19 ms·

I've never understood this, because the economics of hourly launches just don't make sense. There's not nearly enough demand, even assuming they drive prices do

I've never understood this, because the economics of hourly launches just don't make sense. There's not nearly enough demand, even assuming they drive prices down and induce demand. Today, there are about ~1,100 metric tons of satellites launched into orbit annually. Starship is aiming for $100/kilogram cost per kilo to orbit. Let's get absolutely wild and assume that Starship takes over the entire world's launches. It would earn what, 1,100 tons * 1000 kilos/ton * $100/kilo = $110,000,000. $110M is... not a tremendous amount of money. It's definitely not enough to be building a fleet of rockets up. Only about 20% of satellite costs are due to launch (and that was found in a pre-SpaceX era), so it's not likely satellite builders are going to optimize solely on cost. It's not an order of magnitude cost savings for builders. So SpaceX will have to find other means to compete -- reliability, capability, etc. The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference. And that's not even counting the differences in payload capacity. Add several whole integer multipliers to account for that. For starship to need an "hours-scale" relaunch time, you'd need something like 50x+ the number of launches we currently have AND every launch in the nation to be on the platform. It's a cool engineering target, but it's total nonsense for now.

martyvis 2y ago
I think they have a "build it and they will come" attitude. While their own Mars goals will need 100s if not 1000s of launches they also see new customers that would want launch and even recover much larger payloads than what are feasible today
- whaaaaat 2y ago
  I think that's a reasonable attitude to a point, but like, it doesn't scale infinitely. Build it and it will come to 50-100x today's launch capacity? And Mars is still a laughable pipedream. Doing 100s of launches will cost SpaceX so much more than they are making selling launches to the rest of the world, it simply makes no sense. And like, I'm a space enthusiast. I think we should be out mining asteroids and setting up space living quarters. I just... hourly starship launches don't make any sort of logical sense. What they do make sense as is a marketing gimmick for Elon to get on stage to appeal to emotions of investors and nerds online. It's a gorgeous dream! I want it to be! But it's just a clever emotional appeal to get you to not think too hard or too critically.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    The asteroid belt is even further than Mars so you need rapid reusability for that too.
    - mgiampapa 2y ago
      The asteroid belt doesn't have nearly the gravity well to send payloads back from, but it seems much harder to make propellant there in situ.
      - whaaaaat 2y ago
        Some asteroids are water rich, some asteroids are mineral rich. Many mineral rich asteroids appear to be 'hydrated', meaning that among the rocks they contain ice. Solar power will be more effective on an asteroid in NEO than on the surface of Mars, but gravity will be lower. I don't know that we, as a species, really know which will be harder. They'll require different technologies, but the raw materials exist in both places sufficient to manufacture fuel.
        mgiampapa 2y ago
        We have a lot of experience with chemical processes like fractional distilling that will take a lot more work in micro-gravity. Yeah there are tradeoffs, but my hunch is the surface of Mars will be a lot more familiar.
    - whaaaaat 2y ago
      You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to get to meaningful asteroids, and in fact many fantastic candidate asteroids come much, much closer than Mars.
      - mulmen 2y ago
        They don’t come as close as LEO though so you still need rapid reusability.
  - 2y ago
dark_star 2y ago
It's not nonsense. To refuel Starship to land on the Moon like the NASA HLS program proposes [1], it will take 16 Starship Tanker flights [2][3]. So 16 launch, transfer propellant, land, refuel and refill propellant on the ground, and repeat. For Mars launches, which is what Starship is mainly designed for, it's also 8-16 Tanker flights to fully fuel a Mars Starship. But SpaceX anticipates sending fleets of ships each synodic period (2 years), when Earth and Mars are closest. For a fleet of 10 Starships, that would be 10 launches of the Mars Starships, then 160 launches of Tanker Starships to fuel them. You might debate whether Mars colonization is possible or desirable, but Starship and the high launch rate is designed for refueling Moon and Mars landing vehicles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Planned_launch_and_landing_profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Planned_launch... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS
- whaaaaat 2y ago
  I think you are being taken for a ride, but hey, if SpaceX does this in the next 15 years come find me.
why_at 2y ago
I think a big part of the motivation to have many launches within hours is because in order for Starship to deliver anything beyond low earth orbit it will need refueling by many other Starships acting as tankers. This means that for one mission to the Moon for example you might need >10 Starships to launch, and it's better to have them closer together so that you don't have fuel in space being heated by the sun for days. It remains to be seen if they will actually reuse a booster on the same day, but there is a use case for it.
- avmich 2y ago
  > it's better to have them closer together so that you don't have fuel in space being heated by the sun for days. A hydrogen stage for Soviet N-1 rocket was designed so that it would be used near the Moon. The shelf life was going to be about 11 days (I think astronautix.com has this datapoint). Starship is bigger, and methane/LOX is hotter than liquid hydrogen. Will it be storable for a month?..
  - avmich 2y ago
    http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html
- HPsquared 2y ago
  I wonder how much improvement a "sunshade" type thing could make in reducing boil-off. EDIT: or even just orienting the heat shield itself towards the sun, it probably has a fair amount of insulation ability at normal temperatures too.
mulmen 2y ago
Starship is intended to be human-rated. It’s possible to get anywhere on Earth in an hour. One possible use of Starship is to compete with long-haul aircraft routes. Rapid reusability becomes very important in that situation. For Mars and Moon missions multiple Starships have to launch to refuel the Starship that will actually take the trip. Like, a dozen or more. Again, rapid reusability of the booster is appealing in this situation.
- dlisboa 2y ago
  The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes, if ever. Maybe in the US because Musk is the government now. Just risk aversion will inhibit it, plus the economics for it will never make sense either. Just because Musk says some things doesn’t mean they should (or will) exist. His predictions are mostly marketing.
  - JacobThreeThree 2y ago
    Just setup oil-rig style landing terminals in the various oceans. He's already landing Starships in oceans. People today pay $15,000+ USD per seat now for 1st class, and it still takes them 18+ hours.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      1st class is 18h of extreme comfort. Starship would be a few hours of extreme discomfort. It's very likely much of the target audience wouldn't even survive the accelerations if they were allowed to attempt it.
      - hparadiz 2y ago
        It's 60 minutes to any point on the planet. 100 people fitting comfortably with a lot more room than a current airliner. The G forces are meant for humans. Very different considerations. No need to bring food or have bathrooms when the flight is that quick.
avmich 2y ago
Bill Gates once complained that independent developers, other software companies aren't keen about building software for Microsoft's modern graphical environment, Windows, so he had to put his own engineers to work on that. Legend then goes that it's how Office application suit was born :) . With SpaceX Musk surely understands he's aiming way higher than the capacity of the modern space launch market. Your, whaaaaat, reasoning was - and unfortunately even now sometimes is - the standard among the industry professionals. That's why rather early on Starlink - the project which was going to employ Falcon's capacities - was born. With Starship we see some obvious uses for launches - orbital tankers - because Starship doesn't really fly anywhere from LEO without refueling, Solar system probes - we probably going to see many, space telescopes, unmanned satellites of many kinds, manned orbital stations. I hope a Moon base - or several - would be another customer of Starship launches. Elon was talking about picking some slice of the world market of cargo and passenger transportation. Maybe we'll see some other uses which we don't see today. The point, roughly is that, yes, here we have "build and they'll come", and SpaceX will help them to come in all possible ways. So I disagree that it's total nonsense, it might be actually a very good idea.
- Narishma 2y ago
  > Legend then goes that it's how Office application suit was born :) . Legend indeed. All the main Office applications either started on the Mac and/or were bought from third-party developers.
  - avmich 2y ago
    This is a legend :) some apps were running under DOS even before porting to Windows... But still a legend no worse than some others :) .
    - Narishma 2y ago
      No Office application came from DOS to Windows. They either came from the Mac (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) or directly started as Windows apps (Access). Word for DOS was a completely different application with no relation to the Mac and Windows versions.
chroma 2y ago
Doesn't this argument prove too much? Long ago, compute was extremely expensive. The cost of compute went down, but people made tons of money selling more and more computers. The same was true for most technologies when they were first invented. Yes, satellites are expensive compared to launches, but that's because launch costs are so high and launches are so infrequent. If you're spending the money to launch something into space, you'll also spend lots of money making sure that satellite is as reliable and as capable as possible. For example: The James Webb Space Telescope required a complex origami folding mechanism, but it could fit unfolded in Starship's payload bay. Removing that constraint would have saved the program hundreds of millions of dollars. If the cost of something goes down, people buy more of it. This is basic economics, and it would be foolish to assume it doesn't apply to space launches. There are quite a few potential markets that would become viable if launch costs went down: space tourism, rapid point-to-point Earth transport (this would be especially useful for the military), cheap and rapid deployment of new satellite constellations, single module space stations, cheaper satellites due to fewer mass constraints, orbital radio telescopes, beamed power, space infrastructure such as asteroid harvesting, and so on. I doubt all of these things will exist in the future, but a 20x reduction in launch costs would make quite a few of them profitable. Just as how people 50 years ago couldn't have predicted all the future uses of cheap, fast computers, we can't predict all the uses of cheap, fast launches. What we can predict is that lower costs will increase demand.
- metadat 2y ago
  More satellites == more space debris pollution, not really something I'm interested in supporting. Eventually we won't be able to safely get off this rock if there's too much space trash orbiting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris
  - Titan2189 2y ago
    This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
    - 2y ago
wffurr 2y ago
The 80% cost of satellites is in large part optimizing them for infrequent high cost launches. Bringing the cost of launch down means we can launch a lot more stuff and that stuff doesn't have to built to the same quality as e.g. the James Webb or even an Intelsat GEO satellite. This kind of launch capacity is going to change the entire economics of building stuff for space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... has some interesting writing on this.
fastball 2y ago
$100/kg is the cost, not what they are charging. The only missions that will be launched at cost are SpaceX's own payloads (Starlink satellites / Mars colony shenanigans).
JacobThreeThree 2y ago
>I've never understood this, because the economics of hourly launches just don't make sense. There's not nearly enough demand, even assuming they drive prices down and induce demand. There's no demand for travel that would take you to the other side of the earth in 1-2 hours?
mullingitover 2y ago
> The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference There's an interesting post[1] on r/enoughmuskspam drawing some conclusions (based on well documented history) that SpaceX is just an extension of the 80s Star Wars/SDI program. Little easter eggs like the fact that the Falcon rockets are named after the DARPA FALCON Project, Musk's ties to directors of the SDI program, etc. If the real goals of the SDI program are to be realized, i.e. winning WWIII by knocking down all the enemy ballistic nukes, the US would have to put a lot of mass into orbit. You'd need some kind of cheap heavy launch system to put Brilliant Pebbles[2] up there, or as we're calling it these days, Starshield[3]. I think this is 100% the plan, and Musk has gone so hard right because the Heritage Foundation was the original proponent of SDI/"Let's start and win WWIII" and they're still the power players behind the republican party. (Fun fact, SDI and Brilliant Pebbles were heavily pushed by Dr. Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.) The stuff about populating Mars is just an exciting story to tell the rubes so they don't go asking questions about your massive space-based weapons platform. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1gdx11x/elons_full_history_with_russia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1gdx11x/elo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
- askvictor 2y ago
  As if I needed more things to worry about...
- chroma 2y ago
  Your claims are simply incorrect. First, Musk has been talking about Mars since before he founded SpaceX. Other people such as Adeo Ressi, Robert Zubrin, and Reid Hoffman have reported Musk talking about colonizing Mars as early as 2001. It was only after that that he went to Russia to try and buy old rockets, thinking that landing a greenhouse on Mars would excite people about space again. Second, Falcon 1 was named 18 months before the DARPA FALCON project existed. And the contract that SpaceX was awarded was less than half a million dollars. Nine other companies got similar contracts, including AirLaunch and Orbital Sciences Corp. Only Andrews Space, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman got phase two contracts. Third, the Starshield program is almost entirely a product of the Biden administration, and its capabilities are nothing like SDI. Current Starshield satellites are similar to that of Starlink, but owned and operated by the US government. They have better encryption and probably some observational capabilities, but they are incapable of intercepting ICBMs. An SDI program would require technologies very different from what SpaceX has been developing. For example: SpaceX uses liquid fuels, while interceptors would have to be solid boosters. And finally, SDI is unworkable for several reasons. It takes time to launch a satellite constellation, and during that time an adversary would be incentivized to launch their nukes (since it becomes a use it or lose it situation). Or they would build more anti-satellite weapons and ground based lasers, allowing them to take out enough interceptors to launch a devastating nuclear exchange. And even if the system remained intact, it would do nothing to stop hypersonics, bombers, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and nukes being smuggled into the country. People realized this long ago, which is why (in addition to cost) SDI was cancelled. The only way your model of the world could be correct is if Musk was a brilliant con man who has spent the past quarter century risking his fortune to develop reusable rockets for the sole purpose of building a system that everyone knows would not protect the US in a global thermonuclear war. And he's somehow kept this secret from the public this entire time, even though he's leaked many other embarrassing secrets. Musk is far from the sanest person around, but such a claim stretches credulity to the breaking point.
steveoscaro 2y ago
They’ll need something like 8 or 10 tanker launches to fully refuel an orbiting starship that will then depart Earth orbit. That’s the initial use case for quick turnaround at the launch pad.

martyvis 2y ago

I think they have a "build it and they will come" attitude. While their own Mars goals will need 100s if not 1000s of launches they also see new customers that would want launch and even recover much larger payloads than what are feasible today

whaaaaat 2y ago
I think that's a reasonable attitude to a point, but like, it doesn't scale infinitely. Build it and it will come to 50-100x today's launch capacity? And Mars is still a laughable pipedream. Doing 100s of launches will cost SpaceX so much more than they are making selling launches to the rest of the world, it simply makes no sense. And like, I'm a space enthusiast. I think we should be out mining asteroids and setting up space living quarters. I just... hourly starship launches don't make any sort of logical sense. What they do make sense as is a marketing gimmick for Elon to get on stage to appeal to emotions of investors and nerds online. It's a gorgeous dream! I want it to be! But it's just a clever emotional appeal to get you to not think too hard or too critically.
- mulmen 2y ago
  The asteroid belt is even further than Mars so you need rapid reusability for that too.
  - mgiampapa 2y ago
    The asteroid belt doesn't have nearly the gravity well to send payloads back from, but it seems much harder to make propellant there in situ.
    - whaaaaat 2y ago
      Some asteroids are water rich, some asteroids are mineral rich. Many mineral rich asteroids appear to be 'hydrated', meaning that among the rocks they contain ice. Solar power will be more effective on an asteroid in NEO than on the surface of Mars, but gravity will be lower. I don't know that we, as a species, really know which will be harder. They'll require different technologies, but the raw materials exist in both places sufficient to manufacture fuel.
      - mgiampapa 2y ago
        We have a lot of experience with chemical processes like fractional distilling that will take a lot more work in micro-gravity. Yeah there are tradeoffs, but my hunch is the surface of Mars will be a lot more familiar.
  - whaaaaat 2y ago
    You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to get to meaningful asteroids, and in fact many fantastic candidate asteroids come much, much closer than Mars.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      They don’t come as close as LEO though so you still need rapid reusability.
- 2y ago

dark_star 2y ago

It's not nonsense. To refuel Starship to land on the Moon like the NASA HLS program proposes [1], it will take 16 Starship Tanker flights [2][3]. So 16 launch, transfer propellant, land, refuel and refill propellant on the ground, and repeat. For Mars launches, which is what Starship is mainly designed for, it's also 8-16 Tanker flights to fully fuel a Mars Starship. But SpaceX anticipates sending fleets of ships each synodic period (2 years), when Earth and Mars are closest. For a fleet of 10 Starships, that would be 10 launches of the Mars Starships, then 160 launches of Tanker Starships to fuel them. You might debate whether Mars colonization is possible or desirable, but Starship and the high launch rate is designed for refueling Moon and Mars landing vehicles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Planned_launch_and_landing_profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Planned_launch... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

whaaaaat 2y ago
I think you are being taken for a ride, but hey, if SpaceX does this in the next 15 years come find me.

why_at 2y ago

I think a big part of the motivation to have many launches within hours is because in order for Starship to deliver anything beyond low earth orbit it will need refueling by many other Starships acting as tankers. This means that for one mission to the Moon for example you might need >10 Starships to launch, and it's better to have them closer together so that you don't have fuel in space being heated by the sun for days. It remains to be seen if they will actually reuse a booster on the same day, but there is a use case for it.

avmich 2y ago
> it's better to have them closer together so that you don't have fuel in space being heated by the sun for days. A hydrogen stage for Soviet N-1 rocket was designed so that it would be used near the Moon. The shelf life was going to be about 11 days (I think astronautix.com has this datapoint). Starship is bigger, and methane/LOX is hotter than liquid hydrogen. Will it be storable for a month?..
- avmich 2y ago
  http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html
HPsquared 2y ago
I wonder how much improvement a "sunshade" type thing could make in reducing boil-off. EDIT: or even just orienting the heat shield itself towards the sun, it probably has a fair amount of insulation ability at normal temperatures too.

mulmen 2y ago

Starship is intended to be human-rated. It’s possible to get anywhere on Earth in an hour. One possible use of Starship is to compete with long-haul aircraft routes. Rapid reusability becomes very important in that situation. For Mars and Moon missions multiple Starships have to launch to refuel the Starship that will actually take the trip. Like, a dozen or more. Again, rapid reusability of the booster is appealing in this situation.

dlisboa 2y ago
The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes, if ever. Maybe in the US because Musk is the government now. Just risk aversion will inhibit it, plus the economics for it will never make sense either. Just because Musk says some things doesn’t mean they should (or will) exist. His predictions are mostly marketing.
- JacobThreeThree 2y ago
  Just setup oil-rig style landing terminals in the various oceans. He's already landing Starships in oceans. People today pay $15,000+ USD per seat now for 1st class, and it still takes them 18+ hours.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    1st class is 18h of extreme comfort. Starship would be a few hours of extreme discomfort. It's very likely much of the target audience wouldn't even survive the accelerations if they were allowed to attempt it.
    - hparadiz 2y ago
      It's 60 minutes to any point on the planet. 100 people fitting comfortably with a lot more room than a current airliner. The G forces are meant for humans. Very different considerations. No need to bring food or have bathrooms when the flight is that quick.

avmich 2y ago

Bill Gates once complained that independent developers, other software companies aren't keen about building software for Microsoft's modern graphical environment, Windows, so he had to put his own engineers to work on that. Legend then goes that it's how Office application suit was born :) . With SpaceX Musk surely understands he's aiming way higher than the capacity of the modern space launch market. Your, whaaaaat, reasoning was - and unfortunately even now sometimes is - the standard among the industry professionals. That's why rather early on Starlink - the project which was going to employ Falcon's capacities - was born. With Starship we see some obvious uses for launches - orbital tankers - because Starship doesn't really fly anywhere from LEO without refueling, Solar system probes - we probably going to see many, space telescopes, unmanned satellites of many kinds, manned orbital stations. I hope a Moon base - or several - would be another customer of Starship launches. Elon was talking about picking some slice of the world market of cargo and passenger transportation. Maybe we'll see some other uses which we don't see today. The point, roughly is that, yes, here we have "build and they'll come", and SpaceX will help them to come in all possible ways. So I disagree that it's total nonsense, it might be actually a very good idea.

Narishma 2y ago
> Legend then goes that it's how Office application suit was born :) . Legend indeed. All the main Office applications either started on the Mac and/or were bought from third-party developers.
- avmich 2y ago
  This is a legend :) some apps were running under DOS even before porting to Windows... But still a legend no worse than some others :) .
  - Narishma 2y ago
    No Office application came from DOS to Windows. They either came from the Mac (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) or directly started as Windows apps (Access). Word for DOS was a completely different application with no relation to the Mac and Windows versions.

chroma 2y ago

Doesn't this argument prove too much? Long ago, compute was extremely expensive. The cost of compute went down, but people made tons of money selling more and more computers. The same was true for most technologies when they were first invented. Yes, satellites are expensive compared to launches, but that's because launch costs are so high and launches are so infrequent. If you're spending the money to launch something into space, you'll also spend lots of money making sure that satellite is as reliable and as capable as possible. For example: The James Webb Space Telescope required a complex origami folding mechanism, but it could fit unfolded in Starship's payload bay. Removing that constraint would have saved the program hundreds of millions of dollars. If the cost of something goes down, people buy more of it. This is basic economics, and it would be foolish to assume it doesn't apply to space launches. There are quite a few potential markets that would become viable if launch costs went down: space tourism, rapid point-to-point Earth transport (this would be especially useful for the military), cheap and rapid deployment of new satellite constellations, single module space stations, cheaper satellites due to fewer mass constraints, orbital radio telescopes, beamed power, space infrastructure such as asteroid harvesting, and so on. I doubt all of these things will exist in the future, but a 20x reduction in launch costs would make quite a few of them profitable. Just as how people 50 years ago couldn't have predicted all the future uses of cheap, fast computers, we can't predict all the uses of cheap, fast launches. What we can predict is that lower costs will increase demand.

metadat 2y ago
More satellites == more space debris pollution, not really something I'm interested in supporting. Eventually we won't be able to safely get off this rock if there's too much space trash orbiting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris
- Titan2189 2y ago
  This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
  - 2y ago

wffurr 2y ago

The 80% cost of satellites is in large part optimizing them for infrequent high cost launches. Bringing the cost of launch down means we can launch a lot more stuff and that stuff doesn't have to built to the same quality as e.g. the James Webb or even an Intelsat GEO satellite. This kind of launch capacity is going to change the entire economics of building stuff for space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... has some interesting writing on this.

fastball 2y ago

$100/kg is the cost, not what they are charging. The only missions that will be launched at cost are SpaceX's own payloads (Starlink satellites / Mars colony shenanigans).

JacobThreeThree 2y ago

>I've never understood this, because the economics of hourly launches just don't make sense. There's not nearly enough demand, even assuming they drive prices down and induce demand. There's no demand for travel that would take you to the other side of the earth in 1-2 hours?

mullingitover 2y ago

> The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference There's an interesting post[1] on r/enoughmuskspam drawing some conclusions (based on well documented history) that SpaceX is just an extension of the 80s Star Wars/SDI program. Little easter eggs like the fact that the Falcon rockets are named after the DARPA FALCON Project, Musk's ties to directors of the SDI program, etc. If the real goals of the SDI program are to be realized, i.e. winning WWIII by knocking down all the enemy ballistic nukes, the US would have to put a lot of mass into orbit. You'd need some kind of cheap heavy launch system to put Brilliant Pebbles[2] up there, or as we're calling it these days, Starshield[3]. I think this is 100% the plan, and Musk has gone so hard right because the Heritage Foundation was the original proponent of SDI/"Let's start and win WWIII" and they're still the power players behind the republican party. (Fun fact, SDI and Brilliant Pebbles were heavily pushed by Dr. Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.) The stuff about populating Mars is just an exciting story to tell the rubes so they don't go asking questions about your massive space-based weapons platform. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1gdx11x/elons_full_history_with_russia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1gdx11x/elo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

askvictor 2y ago
As if I needed more things to worry about...
chroma 2y ago
Your claims are simply incorrect. First, Musk has been talking about Mars since before he founded SpaceX. Other people such as Adeo Ressi, Robert Zubrin, and Reid Hoffman have reported Musk talking about colonizing Mars as early as 2001. It was only after that that he went to Russia to try and buy old rockets, thinking that landing a greenhouse on Mars would excite people about space again. Second, Falcon 1 was named 18 months before the DARPA FALCON project existed. And the contract that SpaceX was awarded was less than half a million dollars. Nine other companies got similar contracts, including AirLaunch and Orbital Sciences Corp. Only Andrews Space, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman got phase two contracts. Third, the Starshield program is almost entirely a product of the Biden administration, and its capabilities are nothing like SDI. Current Starshield satellites are similar to that of Starlink, but owned and operated by the US government. They have better encryption and probably some observational capabilities, but they are incapable of intercepting ICBMs. An SDI program would require technologies very different from what SpaceX has been developing. For example: SpaceX uses liquid fuels, while interceptors would have to be solid boosters. And finally, SDI is unworkable for several reasons. It takes time to launch a satellite constellation, and during that time an adversary would be incentivized to launch their nukes (since it becomes a use it or lose it situation). Or they would build more anti-satellite weapons and ground based lasers, allowing them to take out enough interceptors to launch a devastating nuclear exchange. And even if the system remained intact, it would do nothing to stop hypersonics, bombers, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and nukes being smuggled into the country. People realized this long ago, which is why (in addition to cost) SDI was cancelled. The only way your model of the world could be correct is if Musk was a brilliant con man who has spent the past quarter century risking his fortune to develop reusable rockets for the sole purpose of building a system that everyone knows would not protect the US in a global thermonuclear war. And he's somehow kept this secret from the public this entire time, even though he's leaked many other embarrassing secrets. Musk is far from the sanest person around, but such a claim stretches credulity to the breaking point.

steveoscaro 2y ago

They’ll need something like 8 or 10 tanker launches to fully refuel an orbiting starship that will then depart Earth orbit. That’s the initial use case for quick turnaround at the launch pad.