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Starship Update [video]
- stvkoch 5y agonothing better than letting the earth be destroyed so that the idea of multi-planetary life has relevance. better future for humanity is have a better earth
- chriswarbo 5y agoWhat a load of nonsense. Going to space lets us have a better Earth! Even at a simple level, we use satellites to monitor sea level, methane emissions (even identifying leaky pipelines from orbit!), atmospheric levels of CO2, NO2, SO2, etc., vegetation cover, ice cover, and on and on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_observation_satellite#Environmental_monitoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_observation_satellite#En...
- macco 5y agoYeah, more CGI. This fixation on Mars seems to me like a scam/distraction to secure funds.
- geerlingguy 5y agoIn a somewhat unique occurrence, the event was close to starting on-time.
- mitchellgoffpc 5y agoI was shooketh
- thecrumb 5y agoYou'd think someone with Elon's money would spend a few bucks on a public speaking course on Udemy or something.
- extheat 5y agoHe has Asperger’s syndrome
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smlacy 5y agoHe takes too many "smart drugs"
- sillysaurusx 5y ago> implying that Elon's speaking style is bad It's a relief that it's not some slick slide deck.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI’ve been doing public speaking for many years, and I’ve never gotten particularly good at it. Not my strong suit. My writing is fairly decent, though.
- renewiltord 5y agoSome people have to conform. You've got to wear a tailored suit, you've got to sound slick, you've got to have your message clean and correct. But that's the point. It's because you're not exceptional so you have to meet the standard signals of being bare competent. But you take a generational talent, and he can sound however he sounds because it's obvious he is what he is and just being himself is the best thing he can be. He can suck at all these things but you know he's one of a kind. Or maybe you don't think it. But it doesn't matter. There's enough people who do. And they'll listen.
- sfblah 5y agoI may not agree with all of his ideas, but I find his speaking style just fine. Honestly, I prefer someone who reaches for words but says what he means to say.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago"It's gonna be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work. You might die." -- Elon's sales pitch for Mars, in his own words. I wonder if any billionaire (or their children) will be doing the early work. It's an interesting game of "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future. Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that there will be a disaster. But over the course of 200 years of constant space travel, it seems incredibly unlikely that there won't be some kind of disaster. The question is, how will we react? I hope we don't give up. And I hope billionaires risk their children alongside the working class.
- rtpg 5y agoWhy do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress? I suppose there's an idea we could apply everything done on Mars to Earth, but like... seriously, what we just took all the prep for mars and just put it in the middle of the Empty Quarter, the Saraha, Antarctica? People barely want to live in the arctic circle, yet believe that our salvation comes in Mars? I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoIt’s helpful to remember it’s not a zero sum game. We can do all of that too. The tech for Mars would make it that much easier. No one wants to live in those places because currently they have a choice. But if our planet becomes irradiated, or hit by a meteor, or suffers a sun burst — all very realistic concerns — then those choices become more limited. And it’s good to have options.
- rtpg 5y agoThe ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built, and it's like 5 floating schoolbuses. Now I'm for walking and chewing bubblegum. But if you believe in opportunity costs and care about navigating that, it feels like the same problem. Our planet becoming irradiated is actually not a huge problem! It would still be easier to live on Earth than on Mars! An irradiated radioactive hellscape of Earth would still be more survivable than Mars. (my more nuanced take is that we have so many basic hospitability problems that need solving, and Mars have all of those times 100, so it would be very good if most of those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems more than the logistics of shooting a bunch of stuff into space for long term transit)
- irrational 5y agoThis is the first time I’ve ever heard him speak. Is he always this awkward? Based off of the 5 minutes I watched, he clearly hasn’t gotten to where he is through charisma and public speaking skills. I’m just wondering if this is typical for him. Also, a million tons to Mars? If each starship lifts 100 tons, that is 10,000 launches. I think he said launch windows only come around every 2 years. He is either planning on building thousands of Starships or taking many years.
- oh_sigh 5y agoYes, he is always extremely awkward. Stumbling over his own words, telling jokes that only he has context for, going into unscripted mini-tangents without much of a point, "ums" 30x in a row, waiting for applause at inappropriate times. An all around zero when it comes to public speaking. Despite me saying all this, I like Elon when he isn't on twitter. I still own TSLA since the IPO and he has made me a lot of money(I doubt TSLA would be where it was without him, even if the products would have been exactly the same). But he still should take a public speaking crash course, and maybe some beta blockers before these events.
- colechristensen 5y agoI think it is good that we have a tech leader succeeding without a polished, coached, focus group approved self presentation. It’s good to have an entirely different brand of bullshit out there and a person demonstrating that a different type of brain can fit in any role.
- mrspeaker 5y agoI think it's a bit of a hack for people like me: everyone has been taught to sound super-confident, make everything super glossy and slick and over-produced. Almost always it's to cover the lack of original or substantial content underlying the delivery. Now the more confident-sounding and charismatic someone is, the less I believe there will be anything interesting I can learn from them, and the less I trust them!
- jcun4128 5y agoHa looks like there's a drone flying around watching the thing get stacked at night Twin launch music composed by Vangelis /s Wow, hope they keep succeeding as they have
- panick21_ 5y agoThe Raptor 2 engine is just an absurd. The original specs were already kind of insane. But Raptor 2 is an monster. They really pushed already significantly into a second generation design before first flight. Raptor 2 is not just a slight upgrade, its a huge upgrade. If it can actually launch multiple times a day without any refurbishment, it will simply totally break space travel as we have known it. This engine makes everything else possible.
- sfblah 5y agoAnd then what? What's the use case?
- panick21_ 5y agoI guess you can listen to the presentation yourself.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoLifting enormous amounts of mass to orbit and Mars. Arguing the merits of these activities is beyond the scope of this thread.
- sfblah 5y agoSorry, I didn't realize we weren't allowed to discuss the point of the presentation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 5y agoI’m unsure there’s much to discuss in that specific regard? If you believe in cheap heavy lift and humans colonizing Mars, you agree this project has merit (and the costs and human effort involved reasonable). If you don’t, you see this project as superfluous and wasteful. Is that interpretation inaccurate? It’s somewhat, but not entirely, binary. From the presentation, development costs will be 5-10% of the Saturn V program (2020 dollars adjusted). Thats a bargain for the capabilities delivered.
- kortex 5y agoI love how some folks are like "Elon isn't a real engineer!" and then he starts going on a tangent in the middle of a presser about how flanges are a PITA to seal once you exceed a few hundred bar (just over a few thousand PSI), and how welding improves the plumbing significantly. Like, what!? That's not how C-suite bigwigs talk. That's primo enginerd banter.
- belter 5y agoWhich one of these personalities is he, when making statements about Tesla FSD? Edit: The answer to this question will be highly relevant during the lawsuits that will follow, the first time the Beta FSD kills somebody.
- dymk 5y agoThe kind that raises capital, probably
- vardump 5y agoCapital... for SpaceX? Because Tesla is already self-funding, with practically no capital access requirements.
- panick21_ 5y agoEngineers can never be wrong about anything. Any engineer making any statement that is wrong must be fundamentally evil.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoHe has been making such statements for 5+ years so I suggest he isn't being an engineer when making them, he is being a PR person.
- more_corn 5y agoElon is wrong about FSD being easy and about his approach, and his timeline. If he can be wrong about those things with grace it’ll be fine. I don’t know if he can do that. His track record for admitting he was wrong hasn’t been great.
- justahuman74 5y agoThe chamber melting on raptor2 is concerning. I hope they find a solution
- colechristensen 5y agoNot really concerning. When you are designing a rocket engine that’s what it does before you’re done, it melts and explodes. In fact it’s what all rocket engines do past their limits. If that wasn’t the problem you were having, it would be concerning.
- rklaehn 5y agoRemember that they are trying to push raptor 2 to even higher pressures, and try to be as efficient as possible. And they want the engine to be rapidly reusable hundreds of times. I am sure they could run the engines at a lower chamber pressure with massive amounts of film cooling and have it be safe for a single launch. It would still be a very high performance engine by today's standards. 330 bar chamber pressure is just nuts. Also, if the biggest remaining problem is the chamber melting, that means that they think they have the pumps under control. Which is a major achievement on its own.
- renewiltord 5y agoThis dude is genuine and it's fucking great. Love it. Inspirational dude.
- spookyuser 5y agoExactly - to the people saying he speaks awkwardly, I prefer Elon speaking awkwardly and genuinely so much more than Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook giving a perfectly spoken but essentially 100% marketing bs presentation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vernie 5y agoAnyone ask about the jacket?
- wiz21c 5y agoThat'd be so great if Musk would apply his might to help us (his fellow humans) solve our current problems instead of inventing a future for the 0.001%...
- nullifidian 5y agoTransport is not the main technical issue in making life multi-planetary. For the amount of time Elon spends talking about it, SpaceX spends surprisingly little time on the actual research that is needed for making an actual Martian colony self-sustainable.
- onion2k 5y agoThe numbers on mass to orbit are fascinating. To date humans have sent 15,517 tons of stuff into space. SpaceX wants to be able to send 15,500 per year with a single Starship, and Elon wants a fleet of 10. That's amazing. That really is "we can have a moonbase now" levels of ambition.
- dividedbyzero 5y agoIt'll be very interesting to see how and if that's going to work out. There will have to be a lot of actual demand for that launch capacity, and it'll have to build up fairly quickly, else SpaceX may not be around anymore when those payloads are ready. I guess lots of companies could do with some zero-g R&D, but actually building a platform to do this, how long will that take? Asteroid mining seems to be a long way from becoming practical, there aren't that many short-term military launches. What's going to keep them afloat for the first decade-or-so of this? Will they get their costs down far enough to make space tourism viable? I mean, despite all the violent optimism from the Elon Musk fan base, I'm pretty stoked to see how this will pan out. Historical game changer and within a decade everyone will wear Made-on-Mars space foam sneakers to their annual vacation to orbit? Incremental and boring like, neat, Netflix has its own fleet of broadcasting satellites and Adidas is saving 3% annually due to some R&D they do in orbit? Or will it fizzle out entirely, great tech but arrived too early?
- onion2k 5y agoThere will have to be a lot of actual demand for that launch capacity... Demand is often a chicken-and-egg problem. Having the capacity available will go a long way to creating the demand. There are plenty of incredibly wealthy people who could be persuaded to build the first moonbase, space hotel, low-gravity manufacturing plant, manned Earth observatory ... and a practically endless list of things we've not thought up yet ... but they can't do those things now because even if they paid the money there just isn't the launch capacity to do it. Putting the capacity in place fixes that problem and frees those people to start spending.
- xiphias2 5y agoThe demand for cheap satellite internet that Starship can provide is clear. Just look in another thread about Starlink of people complaining that the demand is not met fast enough.
- Isinlor 5y agoFor people asking why to go to the Moon or Mars: The movie Avatar made in box office $2.9B. This is exactly the same amount of money as SpaceX asked for the Moon landing - $2.9B. Have you asked people who watched Avatar what is the purpose of watching Avatar? Instead of making a fiction about going to a moon, we can actually go to the Moon. It really is the question - why do you live? What is the purpose of anyone life? There does not seem to be any purpose to anything in the universe. But we can choose what we want to do. So the answer: Because we want to, because it is exciting, because it inspires, because we can. Because this is what life is about.
- 6510 5y ago<sarcasm>Who would have thought space travel was much "easier" than self driving cars.
- udbhavs 5y agoColliding into random objects is pretty unlikely in space, even in the asteroid belt
- wffurr 5y agoAs hard and complex as spacecraft are, they seem like tractable engineering problems. The sheer raw complexity of the human built environment and traffic is very daunting for computing. Calculating orbits and rocket burns seems trivial by comparison.
- credit_guy 5y agoElon Musk's greatest contribution to humankind will be to end war. In a few short years from now, the Reagan era brilliant pebbles will be economically feasible. Which means nobody will be able to keep the nuclear gun pointed at America's head anymore. At which point the US will make Russia and China (and maybe Pakistan and India) an offer they can't refuse: give up all your nukes, please. We'll denuclearize ourselves too, but a bit later. If you don't like trillion dollar annual defense spendings, here's the cheapest way to get rid of that: make sure you're the only guy with nukes. In which case, you will stop seeing things like Russia wanting to invade Ukraine.
- blable2 5y agoYou just know their next CEO is going to be boring as hell.
- me_me_me 5y agoPSA Link to Common Sense Skeptics channel shredding the whole idea of Starship starting from the rocket to logistics of Mars settlement to bits where even one point means total dealbreaker for the whole idea. TLDR The whole thing is a wishful thinking at best if not an outright scam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDYt-phUAxY&list=PL-eVf9RWeoWEfSK9mjKe4E67IK1-1vZxB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDYt-phUAxY&list=PL-eVf9RWeo...
- sidcool 5y agoWould it be easier building a huge habitable space station near Mars than on the surface of Mars itself. Reason why near Mars if because we want redundancy for life. So at a safe distance from Earth.
- rklaehn 5y agoOnce mars settlement gets going, the moons of mars Phobos and Deimos also make for attractive targets. It might be that once starship works, we do all kinds of things, and it turns out that asteroids work better than planetary surfaces. So the belt becomes the focus of economic activity, and the mars colony is just a novelty kept alive by the Musk Foundation.