5 ms·

you still thinking the mars line is anything more than musk's latest FSD or hyperloop distraction/hype story?

londons_explore 1y ago
If you didn't want to go to mars, you wouldn't be making starship at all. It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.
- awongh 1y ago
  Isn't there a degree of market creation that happens when there are big price drops though? What sort of technologies become enabled when putting things in space gets cheaper?
- simiones 1y ago
  The first goals of Starship are putting a human on the Moon (this is what the US government is paying SpaceX for) and decreasing cost-to-orbit (primarily for SpaceX's own use with Starlink). Falcon 9 simply can't fly to the moon, it doesn't have the power. Also, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still too expensive for Starlink to make a good profit. Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
  - stevage 1y ago
    That's a great summary.
  - mr_toad 1y ago
    Everything about the design of Starship, from the fuel choice, to the size, aerobraking capability, to vertical landing system says this is a rocket designed to land and return from Mars. It’s a terrible design for anything else, because it can barely get beyond LEO without in-orbit refuelling. None of the competing rockets (e.g. New Glenn) resemble Starship in the slightest, because none of them are intended to fly to Mars.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      There are several other use cases that Starship is well optimized for. Not surprisingly it's also fairly optimal for building large LEO constellations, It's a little bit large for the current Starlink satellite size, but if the Starlink satellites get significantly larger and more capable, Starship will be fairly optimal. Given SpaceX's business, it seems safe to assume that Starlink was a design goal with at least a similar priority to the Mars goal. Another use case it'd work fabulous for would be a LEO space hotel business. Finally, it's also a great rocket for any use case that involves returning large masses, even if the return is from higher than LEO. Yes, it'll be a thirsty beast requiring many refuelling trips, but the tyranny of the rocket equation makes it hard to do any better. If you want to return dozens of tons from the moon or elsewhere you'd be hard pressed to do better than Starship.
      - DennisP 1y ago
        Any large fully-reusable rocket basically fits those goals, but methane might not be ideal for the second stage, if you don't intend to refuel on Mars. Hydrogen has better ISP, so your mass budget isn't so tight. It's also six times better as a coolant, so if you want to try SpaceX's original plan of using evaporative cooling in place of heavy tiles, it'll work better. Blue Origin and Stoke Space both use a methane first stage, hydrogen second stage. (Stoke Space has planned evaporative cooling from the start, Blue Origin put in a patent application for their version later.) Then again, Musk is also big on reusing components as much as possible, so he might have opposed multiple fuels on principle.
        bryanlarsen 1y ago
        > Hydrogen has better ISP, so your mass budget isn't so tight. You need much larger tanks, so the mass advantage is pretty much completely eliminated. Hydrogen engines generally have much lower thrust for a given size too. Falcon9 or Starship style staging is infeasible with a hydrogen second stage. Rockets that use hydrogen for their second stage separate a lot higher and faster than Falcon9/Starship to make up for this reduced thrust. This makes Falcon/Starship style 1st stage recovery impossible. Hydrogen would be great for a 3rd stage. If you want it to be recoverable, design a third stage that fits within the Starship enclosure. This would be a fabulous way to do small BEO missions without requiring a whole bunch of refueling.
  - mlindner 1y ago
    Starship was started long before the US government spent any money on it. And Starlink is what pays for Starship development.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    He was named after the title of the ruler of Mars in a novel written by Wernher von Braun, so ultimate goal for him has to be Mars. Settlement on Mars is out of one gravity well into another, so it's not clear if it's the best first location of a extraterrestrial human territory - Moon might be easier and more reasonable. So the camp is split between Moon and Mars, and Musk has to be on Mars.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      Mars is a desolate wasteland, and the Moon is an airless desolate wasteland. There is zero chance of building a self-sustaining base on either within the next fifty years, and probably within the next century. It's not a freight problem, it's an ecology problem. Designing a life support system that is stable and self-correcting and isn't in danger of running out of some essential raw material or element isn't just an unsolved problem, it's a barely considered problem. Ironically - or perhaps not - it would be much easier to create a self-sustaining population of machines on Mars and/or the Moon than any project that relies on incredibly complex and messy human biochemistry.
      - tuna74 1y ago
        You should read the novel Evolution but Stephen Baxter and find out what happens next with Mars.
        KineticLensman 1y ago
        IIRC in Evolution civilisation collapses in the near future after some massive volcanic event and the few survivors revert to feral hunting apart from a few cryogenically preserved soldiers who all get very depressed about the situation and then die. Or something like that. Not sure how this is relevant to Mars.
        ceejayoz 1y ago
        Baxter's fiction tends to take the line of "what we think of as humans will be very short lived on a galactic time scale, but life will be around".
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    You could do it with F9 it would just be assembled in orbit over multiple launches like one of the original moon mission profiles instead of single launch (that's also essentially the profile of the Moon and Mars missions in Starship except you're 'just' refueling the ships instead of assembling a larger vessel).
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - ben_w 1y ago
    I don't trust Musk very much these days, but one of the few ways I feel I can still trust him is that he seems to be genuinely and consistently motivated by Mars. Falcon Heavy put a car in a trans-Martian orbit, and Musk has been about Starship-like things going to Mars before SpaceX managed to launch the Falcon 1, let alone them getting a chance to bid for the return-to-Moon mission. But the Artemis mission isn't really about doing things sensibly, it's about pork barrels. You can tell by looking at the wild disparity between the vehicles, where there's this complex process to put a handful of astronauts on a space station and transfer them to a landing vehicle… but the Lunar Gateway is smaller than Starship, and I think small enough you could fit all the parts of the Lunar Gateway inside the payload volume of one Starship. If the USA wants to go to the moon for its own sake, they could do it cheapest by just paying SpaceX for a ride, not all the other contractors.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Really enjoyed the contrast in this submissions two months ago, which characterizes SpaceX as very popular, but for bigger deeper launches, ULA still bring the go to name. https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-key-spacex-competitor-says-he-has-not-been-impacted-by-musks-ties-to-trump/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-key-spacex-competito... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43640049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43640049
- LorenPechtel 1y ago
  If Starship is basically fully reusable (he's insisting on absolutely no refurbishment, that could be relaxed a bit) then the cost per flight for Starship would be well below the cost per flight for Falcon 9. As you say, there's little price elasticity, the cost savings would go in his pocket.

If you didn't want to go to mars, you wouldn't be making starship at all. It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.

awongh 1y ago
Isn't there a degree of market creation that happens when there are big price drops though? What sort of technologies become enabled when putting things in space gets cheaper?
simiones 1y ago
The first goals of Starship are putting a human on the Moon (this is what the US government is paying SpaceX for) and decreasing cost-to-orbit (primarily for SpaceX's own use with Starlink). Falcon 9 simply can't fly to the moon, it doesn't have the power. Also, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still too expensive for Starlink to make a good profit. Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
- stevage 1y ago
  That's a great summary.
- mr_toad 1y ago
  Everything about the design of Starship, from the fuel choice, to the size, aerobraking capability, to vertical landing system says this is a rocket designed to land and return from Mars. It’s a terrible design for anything else, because it can barely get beyond LEO without in-orbit refuelling. None of the competing rockets (e.g. New Glenn) resemble Starship in the slightest, because none of them are intended to fly to Mars.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    There are several other use cases that Starship is well optimized for. Not surprisingly it's also fairly optimal for building large LEO constellations, It's a little bit large for the current Starlink satellite size, but if the Starlink satellites get significantly larger and more capable, Starship will be fairly optimal. Given SpaceX's business, it seems safe to assume that Starlink was a design goal with at least a similar priority to the Mars goal. Another use case it'd work fabulous for would be a LEO space hotel business. Finally, it's also a great rocket for any use case that involves returning large masses, even if the return is from higher than LEO. Yes, it'll be a thirsty beast requiring many refuelling trips, but the tyranny of the rocket equation makes it hard to do any better. If you want to return dozens of tons from the moon or elsewhere you'd be hard pressed to do better than Starship.
    - DennisP 1y ago
      Any large fully-reusable rocket basically fits those goals, but methane might not be ideal for the second stage, if you don't intend to refuel on Mars. Hydrogen has better ISP, so your mass budget isn't so tight. It's also six times better as a coolant, so if you want to try SpaceX's original plan of using evaporative cooling in place of heavy tiles, it'll work better. Blue Origin and Stoke Space both use a methane first stage, hydrogen second stage. (Stoke Space has planned evaporative cooling from the start, Blue Origin put in a patent application for their version later.) Then again, Musk is also big on reusing components as much as possible, so he might have opposed multiple fuels on principle.
      - bryanlarsen 1y ago
        > Hydrogen has better ISP, so your mass budget isn't so tight. You need much larger tanks, so the mass advantage is pretty much completely eliminated. Hydrogen engines generally have much lower thrust for a given size too. Falcon9 or Starship style staging is infeasible with a hydrogen second stage. Rockets that use hydrogen for their second stage separate a lot higher and faster than Falcon9/Starship to make up for this reduced thrust. This makes Falcon/Starship style 1st stage recovery impossible. Hydrogen would be great for a 3rd stage. If you want it to be recoverable, design a third stage that fits within the Starship enclosure. This would be a fabulous way to do small BEO missions without requiring a whole bunch of refueling.
- mlindner 1y ago
  Starship was started long before the US government spent any money on it. And Starlink is what pays for Starship development.
- numpad0 1y ago
  He was named after the title of the ruler of Mars in a novel written by Wernher von Braun, so ultimate goal for him has to be Mars. Settlement on Mars is out of one gravity well into another, so it's not clear if it's the best first location of a extraterrestrial human territory - Moon might be easier and more reasonable. So the camp is split between Moon and Mars, and Musk has to be on Mars.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    Mars is a desolate wasteland, and the Moon is an airless desolate wasteland. There is zero chance of building a self-sustaining base on either within the next fifty years, and probably within the next century. It's not a freight problem, it's an ecology problem. Designing a life support system that is stable and self-correcting and isn't in danger of running out of some essential raw material or element isn't just an unsolved problem, it's a barely considered problem. Ironically - or perhaps not - it would be much easier to create a self-sustaining population of machines on Mars and/or the Moon than any project that relies on incredibly complex and messy human biochemistry.
    - tuna74 1y ago
      You should read the novel Evolution but Stephen Baxter and find out what happens next with Mars.
      - KineticLensman 1y ago
        IIRC in Evolution civilisation collapses in the near future after some massive volcanic event and the few survivors revert to feral hunting apart from a few cryogenically preserved soldiers who all get very depressed about the situation and then die. Or something like that. Not sure how this is relevant to Mars.
        ceejayoz 1y ago
        Baxter's fiction tends to take the line of "what we think of as humans will be very short lived on a galactic time scale, but life will be around".
- rtkwe 1y ago
  You could do it with F9 it would just be assembled in orbit over multiple launches like one of the original moon mission profiles instead of single launch (that's also essentially the profile of the Moon and Mars missions in Starship except you're 'just' refueling the ships instead of assembling a larger vessel).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ben_w 1y ago
  I don't trust Musk very much these days, but one of the few ways I feel I can still trust him is that he seems to be genuinely and consistently motivated by Mars. Falcon Heavy put a car in a trans-Martian orbit, and Musk has been about Starship-like things going to Mars before SpaceX managed to launch the Falcon 1, let alone them getting a chance to bid for the return-to-Moon mission. But the Artemis mission isn't really about doing things sensibly, it's about pork barrels. You can tell by looking at the wild disparity between the vehicles, where there's this complex process to put a handful of astronauts on a space station and transfer them to a landing vehicle… but the Lunar Gateway is smaller than Starship, and I think small enough you could fit all the parts of the Lunar Gateway inside the payload volume of one Starship. If the USA wants to go to the moon for its own sake, they could do it cheapest by just paying SpaceX for a ride, not all the other contractors.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
Really enjoyed the contrast in this submissions two months ago, which characterizes SpaceX as very popular, but for bigger deeper launches, ULA still bring the go to name. https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-key-spacex-competitor-says-he-has-not-been-impacted-by-musks-ties-to-trump/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-key-spacex-competito... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43640049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43640049
LorenPechtel 1y ago
If Starship is basically fully reusable (he's insisting on absolutely no refurbishment, that could be relaxed a bit) then the cost per flight for Starship would be well below the cost per flight for Falcon 9. As you say, there's little price elasticity, the cost savings would go in his pocket.