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Mass to orbit gives you lots of options: Starlink completed, more telescopes like James Webb but cheaper, a moon base, radio telescope on the far side of the mo
by bjelkeman-again 5y ago
Mass to orbit gives you lots of options: Starlink completed, more telescopes like James Webb but cheaper, a moon base, radio telescope on the far side of the moon, orbital rotational space stations (for G forces), missions to asteroids, Mars, outer planets, are just a few things. Point to point transport on Earth, halfway around the world in less than an hour.
- bqmjjx0kac 5y agoSpace mining.
- senectus1 5y agofor building in space.
- monocasa 5y agoIt also opens up off planet manufacturing in a way that can snowball into self sustaining growth. Which IMO is how we're going to mint the first trillionaire.
- XorNot 5y agoAlso the only true way we'll save the biosphere IMO - doing it all somewhere there isn't one, and where your pollutants basically don't matter.
- Seanambers 5y agoIf this pans out and rapid and full reusability of the starship system is realized - which by all accounts looks more than very likely at this stage its more a question of when. Elon Musk will be the world's first trillionaire and he also got Tesla's FSD to pull out of the hat.
- vanattab 5y agoThe launch costs of James Webb were an insignificant part of the spending on the telescope.
- bjelkeman-again 5y agoIndeed, but with a bigger launch vehicle, much of the complexity of JW would have been simplified and the cost of building it gone down.
- boxed 5y agoWell yes. But that's partly because the launch weight was restrained, and the launch cost high. It's a bit unituitive! The limits on launch weight means enormous costs to remove every single grma they can. This makes the launch cost go down in percent. If thy could just make it 50% heavier they could cut development costs by a lot. They could also build one much faster and allow it to fail constructively where you learn a bunch and then build number 2, 3, 4 with the things you learned. So now you have 3 telescopes instead of one. Launch cost changes everything.
- krisoft 5y agoYes. But the telescope cost as much as it did because they needed to origami it into the available space. If you have much more volume and weight you can design a simpler structure which achieves the same goal. Simpler structures cost less.