4 ms·

1969 called; they are asking if you need a rocket designed with slide rules.

sidewndr46 3y ago
I don't think I've ever really doubted SpaceX could build such a rocket & eventually get it to work. But why? What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?
- justrealist 3y ago
  "No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody"
  - failbuffer 3y ago
    Likewise, AT&T licensed the transistor to a small Japanese startup and told them it would probably only be useful for making a hearing aid. Fortunately, Sony had a knack for finding consumer applications of the device and humanity now makes quadrillions of transistors every year.
    - jjeaff 3y ago
      quadrillions (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillions) seemed a bit high to me, so I looked it up. it's actually about 2 Billion Trillion a year.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      That account does not appear to be true. From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf > In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325). (If that is not accessible, https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf says Sony "Concludes transistor license agreement with Western Electric" in October 1953. Western Electric was "the primary equipment manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953." A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review : > The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment. or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets." If you don't mind the high noise, the same 1952 issue includes a description of how you can build your own transistor radio, at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mo... . Hard to think Western Electric didn't know of any of these possibilities when discussing licensing with Sony.
      - failbuffer 3y ago
        Very thorough, thank you My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid." Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
        eesmith 3y ago
        The "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" link says it was Western Electric ("the manufacturing arm of the Bell System") who did the licensing, so it technically should have been WE executives, yes? That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology." What was Transistor Technology? "After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)." (An updated version of Transistor Technology is available from archive.org, in three volumes, eg, https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5... ) I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best. While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/mode/2up?q=sony https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem. I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes: "When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."
- wolfram74 3y ago
  The fact that musk has publicly called induced demand nonsense[0] despite his launch company relying on it is an irony I find delicious. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-musk-dismisses-induced-demand-a-phenomenon-first-witnessed-in-1866/?sh=583f5f6b7c5d https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-mus...
  - zbrozek 3y ago
    It's just demand. We don't call increases in demand 'induced demand' unless we're trying to throw shade on the thing being demanded. The classical case is road use. Add lanes to highways and folks will utilize the capacity to do whatever it is that creates value to them. And we call it induced demand. If transit headways shrink and there are more riders because the service got better, we don't call it induced demand. Or if milk or eggs get cheaper and consumption of those items grows, it's also not induced demand.
- yinser 3y ago
  100-150 tons to orbit or the moon or Mars per starship. NASA is counting on it for lunar operations and Musk anticipates it being the Martian workhorse vehicle
- ericd 3y ago
  The utility is decreasing launch cost per kg by a couple orders of magnitude from the Falcon Heavy, which already represented a huge decrease from other launch systems. Decreasing costs to <1% of former costs seems likely to open a lot of new potential use cases.
- fiftyfifty 3y ago
  Well for one thing they’ll be able to launch 240 Starlink satellites at a time instead of just 60 on the Falcon 9. If they get to the point of reusing the booster and the second stage the cost savings with Starship will be significant over the Falcon 9.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  He's pretty clear, he expects to be building a startship every couple days relatively soon after the design is successfully finalized so that they can launch a crap ton of them at mars to get a colony going (Which I think is dumb, figure out how to build a workable version of o'neill cylinders and focus on mining space and then moving heavy industry off planet into space to solve the pollution issue on planet.) In the near term there will be pretty heavy demand from starlink, as that platform is basically required to economically launch their larger, next gen satellites.
  - jakobson14 3y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-case-against-mars-colonisation https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-cas... Humanity, from now until the sun explodes, will only get one chance to check mars for life. Right now the first samples are still waiting in tubes to get picked up from the martian surface. Musks' solution to the problem of contamination is to fire as many rockets as he can as fast as he can and hope to contaminate mars completely before anyone can red tape his ass. We owe it to all future generations to make sure he never lands a single payload before the question can be thoroughly resolved.
    - snapplebobapple 3y ago
      Yes, lets retard human technological expansion to answer a fairly irrelevant question in the grand scheme of things, that seems prudent... While I think going down the gravity well on mars is stupid, it's stupid because there's no need to trap people there when we should be able to more closely approximate earth gravity and generate nearly limitless surface area while having access to more useful minerals with o'neill cylinders (or something along those lines). Ironically, this could go a long way to fixing the earth... Also, it's really boring whether mars has/had bacterial life or not. If it does, then it rejigs the math on everywhere else, making it way more probable we find it elsewhere as well. That leaves us with it's either not there, so it doesn't matter, or it is there and it's probably in a lot of other spots too, so we'll find it on the next one, once we're actually established in space and multi planetary and the cost of not going to said next one isn't as high as holding the whole species up from getting off this rock into space permanently. The only situation where it actually matters is the very slim chance it's both there and deadly to humans in a way that makes it likely the astronauts make it back to earth and contaminate us all before it kills them.
- soperj 3y ago
  If they can get reuse going and it's cheaper than flying a falcon 9, I think there's a lot of commercial utility. If you can put a 110 ton satellite into orbit for the current price of an 8 ton satellite, then you really don't have to worry about weight as much, which means you can use cheaper parts to build your satellite.
- stevage 3y ago
  >What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform? It's a very interesting question. Much like StarLink, I suspect he has some other plan for monetising this lift capability. I don't buy the Moon base/Mars base plan at all.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    From my perspective Mars is kind of a fantasy. If we actually wanted or needed to go to Mars it'd have happened right after the first moon missions. It's very risky and the returns from a manned mission aren't really apparent

I don't think I've ever really doubted SpaceX could build such a rocket & eventually get it to work. But why? What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?

justrealist 3y ago
"No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody"
- failbuffer 3y ago
  Likewise, AT&T licensed the transistor to a small Japanese startup and told them it would probably only be useful for making a hearing aid. Fortunately, Sony had a knack for finding consumer applications of the device and humanity now makes quadrillions of transistors every year.
  - jjeaff 3y ago
    quadrillions (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillions) seemed a bit high to me, so I looked it up. it's actually about 2 Billion Trillion a year.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    That account does not appear to be true. From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf > In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325). (If that is not accessible, https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf says Sony "Concludes transistor license agreement with Western Electric" in October 1953. Western Electric was "the primary equipment manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953." A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review : > The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment. or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets." If you don't mind the high noise, the same 1952 issue includes a description of how you can build your own transistor radio, at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mo... . Hard to think Western Electric didn't know of any of these possibilities when discussing licensing with Sony.
    - failbuffer 3y ago
      Very thorough, thank you My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid." Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        The "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" link says it was Western Electric ("the manufacturing arm of the Bell System") who did the licensing, so it technically should have been WE executives, yes? That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology." What was Transistor Technology? "After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)." (An updated version of Transistor Technology is available from archive.org, in three volumes, eg, https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5... ) I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best. While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/mode/2up?q=sony https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem. I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes: "When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."
wolfram74 3y ago
The fact that musk has publicly called induced demand nonsense[0] despite his launch company relying on it is an irony I find delicious. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-musk-dismisses-induced-demand-a-phenomenon-first-witnessed-in-1866/?sh=583f5f6b7c5d https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-mus...
- zbrozek 3y ago
  It's just demand. We don't call increases in demand 'induced demand' unless we're trying to throw shade on the thing being demanded. The classical case is road use. Add lanes to highways and folks will utilize the capacity to do whatever it is that creates value to them. And we call it induced demand. If transit headways shrink and there are more riders because the service got better, we don't call it induced demand. Or if milk or eggs get cheaper and consumption of those items grows, it's also not induced demand.
yinser 3y ago
100-150 tons to orbit or the moon or Mars per starship. NASA is counting on it for lunar operations and Musk anticipates it being the Martian workhorse vehicle
ericd 3y ago
The utility is decreasing launch cost per kg by a couple orders of magnitude from the Falcon Heavy, which already represented a huge decrease from other launch systems. Decreasing costs to <1% of former costs seems likely to open a lot of new potential use cases.
fiftyfifty 3y ago
Well for one thing they’ll be able to launch 240 Starlink satellites at a time instead of just 60 on the Falcon 9. If they get to the point of reusing the booster and the second stage the cost savings with Starship will be significant over the Falcon 9.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
He's pretty clear, he expects to be building a startship every couple days relatively soon after the design is successfully finalized so that they can launch a crap ton of them at mars to get a colony going (Which I think is dumb, figure out how to build a workable version of o'neill cylinders and focus on mining space and then moving heavy industry off planet into space to solve the pollution issue on planet.) In the near term there will be pretty heavy demand from starlink, as that platform is basically required to economically launch their larger, next gen satellites.
- jakobson14 3y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-case-against-mars-colonisation https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-cas... Humanity, from now until the sun explodes, will only get one chance to check mars for life. Right now the first samples are still waiting in tubes to get picked up from the martian surface. Musks' solution to the problem of contamination is to fire as many rockets as he can as fast as he can and hope to contaminate mars completely before anyone can red tape his ass. We owe it to all future generations to make sure he never lands a single payload before the question can be thoroughly resolved.
  - snapplebobapple 3y ago
    Yes, lets retard human technological expansion to answer a fairly irrelevant question in the grand scheme of things, that seems prudent... While I think going down the gravity well on mars is stupid, it's stupid because there's no need to trap people there when we should be able to more closely approximate earth gravity and generate nearly limitless surface area while having access to more useful minerals with o'neill cylinders (or something along those lines). Ironically, this could go a long way to fixing the earth... Also, it's really boring whether mars has/had bacterial life or not. If it does, then it rejigs the math on everywhere else, making it way more probable we find it elsewhere as well. That leaves us with it's either not there, so it doesn't matter, or it is there and it's probably in a lot of other spots too, so we'll find it on the next one, once we're actually established in space and multi planetary and the cost of not going to said next one isn't as high as holding the whole species up from getting off this rock into space permanently. The only situation where it actually matters is the very slim chance it's both there and deadly to humans in a way that makes it likely the astronauts make it back to earth and contaminate us all before it kills them.
soperj 3y ago
If they can get reuse going and it's cheaper than flying a falcon 9, I think there's a lot of commercial utility. If you can put a 110 ton satellite into orbit for the current price of an 8 ton satellite, then you really don't have to worry about weight as much, which means you can use cheaper parts to build your satellite.
stevage 3y ago
>What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform? It's a very interesting question. Much like StarLink, I suspect he has some other plan for monetising this lift capability. I don't buy the Moon base/Mars base plan at all.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  From my perspective Mars is kind of a fantasy. If we actually wanted or needed to go to Mars it'd have happened right after the first moon missions. It's very risky and the returns from a manned mission aren't really apparent