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Recently talking remotely on a space conference in Baku Musk talked about launching Starship 10 times a day from an ocean platform, as it will probably be "too
by avmich 3y ago
Recently talking remotely on a space conference in Baku Musk talked about launching Starship 10 times a day from an ocean platform, as it will probably be "too much" for Cape Canaveral. That's 3000+ launches per year, each with 100 t payload, a couple orders of magnitude more than today's mass flow to orbit. Yet at the same time he talked about a million tons on the surface of Mars, which means 5 million tons on the LEO, which means 50000 launches - still some 15 times more than that. So maybe Starship will fly even more often, at least from all launching pads on Earth, especially given that there would be other uses for it.
We're swiftly moving towards a cislunar civilization.
- bmitc 3y agoI thought he "cared" about the climate?
- throwaway69123 3y agoTrending this out are you suggesting the solution to climate change is devolution?
- morsch 3y agoTrending it out, the long term consequence of not dealing with climate change is devolution.
- schiffern 3y agoLet's not forget the original point. "Not dealing with climate change" is quite a misleading characterization of Elon Musk, his actions, and his "cares." If Elon Musk doesn't "care" about climate change just because every actions in his life isn't 100% devoted (monk-like) to maximum action on that issue, then I think you can successfully argue that nobody in human history has ever "cared" about anything. The word becomes meaningless if you redefine it that hard.
- wenebego 3y agoNobody said that, though
- schiffern 3y agoThey did actually. Bmitc, while cowering behind a rhetorical question, claimed that Elon Musk doesn't "care" about climate change because his rockets also emit carbon. However this posits a ridiculous and unattainable purity test (which would only be satisfiable by the aforementioned "monk-like" life) that disingenuously ignores Musk's overwhelmingly net positive work toward carbon reduction via Tesla products.
- rbanffy 3y agoOrbital solar can beam down power at efficiencies much higher than ground-based and require a small fraction of the surface to be used by solar panels.
- nickik 3y agoMusk has often said that Orbital solar is incredibly stupid. And it is.
- rbanffy 3y agoStupid or not, it'd be useful for a number of things, including creating a demand for more than one Starship launch per day. As for the actual uses besides beaming power down, providing additional power to spacecraft in deep space, powering lasers for light sails, or maybe as a directed energy weapon.
- nickik 3y agoIt wont create demand because its not efficient and therefore nobody will invest huge amounts of money in it. > providing additional power to spacecraft in deep space Very likely an extreme niche application or wont happen. > powering lasers for light sails Again, an extreme niche or wont happen. > or maybe as a directed energy weapon. Same thing. In a world where Starship exists, you can throw a deep space probe with gigantic amounts of solar panels, that seems cheaper then having a separate space craft.
- marcusverus 3y agoWell he did give $100 million to fund Carbon Removal X-Prize[0]. [0]https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbonremoval https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbonremoval
- callalex 3y agoNever make the mistake of listening to Musk promising a timeline in any non-binding context. https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- avmich 3y agoI'm not sure that aggressive timeline Musk mentioned - about 4 years before sending an (unmanned) Mars mission (with Starships involved, as I understand), or about 10 years before that kind of a conference - a room for some ~100 people - can happen in space. But the large milestones themselves - making a heavy rocket (Falcon-9), making an even heavier rocket (Falcon Heavy), launching unmanned and manned spacecrafts to ISS (Dragon and Crew Dragon), landing first stages of rockets for further reuse, launching a world-wide ISP - they are all eventually achieved, and "eventually" here still means "very fast by classical space industry standards". And we're not yet talking about money here. So... time may easily slip. Milestones - less so.
- mwint 3y agoDude has a track record of converting "impossible" to "late".
- yieldcrv 3y agonative lunar? I’m not familiar with that prefix in this context
- HWR_14 3y agoIf you mean cislunar, it means within the radius of the moons orbit from earth.
- martin8412 3y agoStarship has still not successfully flown once, so ten times a day seems like pure fiction in the near future.
- valianteffort 3y agoIt's not for lack of trying. The FAA is the only thing holding them back from testing more often and their speed is atrocious and concerns are totally baseless. It's clear the current government, who Elon is at odds with, is weaponizing that over him along with the justice departments bullshit lawsuit about SpaceX not hiring enough foreigners (ITAR regulations specifically ban hiring of foreign nationals). Whatever you think of Elon, or even people like Trump for that matter, you'd have to be an idiot to cheer this kinda stuff on.
- martin8412 3y agoThat's what SpaceX gets for their recklessness. It's not a software product where move fast and break things can be fine. It's damn rockets where even following the regulations it can cost a significant amount of human lives. Their last launch attempt, they couldn't even get a tank of fuel to explode reliably for crying out loud.
- gamblor956 3y agoThe last failed launched caused a bunch of damage to the surrounding neighborhood...and the worst part is that SpaceX didn't even expect that sort of damage could happen. And that's why they're currently being held back. It's not related to some silly DOJ lawsuit. It's because they messed up the basic rules governing their primary business.
- marcusverus 3y ago> The last failed launched caused a bunch of damage to the surrounding neighborhood... You seem to be suggesting that residential areas were impacted, which was not the case. > and the worst part is that SpaceX didn't even expect that sort of damage could happen. While it's true that they didn't expect the launch pad to shatter, the damage was all contained within the evacuated 'hazard area' and their mistake did not endanger the public: "Chunks of material were blown high into the air, with debris striking at least one car near the pad. Although that sounds wild, this appeared to be within the known danger zone of the rocket, called the hazard area, which is an area along the rocket’s planned flight path that is cleared for safety." [0] > It's because they messed up the basic rules governing their primary business. Which rules did they break? [0]https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/26/23699365/spacex-starship-damage-launch-pad-debris https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/26/23699365/spacex-starship-...
- credit_guy 3y agoThe greenhouse gas emissions from all those launches will, surprisingly, be quite material. A single SpaceX Starship rocket has a mass of 5k tons, virtually all of it propellant, about 1000 tons CH4 and 4000 tons O2. When you burn that much CH4 you end up with more than 2500 tons of CO2. In reality, about 10% of the CH4 is not burned (the mix is fuel rich rather than stoichiometric), and because CH4 is about 25 times more potent than CO2, you end up with a total of about 5000 tons of equivalent CO2 greenhouse gases. 50k launches of 5k tons CO2e each is 250 megatons. That is about 5% of the total US greenhouse gas emissions.
- raffraffraff 3y agoThank you. I just posted an angry response to the original link without scrolling for this, but my guess was that the co² footprint for this needless bullshit would be huge. Anyway, good ole HN always has some smart Alec who "done the maths". Credit to credit_guy.
- Dig1t 3y agoScience and exploration are not “needless bullshit”. They are the most important and meaningful that thing humans do.
- raffraffraff 3y agoAgreed, science and exploration are important and meaningful. But sending rockets up and down every few days is more like engineering. He hasn't built CERN. The word "SPACE" seems to make some people go weak at the knees and start daydreaming. This is basically like a gigantic haulage truck and a private jet rolled into one, but it's not bringing useful cargo anywhere (most of the time). It's far more wasteful and far less useful. All they'll discover is how to get a little better at sending rockets off earth "a bit". But fundamentally new science? Nope. This isn't going to lead to the warp drive. And they're not going far enough to bring back a magic rock or an infinity stone, so what's the exploration? We can see further with telescopes. And are SpaceX they going to share all this frighting new knowledge with mankind? Hmmmmm.
- Zigurd 3y agoWhen about half the mass in orbit is Starlink, comprising more than half the mass launched by Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and Starlink has about 2M subscribers, I am skeptical about the TAM for Starship. If Starship has a TAM, we would see it and be able to estimate it based on existing rockets' customers and how riding down the cost curve would change the TAM. Space launch capacity has a long sales cycle. There should be customers for 10 launches per day lining up. If you believe a Mars colony is realistic, OK, it will take that kind of capacity to build it. But that, like Starlink, sounds like another SpaceX project without outside launch customers. I would applaud taking thousands of Elon's fans to Mars to build their paradise, but there are plenty of reasons to think that will not happen in time to be relevant to Starship.