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> Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows Again, this is from 2021, one of tho

> Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows Again, this is from 2021, one of those set of launches was to be last year. And it was to be 1,000 starships bound for Mars to meet that goal. Starship is impressive but we need to be realistic about these numbers. We haven’t even technically had a launch with any payload. Additionally they claim that within 2 years of the Artemis mission we could get 1,000 people on the moon (though say this isn’t going to happen at least). Starship will make Starlink V2 feasible and dozens if not hundreds of missions that would otherwise never be possible. But getting 1 million people to Mars (or even 1,000 people to the Moon) is just fantasy. I will gladly eat crow but none of these capabilities that exist on paper have actually been demonstrated that are necessary to meet these goals. SapceX is the best there is and likely will get to Mars. Just not how Musk describes it.

xupybd 2y ago
He is a salesman that always over promises but still does some cool stuff.
- DoingIsLearning 2y ago
  > still does some cool stuff. Arguably he tweets about it. For the most part the 'doing' of the cool stuff is happening due to the Engineering and Manufacturing teams who are putting in sweat equity on that vision. Judging by the erratic and deteriorating public displays in the past few years I am not even sure he does anything on the strategic level anymore.
  - signatoremo 2y ago
    Without Musk there would not be the breathtaking booster catching happening today, according to his biography: "Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth. It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it." A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?" After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?" https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942/photo/1 https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942/phot...
  - credit_guy 2y ago
    If that's the case, what is the issue with the Engineering and Manufacturing teams of Boeing, Blue Origin, Arianne, etc, etc? The role of a leader is to end deadlocks. All these companies have plenty of talented people, and they often have huge egos, personal agendas, various constraints, some lack resources, some squander them, etc. A leader understands where the problems are and decides. The "buck stops with him". He doesn't do the work himself, but being able to say "you are right, and you are not" is hugely consequential. By comparison, Jeff Bezos seems totally incompetent to lead a space company. Why? Not because he cannot be a good leader, he obviously can. But because he did not put enough personal energy to understand in details what the problems (technical and otherwise) at Blue Origin are, so he can eliminate the deadlocks that make that company unproductive.
tw04 2y ago
>Just not how Musk describes it. Every innovative mission needs someone pushing people to do the impossible. That being said, every company trying to accomplish the impossible needs an adult in the room to ground that visionary. In the case of Space-X, there's an adult in the room. Elon's direct input at Space-X almost set the entire Starship project back a year by insisting on trying a concrete launch pad that all of his engineers told him would fail (and it did). After that failure he appeared to get so distracted by Twitter that Shotwell could point the engineers in a more effective direction. In the case of Tesla, there unfortunately is not. Elon's direct input resulted in canning a low-cost model in favor of a "robo-taxi" that is 100% dependent on full self driving using nothing but cameras. That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. An adult in the room would've told him to either stick with the low-cost model to compete with incoming Chinese imports, or use Lidar so that there's a viable self-driving vehicle that can be sold sometime in the next decade...
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. He goes on stage and says a bunch of bullshit (IMO he commits securities fraud) and then his executives generally do what they think is correct for the company while making sure he feels placated. It seems to sort of work out well enough. It may be that this layer of management is getting weaker.
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    >The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942 https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9. (If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> we need to be realistic about these numbers We need to be realistic about timelines. Specifically, the timelines promulgated by Musk versus SpaceX. (Not an easy task, I know, in part because the latter is more sparing with such predictions.) But we should also be clear eyed about emerging capabilities. Barring a major engineering challenge in in-orbit propellant transfer, Starship's fundamental design looks solid. V1 probably won't get a million people to Mars. But V1 Falcon couldn't be re-used twenty-odd times. The author is correct: national space agencies are copy pasting legacy missions onto paradigm-changing platforms. The closest exception is NASA: Artemis is overly complicated for a single Moon landing, but its use of Starship on the Moon and for in-orbit re-fuelling is a bet-the-house play that could open a real space economy in propellant alone. (First, storage and shuttling. Later, manufacture.) To the degree Artemis might get canned, it's because Lockheed can't manufacture an Apollo-era heat shield [1], Bechtel can't build a non-catching tower [2] and NASA refuses to be mean to them. [1] https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-report-highlights-issues-with-orion-heat-shield/ https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-report-highligh... [2] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pd...
- kibwen 2y ago
  > Barring a major engineering challenge in in-orbit propellant transfer We already have that challenge. Last I checked, SpaceX was claiming it would take five Starship launches to store enough fuel in the depot to perform one lunar mission (which is innately strange considering Apollo did it in one launch on a less powerful rocket, but that's not even the point here). But according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission. That's not exactly inspiring, especially given what it implies about the number of launches it would take to get to Mars and back. To solve the cryogenic boil-off issue we might need to switch to different fuels entirely, which would necessitate new engines.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > SpaceX was claiming it would take five Starship launches to store enough fuel in the depot to perform one lunar mission (which is innately strange considering Apollo did it in one launch on a less powerful rocket, but that's not even the point here) Apollo was disposable. Starship is not. Apollo could thus max out payload at launch, which Starship cannot do design or fuel budget wise. The Apollo paradigm was for literal moon shots. Starship and Artemis are more about building infrastructure. > according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission That is not NASA's position. Folks at NASA and SpaceX disagree around the boil-off rates. Everyone thought about it. We just don't know what it is. We should have a preliminary figure next year, and a final-ish one within two or three years (after the first vehicle's boil-off characteristics are optimized). But yes. There are major engineering challenges in-orbit propellant transfer could raise that could require going back to the drawing board. Hence why I flagged it. Given that's something humanity has never really done, it seems like a fair risk to take given the upsides. (Note, too, that in present designs Starship must function as a launch vehicle, spacecraft and fuel tank. That's not required long term. Well-insulated orbiting fuel depots start making sense rather quickly if you have <$1000/kg launch costs.)
grecy 2y ago
> I will gladly eat crow but none of these capabilities that exist on paper have actually been demonstrated that are necessary to meet these goals. Literally every expert said that about landing the first stage of Falcon 9. Then they said it about reusing it more than 10 times. Then they said it about having good internet from a mega constellation of LEO stas. Then they said it about using stainless steel for starship. Then they said it about having a full-flow staged combustion cycle engine Then they said it about catching the booster with chopsticks. Now they're saying it about... Yes, Elon is wildly optimistic about timelines. I have to laugh at his quote "At SpaceX we make the impossible merely late". You can't deny SpaceX are absolutely doing what everyone said was impossible, and they're continuing to push forward. You'd have to be nuts to bet against them. UPDATE: It was only a couple of months ago the CEO of United Launch Alliance called out SpaceX for showing what he claimed was a "partially assembled engine" [1]. It was a fully-functional engine that test fired [2] Even the CEO of their biggest competitor, and ostensibly the second best rocket company on earth can not fathom what SpaceX are doing. [1] https://x.com/torybruno/status/1819819208827404616 https://x.com/torybruno/status/1819819208827404616 [2] https://x.com/Gwynne_Shotwell/status/1821674726885924923?t=vT35PMKOMiUfWg6hun2f_A https://x.com/Gwynne_Shotwell/status/1821674726885924923?t=v...
- kemotep 2y ago
  But the timeline for Mars is slipping already. This very article says Starship is capable of doing the Mars mission as Musk described which is using the next 10 launch windows to deliver 1 million tons to Mars. That would have involved launching 1,000 Starships last year. They have not done *1* launch with 100 tons of payload, the capacity of this rocket on paper. They will absolutely with this design get to Mars. But the realistic timeline is within the next 20 years, and only a few hundred tons. It will be a monumental achievement that will be immortalized for the rest of humanity. But that scenario is 1/1000th of what Musk describes. Starship is an incredible program but it is still rocket science not rocket fantasy. Please don’t think being realistic about getting 1,000 Starships to Mars in the next two years means I think Starship is a failure.
  - fallingknife 2y ago

xupybd 2y ago

He is a salesman that always over promises but still does some cool stuff.

DoingIsLearning 2y ago
> still does some cool stuff. Arguably he tweets about it. For the most part the 'doing' of the cool stuff is happening due to the Engineering and Manufacturing teams who are putting in sweat equity on that vision. Judging by the erratic and deteriorating public displays in the past few years I am not even sure he does anything on the strategic level anymore.
- signatoremo 2y ago
  Without Musk there would not be the breathtaking booster catching happening today, according to his biography: "Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth. It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it." A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?" After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?" https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942/photo/1 https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942/phot...
- credit_guy 2y ago
  If that's the case, what is the issue with the Engineering and Manufacturing teams of Boeing, Blue Origin, Arianne, etc, etc? The role of a leader is to end deadlocks. All these companies have plenty of talented people, and they often have huge egos, personal agendas, various constraints, some lack resources, some squander them, etc. A leader understands where the problems are and decides. The "buck stops with him". He doesn't do the work himself, but being able to say "you are right, and you are not" is hugely consequential. By comparison, Jeff Bezos seems totally incompetent to lead a space company. Why? Not because he cannot be a good leader, he obviously can. But because he did not put enough personal energy to understand in details what the problems (technical and otherwise) at Blue Origin are, so he can eliminate the deadlocks that make that company unproductive.

tw04 2y ago

>Just not how Musk describes it. Every innovative mission needs someone pushing people to do the impossible. That being said, every company trying to accomplish the impossible needs an adult in the room to ground that visionary. In the case of Space-X, there's an adult in the room. Elon's direct input at Space-X almost set the entire Starship project back a year by insisting on trying a concrete launch pad that all of his engineers told him would fail (and it did). After that failure he appeared to get so distracted by Twitter that Shotwell could point the engineers in a more effective direction. In the case of Tesla, there unfortunately is not. Elon's direct input resulted in canning a low-cost model in favor of a "robo-taxi" that is 100% dependent on full self driving using nothing but cameras. That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. An adult in the room would've told him to either stick with the low-cost model to compete with incoming Chinese imports, or use Lidar so that there's a viable self-driving vehicle that can be sold sometime in the next decade...

pclmulqdq 2y ago
The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. He goes on stage and says a bunch of bullshit (IMO he commits securities fraud) and then his executives generally do what they think is correct for the company while making sure he feels placated. It seems to sort of work out well enough. It may be that this layer of management is getting weaker.
- TMWNN 2y ago
  >The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942 https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9. (If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> we need to be realistic about these numbers We need to be realistic about timelines. Specifically, the timelines promulgated by Musk versus SpaceX. (Not an easy task, I know, in part because the latter is more sparing with such predictions.) But we should also be clear eyed about emerging capabilities. Barring a major engineering challenge in in-orbit propellant transfer, Starship's fundamental design looks solid. V1 probably won't get a million people to Mars. But V1 Falcon couldn't be re-used twenty-odd times. The author is correct: national space agencies are copy pasting legacy missions onto paradigm-changing platforms. The closest exception is NASA: Artemis is overly complicated for a single Moon landing, but its use of Starship on the Moon and for in-orbit re-fuelling is a bet-the-house play that could open a real space economy in propellant alone. (First, storage and shuttling. Later, manufacture.) To the degree Artemis might get canned, it's because Lockheed can't manufacture an Apollo-era heat shield [1], Bechtel can't build a non-catching tower [2] and NASA refuses to be mean to them. [1] https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-report-highlights-issues-with-orion-heat-shield/ https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-report-highligh... [2] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pd...

kibwen 2y ago
> Barring a major engineering challenge in in-orbit propellant transfer We already have that challenge. Last I checked, SpaceX was claiming it would take five Starship launches to store enough fuel in the depot to perform one lunar mission (which is innately strange considering Apollo did it in one launch on a less powerful rocket, but that's not even the point here). But according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission. That's not exactly inspiring, especially given what it implies about the number of launches it would take to get to Mars and back. To solve the cryogenic boil-off issue we might need to switch to different fuels entirely, which would necessitate new engines.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > SpaceX was claiming it would take five Starship launches to store enough fuel in the depot to perform one lunar mission (which is innately strange considering Apollo did it in one launch on a less powerful rocket, but that's not even the point here) Apollo was disposable. Starship is not. Apollo could thus max out payload at launch, which Starship cannot do design or fuel budget wise. The Apollo paradigm was for literal moon shots. Starship and Artemis are more about building infrastructure. > according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission That is not NASA's position. Folks at NASA and SpaceX disagree around the boil-off rates. Everyone thought about it. We just don't know what it is. We should have a preliminary figure next year, and a final-ish one within two or three years (after the first vehicle's boil-off characteristics are optimized). But yes. There are major engineering challenges in-orbit propellant transfer could raise that could require going back to the drawing board. Hence why I flagged it. Given that's something humanity has never really done, it seems like a fair risk to take given the upsides. (Note, too, that in present designs Starship must function as a launch vehicle, spacecraft and fuel tank. That's not required long term. Well-insulated orbiting fuel depots start making sense rather quickly if you have <$1000/kg launch costs.)

grecy 2y ago

> I will gladly eat crow but none of these capabilities that exist on paper have actually been demonstrated that are necessary to meet these goals. Literally every expert said that about landing the first stage of Falcon 9. Then they said it about reusing it more than 10 times. Then they said it about having good internet from a mega constellation of LEO stas. Then they said it about using stainless steel for starship. Then they said it about having a full-flow staged combustion cycle engine Then they said it about catching the booster with chopsticks. Now they're saying it about... Yes, Elon is wildly optimistic about timelines. I have to laugh at his quote "At SpaceX we make the impossible merely late". You can't deny SpaceX are absolutely doing what everyone said was impossible, and they're continuing to push forward. You'd have to be nuts to bet against them. UPDATE: It was only a couple of months ago the CEO of United Launch Alliance called out SpaceX for showing what he claimed was a "partially assembled engine" [1]. It was a fully-functional engine that test fired [2] Even the CEO of their biggest competitor, and ostensibly the second best rocket company on earth can not fathom what SpaceX are doing. [1] https://x.com/torybruno/status/1819819208827404616 https://x.com/torybruno/status/1819819208827404616 [2] https://x.com/Gwynne_Shotwell/status/1821674726885924923?t=vT35PMKOMiUfWg6hun2f_A https://x.com/Gwynne_Shotwell/status/1821674726885924923?t=v...

kemotep 2y ago
But the timeline for Mars is slipping already. This very article says Starship is capable of doing the Mars mission as Musk described which is using the next 10 launch windows to deliver 1 million tons to Mars. That would have involved launching 1,000 Starships last year. They have not done *1* launch with 100 tons of payload, the capacity of this rocket on paper. They will absolutely with this design get to Mars. But the realistic timeline is within the next 20 years, and only a few hundred tons. It will be a monumental achievement that will be immortalized for the rest of humanity. But that scenario is 1/1000th of what Musk describes. Starship is an incredible program but it is still rocket science not rocket fantasy. Please don’t think being realistic about getting 1,000 Starships to Mars in the next two years means I think Starship is a failure.
- fallingknife 2y ago