, and are arguably less useful. Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up? And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once. edit: apologies for the first sentence here which was unnecessary to make my point.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    This whole "whatever I don't like and/or understand isn't worth doing" philosophy is just not interesting. Humanity is not a hivemind. We can do more than one thing. History has countless examples of innovation in one area leading to breakthroughs in another. Just make your own contribution to humanity where you can, we will be fine.
    - lucideer 5y ago
      That's true most of the time. Where it falls down is in cases where it's not "we". There's plenty of orgs doing worthwhile and important space exploration. There's a bunch of individuals destroying this planet who want to go to space and are selling a nice colonists fantasy to get backing. You're right that it's not either or: let's continue supporting viable space efforts. But let's not be naive about it.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
It should be remembered that the unspoken rule of any agency or institution is to justify its own continued existence. For be bureaucracy that is the FAA, all the onerous requirements they place on spaceflight is a feature, not a bug.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where they're okay dumping hydrazine on local villages [1]. 1: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-rocket-stage-falls-in-rural-china/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-rock...
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    To be clear, I'm not saying regulatory agencies are bad. What I am saying, though, is that these agencies don't have an incentive to trim down red-tape in the interest of efficiency. On one level, it would be bad for their employees and budget. On another level, something might slip through the cracks so it makes sense for a safety agency to be far more risk averse than what it watches.
    - freeopinion 5y ago
      Better efficiencies with significantly more launches per year and eventually interplanetary travel would be bad for the agencies that regulate it? How do you figure? The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me. When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.
      - 5y ago
lttlrck 5y ago
How is the FAA blocking environmental protection programs? It's important that we explore, but exploring won't fix the mess we've made.
- mulmen 5y ago
  It could. That's pretty much the entire argument in favor of exploration actually. We are going to need far more advanced technology than we have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate change. If we move heavy industry to space that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other areas like energy generation or storage. I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day. They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and electricity resources.
hef19898 5y ago
Strong statement after the 737 MAX debacle.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Can someone explain why the MAX was allowed to re-use the 737 type certificate?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    There's a swath of people who have adopted the position that it's best to let industry be the primary agent of regulation, largely for ideological political reasons. As we saw with the MAX debacle, such a position is foolish, as companies will always be cravenly willing to cut corners in the interest of short term profits. This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two buttress each other against their individual flaws. However in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked this ideal. We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of government we ask for.
    - matmatmatmat 5y ago
      It is unclear to me why anyone would vote this down. It's spot on.
      - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
        There's a subset of this places reader's that are pretty aggressive with the libertarian stuff. If you know the quip about people thinking they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires, I think that's close to the root of it, something more tangible when you work in tech and the possibility of earning truly big money is more near at hand than most other vocations, even if still something of a luck shot.
kristianp 5y ago
Clickable tweet (links don't work in preformatted text): https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876
onion2k 5y ago
The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. Perhaps that's true, but space launches are important enough that going "slowly"[1] is a good idea. One catastrophic accident with the destruction of a spacecraft leaving a large amount of orbital debris would make space launches much, much harder until we clean up. Rushing to space could slow us down a lot. [1] The space race has only been going for 70 years, and less than 25 years commercially. The idea that anything is happening "too slowly" is quite baffling really.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Humans went ~11,900 years without flight, then ~60 years later we landed on the moon.
- sebzim4500 5y ago
  From Musk's perspective, any timeline which does not establish a permanent presence on Mars within his lifetime is too slow. It looked like that would be impossible before the Starship program, now it merely looks unlikely.
radu_floricica 5y ago
There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one in particular I hear very often and should be debunked. A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket". Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not friendly enough to support us with lower tech. Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars from scratch?
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  Should be debunked if it’s not true (that a colony could be self-sustaining), but you haven’t debunked it here.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I'm probably not going to debunk it either, not by any real standards. But... It seems to me that our level of technology has increased, partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of applying those discoveries, but also at least partly through increased specialization. You've got a farmer growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer. You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS satellites in orbit. And the rocket fuel manufacturers. And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated material culture to achieve that level of productivity on the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because the farmers are so productive that we don't have to spend very many people on farming. A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate. (Africa, maybe?) So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000 people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or replace every one of those tools (and any tools they use in the process). And there's a hard cutoff below which they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't just fall back to being hunter-gatherers. So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000 people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of machines?
nickik 5y ago
Musk always gets unreasonable angry if he feels something slows him down. They have really not been slowed down that much FAA. So everybody should just chill out. Btw, for people interest, this interview with Ken Davidian FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is interesting: https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/247-ken-davidian-faa https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/2...
- sangnoir 5y ago
  I have a feeling Musk and the FAA have very different standards around public safety. He has his differences with the SEC and NTSB too, but I feel the FAA hews far closer to the public safety end of the spectrum, and not the "move fast and break things(bones)" end.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Diederich 5y ago
> The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket. While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I will note another very important thing SpaceX is doing: "The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad." A lot of what SpaceX is doing is extremely inspirational, and I think the world could use more things to look forward to in the future.
- shakezula 5y ago
  > This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket. It's always presented as a false dichotomy, though. We can have both. People insist we should be spending our money fixing the planet, but we already are, including Musk who just sponsored the largest XPrize in history for a carbon sequestration method. First we must overcome the political hurdles to get people to even recognize that climate change is a problem. Obviously money is only barely starting to trickle in to carbon sequestration tech.
gridspy 5y ago
There are a couple of major reasons the FAA is involved: 1. Fuel-air explosions at ground level can injure people or destroy property (even kilometers away) 2. Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day 3. Lots of fuel is toxic, we need to mitigate this. Basically someone has to walk through all the worst case scenarios and ensure that everyone (and nature) remains safe or as safe as it is possible to be.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I am sorry but this is false. Toxicity and polluting aspects of Rockets is of a negligible concern, Everyday Astronaut (Youtube fame) gets this so often that he did an entire hour long video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4 > Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day Well darn.
  - iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
    Hydrazine is highly toxic and Crew Dragon uses a derivative of it.
    - mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
      Neither Crew Dragon, or Hydrazine, is on the rocket in question...
      - iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
        So the FAA should hand off regulation of one particular rocket to a different agency because it is not dangerous to the public in one particular aspect? What if they decide to use hydrazine in the maneuvering thrusters? Then it should be handed back?
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
> The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions. For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity. We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention. But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >We can extend modern medical care to the entire world What do you mean by "modern" medical care? Do you think that will make a significant difference in life expectancy? The difference between, say, Rwanda and the USA is less than ten years, I believe. Comparable to the gender gap in some countries like Russia. What about the gap between countries like the USA and UK versus Japan at the top? Is that important to close? (My info from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...)
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    Yes, it makes a substantial difference, particularly in child mortality. Hans Rosling has been dead some years now, but used to do great talks going through the basic data and trends. I'm not sure why you're adopting a tone of debate/rebuttal. Every problem you mention is something I think we should address exactly under what I said originally, whether its inequitable access to healthcare in the US, or straight up lack of modern facilities in low income nations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cblconfederate 5y ago
> the more protection it needs, the more important it is for them to get out of the way of projects like this. That's a non sequitur
jonahbenton 5y ago
Sorry, this is such an absolutely absurd argument. What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet. The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve.... Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T? For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be. Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time. Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  This is a tiring argument of opportunity cost for Space Exploration. It has been discussed ad-nauseum on HN. It is not a zero sum game - we can explore space and simulatenously do the things that are immediately in need and urgent.
- ctoth 5y ago
  Almost as if he's thought about the thing he's devoted a good chunk of his life and wealth towards, here's Musk: “The point at which one says the goal is to make life multi-planetary, it means that we need to have a self-sustaining city on Mars,” Musk said. “That city has to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason whatsoever. Doesn’t matter why. If those resupply ships stop coming, does the city die out or not? In order to make something self-sustaining, you can’t be missing anything. You must have all the ingredients. It can’t be like, well this thing is self-sustaining except for this one little thing that we don’t have. It can’t be. That’d be like saying, ‘Well, we went on this long sea voyage, and we had everything except vitamin C.’ OK, great. Now you’re going to get scurvy and die—and painfully, by the way. It’s going to suck. You’re going to die slowly and painfully for lack of vitamin C. So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the vitamin C there on Mars. Then it’s like, OK, rough order of magnitude, what kind of tonnage do you need to make it self-sustaining? It’s probably not less than a million tons.” That’s not a precise number, of course. It’s a rough estimate. But Mars settlers will need vast quantities of stuff. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the Red Planet, and there are many steps in mining. To make consumer products requires a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials. “I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-plan-to-build-one-starship-a-week-and-settle-mars/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-pl...
throwaway4220 5y ago
Musk is very good at getting public support on his side. Please, we’ve already lost the public support for so many important institutions in the US. I get they are slow, and this is frustrating but I don’t want the FAA to be on the chopping block because someone didn’t plan ahead. If the FDA gets in the way of vaccine development you bet musk would tweet against it.

ortusdux 5y ago

Musk tweeted an amazing photo of the fuel lines being welded in. This was taken 3 days ago. https://www.space.com/starship-super-heavy-engine-section-photo https://www.space.com/starship-super-heavy-engine-section-ph...

failuser 5y ago

This is like N1 first stage coming back on a new technological level.

petewailes 5y ago
Hopefully it works better
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  That seems highly likely. The N1 couldn't be static fired, and they didn't have the benefits of sophisticated modern computer control and design.
Clewza313 5y ago
For readers needing a refresher in 1960s Soviet rockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

milansuk 5y ago

In 2019, Elon tweeted[0] that the price of one Raptor engine is under $1M with the goal going under 250K for the next version. Any recent info where there are now? I'm still surprised they moved to this orbital fly so quickly without doing more tests. Going from 3 engines to almost 30 is crazy. Also, If I understand it right, both booster and starship will end up in the ocean. I hope they will be able to reuse at least a few engines. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179107539352313856 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179107539352313856

Ajedi32 5y ago
No further word on costs as far as I'm aware, other than that <$1000/ton of thrust is still the goal long-term: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1420826978102435845 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1420826978102435845
- jhgb 5y ago
  Considering that cost-wise, they're already putting the RS-25 to shame (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-pay-a-staggering-146-million-for-each-sls-rocket-engine/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-pay-a-stag...), this seems more like an icing on the cake.
  - lutorm 5y ago
    Given that you could probably build a Merlin out of solid gold and it would come in cheaper than an RS-25, that's not exactly saying much...
    - piercebot 5y ago
      Maybe not once you consider the R&D costs of figuring out how not to melt a solid gold Merlin engine ;)
      - lutorm 5y ago

chasd00 5y ago

With a Democrat in the whitehouse and many establishment players (with politicians in their pocket) unhappy, I can see the FAA dragging things out. There are many powers that be who would love to see the FAA force SpaceX to tear down their launch tower and move it a few feet over because of baby turtles or some other ridiculous excuse.

Scene_Cast2 5y ago

What's the scaling like for rocket engines? How much more efficiency (in various forms) could you get if you made 1 giant engine instead? (Disregarding reliability)

tksmith151 5y ago
I'm not a rocket scientist, but my understanding is that efficiency is derived from the exit velocity of matter from the engine. So the faster it can fire matter in the opposite direction the more efficient it is. There are some other factors as well like bell shape, which are generally designed to provide better efficiencies at different atmospheric pressures (ranging from sea level to vacuum of space). The main consideration after these factors is the mass of the engines. If multiple engines and one giant engine had all of these same factors equal, then I don't think there would be much difference in the efficiency of the rocket. Likely though, there are differences and other advantages to multiple small engines. The easiest one for me to think of is modularity. If you want a specific thrust for a payload it's much easier to add more small engines together than to try and throttle down the large engine to the correct amount, if that is possible at all.
KiwiJohnno 5y ago
Musk has actually talked about that before, during the early stages of Raptor development. He said they were downsizing Raptor from the originally planned size, because their analysis showed a smaller size was the sweet spot for maximum thrust/weight ratio.
mlindner 5y ago
There are a lot of issues you get from scaling an engine up, one of the major issues being combustion instability. The larger the "blob" of fuel and oxidizer mixed together that you're trying to burn, the more you will get things like eddy currents and shockwaves flowing through the material. These disrupt the combustion and make it uneven, possibly leading to feedback cycles where these elements self-reinforce eventually causing vibration or otherwise damage to the engine. The smaller the physical size of your combustion chamber the easier these things are. The largest single engine ever built, the F1 engine that pushed the Saturn V, had massive issues with this that were further made worse because the engines were largely designed without the aid of computers.

sfblah 5y ago

I genuinely don't understand what the point of all this is. Is this all about sending people to Mars? Is it basic research? What is the end goal here? I don't follow this too much, so I'm hoping someone can paste me a link to something I can read to explain the justification for building this thing.

grammarprofess 5y ago
one objective is to have affordable and perfomant global connectivity
mlyle 5y ago
Starship/Super Heavy have the prospect of dramatically reducing the cost of launch to orbit, the moon, and beyond. NASA has selected the platform for supply to the Lunar Gateway. SpaceX wants to use it to take humans to Mars. But it's also a decent platform for just getting lots and lots of mass into LEO.
sebzim4500 5y ago
Elon Musk claims this is all to establish a civilisation on Mars in order to decrease the chance of humanity destroying itself. He might not have an entirely faithful relationship with the truth, but there is really no other rational reason to be so aggressive with the Starship program. SpaceX already does the vast majority of commercial launches using its Falcon 9 rocket, so they don't need to do anything this drastic.
- perrylaj 5y ago
  My assumption has always been that the first to Mars will have a huge edge in gaining access to any natural resources (ore, salts, etc) that might have commercial value. I imagine the first organization to establish mining and refining capabilities on Mars would stand to make trillions in the production of things like steel and aluminum, as would be needed to build out any sizeable settlements on the planet.
  - ryan93 5y ago

matmatmatmat 5y ago

I'm stunned at the level of "optimism" in these comments. Guys, we're not going to be setting up colonies on Mars, we're not going to setting up heavy industry in space. There is literally no. point. at. all. Mars is less hospitable than even the least hospitable places on Earth. "Heavy" industry, pretty much by definition, means it's way cheaper to do it on Earth than in space (no amount of rocket development will ever overcome those physics.) I'm barely, just barely, partial to the argument that there should be a Mars colony so that humanity could go on even if we wiped ourselves out on Earth, but the challenge of an off-Earth colony is so great, I'm pretty reluctant we'll see anything successful in the next 50 years. Even once you figure out all the mechanics of building something in a high radiation/below freezing/basically no atmosphere environment, you have to figure out how to get a few dozen people to work together for _years_ without interpersonal conflicts destroying the whole mission. Also, uh, why don't we just fix Earth? Oh, that's not sexy? No, of course not, because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas or a colony run by a dictator.

mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
Really confused on why you're critiquing the guy who's commercialized and popularized the electric vehicle (Tesla), setting up a crucial switch away from fossil fuel to save earth, for not saving earth? What am I missing here?
kbenson 5y ago
> Also, uh, why don't we just fix Earth? Oh, that's not sexy? No, of course not, because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas or a colony run by a dictator. Fixing your run down car will never provide the same level of utility and redundancy that having two cars will. Preferably you do both. If you live in a somewhat remote location, and your wife is pregnant and you know she needs to go to the hospital because of complications, you don't just make sure your somewhat run-down car is in better condition, and gassed up, you also make sure to find someone else in the area that you can rely on for a vehicle because it's that important. When it comes down it it, there are things important enough that you try to reduce thy impact random chance can have on it. Having all humans on Earth is one of those things to many people.

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afterburner 5y ago

I see they've been taking tips from my overdone Kerbal rockets. (Honestly this is cool.)

CalChris 5y ago

Well, I guess Proton is kind of out of the international heavy lift business now. It has had only 2 launches this decade. The Proton-M could do 2.35M lbs of thrust. The Saturn V could do 7.5M lbs. So this Super Heavy + Raptors must be in the range of 15M lbs.

darknavi 5y ago

Reading some of these comments makes me wonder what it was like when explorers were trying to justify exploring the "New World". Humans have been exploring forever. Why stop now?

gengelbro 5y ago
I guess you haven't been reading the room lately. In the modern retelling, the explorers that found the "New World" produced only net negatives and we'd have been all much better off had they stayed in western europe.
- darknavi 5y ago
  > In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
- taylorlapeyre 5y ago
  Very few make or believe that argument. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wishing that things had gone a little better than they did at the time. We can still believe in a more humane world while still greatly appreciating the benefits that modern society has given us.
- krastanov 5y ago
  This is nonsense. I am sympathetic to even the most obnoxiously leftist descriptions of the exploration of the New World, but even then, acknowledging that the large scale conquest of the Americas involved multiple genocides is not in conflict with acknowledging that some of the explorers that found new lands (not only the Americas) were brave visionaries. Why is it so difficult to just accept that a single person can have both inspiration qualities that we should try to emulate and also grave moral failings we should learn from? No one is perfect and hardly anyone is purely evil either.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  You can explore and discover new worlds without raping, killing and exploiting the new people you find. The problem wasn't the exploration, and there's nothing inherent about exploration that forces you to murder others.

kaminar 5y ago

Wonder where they parked the 29 Ford Raptors...

allenrb 5y ago

How so many educated, intelligent people seem to think that we (as a species, or even as Americans) are so resource-poor that “space exploration” and “improving the earth” yield an either/or decision absolutely mystifies me. You want to free up resources for either one? Start with global military spending and the financial sector. Both have their place and both have grown far beyond it.

lumost 5y ago
The economy isn’t zero sum. Particularly in this case where aerospace innovation has been largely funded by the military for the last 80 years. Rocket engines, hypersonic vehicles, and orbital rockets have a dual use for missile technology ( both conventional and nuclear )
dchichkov 5y ago
Using these resources to improve chemical flamethrowers is sub-optimal. A dead end. Nuclear fusion is a more likely answer to spaceflight and Earth's clean energy problem. It likely should be the priority.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >Nuclear fusion is a more likely answer to spaceflight and Earth's clean energy problem. Considering we don't even have fission rockets or airplanes in normal use, making a fusion powerplant that is light enough to get off the ground seems very far fetched. Even if we eventually use fusion for travel beyond earth orbit, I'd bet chemical rockets would still be in use. Don't we already have thrusters that are useful in space, but completely unable to support themselves against 1G and so they can't lift off from the ground? I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category.
  - dmoy 5y ago
    > Don't we already have thrusters that are useful in space, but completely unable to support themselves against 1G and so they can't lift off from the ground? Yes. For example ion thrusters have specific impulse that is like an order of magnitude or two (or three?) better than chemical rockets, but they can't lift anything out of the atmosphere. > I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category. Sorry I have no idea about that.

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bob1029 5y ago

What monstrous weapon system or panopticon could we hoist into orbit on such a machine? With ultra heavy lift prices moving into tourism territory, its hard to comprehend the US military not taking advantage at some point.

cryptonector 5y ago
More than one GPS constellation per-launch. Replacement sats for what any get shot down in kinetic war. 100tn tungsten rods, or 100 1tn tungsten rods. 100 tons of cargo anywhere around the world in under an hour? Many nukes, natch. But, really, Starlink is the weapon you're thinking of: world-wide coverage, high-bandwidth, low latency, low cost military communications system. All the air assets, and maritime assets, all the boots on the ground, and all the drones, connected via a bog-standard Internet protocols (probably using VPNs and cryptography, naturally) and soon-to-be-commodity hardware. The U.S. would be insane to not let SpaceX go on. The U.S. air force simply needs this.
mr_toad 5y ago
The military seems more interested in the potential for sub-orbital flights. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-starting-to-get-really-interested-in-starship/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-s...

fukmbas 5y ago

The amount of pollution this thing is generating is gross. We need to focus on earth, fuck mars.

JoshTko 5y ago

I really don't understand what benefit space exploration will have for humans. Mars has perchlorate everywhere which is very toxic for humans and that is just the toxins we know about.

iamgopal 5y ago

If we just do not fight with each other, with the amount of money that each country spend on defence, we can probably setup a living base on Mars with a million people before 2040.