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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 f

by 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
    You can make those on earth much cheaper.
- the_duke 5y ago
  There is a very practical reason: Starlink. Launching all those Starlink sats on Falcon 9 must be much more expensive than they would like, and Starship aims to provide a considerably higher payload capacity with much lower cost (if the re-usability plans work out). Apart from that, Musk is great at marketing and sometimes full of crap, but when you listen to some of his converstions it's not hard to believe that the Mars mission is earnestly what drives him.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    I am still not convinced Starlink being really cheaper than ground based fibre. Exceptions I can think off: - military application, but they have their solutions - on high seas, no idea how that works now - regions maintaining ground stations is risky (war zones and so on) Maybe I am wrong, but I have the impression Starlink is for SpaceX is what FSD is for Tesla, a way to "raise" money. And that is working. I am just not sure if I like it, since it would mean innovation success depends more on the founders ability to raise money than actual product market fit or profitability.
    - joshmarlow 5y ago
      It's possible that it would not be cheaper from an overall infrastructure perspective, but still cheaper for consumers with limited options. Most of my extended family lives in rural Tennessee where their internet options are still dial-up and 5G. Comcast isn't interested in laying additional fiber to remote houses. There are options through AT&T, but I think they end up paying close to $20/GB. Several of my relatives are pretty pumped about StarLink as a potential option. I think the niche for StarLink is this - outlying communities where traditional ISPs are uninterested in building out infrastructure for the 'long tails' of the population.
BobbyJo 5y ago
Do you have any idea how much raw material and energy would be available to humanity if we were able to successfully colonize the solar system? The scale of what we could build and learn would be absolutely shaking. Seriously. That's enough 'why' for me.
- jonahbenton 5y ago
  On what timescale, at what level of capital investment?
  - afterburner 5y ago
    Hundreds of years, government-level investment.
  - kamkazemoose 5y ago
    In a little over 100 years we've gone from the first powered flight to flying a helicopter on Mars. We might not be mining asteroids in 5 years but it isn't unreasonable to think it could happen in our lifetimes.
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
The initial technical goal is "more mass to orbit". Due to the rocket equation, the amount of fuel needed is ~20x the amount of payload to low earth orbit. Any fuel needed to get from low earth orbit to higher orbits needs to get to low orbit first, and so counts as mass. So the more mass and the greater a distance one wants to fly, the larger the required rocket. This rocket is very large. People and the necessary life support for people are quite massive compared to robots. Once one can get lots of mass to orbit, one can think about things like sending people past low earth orbit (around the moon, to the moon, or to Mars). So far, NASA has committed to sending people to the Moon, but no farther. Elon Musk says that the goal is Mars, but any craft which could be used to start a Mars colony also has the ability to start a much larger moon colony, or perhaps to land on the moon and take off again without leaving (expensive) parts of the rocket behind. There is some applied science research, such as around methods for reentry, but the final goal is establishing human colonies.
qq4 5y ago
Progress.
jltsiren 5y ago
The point is making orbital launches cheaper. Musk may have some further goals, but they will probably be irrelevant. Predicting the consequences of new technology is always difficult. Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Rockets are still expensive enough that you can't afford one unless you have a really valuable payload to launch. Expensive but reliable rockets gave us useful things like communications satellites, GPS, and weather satellites. An order-of-magnitude reduction in launch costs may have given us slightly better satellite services (like Starlink) but nothing qualitatively different. Another order-of-magnitude reduction could plausibly bring bigger changes.
- mlyle 5y ago
  > Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Eh, but upmass is significantly up, despite it taking less mass to do stuff in space and stuff lasting longer. Not to mention that it may take a long time from launch getting cheaper for payload to really start to take advantage of it. If launch stays sustainably cheap, it may be time to start analyzing the economics of space power stations, etc, again, which were almost feasible with worse technology at much higher launch costs.
ctoth 5y ago
This article does a pretty good job of explaining the overall plan. 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...

by sfblah 5y ago

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
  You can make those on earth much cheaper.
the_duke 5y ago
There is a very practical reason: Starlink. Launching all those Starlink sats on Falcon 9 must be much more expensive than they would like, and Starship aims to provide a considerably higher payload capacity with much lower cost (if the re-usability plans work out). Apart from that, Musk is great at marketing and sometimes full of crap, but when you listen to some of his converstions it's not hard to believe that the Mars mission is earnestly what drives him.
- hef19898 5y ago
  I am still not convinced Starlink being really cheaper than ground based fibre. Exceptions I can think off: - military application, but they have their solutions - on high seas, no idea how that works now - regions maintaining ground stations is risky (war zones and so on) Maybe I am wrong, but I have the impression Starlink is for SpaceX is what FSD is for Tesla, a way to "raise" money. And that is working. I am just not sure if I like it, since it would mean innovation success depends more on the founders ability to raise money than actual product market fit or profitability.
  - joshmarlow 5y ago
    It's possible that it would not be cheaper from an overall infrastructure perspective, but still cheaper for consumers with limited options. Most of my extended family lives in rural Tennessee where their internet options are still dial-up and 5G. Comcast isn't interested in laying additional fiber to remote houses. There are options through AT&T, but I think they end up paying close to $20/GB. Several of my relatives are pretty pumped about StarLink as a potential option. I think the niche for StarLink is this - outlying communities where traditional ISPs are uninterested in building out infrastructure for the 'long tails' of the population.

BobbyJo 5y ago

Do you have any idea how much raw material and energy would be available to humanity if we were able to successfully colonize the solar system? The scale of what we could build and learn would be absolutely shaking. Seriously. That's enough 'why' for me.

jonahbenton 5y ago
On what timescale, at what level of capital investment?
- afterburner 5y ago
  Hundreds of years, government-level investment.
- kamkazemoose 5y ago
  In a little over 100 years we've gone from the first powered flight to flying a helicopter on Mars. We might not be mining asteroids in 5 years but it isn't unreasonable to think it could happen in our lifetimes.

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago

The initial technical goal is "more mass to orbit". Due to the rocket equation, the amount of fuel needed is ~20x the amount of payload to low earth orbit. Any fuel needed to get from low earth orbit to higher orbits needs to get to low orbit first, and so counts as mass. So the more mass and the greater a distance one wants to fly, the larger the required rocket. This rocket is very large. People and the necessary life support for people are quite massive compared to robots. Once one can get lots of mass to orbit, one can think about things like sending people past low earth orbit (around the moon, to the moon, or to Mars). So far, NASA has committed to sending people to the Moon, but no farther. Elon Musk says that the goal is Mars, but any craft which could be used to start a Mars colony also has the ability to start a much larger moon colony, or perhaps to land on the moon and take off again without leaving (expensive) parts of the rocket behind. There is some applied science research, such as around methods for reentry, but the final goal is establishing human colonies.

qq4 5y ago

Progress.

jltsiren 5y ago

The point is making orbital launches cheaper. Musk may have some further goals, but they will probably be irrelevant. Predicting the consequences of new technology is always difficult. Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Rockets are still expensive enough that you can't afford one unless you have a really valuable payload to launch. Expensive but reliable rockets gave us useful things like communications satellites, GPS, and weather satellites. An order-of-magnitude reduction in launch costs may have given us slightly better satellite services (like Starlink) but nothing qualitatively different. Another order-of-magnitude reduction could plausibly bring bigger changes.

mlyle 5y ago
> Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Eh, but upmass is significantly up, despite it taking less mass to do stuff in space and stuff lasting longer. Not to mention that it may take a long time from launch getting cheaper for payload to really start to take advantage of it. If launch stays sustainably cheap, it may be time to start analyzing the economics of space power stations, etc, again, which were almost feasible with worse technology at much higher launch costs.

ctoth 5y ago

This article does a pretty good job of explaining the overall plan. 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...