SpaceX Hopes to Eventually Build One Starship Per Day at Its Texas 'Starfactory' (space.com) 305
SpaceX's successful launch (and reentry) of Starship was just the beginning, reports Space.com:
SpaceX now aims to build on the progress with its Starship program as continues work on Starfactory, a new manufacturing facility under construction at the company's Starbase site in South Texas... "When you step into this factory, it is truly inspirational. My heart jumps out of my chest," Kate Tice, manager of SpaceX Quality Systems Engineering, said [during SpaceX's livestream of the Starship flight test]. "Now this will enable us to increase our production rate significantly as we build toward our long-term goal of producing one Ship per day and coming off the production line soon, Starship Version Two."
This new version of Starship is designed to be more easy to mass produce, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on social media.
Space.com argues that the long-term expansion comes as SpaceX "looks to use Starship to eventually make humanity interplanetary."
This new version of Starship is designed to be more easy to mass produce, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on social media.
Space.com argues that the long-term expansion comes as SpaceX "looks to use Starship to eventually make humanity interplanetary."
Say what you will about Elon Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but SpaceX is the only company that is doing things comparable to what science fiction writers envisioned decades ago. Producing new rocket designs and technology at a massive scale and fast pace. At the same time, Boeing has been struggling for 10 years to get some valves right on a capsule and others have been struggling to get anything up to what is generally considered "space" (except the Chinese I guess who are steadily progressing).
Re:Say what you will about Elon Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
Boeing has been struggling
I think you're being supremely generous here. Unless you mean struggling like an addict. The addiction in this case being public money.
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I think you're being supremely generous here. Unless you mean struggling like an addict. The addiction in this case being public money.
I mean, that's the problem. They were set up for gobbling up public money with the old cost+ contracts, so 10 years to get a valve working was great business. But they are on a fixed contract now, so that project is no longer profitable, something they've never faced before and it shows...
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SpaceX certainly deserves a lot of credit, but it's not magic. There are competitors too, last week a Chinese private company launched 3 satellite carrying rockets to orbit successfully, all from ships not far off the coast. This is good, competition is good, as are many varying designs and options.
That said, one Starship a day? What is the market for that?
Re: Say what you will about Elon Musk (Score:2)
Computer Technology (Score:2)
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but SpaceX is the only company that is doing things comparable to what science fiction writers envisioned decades ago.
In space perhaps but there are lots of technology companies making products that were science fiction only a few decades ago: smart phones, video calls, tablets, watches that make phone calls, "AI" etc. It's easy to forget that given how ubiquitous such devices have now become but 30 years ago these were all science fiction, just look at Star Trek the Next Generation: we now have tablets very similar to the ones on the show and you can even get a functional bluetooth star trek communicator badge [fametek.com]!
Musk ma
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Yeah, I did mean just space-related science fiction. :D
But I disagree with your take that there are companies that make smart phones that were science fiction a few decades ago.
When phones are concerned, we are way, way, beyond science fiction. It's like most of the collective effort of humanity went there. We even lost basic things like commercial supersonic flights, but our phones can do things and look beyond anything imagined even as late as the 80s
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SpaceX is doing things comparable to what others have done for half a century. Launch satellites into orbit, a bit cheaper.
A lot cheaper. A lot faster. A lot more reliable. All the while still being the only landing main orbital class booster. Been a key resupplier to the ISS for years. For four years has been the only manned launch provider outside Russia. Is the only private provider of manned orbital flights. SpaceX put about four times the tonnage into orbit last year than the entire rest of the world combined. Providing Internet access for three million households (and blowing past subscription totals for every oth
Right after robotaxis and the roadster (Score:2, Insightful)
Elon makes some awesome PR noise to keep his business being talked about but his record of getting even close to fulfilling his PR plans is about zero. It has to be intentional. No one that successful could be so wrong so often otherwise.
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I think it is quite possible that Elon is not actually that smart, but got really lucky with advisers and listened to them often enough. So far, that is. There are other examples of nil-wits that made it big. His "management" of Twitter speaks volumes as to his actual skills. "Never attribute to maliciousness which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Re:Right after robotaxis and the roadster (Score:5, Insightful)
Elon makes some awesome PR noise to keep his business being talked about but his record of getting even close to fulfilling his PR plans is about zero. It has to be intentional. No one that successful could be so wrong so often otherwise.
Absolutely. It is clearly a deliberate strategy that accounts for the vast majority of his wealth. This wealth - in the form of Tesla stock - exploded in mid 2020 when the valuation of Tesla by the market went far beyond a level that any plausible assessment of the company's real economic prospects could sustain with a PE Ratio of 1120 [macrotrends.net], now down to a still grossly overvalued but less insane value of 45. That overvaluation bubble of Tesla, driven by the hype Musk engineered, translated directly into money in his pocket.
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there are ten sad, lonely, B-Ark pricks like you
Wait a second. So in your fantasy land, we've figured out how to genetically modify humans to exist on local planets with zero external inputs to keep them from dying immediately?
That's fantastic news!!
Wait a second... nope. Just self delusion and whimsy at play. Again.
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Lmao, you're fucking hilarious.
Name the outrageous claims your hero has made that actually happened at all, ever, much less anything close to when he said they would.
You Elon fanboys are so funny. Why do you worship some random dude? Because he's rich?
I drive one of his cars. I do not suck his cock.
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Indeed. These people think anybody with tons of money must be smart and capable. Observable reality does not support that conclusion.
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Lmao, you're fucking hilarious.
Name the outrageous claims your hero has made that actually happened at all, ever, much less anything close to when he said they would.
He's not my hero, but I would rather be in that camp that the irrational hater's camp. At least they are positive and not mired in loathing.
But how about landing an orbital class rocket on a barge and then reflying it? How about beating incumbent aerospace to launching astronauts to space with Crew Dragon? How about getting a rocket into space with twice the thrust of the world's previous record holder for most powerful rocket that was built in tents in the south Texas desert from a launch facility built
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I'm not a hater. But I don't worship his cock either. He's just a guy who has built or bought some companies. I bought his car because it was the best option for my needs after researching everything in my price range. I didn't buy it for anything to have to do with him nor avoid it for anything to do with him.
The cock suckers think he's a god and going to send them to live on Mars. While the haters loved him until he turned out to be politically conservative then suddenly he was Satan. I didn't hate
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He’s not a genius. He was lucky with investments during the dot com boom. He didn’t invent PayPal or tesla.
GIGO (Score:2)
SpaceX is hallucinating (Score:2)
Or rather Musk is. What else is new?
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Great! (Score:4, Informative)
Boeing builds a half one per decade.
Fake it till you break it. (Score:2)
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A lot of commenters in this thread seem to think they know more about business than every VC and bank in the universe that's begging to be in on SpaceX. The company turns away 9-figure investment offers constantly. And it's not a public company, so there's no incentive to deceive or hype.
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There are other motivations to deceive or hype than attempting to juice the stock of a publicly-traded company. The hype serves as advertising. They're trying to generate enthusiasm about their products and services in the minds of their target consumer. It seems that companies with which Musk is associated do this constantly. They're trying to fake it until they make it. It helps that the target consumers don't seem to mind much when projection after projection is missed.
It's fine. People like their
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Interplanetary Civilization (Score:2)
You can't have an Interplanetary Civilization without logistics. The vision of having this many spacecraft is mind-blowing, sci-fi fantasy but it's visionary, which industries in the US have lacked for decades.
Whoa, slow down there, space cowboy! (Score:2)
Will SpaceX Missiles Destroy Northern Cities? (Score:2)
ad astra (Score:2)
What's with "Starship" and "Starliner"? These things are going to a star? Did "astro"nauts go to the stars? Hyperbole on steroids. Maybe the result of too much moonshine.
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Yup. In addition unless they're making them from blow-moulded plastic or something there's no way they can sustain that rate.
Why? Is there a physical limitation on raw material shipment into the facility or a stage of assembly that is too gatekeeped by some other limitation?
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"Why? Is there a physical limitation on raw material shipment into the facility or a stage of assembly that is too gatekeeped by some other limitation?"
Yes. They're called roads. Right now there's only Boca Chica Blvd.
I suppose you could try floating stuff down the Rio Grande building a dock to get stuff by ship from the Gulf of Mexico.
That's not likely to be easy
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"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
Re:It just makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
What he said was "as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18. [seamussweeney.net]" and was specifically talking about the IBM 701 [wikipedia.org].
Re:It just makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, Musk cant even make a proper car. If you want to risk your life to mass created rockets to that idiot, then you have a death wish.
I know. Crazy right? Who would trust rockets built by the company that has built the least expensive, most frequently launching and most reliable workhorse of an orbital rocket the world has ever seen?
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Isn't that the same company that said they would be doing ballistic flights to Shanghai by 2020?
And flying cargo around the world?
Re:It just makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
If IBM had geared up to produce a computer a day in 1943, they would have gone out of business.
Maybe in some hypothetical future there would be some crazy demand for spacecraft, but as it stands there's no sign of that volume of demand.
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"what the profits from Starlink are meant to fund"
What profits?
The current Starlink flock aren't even networked together, each is basically an undersized orbiting cell tower that's connected to one point on the ground at a time. 100 heavy users will make 1 Starlink essentially useless unless you have a fondness for the good ol' dialup days.
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Nearly 7 billion in revenue this year with only 3 million customers, by most estimates at least half a billion in profit. Starship makes the costs plummet and the customer capacity skyrocket. Doesn't take a genius to figure out how profitable that's going to be, with competitors all at least 5 years behind and facing drastically higher cost to orbit.
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Nearly 7 billion in revenue this year with only 3 million customers, by most estimates at least half a billion in profit. Starship makes the costs plummet and the customer capacity skyrocket. Doesn't take a genius to figure out how profitable that's going to be, with competitors all at least 5 years behind and facing drastically higher cost to orbit.
It's going to take far more than half a billion dollars to finance a Mars colony. Even if they boost the annual Starlink profit level up to five billion it won't be enough to set up and support the one million strong colony on Mars that Spacex itself has estimated will cost between a ridiculously low 100 billion to a more realistic 10 trillion. Maybe if Elon can actually realise his dream of reshaping Twitter of all things into a financial power house that represents "half of the global financial system" he
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Which is precisely why the constellation wants to launch more and larger satellites.
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Re: It just makes no sense (Score:2)
They already have the customer - Musk wants to set up a colony on Mars. For that he believes he needs 1000 of these things going at the same time.
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Are you suggesting that buying a Starship and launching it might become as practical for any company with the cash as buying a private jet? For comparison sales of private jets are around 700 a year.
That seems unlikely, and also not something we actually want. LEO is getting full up already and the capability to put thousands of satellites in orbit every year is not something that everyone should have access to. And even if it was, would they buy their own Starship or just pay someone else to put them up in
Re:It just makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
> LEO is getting full up already
LEO can hold trillions of satellites without triggering Kessler syndrome. The earth's surface holds billions of cars and boats, and space is 3-dimensional. LEO below 300 miles is self-clearing so fairly Kessler proof.
Orbits like GEO have a relatively limited capacity. VLEO much less so.
LEO or GEO [Re:It just makes no sense] (Score:2)
> LEO is getting full up already
LEO can hold trillions of satellites without triggering Kessler syndrome. The earth's surface holds billions of cars and boats,
Cars travel at about 0.025 kilometers per second. Boats even slower. LEO satellites travel at 7.8 kilometers per second. There may not be billions of them, but they carve a bigger swath. And, when cars and boats are parked, which is most of the time, they travel at 0 km/s.
and space is 3-dimensional. LEO below 300 miles is self-clearing so fairly Kessler proof.
Not if you have "trillions of satellites"!
Orbits like GEO have a relatively limited capacity. VLEO much less so.
Yes and no. GEO altitude is 35,786 km, so the circumference of GEO is a hundred times bigger than LEO, and the satellites move slower, and, more important, if they haven't lost control, they are a
Re:It just makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
>It would also become an environmental issue. One Starship launch alone produces an estimates 76,000 tons of CO2, compared to about 90kg per hour per passenger of a long haul flight.
Where on god's green earth did you get that number? The entire fully fueled stack of Super Heavy and Booster, vehicle, fuel and oxidizer is only 5,000 pounds. (which may be the first time in history someone uses the word 'only' on conjunction with a rocket).
Quick search. The full stack carries 2,750 tons of methane between both stages. Assuming full atmosphere combustion. One burned methane molecule results in one carbon dioxide. More searching shows mass ratio of about 2.75 between those two molecules. So 2.75 times 2750 tons is 7,563 tons. Hmm, curiously a decimal point and a bit of rounding away from your claim.
Correction needed [Re:It just makes no sense] (Score:2)
I think you mistakenly typed "pounds" when you meant "tons" in the first paragraph of your reply, but, yes, nowhere near the 76 kT of the post you replied to.
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"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
That was said not long after computers were invented and people had not yet seen the full scope of their usefulness. OTOH, rockets using that sort of technology have been around for a long time so it is clear what they are and are not useful for.
It is clear that there are very limited uses for such large rockets being built at a rate of one per day; in fact there is really only one use - which is to feed Musk's obsession with making a colony on Mars for his disciples. If you know much about Musk, you wil
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Why would you need to build that many reusable rockets? There's no pot of gold on Mars. There's no sense in sucking this planet dry in order to go to an even drier one. If we can make Mars habitable, then we can keep Earth habitable. And all the other bumper sticker level slogans you've seen already. Why on Earth, joke intended, would we need that many rockets?
Space tourism? Perhaps a hotel in space like in 2001? I agree he’s likely to have a lot of Starships sitting around since government launches are unlikely to warrant such a large fleet. Course, “long term goal” in Musk-speak likely means “probably never but it’s good PR.”
Re: It just makes no sense (Score:2)
The trick is that when space launch is cheep, the way you design satellites changes. You no longer design one multi-billion dollar satellite, and try to make sure it doesnâ(TM)t go wrong, because thereâ(TM)s no longer a $100,000,000 penalty to each time you launch. Instead, you build 1000 $100,000 satellites, save a bunch of money, and throw them up repeatedly.
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Starship is intended to pay it's way to mars by with passenger and cargo flights around Earth. Like an airline, but with orbital rockets.
Ignoring the rest of your comment is the behavior we have been employing since the before we starting using fire for stuff.
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An airline that can only take off and launch from a tiny number of sites. That number is not only limited by regulations but just basic infrastructure. The Starship can't reach Earth orbit without the first stage booster. There's a very limited number of locations that can possibly launch, recover, and service those boosters. A Starship landing anywhere but a dedicated spaceport would be stranded.
Re: It just makes no sense (Score:2)
They would have been dead only because these prototypes have no place for a human to strap in and no life support systems. (And they "landed" it in water as per their test plan, so I suppose drowning would also have been a factor.)
Otherwise, the reentry actually was survivable. Despite having low odds of success prior to launch.
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The fact that you're calling it a "wing" is proof you're not familiar with the program. Or the fact they've only been flying full-up Starship stacks for 14 months, but you're actually accusing them of not having yet accomplished what every other space organization on Earth isn't even trying to do.
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You sound like a child asking why 14 months isn't enough to have a 100% successful flight of the most advanced rocket ever built. An ignorant, illiterate child who has never read a single book about space or aviation. They must be dispensing pilot's licenses by the bushel.
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> Why would you need to build that many reusable rockets?
Well if they try to force those production numbers, the build quality will probably be on par with Tesla vehicles... and the word "reusable" starts doing more heavy lifting than the rockets.
=Smidge=
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Don't forget that he wants to use these for terrestrial transport. There are about a thousand 787's currently in service globally.
Having heard (and felt) a rocket launch from miles away, I have some quiet doubts about the feasibility of the idea near major metros, but I'm unwilling to bet against Musk.
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I'm unwilling to bet against Musk.
- Solar City: effectively a failure, bought back by Tesla in a dubious financial move
- Hyperloop: nothing practical came out of it, unsurprisingly so
- Twitter/X: has been losing users since Musk bought it, still not dead, can be some hope
- Boring: Besides the underwhelming Vegas Loop, not much came out of it, tunnel experts fail to see what Boring brings to the table
SpaceX and Tesla are doubtlessly successes, so were Zip2 and PayPal before that, but even within these companies, and almost all announcement a
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I'd agree with most of your assessments about the outcomes of those companies. I'd question how successful Tesla is since it seems to be in the early stages of imploding, and it seems like Musk's behaviour is playing a pretty big part in that. SpaceX, on the other hand, is in the middle of experiencing a meteoric rise. They've captured more than 80% of the global launch market (in which I include state actors like China and Russia), a share which is still increasing. Their launch costs are already dramatica
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PayPal wasn't his success; he'd already been shown the door before the platform was sold & he was opposed to how it was implemented.
The only reason he benefited was because he was able to hang on to a 10% stake
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He backed out of buying Twitter when he found out they were lying to him about their algorithms. The Delaware "chancery" (wtf?) forced him to pay them anyway.
He backed out of doing the due diligence to which he was entitled. The cheap schmuck didn't even think to sign up for Twitter's Firehose API that would have given him access to raw tweets in real time. And despite his trash talk & copious use of poop emojis when he was trying to weasel out of the deal - no offense intended to actual members of the distinguished family of Mustelidae - he cowered & caved like a little bitch when the Twitter suit against him was about to go to discovery.
The Chancery co
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That about cover it,
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There are videos out there of Elon's vision. It involves sending a steady stream of Starships to Mars and back, ferrying people and supplies. It takes a lot of payload to supply a planetary colony. Reusable yes... when one gets back it lands, gets re-supplied and re-staffed, and away it goes.
Even if you had a new supply load arriving at Mars every two days, that's a lot of ships to have in rotation. An Earth year of 365 days would be 182 on the way (arriving every two days), and 182 on the way back to Eart
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We call videos like that "entertainment" and if combined with good acting and a script can make some money in a theater or streaming service (less likely).
We shouldn't confuse that with reality.
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It involves sending a steady stream of Starships to Mars and back, ferrying people and supplies.
Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like more of a nightmare than a vision.
A stupidly expensive supply chain spewing valuable, scarce, resources at a dead planet to sustain a pointless colony for no good reason other than humans suck at separating fantasy from reality.
I don't think anyone believes Musk is interested in Mars for Mars Sake. What he envisions is based upon reasonable investment advice: Don't put your eggs in one basket.
While we are doing a lot to destroy the habitability of our current basket, which is completely moronic (and demonstrable of how our current envisioning of capitalist democracy [that encourages competitive nation states and national patriotism] is fundamentally flawed) natural disasters still remain a major risk to the species.
Musk may
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"stable politics - neither of which are looking good at the moment"
he hasn't been helping that, not even a little
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>While we are doing a lot to destroy the habitability of our current basket
Mars is a disaster. It's the opposite of habitable. So you're sending your eggs from a habitable basket to an extremely inhospitable basket? It's completely stupid of Musk to think that sending mass quantities of humans to Mars is going to save the human race from itself.
This is the biggest waste of human intelligence and resources I can think of, second to the n
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The benefits of a Mars colony to those of us smart enough to stay on Earth are likely to be immense. To achieve such a thing is absurdly difficult, so it requires a wide variety of innovations. It requires finding ways to use limited resources in far more efficient ways than we've ever done before. It requires recycling of everything you build into other things you need. It requires massive improvements to 3D printing to create things on site you can't wait for delivery on. One Starship a day is minuscule c
Re:It just makes no sense (Score:5, Interesting)
If you follow the original plans, in order to sustain a colony on Mars they figure they would need a fleet of about 1000 Starships. Only a subset of those would actually make the regular return journey to Mars, but while those ships are in orbit around Earth with their payload already launched and waiting for the transit window, then they require a fleet of Starships to launch and fill their fuel tanks (the payload ones arrive in Earth orbit with empty fuel tanks). You need something like 3 extra Starship refueling flights to fill the tanks on the payload Starship so it's ready to go to Mars.
I don't really buy into the whole "settlement on Mars" idea, since I think it's a big money loser. However, designing the whole thing for rapid re-usability and assembly-line production will apparently bring the cost of launching mass to orbit down by a factor of 10 or more from the current cost of Falcon 9 (which is already an order of magnitude cheaper than prior options). Falcon 9 is already launching more than half of all mass to orbit worldwide today. So basically you can expect there to be several LEO satellite communication networks (like Starlink) and instead of having 4000 satellites per constellation like now, they'll have more like 40,000 satellites per constellation (which improves coverage slightly, but mostly improves bandwidth). Also it will support true space tourism (into orbit, not just above 100 km for a couple minutes) and obviously there are going to be enormous military applications. Some expect there to be point-to-point flights worldwide where you can fly half-way around the planet in a couple hours.
So there is a market for mass production of Starships. Of course, like any other technologies, it'll have positive aspects and negative ones. There's definitely an environmental footprint, though it's far less than most other "big" polluters like ocean vessels, airplanes, and electricity production.
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I'm not sure having multiple hundreds of thousands of satellites in LEO is a good idea. Especially privately operated ones where inevitable cost cutting will lead to failures.
There's also the environmental aspect. Starlink sats have a lifespan of 5 years, so at the expected size of the final network they will be launching 8,000/year, and de-orbiting 8,000/year. That's a lot of CO2 to put them up, and a lot of crap burning up in the upper atmosphere. It gets worse if we assume others will be doing the same t
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Historical Precendence (Score:2)
I don't really buy into the whole "settlement on Mars" idea, since I think it's a big money loser.
So were the first North American colonies.
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Only a small percentage will actually make it... I'm just saying... exactly 0/3 so far have successfully made an earth reentry without blowing up or disintegrating. Last Wednesday's test Starship disintegrated on the way into the atmosphere.
No, Starship did not disintegrate on flight four. It survived, intact and functional, all the way through its intended belly flop, flip, engine relight and soft touchdown into the water.
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Re:It just makes no sense (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's just figurative. I guess doing a production run in which you average 1 rocket engine per day when falcon super heavy takes 33 of them might make sense.
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The reusable aspect would mostly be applied in LEO to amortize the cost of the ship, but the idea for Mars trips is that most would be one-way. It's meant to be a migration fleet, not a trade corridor.
Do you only get up in the morning and leave your house because you expect a "pot of gold" somewhere? Sounds like a pretty awful way to be.
People would be going to Mars to build a new future, not because they expect
Re: It just makes no sense (Score:4, Insightful)
One, Earth is not "depleted." Not even slightly, let alone "heavily." I don't know where the hell you're getting that idea, but humanity is not even physically capable of doing that yet. Every economic failure on this planet since the advent of modern science has been purely political.
Two, people don't leave a "super healthy" place, so you're talking out of your ass making migration conditional on perfecting existing society. Life wouldn't even have left the ocean if evolution worked the way you're advocating. It's the orphan soul that wanders, not the mama's boys in sweet lands that provide for all. You may have noticed that this post isn't in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Your comment is just a bunch of ignorant cliches. You have no idea what you're talking about. Our resources are not "limited" in any sense that you're using the word, and SpaceX has nothing to do with "our tax dollars." It's overwhelmingly funded by Starlink subscriptions and private investments anticipating more of them.
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Why would you need to build that many reusable rockets?
Because you need about 12 just to get to the moon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Resources may be there (Score:2)
There's no pot of gold on Mars.
No but there may well be other valuable resources. For example, the moon has lots of helium-3 on its surface from the solar wind and, if we ever get fusion reactors working, that will be a very valuable fuel for them and it is very hard to find on Earth. Asteroids are also known to contain significant rare earth metal deposits. Who knows what else we may find? Remember that most solar system exploration so far has been purely scientific and has not been looking for new resources to exploit.
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Minimum-energy Mars transfer windows are relatively infrequent, roughly every 26 months. This means that, if you want to build a colony on Mars, you don't want a steady stream of rockets making the trip back and forth, you want a large number of them to all go at the same time. Potentially hundreds of them. Starship, for such missions, requires being refueled in orbit, and it takes eight launches to refuel each one. A lot of those refueling launches would be rapidly reused Starships, but you'd still need a
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Consider that tank-to-tank propellant transfer test that was done on Starship 3 (?) test flight. Future Starships might go up, stay up for a refuel, explore, then come back down to refurbish. Or even refuel satellites? Or refuel space stations? Or Moon Bases?
Perhaps there is a future Starship variant that will be a freighter, not unlike the US Space Shuttle. That could bring heavy freight to orbit and beyond. Now space construction can occur.
I think this is a case of having more than you need rather than n
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Why would you need to build that many reusable rockets? There's no pot of gold on Mars.
There *is* a heck of a lot .. on 16 Psyche.
I dunno about you, but the idea of shipping off in a space ship for a year or two, to mine my fortune in space minerals, sounds kinda .. fun ..
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He can make Mars habitable more or less: alone
He has no chance in hell to do anything on earth that makes the current situation better. That is a mankind effort and not a single person effort.
He does enough on earth, solar roofs, batteries, electric cars ...
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The Starship program will cost north of $10B. The taxpayer is contributing $3B, most of which will go towards a custom moon landing variant only needed for the Artemis program. So the taxpayer is paying for about 10% of the cost.
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Most of that money is for Falcon9, not for Starship. And it's for operations, not R&D. The alternative to giving SpaceX $67M for a ride on Falcon 9 is giving ULA $95M for a ride on Vulcan.
When the US government buys a gasoline F-150 from Ford do you call it an EV subsidy?
Re: It just makes no sense (Score:3)
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The starship didn't disintegrate. The flap was functional enough for starship to make a controlled soft landing in the Indian Ocean. The flap burning through meant it didn't land on the exact spot it intended and was about 6km off target but they have already updated the design to make the burn through less likely.
Re:It just makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
According to what I've read, it came apart and disintegrated long before it reached water. I'm talking about Starship, not the booster. The booster had a controlled landing in water. The Starship actually disintegrated. Video was eventually lost, but some telemetry was still being provided and was indicative of the component fluttering to the ground. It came apart. Even if it didn't come apart, because of the holes in the ACTUAL starship, the heat and gases would have killed everyone on board even if they were in suits. You don't want holes in your spaceship when entering the atmosphere. The metal was actually melting and on fire.
What you have read and are parroting here is flat out wrong. The Starship upper stage had plasma burn through at the seal between one (perhaps more but at this point we only have camera footage on one) of the two upper flaps and the main body of the vehicle. This resulted in the part of the skin on the flap coming off through a combination of melting and physically being ripped away from the way past supersonic gas flow, Yet the flap's internal framework appeared to have stayed intact as well as the actuator mechanism for the flap continuing to function. There is no public information indicating what the internal conditions inside the ship were, but it is very likely there was no breach as the flap motor would have been one of the first things to go should there have been a breach.
It did not actually disintegrate. The telemetry you call fluttering showed the intended belly flop from the upper atmosphere down to almost sea level. The Starship performed its flip maneuver, engine relight and just like the main booster performed a soft touchdown into water.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)