SpaceX Has Starry-Eyed Ambitions for Its Starship (theatlantic.com) 108
Elon Musk has laid out an ambitious future for his spaceship project, the effort to deliver people to the moon and Mars. Marina Koren, writing for The Atlantic: The whole thing felt like an Apple event. The weeks of anticipation and breathless guesses from fans and critics. Onstage, the greatest-hits reel highlighting the company's beloved products over the years. A grand walk-through of the next product's features: the sleek design, the impressive specs, simulations of how it's going to work. A man with a mic, both salesman and visionary, looking out at the crowd. It is strange to compare the unveiling of a spaceship to the annual release of a smartphone, but this is the reality Elon Musk has conjured with SpaceX, and in a relatively short amount of time.
Musk gave a talk about SpaceX's prototype spaceship, Starship, on Saturday night in Boca Chica, Texas, a small coastal town not far from the U.S.-Mexico border, which SpaceX picked to house this ambitious project just a few years ago. The vessel, roomy enough to fit 100 passengers, will be shot into orbit by a massive, reusable rocket, which the company is also building and which could be as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo astronauts. Starship has multiple missions; it is supposed to shuttle people on swift journeys to different cities on Earth, as well as carry them on long-haul flights to the moon and Mars.
The event came 11 years after SpaceX reached orbit for the first time with the earliest version of its Falcon rockets. Since then, the company has flown rockets to orbit over and over again, then landed the accompanying boosters upright on the ground and reused them, an industry first for orbital missions. The company has launched commercial satellites, government spy missions, and cargo to the International Space Station. It shot a Tesla toward Mars and sprinkled internet satellites around Earth. Musk founded SpaceX to someday send people to Mars, and he has said for years that he will make space travel as easy as hopping on a plane. As he stood in front of a gleaming steel spaceship, it was tempting to start believing him. "It's really gonna be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back," Musk said.
Musk gave a talk about SpaceX's prototype spaceship, Starship, on Saturday night in Boca Chica, Texas, a small coastal town not far from the U.S.-Mexico border, which SpaceX picked to house this ambitious project just a few years ago. The vessel, roomy enough to fit 100 passengers, will be shot into orbit by a massive, reusable rocket, which the company is also building and which could be as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo astronauts. Starship has multiple missions; it is supposed to shuttle people on swift journeys to different cities on Earth, as well as carry them on long-haul flights to the moon and Mars.
The event came 11 years after SpaceX reached orbit for the first time with the earliest version of its Falcon rockets. Since then, the company has flown rockets to orbit over and over again, then landed the accompanying boosters upright on the ground and reused them, an industry first for orbital missions. The company has launched commercial satellites, government spy missions, and cargo to the International Space Station. It shot a Tesla toward Mars and sprinkled internet satellites around Earth. Musk founded SpaceX to someday send people to Mars, and he has said for years that he will make space travel as easy as hopping on a plane. As he stood in front of a gleaming steel spaceship, it was tempting to start believing him. "It's really gonna be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back," Musk said.
Been to Apple Events - this Wasn't Close to One (Score:4, Interesting)
I watched the event live on YouTube and I have to say that maybe the crowd was revved up but in terms of a presentation it was pretty poor; it left me wondering how Musk became a billionaire, running multiple companies. His ability to "present", that is talk cogently, confidently without excessive huhs and pauses was, very poor. The materials presented weren't new and there wasn't any information in it I hadn't heard before. At the end, I couldn't figure out what the purpose was other than to show off the Starship in the background and give his fanbois a chance to celebrate.
Going back there was one point that was surprising and that was the use of the parachute on the Falcon 1 and how it shredded upon return - which SpaceX was surprised at but the parachute manufacturer seemed to know. This didn't give me a great feeling about their engineering processes...
However, SpaceX has done some remarkable things and really turned the launcher market on it's head with the reuse of first stage engines. It will be interesting to see what happens with Starship and I wish them good luck on it - although in the short term, I would like to see them focusing on Dragon and getting people two and from the ISS, that seems like it should be the priority for them.
Shouldn't post while debugging (Score:2, Troll)
Sorry, looking over the previous post it reads in places like a Donald Trump tweet.
- "reuse of the first state engines" should just be "reuse of the first stages".
- "getting people two and from" should be "getting people to and from"
- "that seems like it should be the priority for them." should be "that seem like it should be their priority."
Re:Been to Apple Events - this Wasn't Close to One (Score:4, Interesting)
SpaceX - Visionary who makes the cheapest space ship possible.
Re: Been to Apple Events - this Wasn't Close to On (Score:4, Insightful)
it left me wondering how Musk became a billionaire
Musk is the very embodiment of function over form, and his results speak for themselves. The fact that you focus not on those but rather his inarticulate manner of speaking... strongly suggests that you're not even bright enough to even begin to fathom how smart he actually is.
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Yes, in the presentation it seemed like Elon was actually composing his results, in his head, as he spoke them.
There was very little word choice by committee or polishing, just a Freakin Genius (TM) giving you his unvarnished impression of the situation instead of selling you on what puts the most money into his pocket
I have been watching the livestream for Boca Chica since last March, and both the words and actions of SpaceX line up with delivering something valuable
Re: Been to Apple Events - this Wasn't Close to O (Score:5, Interesting)
I enjoyed watching him speak, partly because he was so inarticulate. It's nice to see a geek speaking about what his company is doing, for a change. Much better than some smooth-talking MBA spitting out buzzwords. I can identify with Musk far more than with Jobs.
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There's something about people who come across as too polished and perfect that is unnerving to me. It doesn't feel like interacting with a normal human; it feels like interacting with a product.
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Re:Been to Apple Events - this Wasn't Close to One (Score:5, Insightful)
Would You Invest in Musk After this Presentation? (Score:2)
It's interesting to see how people take comments - I guess I should have noted that I was looking at the presentation from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I don't think any investor would give money based on how Musk did his presentation.
Looking back, a big reason why I disliked the presentation so much was that the videos, location and setting was highly polished and were out of place with how Musk's was stammering and stumbling through the presentation. The videos were amazing and it's incredible se
Re:Been to Apple Events - this Wasn't Close to One (Score:5, Interesting)
Most CEO are salesmen. Obviously, they're good at presentations, good at selling the company to investors, good at selling themselves to hiring committees, that sort of thing. It's quite the valuable talent.
Musk is one of those rare exceptions: the "idea man" who also puts in the effort to deliver on his ideas. Sure, he's not good at delivery, but compared to most "idea men" (who are entirely useless), he stands out. Like strong senior guys in a lot of fields, he's good at cutting through the usual BS to make a decision, and doesn't get too attached to what he thinks is cool in the face of practicality, nor go the other way and insist on a noble lofty vision that's impossible to deliver.
But people emotionally want leaders to be well spoken. It's some deep-seated psychological need. So Musk gets a lot of hate. It's a funny old world, where the guy who's bad at slick sales presentations is seen as a charlatan.
Ooh. I saw this one. (Score:4, Funny)
Spoiler: The computer goes crazy and tries to crash into the sun, but they take a bomb that an incompetent suicidal guy brought on board, and use it to blow up the computer, allowing Ted Striker to fly the thing manually, nearly killing William Shatner on landing.
New Starship page at spacex.com (Score:5, Informative)
Re: New Starship page at spacex.com (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. The shuttle cost ~$18000/kg to LEO in 2011 dollars. Falcon Heavy costs $1400/kg to LEO in 2019 dollars. Starship is targeted at a price of upper dozens/lower hundreds of dollars per kilogram to LEO.
The cheaper access gets to space, the more you can do in it. Regardless of whether it's a "chemical rocket" or not. A 286 and a Xeon 5680 are both "silicon chips", but that doesn't make them remotely equivalent.
As for the Shuttle, the idea behind the programme wasn't wrong. But it should have been a small, high-development-budget, limited-scope, evolutionary demonstrator. Instead it was forced by budgetary pressures and the need to seek funding elsewhere into being a large, (comparatively) low-development-budget, broad-scope workhorse. And as a consequence ended up scaring people off of reusables for decades. But still, we learned a lot from the Shuttle's failures.
(The Shuttle also seemed to be the start of where "NASA lost its way" - not for internal reasons, but because the manned spaceflight side of it morphed into a congressional jobs programme)
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Blew my mod points commenting, but +1 for the "silicon" reference :)
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You can't. Because Physics. There is no magical technology. Chemical rockets are it. And yes, even SpaceX isn't really cheaper. They are losing tons of money. It is like saying "Uber is cheaper".
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We *did* build nuclear rockets with much higher Isp. A bunch of working ones. Test fired them dozens of times, even. They were a huge success and outperformed the program goals. The funding got cut late in the program because Nixon didn't like it and congress was afraid it'd lead to an expensive Mars mission.
They're only useful for upper stage engines, because while they're very efficient (2.2x the Isp of a SpaceX Raptor in vacuum), they have a terrible thrust-to-weight ratio. IIRC they're something like 7:
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Plus the whole problem of radioactive pollution from an exploding rocket (for any stage), and the problem of radioactive exhaust for many designs, which makes them ill-advised for a first stage where that waste all ends up in the Earth's ecosystem.
As I recall, the plan with one of the early nuclear rockets was actually to intentionally use it as a weapon - just flying it back and forth over Russia spreading radioactive fallout wherever it went.
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Losing money compared to NASA? You're smoking crack again.
SpaceX is vastly cheaper than anything before it, and if starship actually works, it's so much cheaper as to be a difference in kind.
Chemical rockets are it for getting to orbit (at least for this century - eventually: megastructures). However, nuclear rockets are the future of interplanetary travel. Once we get true space ships that stay in space, going around between destination orbits, nuclear rockets are what makes sense. And that we will see
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Venus is a great way to get a start on nuclear propulsion - in the form of an ascent stage (ferrying people between a Landis habitat and an elliptical Venus orbit, to meet up with an Earth transfer stage).
* Venus needs nuclear. A Landis habitat technically can use chemical ascent stages, but it's incredibly difficult. They require a huge habitat to lift a rocket with the capability of only a few crew, and you have to recapture and re-mate the returning two-stage vehicle while hanging under the hab
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If there's one thing KSP has taught me, it's that nuclear engines are useless for getting off Venus!
OK, OK, are you actually talking about ascent from Venus surface? That seems like many more problems than just the engine, or are you talking cloud cities? Assuming the latter, it makes a lot of sense to me, going between Venus mid-atmosphere and some middling Earth orbit.
You can bet people will NIMBY anyway: heck, I've heard people protest that a nuclear rocket will contaminate space. Rationality just doe
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Lol ;) I'm sure you know of course that KSP deliberately nerfed nuclear engines because they'd make the game way too easy ;) Even a NERVA-powered rocket could lift off from Earth's surface, and NERVA is quite an obsolete design. Modern designs allow for much higher thrust to weight ratios. Not just due to better core designs, but also things like "afterburners" (injecting LOX into the hot hydrogen during th
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We're not using WW2 rockets. Reusability, while not fancy technology, is a total game changer. And the Raptor engine is actually a pretty impressive step forward if you're familiar with the intricacies of rocket engines.
Falcon 9 began to tackle reusability, while Starship was designed from the ground up tackle it head on, while future generations will only get better. Alternatives to rockets are unlikely to become attractive until fuel costs become a major part of the cost of a rocket launch. Currentl
Re: New Starship page at spacex.com (Score:1)
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Nobody but creamers are talking about humans traveling to other stars - that's just not a realistic option for the forseeable future and speculation on the state of technology centuries in the future is only good for entertainment. We don't even have any theoretical basis on which to believe we could get a single person to another star within their lifetime without harnessing a power source dwarfing the entire global energy consumption.
Back in reality, I'll admit that for interplanetary travel chemical roc
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oops, that should start "Nobody but dreamers..."
Re: New Starship page at spacex.com (Score:1)
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Indeed :-)
You're welcome. Though if I may say so, you come across as rather... strident yourself, and these boards do have a tendency to amplify that sort of thing back at you.
Asteroid mining is definitely the commercial incentive we need to get established in space - and launch costs are falling enough that people are preparing to attempt to mine them. The initial expense and learning curve really makes those first steps a lot less attractive than they might be.
The thing is though - you don't need speed
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Chemical rocket. Yawn. Has anything new happened since the space shuttle?
Yes, rockets are re-usable now. And not "re-usable" in the space shuttle sense of "cost more to refurbish than to build from scratch" (the goal of congress after all was to channel taxpayer dollars to their districts, not launch rockets, so: stunning success). Re-usable in the sense of "inspect everything, swap a couple cheap parts, and launch it again".
As Rei says above: the difference in cost is remarkable. Rocket fuel is cheap. To quote Musk: it you had to throw away the airplane after each flight, v
Re: New Starship page at spacex.com (Score:1)
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You're just projecting your ignorance of physics and the limitations of the universe we live in. Warp drives aren't a real thing, you know?
There simply isn't a good alternative to chemical rockets for getting into orbit. Nuclear rockets are much better, but not for use in the atmosphere. But what matters practically is cost, and if it's cheap enough to get into orbit, that unlocks a world of new possibilities.
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When we can get to AND back from Mars in a few days or even a few weeks, lemme know. When we can get to the other planets in a few weeks at most or a month or two there and back, lemme know
You apparently don't know enough to understand you're talking about warp drives, but you're talking about warp drives right here.
I'm afraid this is a case of "it would take a semester of focused physics education just to explain to you how much you don't know."
. We are definitely not leaving this system with chemical rockets.
Which is why I and other have repeated mentioned nuclear rockets. But,once more for the hard-of-thinking, you're not using those to get to orbit.
Sounds Like... (Score:2)
"Fully self-driving"....
How about a moratorium on Elon Musks announcements and Slashdot only actually covers things customers can use in
Re: Sounds Like... (Score:1)
Exactly this.
Elon Musk building a rocket or self driving car is similar to an 8 year old building a âoehouseâ aka fort in the backyard.
The only difference is Elon Musk has more money. The problem is you canâ(TM)t just throw money at problems that havenâ(TM)t been solved yet. You have to actually solve the problems first.
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They're on the cusp of solving the problem of global access to broadband in suburban/rural/remote areas. If nothing else succeeds, I really hope that one pans out. Doesn't really have anything to do with Starship, though. That'll probably all launch on the Falcon 9.
Re: Sounds Like... (Score:4, Insightful)
Elon Musk building a rocket... is similar to an 8 year old building a Ãoehouseà aka fort in the backyard
I wish I could glibly spout-out demonstrably false shit like you're able but sadly some of us are cursed with self-respect...
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If said 8-year-old's house forts represented the lion's share of the entire world's commercial housing market, that would be a great analogy.
And if so, I most definitely would pay attention to what said 8-year-old was working on.
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Yeah, meanwhile, last weekend, people drove their Teslas about a hundred thousand or so on autonomous summon through parking lots (parking lots being one of the hardest self-driving challenges to get right; the consequences of messing up aren't as severe, but parking lots are a mess of unpredictable pedestrians, poorly controlled intersections, and people randomly pulling into your lane unexpectedly)
I'm not a FSD optimist, but your timing on complaining about FSD progress is pretty p
Re: Sounds Like... (Score:2)
First time, Atlantic? (Score:3)
Musk does one of these engineering updates roughly once a year. He's never slick, but always honest and competent on the engineering, even if he tends towards being overly optimistic. If anything, this one was a bit more light on the tech than most of them have been.
One might naively assume that an Atlantic reporter assigned to covering the event would have reviewed some of the previous tech updates to gain some background perspective. He's also bravely discussing philosophical motivations for Mars now.
Main takeaways for me: Starship is coming in heavier than hoped; purely radiative cooling is off the table for now (glass tiles instead); it is anticipated that some Starships will be taken apart on Mars for raw materials; Superheavy is about two iterations away; current Teslas don't need modification to work on Mars; Starship could SSTO without cargo; Superheavy could fly 20x per day; Musk is all-in on rapid iteration.
There were some nerd-vittles about engine layout and engine impulse characteristics, but everyone who cares has already watched the video.
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current Teslas don't need modification to work on Mars;
Have they tested with abrasive dust and almost no atmosphere? My money that electronics will overheat (decreased cooling) and exposed moving parts will get clogged by martian dust.
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Heat might be an issue, but that 1% atmosphere is going to do some cooling. Plus, at least on the battery pack side, they need to be "warm enough" for the lithium reactions to take place. I'd think that the self-heating would be desired here, within reason.
As for the dust - genuine question - how Martian dust any different than a sand storm? The particles are still abraded, ie not like lunar dust. It suspends in the atmosphere more, but wouldn't you expect wear and tear if you were driving through sands
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Yeah, heat is an obvious limitation. EVs don't need the sort of cooling that ICEs do, but they still need cooling. Nighttime heating needs will also increase. Lower gravity will also affect the optimal suspension design, and driving on regolith would require appropriate tires. Control mechanisms for electrostatically charged dust probably need to be implemented as well.
Still, the amount of modifications that would be needed is pretty limited. "In general", EVs work offworld.
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Mars' atmosphere is much thinner, but also much colder in most places. Existing vehicles on Mars spend most of their time heating components rather than cooling them. I'd imagine you might need to modify the car's heat exchangers, and maybe run liquid cooling to electronics and motors rather than just the battery pack.
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"Thinner" matters far more than "colder". And electric cars put out many orders of magnitude more heat than rovers, which slowly crawl along.
Motors (and some electronics) are already liquid cooled in Teslas.
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I agree - shedding heat is going to be the biggest challenge making an EV work on Mars.
Still, it depends how hard you're driving - it's going to be a while before there's any nice smooth roads on Mars. You could also drive hard for at least a short time before components started getting hot enough that you needed to ease up.
The most effective strategy though is probably not trying to shed heat into the almost non-existent air, but into the ground. Whether that means thermally conductive tires, dragging a
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>enough to be plenty useful, especially with 38% gravity (=38% rolling resistance) and near-zero air resistance. ...and of course the fact that you're only radiating the waste heat, which I somehow completely overlooked. Assuming 90% drive-train efficiency, 4kW of radiative cooling allows for 40kW of engine output: enough to really put that sucker to work.
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The way he keeps mentioning the "current teslas can drive of Mars' surface" thing, I suspect the first Mars shot will be like the first Falcon Heavy shot: the payload will be a Tesla again. This time it will be outfitted for remote control and it'll drive some distance across the surface before getting stuck on a rock or something.
C'mon, you know it's coming...
Reporting, 2019 style (Score:2)
Get this, he's building a moon rocket. Better get down to Texas to check this out, there might be something to it...
humanity isn't ready (Score:1)
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Re: humanity isn't ready (Score:1)
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The Starship programme is expected to cost $2-3B, spread across multiple years. The global economy (PPP) is $127,8T/yr. If all of Starship's costs were compressed into a single year, it would represent 0,002% of the global economy. With the global of preserving humanity against the risk of the extinction of the species.
Yeah, a couple billion dollars per year to become multiplanetary is IMHO worth it. Even apart from the potential benefit to Earth about drastically reduced costs to space enabling afforda
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To stay well away from religious idiots who kill each other in masse by irrational reasons, psychopaths who are actively trying to take possession of ALL the riches of the planet for itself even if it means the death of all their descendants, and a number of other very ignorant and dangerous people who don't seem to mind behaving like Neanderthals.
It is not acceptable to kill each one of the above examples, so the other alternative is to find another pl
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Re: humanity isn't ready (Score:3)
Honestly, I mostly want to leave in order to get away from the miserable cunts who keep telling us we shouldn't.
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> spreading like some virus... expunge the psychosis that is destroying higher life here.
Guys! Guys! Solve all the world problems with this one simple trick that capitalists hate!
Everyone is the problem except you. You, are different. You "get it". You could save the world. All you need is a little power and of some god damned respect from people too dumb to know better.
Get over yourself.
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>what about this fire burning down the world?
The world is not on fire. The world will not end. Even with the worst predictions of climate change.
>s endlessly-growing anthropogenic ecological/existential crisis,
The largest contributor to the mass extinction event is habitat loss.
> your succession of denials an gas-lighting efforts
What did I deny by calling out your "muh humanity is a virus"? It's a tired and old trope that has been around for far too long with failed prediction after failed predicti
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Sure. Why not. For you, I will deny anything just lay off the drugs and get a job.
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Anything you want. Nothing gets past you.
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spreading like some virus... expunge the psychosis that is destroying higher life here.
service to the destructive ideology
They say his big brain grew three sizes that day.
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The world's not on fire. But the sun is. It's only a matter of time before Earth can't support life, as the sun gradually gets hotter. Best not to be stuck on Earth forever. (It may well be easier to fix the sun than to move a large population to another star, but either way that's a problem for a trillion people living in space to solve.)
Re: humanity isn't ready (Score:2)
We need to work out our political problems and demonstrate that we can live sustainably as a part of this garden world
You can keep your [poluting] heavy industry, get rid of it and go back to the Dark Ages... or move it off-planet.
Pick one.
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We need to work out our political problems
Tell you what. You hang out here on Earth until humans are perfect. My decedents will colonize the galaxy, flaws and all. And when the inevitable super-nova or gamma-ray burst sterilizes the Earth, we'll shed a tear for you.
"Sustainable" is short-term thinking. Nothing is sustainable in the long view.
They know it too (Score:2)
You can see it in Musk's eyes when he talks about the expectations for Starship. I think the company privately knows the timeline is much longer. But Musk tries to generate buzz so he can get more of that private funding.
A real and existential threat to today's NASA (Score:4, Interesting)
SpaceX is posing a real and existential threat to NASA. SpaceX has taken the Skunk Works approach to product development and is delivering on timelines that were considered impossible. NASA is taking a defense contractor approach to space, and it shows.
What is NASA good for, if SpaceX can launch rockets faster, better, and cheaper than NASA? Regulation? Safety processes? Certification? A port operator? Science?
Re:A real and existential threat to today's NASA (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if SpaceX is an "existential threat" (a phrase that's used all too often nowadays) but it should result in a shake up of how NASA does business.
I read years ago that when NASA was formed, two approaches to space were considered, the first was an entrepreneurial approach (much the way SpaceX does business) with NASA and other satellite customers asking aerospace contractors to bid on payloads and create their own solutions. As part of this, the contractors would be solely responsible for facilities/materials/technology development. The argument against this approach was the incredible cost for a company to develop this infrastructure. The second approach was a centralized governmental approach in which a government organization had planning staff and selected technologies to develop along with their plan to get into space. The argument for this approach is that it allows multiple companies to bid on technologies using different approaches with the best one being selected. The person who articulated the two approaches and pushed for the second one was Wernher Von Braun because that approach worked so well in Germany in the 1940s.
I don't know how true this story (I have no idea where the reference is to review it), but it is interesting and we're now at the point where the first approach is coming into the forefront with SpaceX and Blue Origin (as well as Orbital, Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit).
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Over the course of the next year, SLS is going to be an albatros around NASA's neck. Its very existence is going to invite continuous negative comparisons on the agency.
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Over the course of the next year, SLS is going to be an albatros around NASA's neck. Its very existence is going to invite continuous negative comparisons on the agency.
Without the SLS, NASA has no reason to exist as far as Congress is concerned. That is NASA's only purpose.
Re:A real and existential threat to today's NASA (Score:4, Informative)
That's a bit like saying Boeing poses an existential threat to the FAA or SAFE Boats Company poses a threat to NOAA.
NASA has been stretched thin for decades acting as a general contractor. Government programs often operate best as grant writing organizations.
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Um, fock you SpaceX fanboys. NASA has done what SpaceX did (and more) over 50 years ago. And no, nothing that SpaceX has done was ever considered impossible. Self landing rockets were demonstrated FORTY YEARS AGO.
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Go read the appendix of Feynman's report where he discusses the Space Shuttle's main engines and then get back to us about NASA building reusable rockets.
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What is NASA good for, if SpaceX can launch rockets faster, better, and cheaper than NASA? Regulation? Safety processes? Certification? A port operator? Science?
Rent seeking.
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I don't see how NASA's role has changed at all. SpaceX does launch vehicles (and a capsule). NASA at most only specced out launch vehicles and/or capsules for other people to make. The things they did in-house have been:
They're still doing those. If other companies have the launch vehicles covered and they don't even need to spec them, find a contractor, be on their
Real $$ (Score:2)
The real $$ is in getting sustainable robotics and compute power on Mars. Especially compute. Mars will be used for a planetary scale supercomputer with a side hustle for rare elements far before it is ever colonized.
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Yeah. Nutter.
As easy as getting on a plane (Score:2)
Meanwhile, TSA has made getting on a plane as difficult as space flight
Calling... (Score:1)
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On the one hand I agree, on the other, it's hardly more presumptuous than many car names.
There's also a poetic truth to it. It is the first rocket designed to (eventually) make getting to space affordable. As in "a few thousand dollars for a round trip to orbit" affordable. That's going to open the doors for everyday people to get into space. That and commercially lucrative real estate (aka asteroids - there's far more than just gold in them hills) will make it all but inevitable that humanity colonizes
Sorry Elon... (Score:2)
But unless it comes with a warp drive, hyperdrive, jump drive, or at least a Bussard ramjet; it's not a starship.