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Science upside for Starship

191 points by makaimc 5y ago

JulianMorrison 5y ago
The aside section of what Starlink can do, sounds to me like the kind of thing that gives militaries sleepless nights.
- jacknews 5y ago
  Do they also have a division researching the black orchid, Orchidae Nigra?
dvh1990 5y ago
This sounds mind-blowing, except that current public sentiment seems strongly against space exploration and that may catch up with budgets. Even though SpaceX does the launches, it is government agencies that deal with launching missions, and government budgets are influenced by public opinion.
- Causality1 5y ago
  It's hard to blame the public for feeling that way when space projects run two decades behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  I’m not sure why you think current public opinion is opposed to space exploration? It’s definitely opposed to space tourism for the rich, but that’s a separate thing.
  - dvh1990 5y ago
    There's a strong anti Mars settlement sentiment going on, not just anti "space tourism". The idea, which I don't really subscribe to in this context, that we should utilize whatever resources we assign to space towards fighting climate change and fixing problems here on Earth.
    - ruph123 5y ago
      It is one thing to be against a Mars settlement and another to be against space exploration. E.g. it would serve the latter better if we would explore Venus, Europa, Titan, etc. than trying to live underground on a dead poisonous planet.
      - bdamm 5y ago
        Trying to live underground on a dead planet might just prove that we need Earth. Lots of people say space tourism is silly and then go gas up their car while complaining that Teslas are how the coastal elites will take their retirement.
        kitsunesoba 5y ago
        To add on, I think there’s a lot of value to be had in the various science that can only be done with boots on the ground on Mars. The rovers have been great don’t get me wrong, but a team of scientists with a Starship full of equipment can do volumes more research in a couple of weeks than a rover can during its entire mission, including things that weren’t originally planned. What we learn there can be helpful for understanding the history of the solar system as well as planetary dynamics (remember that in terms of well-studied planets, we’re currently at sample size = 1).
        runarberg 5y ago
        How fast do we actually need to learn about Mars? How far are we willing to go, how much are we willing to spend just to speed things up there? We don’t live in the 1950s or the 1890s any more. We are not willing to sacrifice the lives of our explorers like we did when we went to the moon or Antarctica in the 1960s and 1900s respectively. We are not engaging in juvenile races to “get there first” which is both expensive and dangerous. The space exploration of today is more collaborative and careful then the explorations of the past. So we don’t risk the lives of our explorers nor the unnecessary expenses of getting things done 20 years when we can do it in 50 for far less money and with infinity more safety.
  - ArtWomb 5y ago
    >>> public opinion is opposed to space exploration It's always been true ;) If you put it to a vote, majority of americans will allocate public funds towards terrestrial concerns over a new space lab. Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. In today's dollars, what was nasa's highest yearly budget: maybe $30B? Let's see what 5% of US GDP devoted to Space R&D and Peaceful Expansion by mid century looks like!
    - virgilp 5y ago
      If you put it to a vote, majority of Americans will allocate public funds towards stimulus cheques and not the military.... what majority of Americans would allocate funds towards is not necessarily the thing that gets done.
    - mdorazio 5y ago
      I don’t really think that’s the case - it’s more nuanced. Most Americans are pro space exploration [1], but against manned missions and colonization efforts [2]. I have a strong feeling most people are probably also against boondoggle projects like SLS and seemingly-constant massive cost overruns on things like JWST. This makes sense if you think about it - flying humans around the solar system just doesn’t make much sense until we have actual orbital industry at some point in the future to bring the costs down to a reasonable level. And I personally have to agree with the camp opposed to Mars colonization, but for different reasons than most. Mars is kind of a crappy place to try and live by most metrics. It seems like colonization efforts would be better allocated to large asteroids or water-rich moons. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-americans-believe-it-is-essential-that-the-u-s-remain-a-global-leader-in-space/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-a... [2] https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exploration-poll/ https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exp...
    - bnralt 5y ago
      > Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. When someone (usually NASA or NASA fanboys) does a Gish gallop and drops of huge list of things supposedly created by NASA, it's worth picking a couple to take a deep dive into. When you look at the details, the amount of tech transfer is often not anywhere close to the amount claimed. Still, there is good science and technology that comes out of NASA. But it's likely we'd have a lot better results if a large chunk of the NASA budget wasn't spent throwing people up into space for no reason.
- wffurr 5y ago
  But doesn't Starship dramatically reduce budget needs for exploration? The whole point of the essay series is to try to get institutions and researchers thinking about the economics of exploration with a steady cadence of reusable Starship launches.
  - dvh1990 5y ago
    Oh I get the purpose of the article and it got ME excited. However, I'm concerned about other voices which may speak out against it in the context of my original reply. It'd be interesting to follow this thread and see if this sentiment can be heard here.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  TBF most of the places where starship will go have already been explored. I think spaceX's plan is more about exploitation
  - cnlevy 5y ago
    A human in ONE day can explore more than a rover in a year. There's no comparing the amount of research which can be done by a teleoperated rover to what can be done by a real human on-site. As a comparison, Opportunity rover covered 45.16 km in 15 years. The Apollo 17 crew covered 35.74 kilometers in 3 days.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      A human can also mine and bring back valuable stuff. Initially rock samples for testing. Eventually minerals (asteroid mining comes to mind). Space exploration does not pay for itself commercially at this point. Maybe that's one more thing Musk can change.
      - GuB-42 5y ago
        A rover can do that too. In fact, Perseverance already has the ability to collect samples and prepare them for a future pick-up mission. It is just that we are not found of sending people and letting them die there, so a human mission implies a return mission, and if there is a return mission, of course you want to bring back souvenirs. In fact, a sample return mission can be seen as a step towards a manned mission. First you try to bring back a pile of rocks, then you consider bringing back humans. And yes, humans are far more efficient than robots at space exploration today, but robots keep improving, and I think it will take many years before we put people on Mars, so by the time we are ready for a manned Mars mission, we will probably have much better robots. Not as good as humans, but digging lots of rocks and moving faster than a snail will probably be well within their abilities.
        ncmncm 5y ago
        Will anybody really ever come by to pick up Perseverence's samples? That has struck me as really implausible. If it could carry the sample containers to wherever it fills them, it could carry them to wherever it ends up, too, and whatever is supposed to fetch them could make a single stop. Sending another lander just to sweep up after it seems massively wasteful. Clue?
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  I would caution against giving to much credit to social media / leftist politicians railing against spending money on space when we can use the money on earth. These people have a loud platform but I don't think most people agree with them. Similar to how so many loud 'woke' people make you think democrats are all focused on forcing workspace equality no matter the cost or anti cop. Social media and indeed traditional media (both for and against) looking for clicks has spotlighted these people but their influence is limited amongst the majority. I think most people are excited about space and mars and all for it, understanding that creating a base on mars or the moon is a completely unrelated thing to fixing global warming here on earth. I say this as someone that votes democrat.
- rozab 5y ago
  It seems to me that Bezos and Branson have done irreparable damage to public perceptions of space exploration. Flying up billionaires does not inspire people.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    I think it depends on how it is done. The Inspiration 4 series was well-received on Netflix and they had a billionaire on board who paid for the mission. I think the dearMoon mission could also go very well and inspire people.
rbanffy 5y ago
It's kind of funny that we are on the verge of having too much launch capacity. Right now, SpaceX fills their launch schedule with Starlink satellites, as nobody can produce satellites for launch fast enough to fill their launch vehicles at the cadence they can be operated. And that's only for Falcon. Starship, if it works, will give us so much launch capacity that we'll be unable to fully utilize a handful of vehicles for more than a decade. Every satellite today is at the end of a long production chain with lots of bottlenecks, finding funding for launch being only one of them. We'll need assembly lines of them to feed this rocket.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adfgergaehg 5y ago
  We have always had too much launch capacity. You will notice that every program estimates prices based on how many launches occur a year, with the price going down the more launches there are. Large launch vehicles are less expensive per mass to orbit than small ones. There are huge economies of scale. It isn't that SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity and so fills it with Starlink satellites. SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity because they're launching so many Starlink satellites. They only make large launch vehicles and they can only hit the prices they do if the launch regularly. If they stop manufacturing their own demand the price will rise precipitously. SpaceX is currently subsidized by investor money. The steady state remains to be seen. One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued was that there was no need for such a large vehicle. It was cheap per unit mass to orbit but there was not enough demand to justify it.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued What happens when launching a Saturn-V sized payload becomes cheaper than launching an Atlas V sized one?
    - adfgergaehg 5y ago
      If and when that happens I'll re-evaluate. I don't buy the SpaceX marketing about the Starship for a millisecond. (And I'm baffled why a government contractor that isn't publicly-traded is marketing to the public in the first place.)
adfgergaehg 5y ago
I am still utterly baffled by the way people are impressed by a reusable launch vehicle. This stuff is old hat. This person worked at NASA! They probably worked on systems that were launched on Shuttles! Can anyone explain this to me? I realize that the Shuttle was not beloved, but how could someone write thousands of words on reusable launch vehicles and somehow forget that the U.S. has been operating them since the '80s?
gammarator 5y ago
> I know dozens of astronomers who would donate half their meager salaries in perpetuity so they didn’t have to endure That Guy dragging Jill Tarter and insisting that it was an alien artifact, ever again. This is accurate.
idlewords 5y ago
Let's maybe see the magic rocket fly first, at the promised cost to orbit. Musk enjoys making promises about doing stuff at huge scale and fractional cost.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  The entire article seems to hinge on taking all of Starship's promises for granted (not just the ridiculously low cost to orbit, but also in-space refueling and other sci-fi ideas!). I think skepticism on this very premise is more than warranted, as you're also saying. The ampunt of people who just want to believe is almost astonishing.
  - sq_ 5y ago
    I don't disagree that skepticism may be warranted, but I think that people are also willing to believe in SpaceX's ability to solve hard problems, given their track record. As far as I can tell and have heard other people much smarter than me say, there's no real physics-level barrier to any of Starship's goals. There's plenty of tough, tough engineering problems to solve, but it doesn't require unobtanium in order to work. SpaceX has already pulled off landing an orbital-class first stage (not to discount the prior work in the form of DC-X and others, but they weren't orbital), and they've gotten to the point where they can refly those stages many times in relatively quick succession. Seems reasonable to believe that they can figure out Starship, even if it may not be in the exact form or on the exact timescale that they want.
    - idlewords 5y ago
      It's important to distinguish engineering promises (where SpaceX has a great track record) and economic promises, where Musk just applies the same algorithm over and over (promise 10x performance for 1/100 the cost). I don't doubt SpaceX's ability to build an amazing rocket, but I wish there were more realism about the claimed costs of mass to orbit. See hyperloop, cheap tunnels, electric cars, batteries, you name it.
      - 5y ago
tsimionescu 5y ago
The article seems to take wildly optimistic cost, capacity, and capability claims for granted. It then verges on the ridiculous, talking about Mars terraforming with giant light sails. I couldn't read past that, as it seemed to go into more and more examples of improbable technologies that are stopped by many more concerns than launch capacity.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  you must not be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling
  - a-nikolaev 5y ago
    Dreaming is fine, but Musk has a track record of not delivering on his over-optimistic promises. And a dream is not enough to overpower gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. There are very hard physical limits on how efficient a rocket can be, even in the most optimistic scenarios.
    - atonalfreerider 5y ago
      Last I saw, the roads are full of Teslas and there have been 5 crewed launches to orbit on reflown Falcon boosters. Without Tesla, the electric car market would probably be farther behind, and without SpaceX we'd definitely still be flying astronauts on Soyuz. These achievements seems routine now, but it's important to take stock of their significance.
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        So we were already flowing astrounauts in with proven technology. What new did SpaceX do in that field?
        Cyphase 5y ago
        "We were already doing X with proven technology" is not really a good argument. In the United States, people have had video displays in their homes since the 1950's. Are we going to ask what new has been done in that field since then? Also, sometimes you have to rebuild technological capabilities on a new foundation in order to move things forward. Yes, humans have been able to send humans into space since the 1960's (though not beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972). SpaceX only recently caught up with that capability. They still haven't sent anyone beyond low Earth orbit. But they're catching up, and using a foundation of technology that will allow us to wildly surpass what was possible with the technology of the 1960's.
_joel 5y ago
The post mentions an expendable version at 15m d but that can't be done on either the current iteration (9m) or v2.0 (12m). The original plan was for 15m but that would require around 100 raptors to get it off the ground!
- Foxcoditrad54 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on why it can't be done? Edit: I mean 15m fairing on a 9m starship.
  - zardo 5y ago
    Could you elaborate on what that would be? You're thinking of a Starship with a disposable fairing on top of it?
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      TFA elaborates: > For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
      - _joel 5y ago
        As I've noted in other replies, you'd need an entire new stage0 to accomodate this. Even larger than the 2.0 planned. It'd be have to be made especially for this.
        ncmncm 5y ago
        I don't know what you mean. Are you saying there is not enough room for that next to the stacking tower? I don't think people are talking about changing Super Heavy.
apeace 5y ago
I don't know anything about this, but I was surprised to read about the light sails proposal for heating Mars. > Mere dozens of such Starship launches would be needed to substantially increase net insolation on Mars and begin raising the temperature, without the emplacement of any surface infrastructure. Heating sounds like a good step, but aren't the major challenges a lack of atmosphere and magnetosphere? Having one without the others seems a bit useless to me. What am I missing?
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Heat should help add atmosphere to some degree. Solid co2 could gasify and some frozen water could enter the atmosphere.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  If you can heat the planet up, you can start redirecting comets or asteroids rich in water ice and frozen CO2 into it to get a thicker atmosphere.
  - cnlevy 5y ago
    I'm looking for the day where 1000 Starships pull a million ton ice asteroid into Mars in order to thicken its atmosphere.
    - Valgrim 5y ago
      A million tons of ice would add more or less the water content of a medium-small fishing pond on the whole planet (or a cube with 100 meter sides). The order of magnitude of would require stripping Ceres of it's mantle.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
I like the idea of a ringed station made of starship shells. But I wonder if instead of making hollow starships and then having to deal with all the engines and fuel tanks when converting to a ring segment, perhaps it would be possible to make a tubular section which fits over the outside of starship like a sleeve? I suppose it would need cutouts for the flaps since that starship would ideally be reusable, and it would need to be two halves since there is no way to slide it off if there are flaps there. But IDK maybe it could work!
bmcahren 5y ago
This writing reminds me of when popular science was good.
- Game_Ender 5y ago
  It really does. Brings me back to when I was kid and would pour over every issue and to learn about what the FUTURE would bring. Very impressive thoughts about the what the power of cheap scale can do: “Quantity has a quality all of its ow “ really hits home.
reportedcalls1 5y ago
Cold Calling: https://reportedcalls.net/ https://reportedcalls.net/
inasio 5y ago
One way to use excess capacity is to become an airline... Looking at the types of projects that Musk has been working with (Boring, barges, etc), it doesn't strike me as fully ridiculous
peter303 5y ago
SpaceX is launching their first commercial package(DART) to leave Earth orbit Nov 23(?). They did a demo of this capability with the Mars orbit roadster a few years back. The 2022 manifest has a lunar package and another asteroid probe. (My source is the 131 launches in Wikipedia and I could hace missed something.)

191 points by makaimc 5y ago

JulianMorrison 5y ago

The aside section of what Starlink can do, sounds to me like the kind of thing that gives militaries sleepless nights.

jacknews 5y ago
Do they also have a division researching the black orchid, Orchidae Nigra?

dvh1990 5y ago

This sounds mind-blowing, except that current public sentiment seems strongly against space exploration and that may catch up with budgets. Even though SpaceX does the launches, it is government agencies that deal with launching missions, and government budgets are influenced by public opinion.

Causality1 5y ago
It's hard to blame the public for feeling that way when space projects run two decades behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget.
mdorazio 5y ago
I’m not sure why you think current public opinion is opposed to space exploration? It’s definitely opposed to space tourism for the rich, but that’s a separate thing.
- dvh1990 5y ago
  There's a strong anti Mars settlement sentiment going on, not just anti "space tourism". The idea, which I don't really subscribe to in this context, that we should utilize whatever resources we assign to space towards fighting climate change and fixing problems here on Earth.
  - ruph123 5y ago
    It is one thing to be against a Mars settlement and another to be against space exploration. E.g. it would serve the latter better if we would explore Venus, Europa, Titan, etc. than trying to live underground on a dead poisonous planet.
    - bdamm 5y ago
      Trying to live underground on a dead planet might just prove that we need Earth. Lots of people say space tourism is silly and then go gas up their car while complaining that Teslas are how the coastal elites will take their retirement.
      - kitsunesoba 5y ago
        To add on, I think there’s a lot of value to be had in the various science that can only be done with boots on the ground on Mars. The rovers have been great don’t get me wrong, but a team of scientists with a Starship full of equipment can do volumes more research in a couple of weeks than a rover can during its entire mission, including things that weren’t originally planned. What we learn there can be helpful for understanding the history of the solar system as well as planetary dynamics (remember that in terms of well-studied planets, we’re currently at sample size = 1).
        runarberg 5y ago
        How fast do we actually need to learn about Mars? How far are we willing to go, how much are we willing to spend just to speed things up there? We don’t live in the 1950s or the 1890s any more. We are not willing to sacrifice the lives of our explorers like we did when we went to the moon or Antarctica in the 1960s and 1900s respectively. We are not engaging in juvenile races to “get there first” which is both expensive and dangerous. The space exploration of today is more collaborative and careful then the explorations of the past. So we don’t risk the lives of our explorers nor the unnecessary expenses of getting things done 20 years when we can do it in 50 for far less money and with infinity more safety.
- ArtWomb 5y ago
  >>> public opinion is opposed to space exploration It's always been true ;) If you put it to a vote, majority of americans will allocate public funds towards terrestrial concerns over a new space lab. Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. In today's dollars, what was nasa's highest yearly budget: maybe $30B? Let's see what 5% of US GDP devoted to Space R&D and Peaceful Expansion by mid century looks like!
  - virgilp 5y ago
    If you put it to a vote, majority of Americans will allocate public funds towards stimulus cheques and not the military.... what majority of Americans would allocate funds towards is not necessarily the thing that gets done.
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    I don’t really think that’s the case - it’s more nuanced. Most Americans are pro space exploration [1], but against manned missions and colonization efforts [2]. I have a strong feeling most people are probably also against boondoggle projects like SLS and seemingly-constant massive cost overruns on things like JWST. This makes sense if you think about it - flying humans around the solar system just doesn’t make much sense until we have actual orbital industry at some point in the future to bring the costs down to a reasonable level. And I personally have to agree with the camp opposed to Mars colonization, but for different reasons than most. Mars is kind of a crappy place to try and live by most metrics. It seems like colonization efforts would be better allocated to large asteroids or water-rich moons. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-americans-believe-it-is-essential-that-the-u-s-remain-a-global-leader-in-space/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-a... [2] https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exploration-poll/ https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exp...
  - bnralt 5y ago
    > Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. When someone (usually NASA or NASA fanboys) does a Gish gallop and drops of huge list of things supposedly created by NASA, it's worth picking a couple to take a deep dive into. When you look at the details, the amount of tech transfer is often not anywhere close to the amount claimed. Still, there is good science and technology that comes out of NASA. But it's likely we'd have a lot better results if a large chunk of the NASA budget wasn't spent throwing people up into space for no reason.
wffurr 5y ago
But doesn't Starship dramatically reduce budget needs for exploration? The whole point of the essay series is to try to get institutions and researchers thinking about the economics of exploration with a steady cadence of reusable Starship launches.
- dvh1990 5y ago
  Oh I get the purpose of the article and it got ME excited. However, I'm concerned about other voices which may speak out against it in the context of my original reply. It'd be interesting to follow this thread and see if this sentiment can be heard here.
cblconfederate 5y ago
TBF most of the places where starship will go have already been explored. I think spaceX's plan is more about exploitation
- cnlevy 5y ago
  A human in ONE day can explore more than a rover in a year. There's no comparing the amount of research which can be done by a teleoperated rover to what can be done by a real human on-site. As a comparison, Opportunity rover covered 45.16 km in 15 years. The Apollo 17 crew covered 35.74 kilometers in 3 days.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    A human can also mine and bring back valuable stuff. Initially rock samples for testing. Eventually minerals (asteroid mining comes to mind). Space exploration does not pay for itself commercially at this point. Maybe that's one more thing Musk can change.
    - GuB-42 5y ago
      A rover can do that too. In fact, Perseverance already has the ability to collect samples and prepare them for a future pick-up mission. It is just that we are not found of sending people and letting them die there, so a human mission implies a return mission, and if there is a return mission, of course you want to bring back souvenirs. In fact, a sample return mission can be seen as a step towards a manned mission. First you try to bring back a pile of rocks, then you consider bringing back humans. And yes, humans are far more efficient than robots at space exploration today, but robots keep improving, and I think it will take many years before we put people on Mars, so by the time we are ready for a manned Mars mission, we will probably have much better robots. Not as good as humans, but digging lots of rocks and moving faster than a snail will probably be well within their abilities.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Will anybody really ever come by to pick up Perseverence's samples? That has struck me as really implausible. If it could carry the sample containers to wherever it fills them, it could carry them to wherever it ends up, too, and whatever is supposed to fetch them could make a single stop. Sending another lander just to sweep up after it seems massively wasteful. Clue?
wonderwonder 5y ago
I would caution against giving to much credit to social media / leftist politicians railing against spending money on space when we can use the money on earth. These people have a loud platform but I don't think most people agree with them. Similar to how so many loud 'woke' people make you think democrats are all focused on forcing workspace equality no matter the cost or anti cop. Social media and indeed traditional media (both for and against) looking for clicks has spotlighted these people but their influence is limited amongst the majority. I think most people are excited about space and mars and all for it, understanding that creating a base on mars or the moon is a completely unrelated thing to fixing global warming here on earth. I say this as someone that votes democrat.
rozab 5y ago
It seems to me that Bezos and Branson have done irreparable damage to public perceptions of space exploration. Flying up billionaires does not inspire people.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  I think it depends on how it is done. The Inspiration 4 series was well-received on Netflix and they had a billionaire on board who paid for the mission. I think the dearMoon mission could also go very well and inspire people.

rbanffy 5y ago

It's kind of funny that we are on the verge of having too much launch capacity. Right now, SpaceX fills their launch schedule with Starlink satellites, as nobody can produce satellites for launch fast enough to fill their launch vehicles at the cadence they can be operated. And that's only for Falcon. Starship, if it works, will give us so much launch capacity that we'll be unable to fully utilize a handful of vehicles for more than a decade. Every satellite today is at the end of a long production chain with lots of bottlenecks, finding funding for launch being only one of them. We'll need assembly lines of them to feed this rocket.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adfgergaehg 5y ago
We have always had too much launch capacity. You will notice that every program estimates prices based on how many launches occur a year, with the price going down the more launches there are. Large launch vehicles are less expensive per mass to orbit than small ones. There are huge economies of scale. It isn't that SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity and so fills it with Starlink satellites. SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity because they're launching so many Starlink satellites. They only make large launch vehicles and they can only hit the prices they do if the launch regularly. If they stop manufacturing their own demand the price will rise precipitously. SpaceX is currently subsidized by investor money. The steady state remains to be seen. One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued was that there was no need for such a large vehicle. It was cheap per unit mass to orbit but there was not enough demand to justify it.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued What happens when launching a Saturn-V sized payload becomes cheaper than launching an Atlas V sized one?
  - adfgergaehg 5y ago
    If and when that happens I'll re-evaluate. I don't buy the SpaceX marketing about the Starship for a millisecond. (And I'm baffled why a government contractor that isn't publicly-traded is marketing to the public in the first place.)

adfgergaehg 5y ago

I am still utterly baffled by the way people are impressed by a reusable launch vehicle. This stuff is old hat. This person worked at NASA! They probably worked on systems that were launched on Shuttles! Can anyone explain this to me? I realize that the Shuttle was not beloved, but how could someone write thousands of words on reusable launch vehicles and somehow forget that the U.S. has been operating them since the '80s?

gammarator 5y ago

> I know dozens of astronomers who would donate half their meager salaries in perpetuity so they didn’t have to endure That Guy dragging Jill Tarter and insisting that it was an alien artifact, ever again. This is accurate.

idlewords 5y ago

Let's maybe see the magic rocket fly first, at the promised cost to orbit. Musk enjoys making promises about doing stuff at huge scale and fractional cost.

tsimionescu 5y ago
The entire article seems to hinge on taking all of Starship's promises for granted (not just the ridiculously low cost to orbit, but also in-space refueling and other sci-fi ideas!). I think skepticism on this very premise is more than warranted, as you're also saying. The ampunt of people who just want to believe is almost astonishing.
- sq_ 5y ago
  I don't disagree that skepticism may be warranted, but I think that people are also willing to believe in SpaceX's ability to solve hard problems, given their track record. As far as I can tell and have heard other people much smarter than me say, there's no real physics-level barrier to any of Starship's goals. There's plenty of tough, tough engineering problems to solve, but it doesn't require unobtanium in order to work. SpaceX has already pulled off landing an orbital-class first stage (not to discount the prior work in the form of DC-X and others, but they weren't orbital), and they've gotten to the point where they can refly those stages many times in relatively quick succession. Seems reasonable to believe that they can figure out Starship, even if it may not be in the exact form or on the exact timescale that they want.
  - idlewords 5y ago
    It's important to distinguish engineering promises (where SpaceX has a great track record) and economic promises, where Musk just applies the same algorithm over and over (promise 10x performance for 1/100 the cost). I don't doubt SpaceX's ability to build an amazing rocket, but I wish there were more realism about the claimed costs of mass to orbit. See hyperloop, cheap tunnels, electric cars, batteries, you name it.
    - 5y ago

tsimionescu 5y ago

The article seems to take wildly optimistic cost, capacity, and capability claims for granted. It then verges on the ridiculous, talking about Mars terraforming with giant light sails. I couldn't read past that, as it seemed to go into more and more examples of improbable technologies that are stopped by many more concerns than launch capacity.

aero-glide2 5y ago
you must not be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling
- a-nikolaev 5y ago
  Dreaming is fine, but Musk has a track record of not delivering on his over-optimistic promises. And a dream is not enough to overpower gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. There are very hard physical limits on how efficient a rocket can be, even in the most optimistic scenarios.
  - atonalfreerider 5y ago
    Last I saw, the roads are full of Teslas and there have been 5 crewed launches to orbit on reflown Falcon boosters. Without Tesla, the electric car market would probably be farther behind, and without SpaceX we'd definitely still be flying astronauts on Soyuz. These achievements seems routine now, but it's important to take stock of their significance.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      So we were already flowing astrounauts in with proven technology. What new did SpaceX do in that field?
      - Cyphase 5y ago
        "We were already doing X with proven technology" is not really a good argument. In the United States, people have had video displays in their homes since the 1950's. Are we going to ask what new has been done in that field since then? Also, sometimes you have to rebuild technological capabilities on a new foundation in order to move things forward. Yes, humans have been able to send humans into space since the 1960's (though not beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972). SpaceX only recently caught up with that capability. They still haven't sent anyone beyond low Earth orbit. But they're catching up, and using a foundation of technology that will allow us to wildly surpass what was possible with the technology of the 1960's.

_joel 5y ago

The post mentions an expendable version at 15m d but that can't be done on either the current iteration (9m) or v2.0 (12m). The original plan was for 15m but that would require around 100 raptors to get it off the ground!

Foxcoditrad54 5y ago
Can you elaborate on why it can't be done? Edit: I mean 15m fairing on a 9m starship.
- zardo 5y ago
  Could you elaborate on what that would be? You're thinking of a Starship with a disposable fairing on top of it?
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    TFA elaborates: > For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
    - _joel 5y ago
      As I've noted in other replies, you'd need an entire new stage0 to accomodate this. Even larger than the 2.0 planned. It'd be have to be made especially for this.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        I don't know what you mean. Are you saying there is not enough room for that next to the stacking tower? I don't think people are talking about changing Super Heavy.

apeace 5y ago

I don't know anything about this, but I was surprised to read about the light sails proposal for heating Mars. > Mere dozens of such Starship launches would be needed to substantially increase net insolation on Mars and begin raising the temperature, without the emplacement of any surface infrastructure. Heating sounds like a good step, but aren't the major challenges a lack of atmosphere and magnetosphere? Having one without the others seems a bit useless to me. What am I missing?

mrfusion 5y ago
Heat should help add atmosphere to some degree. Solid co2 could gasify and some frozen water could enter the atmosphere.
wongarsu 5y ago
If you can heat the planet up, you can start redirecting comets or asteroids rich in water ice and frozen CO2 into it to get a thicker atmosphere.
- cnlevy 5y ago
  I'm looking for the day where 1000 Starships pull a million ton ice asteroid into Mars in order to thicken its atmosphere.
  - Valgrim 5y ago
    A million tons of ice would add more or less the water content of a medium-small fishing pond on the whole planet (or a cube with 100 meter sides). The order of magnitude of would require stripping Ceres of it's mantle.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

I like the idea of a ringed station made of starship shells. But I wonder if instead of making hollow starships and then having to deal with all the engines and fuel tanks when converting to a ring segment, perhaps it would be possible to make a tubular section which fits over the outside of starship like a sleeve? I suppose it would need cutouts for the flaps since that starship would ideally be reusable, and it would need to be two halves since there is no way to slide it off if there are flaps there. But IDK maybe it could work!

bmcahren 5y ago

This writing reminds me of when popular science was good.

Game_Ender 5y ago
It really does. Brings me back to when I was kid and would pour over every issue and to learn about what the FUTURE would bring. Very impressive thoughts about the what the power of cheap scale can do: “Quantity has a quality all of its ow “ really hits home.

reportedcalls1 5y ago

Cold Calling: https://reportedcalls.net/ https://reportedcalls.net/

inasio 5y ago

One way to use excess capacity is to become an airline... Looking at the types of projects that Musk has been working with (Boring, barges, etc), it doesn't strike me as fully ridiculous

peter303 5y ago

SpaceX is launching their first commercial package(DART) to leave Earth orbit Nov 23(?). They did a demo of this capability with the Mars orbit roadster a few years back. The 2022 manifest has a lunar package and another asteroid probe. (My source is the 131 launches in Wikipedia and I could hace missed something.)