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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-underst

• 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.