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Not into space things and while this is cool i wonder what the great significance of this is? I see lots signaling how great this is and it's lost on me.

modeless 2y ago
Totally reasonable question. This is the first rocket ever that will (assuming further success) land in its entirety back on the launch pad, refuel, and go back to orbit the same day. Imagine that every time an airliner landed its cockpit was destroyed and you had to build a new one. A fully reusable airplane would be a transformational improvement. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here.
- nexus6 2y ago
  Is there such a need for a heavy launch rocket to launch routinely?
  - stetrain 2y ago
    If we want to establish long term bases on the Moon or Mars then yes, you need not only to send crew and habitation modules but ongoing supplies and equipment. Other use cases include launching and maintaining satellite constellations (Starling / Starshield), and launching singular large payloads like space telescopes. Even for smaller payloads, having both the first and second stages be reusable will reduce launch costs.
  - soperj 2y ago
    If satellites don't have to worry as much about weight constraints they can be made cheaper and quicker. Space missions can become more routine.
  - modeless 2y ago
    SpaceX already launches multiple times per month just to maintain Starlink. That will be much cheaper with Starship while enabling larger and more capable satellites. In fact, it's likely that one of the reasons SpaceX built Starlink is to create their own customer (and spur competitors) to plausibly use a significant fraction of Starship's capabilities. None existed at the time. In the near term the biggest reason to do multiple launches in a day will be orbital refueling. This is required for sending much, much larger payloads to the Moon and Mars. It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit, and obviously doing that as quickly as possible will be beneficial. NASA has already committed to this plan for Artemis.
    - dmurray 2y ago
      > It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit Require, or just make comfortable? Saturn V had the lift capacity of "only" a couple of Falcon Heavies, but was enough to carry astronauts, a car, a lunar lander with enough fuel to take off, and a command module.
      - modeless 2y ago
        We're not trying to do Apollo again. That would be easier, but we want to build a base this time. For that we need to send a lot more mass and it needs a lot more fuel.
      - fernandopj 2y ago
        Require. I answered that in this same subtopic.
      - thinkcontext 2y ago
        It's necessary because the Starship upper stage is so heavy. With a non reusable upper stage Starship's capacity would be enormous.
        SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
        Also because of the Lunar Gateway part of the plan. That pretty much just serves to waste fuel and funnel taxpayer money to the companies funding several congressmembers' election campaigns.
        dmurray 2y ago
        Is that true? SpaceX [0] gives the capacity as 150t reusable or 250t expendable, which is significant, but not enough to make one "enormous". If you really got order-of-magnitude gains from an expendable upper stage, it wouldn't be that exciting to have reusable rockets (which are more complex and still only fly one order of magnitude more times) in the first place. [0] https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/ https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Needs tend to develop once the means are there. 200 years ago, there was no need to use electricity. 100 years ago, there was no need to use a programming language. 30 years ago, there was no need for gigabit wireless Internet.
    - JacobThreeThree 2y ago
      Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Or perhaps earlier and closer to the heart of USA's citizens, 300 years ago, there was no need for rail lines and trains.
    - Animats 2y ago
      > Needs tend to develop once the means are there. Counterexample: space stations. We've had small manned space stations for decades now, but no real application for them. They're national prestige items only.
      - pixl97 2y ago
        Because launch cost is expensive. There are a lot of interesting things we can develop in zero gravity if the cost per pound was cheap.
      - rodiger 2y ago
        Not true! The ISS has functioned as an outpost for science- 3,000+ experiments and counting https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-research-results-contributing-to-deep-space-exploration/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-res...
        mrguyorama 2y ago
        And most importantly for anyone who cares about space the way Elon claims to: The ISS has done pretty much all the research we have on how humans survive in space.
  - edm0nd 2y ago
    Yes, obviously. It takes a heavy launch rocket to launch heavier things into space or missions, refueling, and to goto other planets.
  - fernandopj 2y ago
    It's a mandate for the next Artemis Mission. [1] The HLS (Spaceship) will need many refuels at orbit in order to get to the Moon and back. That means at least a dozen of fully-loaded Heavy launches to LEO just so each one of them can load a bit of fuel into HLS. The fuel in orbit can't sit idle for too long, or it deteriorates; I haven't found a limit on days for that, but a week-long launch window is considered a dealbreaker, we're talking a dozen Heavy launches in a week. It's either a short launch window, or at least 6 Starships built and launched twice in ~10 days. Don't count out on SpaceX building 12 Heavy Starships just for that Artemis mission. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III
  - dwaltrip 2y ago
    Yes, to do anything at all in the rest of the universe. We are insatiably curious explorers. The cosmos calls to us. Many are willing to do anything they can to answer that call.
  - childintime 2y ago
    Think about it, Starship enables a new era of military dominance in space. Military stuff is notoriously heavy. Besides, Elon is the first to go after supervillain territory.
- eunoia 2y ago
  > go again the same day. That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
  - modeless 2y ago
    It's a good question. The hurdle to clear for same-day reuse will be the heat shield. SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that Starship can reenter the atmosphere and remain fully intact. Doing it while sustaining near zero wear on the heat shield will be even harder. But I think it is not impossible, and I don't know of any other obvious blockers for same day reuse.
    - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
      Even if they can reuse the booster, it would be huge.
    - soperj 2y ago
      They'll likely reuse the booster on the same day well before the starship portion. No heat shield on the booster. Some starships will likely stay in space for a long time before returning.
      - thinkcontext 2y ago
        Musk has said they're aiming for hundreds of reuses for the booster and dozens for the ship.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      It's certainly looked fully intact when reaching ground. When they manage to do the intended landing it should be pretty unharmed, but I'm sure it will take a while before same-day reuse is attempted.
      - modeless 2y ago
- 7e 2y ago
  I think the economics of space are are much more likely to be transformed by something like https://www.longshotspace.com/ https://www.longshotspace.com/. Rockets are complex, still costly, and polluting.
  - modeless 2y ago
    The problem with space guns is you can't just yeet rocks into orbit. Any orbit that starts at the surface returns to the surface. So you still need a disposable rocket and avionics and fuel in every payload to change the orbit once out of the atmosphere. Only now the rocket needs to survive being literally shot out of a gun and then traveling at orbital velocity in atmosphere. That puts a pretty high floor on the cost per shot.
    - gridspy 2y ago
      Plus, your payload needs to be gun compatible. Not gonna put people in there.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Well, in WW2 we did manage to put working radar in artillery shells.
        itishappy 2y ago
        With vacuum tubes, no less!
      - 7e 2y ago
        Space is for robots.
        gridspy 2y ago
        While mass to orbit costs as much as it does now, sure. However later on it's gonna be great to have humans closer to the working robots to reduce the round-trip latency. They could also perform tasks robots are not suited for. Consider operators living on Mars and operating drones near their habitat each day. It would be like modern day drone operators and robot assisted surgery. Like remote operators of mega-trucks today. Those robots could interact with the operators - driving into a "garage" that can be pressurized for maintenance, upgrades or science. StarShip promises to reduce the cost of mass to orbit, making larger and more complex scientific, industrial and habitat options feasible.
- irthomasthomas 2y ago
  He's already spent the $3bn funding that was supposed to deliver the rocket to the moon and back.
  - vojtapol 2y ago
    That's just straight up not true. The $3bn were never meant to fund the entire project in the way you imply.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    That is totally false, but you are not the first person I have heard spread this roomer. You can go to the official govenrment website and look at the contract, it tells you exactly how much has been paid out and how much has not been. The money is getting out as SpaceX hits development milestones. I don't remember, exactly but about 2.x billion $ were paid out so far. The money is spread over 40ish milestones. And they have done like 25 or so by now. To get the full pay out, they will be required to land on the moon and take off again. Those are likely the last couple milestones.
tedsanders 2y ago
If you go to space, 90% of the cost is the rocket (depending on your accounting). If rockets can be made reusable, then you can drop costs by 90%, to first order. Cheaper rockets means cheaper satellites for internet and sensors and stuff.
- gridspy 2y ago
  Also, as mass to orbit gets cheaper you can build your payload more cheaply. Many compromises in complexity and material cost are made to minimize payload mass - we'll be able to launch cheap and heavy satellites and probes into orbit instead.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Cheaper rockets also mean cheaper payload in that the payloads don't have to be engineered to such high standards of reliability.
- dylan604 2y ago
  >(depending on your accounting). some of the best weasel words ever laid to print. Enron accounting vs PWC vs your mom using Quickbooks for her side hustle type of depending?
inglor_cz 2y ago
Rockets that are easily reusable make spaceflight a lot more logistically feasible, which should translate to a massive drop in costs. We are going to see massively increased space activity of all sorts. It is almost impossible to predict all consequences thereof.
soperj 2y ago
Price decreases significantly when you can reuse. This rocket is the same size as the ones that brought the Apollo missions to the moon, but will cost significantly less because they don't have to build one every time they launch it.
stetrain 2y ago
It's a rocket in the same ballpark as the Saturn V but where the two stages can both be recovered and re-used. SpaceX has demonstrated being able to fly the same rocket stage dozens of times with minimal refurbishment with their Falcon 9 family of rockets, but they still have to build and discard the second stage of the Falcon 9 for each launch. Starship scales that up in magnitude and adds second-stage reusability.
politician 2y ago
Consider ocean-going freight transportation: the container ships and the containers, the port facilities and the cranes. Now imagine that you were able to witness the very first round-trip sailing of such a container ship between two newly constructed still-experimental-and-heretofore-unproven ports. That'd be pretty cool right? The dawn of a new era in global trade. This is that, for space. (Booster as container ship, Orbital vehicle as container, launch tower as literal crane, launch complex as port)
- tialaramex 2y ago
  No. The ports were just expanding on an existing idea. I live in a port city, a thousand years ago middle ages people with much smaller boats used this same area to travel much shorter distances with fewer goods, today it has those cranes and a railway and moves inter-modal containers which have travelled from across the world, but it's just the same idea. Why is there a port here? Because of the unusual tidal pattern? Deep water? No. People. The other reasons are reasons to put the port here maybe in particular rather than a few miles in either direction, but the people are why there's a port. In 1024 there were thousands of people, today perhaps closer to half a million depending on how you count. There are no people on Luna, and no people on Mars. Visiting these barren rocks is like going up Everest. This damp rock is where our species was born and it's where it will die. It's not much, but its ours, and there's nothing like it within any plausible travel distance.
  - politician 2y ago
    People congregate around water sources. They don't just gather anywhere and make it happen. Ports are where they are due to the location having the necessary resources to support a population servicing a useful(1) industry. Similarly, moon or Mars bases will be where they are if the location has some useful(1) industry and sufficient resources to support a population servicing that industry. (1) 'Useful' to them, and not necessarily to everyone everywhere all the time.
MostlyStable 2y ago
This article [0] is a pretty good explainer for why Starship is such a big deal [0] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
- cylinder714 2y ago
  Brilliant article, and I neglected to bookmark it earlier, thank you.
- Animats 2y ago
  That's very good. And it's from 2021. Since then: - Starship is actually launching now - Boeing's reputation and credibility are in tatters - Trump won with heavy support from Musk. Expect a new head of NASA who is pro-Musk, and a cancellation of the Senate Launch System. On the other hand, it's not clear what a Moon base is good for. The ISS isn't very useful.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    > it's not clear what a Moon base is good for not letting China do it first
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Great article, but that's not what economists do. It's more what cost accountants do.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  > Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, So, for the cost of a single SLS launch ($4B), Starship would be able to put the mass of the battleship USS Texas into orbit. If the cost is reduced to $1M/launch, it could put the mass of four Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers into orbit.
Ductapemaster 2y ago
This is a great resource for why Starship is groundbreaking. So much so, it’s not even really comprehensive to the existing space-industrial complex. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
hadlock 2y ago
The big thing is that it dramatically reduces the cost of shipping things into space. Previously it was difficult to ship anything much larger than a compact car in to orbit. Now you can ship half of a basketball court into orbit, including all the vertical space. Until very very recently the roughly bus sized ISS modules were the largest habitable spaces we could ship to orbit (although Skylab in the 70s were basically repurposed Saturn V fuel tanks and also big) so now it's possible/probable we can ship 20 people to space, and have moderately comfortable accommodations for them. We can also ship mining equipment and substancially more supplies to the moon. Or mars. We went from using pack goats to 18 wheelers to ship stuff in space. The pack goat can ship a handful of hand made silk scarves and Faberge eggs over the Himalayas, but the 18 wheeler can deliver everything from socks and tshirts to cell phones and big screen tvs and trucks and lawn mowers. This really opens up space to more than the highest, most bleeding edge science and we might actually see more than 100 humans in space at the same time, in our lifetimes.
- taneq 2y ago
  Literally anything but the metric system, huh? ;)
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I applaud GP's effort at also avoiding shipping cliches like Olympic-size swimming pools.
    - hadlock 2y ago
      Well, basketball courts have a ~12m diameter 3-point line, and the inside of a starship is ~9m. Swimming pools are mostly rectangular from the outside observer's perspective.
    - taneq 2y ago
      It was classy, for sure. At least seven or eight hundred milliClass. :D
adamm255 2y ago
I’m with you. As landing the thing means nothing if you can’t get payloads to the destination. To get this thing to the moon would need like 20 refuelling flights to meet it on the way.
- dylan604 2y ago
  this just reads as very strange. "meet it on the way"? it's not like they can place these in an orbit that they can just pull up and stop to refuel like a highway gas station. the refueling "pod" would need to be moving at the same speed as the ship.
- cwillu 2y ago
  Hence the plan to have ten or so launches to refuel the top stage while it's still in orbit, a place that notably _is_ halfway to the moon's surface + the return trip to the earth. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_system_delta_v_map.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...
llboston 2y ago
Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right? This is exactly what Starship will do to space travel. Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality. Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space or nestled in a crater on the Moon. We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.
- deanCommie 2y ago
  See this is the kind of thing that's not helpful. It's just an outlandish overly optimistic mishmash of different concepts. Let's start with your analogy: > Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right? If you mean to use this to explain that what today costs X will in the future cost 0.01X, you're probably right. But a more accurate analogy is "Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn't cost $50,000,000, but only $500,000, unbelievable, right?" Same ratios, but deeply different implications. Today, the idea of setting up a continuously settled Mars colony - hell even a Moon colony - is unfeasibly expensive. It's ACHIEVABLE - we have the technology and the money - but it would cost an intolerable percentage of the GDP of the world to accomplish. A 100x reduction in costs means that it becomes a fundable endeavour that countries like the US could still justify. We're still talking about generations - maybe a century - away from someone being able to just pop over to Mars for a summer vacation, the way that a college student could to do today with an intercontinental flight. > Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality. For a very generous definition of soon and for a highly implausible definition of what a "cruise ship" is - it'll never be as accessible to the average person as earth cruise ships. Not as long as you keep using rockets. Regardless of reusability, there are realities of fixed FOSSIL FUEL costs associated with getting into gravity. They're not cheap, and they're not frivolous. If you want to be able get things into orbit as cheap as you're suggesting, you need to start investing in a space elevator, which noone is right now. > Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space Cool, yeah, that's true, that becomes more available. > or nestled in a crater on the Moon. ..why? > We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity. And the final cherry on the cake. Humanity becoming inter-planetary is important on a macro scale. And trying to go further and further into space will INCENTIVISE research into these concepts. But in no way does getting to orbit cheaper make it easier to figure out any of these concepts. There's nothing we can do from Mars or on the way to Mars in terms of this science that we can't do from Earth.
shirro 2y ago
Honestly of very little significance to the typical individual. It isn't going to pay my bills or provide for my kids. It does nothing for people suffering war and genocide. Nothing for poverty, access to health care and education. Nothing for the biggest threats facing our civilization. It is still a remarkable technical achievement and I think the people who have designed and built these systems deserve some celebration for their accomplishments. It has the potential to lower costs and increase the capacity for greater commercialization, militarization and exploration of space. I think the extent you see that as something positive is subject to your faith in humanity. I tend to think technologies connection to social progress is a three steps forward, two steps back sort of thing. We have certainly made gains in my lifetime but we could have gone a lot further.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Your posts reminds me of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. It had many fits and starts, and people thought it would take decades to pay off. But just as soon as it was completed, it changed everything overnight. This is what Musk is doing.
  - shirro 2y ago
    SpaceX are not building a transcontinental railroad. I think that is a false equivalence. An operational Starship should be very impactful on space exploration but it won't be shipping cattle back from Mars. There is a difficult to discern line between reality and bullshit that Musk likes to blur. The "vision" stuff is there to hype up the troops and investors. You don't need to swallow it to appreciate the technology. It isn't narrow minded to reject stuff that just doesn't add up. The scales, time, distance, energy, investment involved in space colonization are incomparable to settling the USA. The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      SpaceX is building a railroad to the solar system. It will change everything, and quickly. > The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier. That's what people thought before the railroad was completed. See "Nothing Like It In the World" by Stephen Ambrose: https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1863-1869/dp/0743203178/ https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1...
ANewFormation 2y ago
Cost. Ballparking from memory (because I'm on mobile) sending something to space on the Space Shuttle cost something like $40k/kg. The Falcon brought that down to 2500, and the Falcon Heavy down to just over $1k/kg. So nearly two orders of magnitude cheaper, but you still can't really do anything too fun in space at $1k/kg. The goal with Starship (and its rapid reuse) is to bring costs down another couple of orders of magnitude to where we could eventually even see costs drop into the single digit per kg. And at that point suddenly space becomes open to things that sound difficult to even fantasize about today, like colonizing Mars, taking suborbital flights to get from Texas to Hong Kong, or setting up industrial systems on the Moon, to say nothing of space tourism that doesn't start with the prerequisite of being a billionaire.
caekislove 2y ago
Yeah we should call this whole thing off and spend the money on solving poverty! /s

modeless 2y ago

Totally reasonable question. This is the first rocket ever that will (assuming further success) land in its entirety back on the launch pad, refuel, and go back to orbit the same day. Imagine that every time an airliner landed its cockpit was destroyed and you had to build a new one. A fully reusable airplane would be a transformational improvement. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here.

nexus6 2y ago
Is there such a need for a heavy launch rocket to launch routinely?
- stetrain 2y ago
  If we want to establish long term bases on the Moon or Mars then yes, you need not only to send crew and habitation modules but ongoing supplies and equipment. Other use cases include launching and maintaining satellite constellations (Starling / Starshield), and launching singular large payloads like space telescopes. Even for smaller payloads, having both the first and second stages be reusable will reduce launch costs.
- soperj 2y ago
  If satellites don't have to worry as much about weight constraints they can be made cheaper and quicker. Space missions can become more routine.
- modeless 2y ago
  SpaceX already launches multiple times per month just to maintain Starlink. That will be much cheaper with Starship while enabling larger and more capable satellites. In fact, it's likely that one of the reasons SpaceX built Starlink is to create their own customer (and spur competitors) to plausibly use a significant fraction of Starship's capabilities. None existed at the time. In the near term the biggest reason to do multiple launches in a day will be orbital refueling. This is required for sending much, much larger payloads to the Moon and Mars. It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit, and obviously doing that as quickly as possible will be beneficial. NASA has already committed to this plan for Artemis.
  - dmurray 2y ago
    > It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit Require, or just make comfortable? Saturn V had the lift capacity of "only" a couple of Falcon Heavies, but was enough to carry astronauts, a car, a lunar lander with enough fuel to take off, and a command module.
    - modeless 2y ago
      We're not trying to do Apollo again. That would be easier, but we want to build a base this time. For that we need to send a lot more mass and it needs a lot more fuel.
    - fernandopj 2y ago
      Require. I answered that in this same subtopic.
    - thinkcontext 2y ago
      It's necessary because the Starship upper stage is so heavy. With a non reusable upper stage Starship's capacity would be enormous.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
        Also because of the Lunar Gateway part of the plan. That pretty much just serves to waste fuel and funnel taxpayer money to the companies funding several congressmembers' election campaigns.
      - dmurray 2y ago
        Is that true? SpaceX [0] gives the capacity as 150t reusable or 250t expendable, which is significant, but not enough to make one "enormous". If you really got order-of-magnitude gains from an expendable upper stage, it wouldn't be that exciting to have reusable rockets (which are more complex and still only fly one order of magnitude more times) in the first place. [0] https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/ https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Needs tend to develop once the means are there. 200 years ago, there was no need to use electricity. 100 years ago, there was no need to use a programming language. 30 years ago, there was no need for gigabit wireless Internet.
  - JacobThreeThree 2y ago
    Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Or perhaps earlier and closer to the heart of USA's citizens, 300 years ago, there was no need for rail lines and trains.
  - Animats 2y ago
    > Needs tend to develop once the means are there. Counterexample: space stations. We've had small manned space stations for decades now, but no real application for them. They're national prestige items only.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      Because launch cost is expensive. There are a lot of interesting things we can develop in zero gravity if the cost per pound was cheap.
    - rodiger 2y ago
      Not true! The ISS has functioned as an outpost for science- 3,000+ experiments and counting https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-research-results-contributing-to-deep-space-exploration/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-res...
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        And most importantly for anyone who cares about space the way Elon claims to: The ISS has done pretty much all the research we have on how humans survive in space.
- edm0nd 2y ago
  Yes, obviously. It takes a heavy launch rocket to launch heavier things into space or missions, refueling, and to goto other planets.
- fernandopj 2y ago
  It's a mandate for the next Artemis Mission. [1] The HLS (Spaceship) will need many refuels at orbit in order to get to the Moon and back. That means at least a dozen of fully-loaded Heavy launches to LEO just so each one of them can load a bit of fuel into HLS. The fuel in orbit can't sit idle for too long, or it deteriorates; I haven't found a limit on days for that, but a week-long launch window is considered a dealbreaker, we're talking a dozen Heavy launches in a week. It's either a short launch window, or at least 6 Starships built and launched twice in ~10 days. Don't count out on SpaceX building 12 Heavy Starships just for that Artemis mission. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III
- dwaltrip 2y ago
  Yes, to do anything at all in the rest of the universe. We are insatiably curious explorers. The cosmos calls to us. Many are willing to do anything they can to answer that call.
- childintime 2y ago
  Think about it, Starship enables a new era of military dominance in space. Military stuff is notoriously heavy. Besides, Elon is the first to go after supervillain territory.
eunoia 2y ago
> go again the same day. That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
- modeless 2y ago
  It's a good question. The hurdle to clear for same-day reuse will be the heat shield. SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that Starship can reenter the atmosphere and remain fully intact. Doing it while sustaining near zero wear on the heat shield will be even harder. But I think it is not impossible, and I don't know of any other obvious blockers for same day reuse.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    Even if they can reuse the booster, it would be huge.
  - soperj 2y ago
    They'll likely reuse the booster on the same day well before the starship portion. No heat shield on the booster. Some starships will likely stay in space for a long time before returning.
    - thinkcontext 2y ago
      Musk has said they're aiming for hundreds of reuses for the booster and dozens for the ship.
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    It's certainly looked fully intact when reaching ground. When they manage to do the intended landing it should be pretty unharmed, but I'm sure it will take a while before same-day reuse is attempted.
    - modeless 2y ago
7e 2y ago
I think the economics of space are are much more likely to be transformed by something like https://www.longshotspace.com/ https://www.longshotspace.com/. Rockets are complex, still costly, and polluting.
- modeless 2y ago
  The problem with space guns is you can't just yeet rocks into orbit. Any orbit that starts at the surface returns to the surface. So you still need a disposable rocket and avionics and fuel in every payload to change the orbit once out of the atmosphere. Only now the rocket needs to survive being literally shot out of a gun and then traveling at orbital velocity in atmosphere. That puts a pretty high floor on the cost per shot.
  - gridspy 2y ago
    Plus, your payload needs to be gun compatible. Not gonna put people in there.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Well, in WW2 we did manage to put working radar in artillery shells.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        With vacuum tubes, no less!
    - 7e 2y ago
      Space is for robots.
      - gridspy 2y ago
        While mass to orbit costs as much as it does now, sure. However later on it's gonna be great to have humans closer to the working robots to reduce the round-trip latency. They could also perform tasks robots are not suited for. Consider operators living on Mars and operating drones near their habitat each day. It would be like modern day drone operators and robot assisted surgery. Like remote operators of mega-trucks today. Those robots could interact with the operators - driving into a "garage" that can be pressurized for maintenance, upgrades or science. StarShip promises to reduce the cost of mass to orbit, making larger and more complex scientific, industrial and habitat options feasible.
irthomasthomas 2y ago
He's already spent the $3bn funding that was supposed to deliver the rocket to the moon and back.
- vojtapol 2y ago
  That's just straight up not true. The $3bn were never meant to fund the entire project in the way you imply.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  That is totally false, but you are not the first person I have heard spread this roomer. You can go to the official govenrment website and look at the contract, it tells you exactly how much has been paid out and how much has not been. The money is getting out as SpaceX hits development milestones. I don't remember, exactly but about 2.x billion $ were paid out so far. The money is spread over 40ish milestones. And they have done like 25 or so by now. To get the full pay out, they will be required to land on the moon and take off again. Those are likely the last couple milestones.

tedsanders 2y ago

If you go to space, 90% of the cost is the rocket (depending on your accounting). If rockets can be made reusable, then you can drop costs by 90%, to first order. Cheaper rockets means cheaper satellites for internet and sensors and stuff.

gridspy 2y ago
Also, as mass to orbit gets cheaper you can build your payload more cheaply. Many compromises in complexity and material cost are made to minimize payload mass - we'll be able to launch cheap and heavy satellites and probes into orbit instead.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Cheaper rockets also mean cheaper payload in that the payloads don't have to be engineered to such high standards of reliability.
dylan604 2y ago
>(depending on your accounting). some of the best weasel words ever laid to print. Enron accounting vs PWC vs your mom using Quickbooks for her side hustle type of depending?

inglor_cz 2y ago

Rockets that are easily reusable make spaceflight a lot more logistically feasible, which should translate to a massive drop in costs. We are going to see massively increased space activity of all sorts. It is almost impossible to predict all consequences thereof.

soperj 2y ago

Price decreases significantly when you can reuse. This rocket is the same size as the ones that brought the Apollo missions to the moon, but will cost significantly less because they don't have to build one every time they launch it.

stetrain 2y ago

It's a rocket in the same ballpark as the Saturn V but where the two stages can both be recovered and re-used. SpaceX has demonstrated being able to fly the same rocket stage dozens of times with minimal refurbishment with their Falcon 9 family of rockets, but they still have to build and discard the second stage of the Falcon 9 for each launch. Starship scales that up in magnitude and adds second-stage reusability.

politician 2y ago

Consider ocean-going freight transportation: the container ships and the containers, the port facilities and the cranes. Now imagine that you were able to witness the very first round-trip sailing of such a container ship between two newly constructed still-experimental-and-heretofore-unproven ports. That'd be pretty cool right? The dawn of a new era in global trade. This is that, for space. (Booster as container ship, Orbital vehicle as container, launch tower as literal crane, launch complex as port)

tialaramex 2y ago
No. The ports were just expanding on an existing idea. I live in a port city, a thousand years ago middle ages people with much smaller boats used this same area to travel much shorter distances with fewer goods, today it has those cranes and a railway and moves inter-modal containers which have travelled from across the world, but it's just the same idea. Why is there a port here? Because of the unusual tidal pattern? Deep water? No. People. The other reasons are reasons to put the port here maybe in particular rather than a few miles in either direction, but the people are why there's a port. In 1024 there were thousands of people, today perhaps closer to half a million depending on how you count. There are no people on Luna, and no people on Mars. Visiting these barren rocks is like going up Everest. This damp rock is where our species was born and it's where it will die. It's not much, but its ours, and there's nothing like it within any plausible travel distance.
- politician 2y ago
  People congregate around water sources. They don't just gather anywhere and make it happen. Ports are where they are due to the location having the necessary resources to support a population servicing a useful(1) industry. Similarly, moon or Mars bases will be where they are if the location has some useful(1) industry and sufficient resources to support a population servicing that industry. (1) 'Useful' to them, and not necessarily to everyone everywhere all the time.

MostlyStable 2y ago

This article [0] is a pretty good explainer for why Starship is such a big deal [0] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

cylinder714 2y ago
Brilliant article, and I neglected to bookmark it earlier, thank you.
Animats 2y ago
That's very good. And it's from 2021. Since then: - Starship is actually launching now - Boeing's reputation and credibility are in tatters - Trump won with heavy support from Musk. Expect a new head of NASA who is pro-Musk, and a cancellation of the Senate Launch System. On the other hand, it's not clear what a Moon base is good for. The ISS isn't very useful.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  > it's not clear what a Moon base is good for not letting China do it first
WalterBright 2y ago
> We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Great article, but that's not what economists do. It's more what cost accountants do.
pfdietz 2y ago
> Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, So, for the cost of a single SLS launch ($4B), Starship would be able to put the mass of the battleship USS Texas into orbit. If the cost is reduced to $1M/launch, it could put the mass of four Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers into orbit.

Ductapemaster 2y ago

This is a great resource for why Starship is groundbreaking. So much so, it’s not even really comprehensive to the existing space-industrial complex. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

hadlock 2y ago

The big thing is that it dramatically reduces the cost of shipping things into space. Previously it was difficult to ship anything much larger than a compact car in to orbit. Now you can ship half of a basketball court into orbit, including all the vertical space. Until very very recently the roughly bus sized ISS modules were the largest habitable spaces we could ship to orbit (although Skylab in the 70s were basically repurposed Saturn V fuel tanks and also big) so now it's possible/probable we can ship 20 people to space, and have moderately comfortable accommodations for them. We can also ship mining equipment and substancially more supplies to the moon. Or mars. We went from using pack goats to 18 wheelers to ship stuff in space. The pack goat can ship a handful of hand made silk scarves and Faberge eggs over the Himalayas, but the 18 wheeler can deliver everything from socks and tshirts to cell phones and big screen tvs and trucks and lawn mowers. This really opens up space to more than the highest, most bleeding edge science and we might actually see more than 100 humans in space at the same time, in our lifetimes.

taneq 2y ago
Literally anything but the metric system, huh? ;)
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I applaud GP's effort at also avoiding shipping cliches like Olympic-size swimming pools.
  - hadlock 2y ago
    Well, basketball courts have a ~12m diameter 3-point line, and the inside of a starship is ~9m. Swimming pools are mostly rectangular from the outside observer's perspective.
  - taneq 2y ago
    It was classy, for sure. At least seven or eight hundred milliClass. :D

adamm255 2y ago

I’m with you. As landing the thing means nothing if you can’t get payloads to the destination. To get this thing to the moon would need like 20 refuelling flights to meet it on the way.

dylan604 2y ago
this just reads as very strange. "meet it on the way"? it's not like they can place these in an orbit that they can just pull up and stop to refuel like a highway gas station. the refueling "pod" would need to be moving at the same speed as the ship.
cwillu 2y ago
Hence the plan to have ten or so launches to refuel the top stage while it's still in orbit, a place that notably _is_ halfway to the moon's surface + the return trip to the earth. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_system_delta_v_map.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...

llboston 2y ago

Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right? This is exactly what Starship will do to space travel. Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality. Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space or nestled in a crater on the Moon. We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.

deanCommie 2y ago
See this is the kind of thing that's not helpful. It's just an outlandish overly optimistic mishmash of different concepts. Let's start with your analogy: > Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right? If you mean to use this to explain that what today costs X will in the future cost 0.01X, you're probably right. But a more accurate analogy is "Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn't cost $50,000,000, but only $500,000, unbelievable, right?" Same ratios, but deeply different implications. Today, the idea of setting up a continuously settled Mars colony - hell even a Moon colony - is unfeasibly expensive. It's ACHIEVABLE - we have the technology and the money - but it would cost an intolerable percentage of the GDP of the world to accomplish. A 100x reduction in costs means that it becomes a fundable endeavour that countries like the US could still justify. We're still talking about generations - maybe a century - away from someone being able to just pop over to Mars for a summer vacation, the way that a college student could to do today with an intercontinental flight. > Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality. For a very generous definition of soon and for a highly implausible definition of what a "cruise ship" is - it'll never be as accessible to the average person as earth cruise ships. Not as long as you keep using rockets. Regardless of reusability, there are realities of fixed FOSSIL FUEL costs associated with getting into gravity. They're not cheap, and they're not frivolous. If you want to be able get things into orbit as cheap as you're suggesting, you need to start investing in a space elevator, which noone is right now. > Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space Cool, yeah, that's true, that becomes more available. > or nestled in a crater on the Moon. ..why? > We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity. And the final cherry on the cake. Humanity becoming inter-planetary is important on a macro scale. And trying to go further and further into space will INCENTIVISE research into these concepts. But in no way does getting to orbit cheaper make it easier to figure out any of these concepts. There's nothing we can do from Mars or on the way to Mars in terms of this science that we can't do from Earth.

shirro 2y ago

Honestly of very little significance to the typical individual. It isn't going to pay my bills or provide for my kids. It does nothing for people suffering war and genocide. Nothing for poverty, access to health care and education. Nothing for the biggest threats facing our civilization. It is still a remarkable technical achievement and I think the people who have designed and built these systems deserve some celebration for their accomplishments. It has the potential to lower costs and increase the capacity for greater commercialization, militarization and exploration of space. I think the extent you see that as something positive is subject to your faith in humanity. I tend to think technologies connection to social progress is a three steps forward, two steps back sort of thing. We have certainly made gains in my lifetime but we could have gone a lot further.

WalterBright 2y ago
Your posts reminds me of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. It had many fits and starts, and people thought it would take decades to pay off. But just as soon as it was completed, it changed everything overnight. This is what Musk is doing.
- shirro 2y ago
  SpaceX are not building a transcontinental railroad. I think that is a false equivalence. An operational Starship should be very impactful on space exploration but it won't be shipping cattle back from Mars. There is a difficult to discern line between reality and bullshit that Musk likes to blur. The "vision" stuff is there to hype up the troops and investors. You don't need to swallow it to appreciate the technology. It isn't narrow minded to reject stuff that just doesn't add up. The scales, time, distance, energy, investment involved in space colonization are incomparable to settling the USA. The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    SpaceX is building a railroad to the solar system. It will change everything, and quickly. > The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier. That's what people thought before the railroad was completed. See "Nothing Like It In the World" by Stephen Ambrose: https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1863-1869/dp/0743203178/ https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1...

ANewFormation 2y ago

Cost. Ballparking from memory (because I'm on mobile) sending something to space on the Space Shuttle cost something like $40k/kg. The Falcon brought that down to 2500, and the Falcon Heavy down to just over $1k/kg. So nearly two orders of magnitude cheaper, but you still can't really do anything too fun in space at $1k/kg. The goal with Starship (and its rapid reuse) is to bring costs down another couple of orders of magnitude to where we could eventually even see costs drop into the single digit per kg. And at that point suddenly space becomes open to things that sound difficult to even fantasize about today, like colonizing Mars, taking suborbital flights to get from Texas to Hong Kong, or setting up industrial systems on the Moon, to say nothing of space tourism that doesn't start with the prerequisite of being a billionaire.

caekislove 2y ago

Yeah we should call this whole thing off and spend the money on solving poverty! /s