Outer Space Thread

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

They just 2x’d nasas most powerful booster. As a private company with a contract to land people already in orbit on the moon. Just can’t muster up the incredulity some people have I guess.

[AdmiralKird]

I’m confused with all the skepticism.

Is the outrage due to this vehicle not being able to make it to mars? Or false advertising? Or because it’s an attempt to revolutionize travel but not go to mars?

Or simply because of musk?

One seems more plausible than the other

I'm not outraged, but the hype conjuring about it occludes the judgement of policy makers and creates a "reality distortion field" around the vehicle which can drastically affect better allocation of society's public funding.

I voiced this opinion with a friend leading up to the launch, I just didn't partake here because I didn't read the thread being bumped. I think a site-to-site and super heavy lifter is a good thing. But if we allocate funding for moon, mars, and asteroids vehicles to "starship" then it is tantamount to siphoning resources that should be going elsewhere to develop those vehicles so that we actually have them. That's not to say current alternatives like the congressional bloat of SLS is anything less of a money pit, or whatever ULA came up with and whomever the other one was/is. But if we dump money into starship under a false premise then we could very well have nothing that can go to the moon or Mars in 2030, and just have a big low earth orbit lifter. This would waste talent on earth from other companies/agencies, and allow one company to corner all of the space market through cannibalizing the moon/mars market all while saying they're trying to get there, and dragging us along on their coattails for decades as they keep working to make starship into something it can't do well or efficiently. I don't want this to happen because I want us to actually go back to the moon and Mars.

Personally I would like to see a dedicated lander for the moon plus mars developed that is much smaller and designed to fit those missions and could achieve the moon goal by the end of the 2020's. I would like to see NASA develop a dual-use successor to the ISS, albeit smaller, that could be sent to Mars on a two year mission or parked in Earth Orbit. Cargoship or Falcon Heavy could play a large role in putting either in orbit. This could see a manned mission to Mars by the 2041 or 2043 transfer windows. Considering the Mars sample return would just be getting back to Earth by 2033 (and thats if its on schedule) that would be pretty ambitious already. You might be able to do something with Starship within that same time frame but you would trade multiples of safety for it.

[Arthur Dent]

They're never getting the booster with 33 engines under $200,000 in maintenance costs per flight and 1,000 launches.

Doesn’t seem likely to me either. Especially after you kill your first crew.

The international flight thing does not seem at all plausible to me. You are going to pay way more to save a couple hours and have a ~1% chance of being incinerated? And what are chances these things are going to have a reliable frequent launch schedule from where you are to your destination? Zero.

There are some scant articles from back in the day. It's reported as sort of as a feature of Starship, but not the focus. The reason I believe its most real focus is because:

1. Musk in general spends an inordinate amount of time talking about regulations. If this were ever going to be a thing, they would have to completely re-write the book on space launches.

2. Musk says he plans to build 1,000 Starships... to carry people to Mars. You don't need 1,000 ships to go to Mars. We haven't even sent anyone, once. Where is the money going to come from for 1,000 starships? 1,000 sounds plausible if you consider they're operating as an airline.

3. It's where the most money is at - if it can be achieved. There are other places where Starship can make money. It could haul the largest scientific and communication payloads into orbit. It could put up a much larger visible spectrum telescope. It could haul massive space station sections into orbit. Space tourism will still be a thing - but that's building a thing that barely exists as an industry.

4. Most of Musk's ventures are about changing the way we travel. Tesla is to change how we drive by upending fossil fuel cars. The Boring Company is about creating networks of highways under cities and improving intracity travel. Hyperloop is to redefine intraconinental and intercity travel. You can say SpaceX changes the way we travel because we don't travel to the mars or moon, but there's a gap in there for intercontinental travel.

5. There's no real discussion of using Starship for heavy cargo. Starship is always about people. Falcon Heavy is for heavy cargo. But Starship would be even better at heavy cargo if it just carried a big payload in a faring. With heavy cargo you could assemble a real living spaceship/mobilespacestation for the journey to mars, and a dedicated lander.

It totally could be the case that Musk thinks this will work, but it’s a completely absurd idea with no chance of success.

In addition to his regular casual dishonesty, Musk suffers to an unusual degree with Silicon Valley brain, where you consider a problem at an incredible degree of abstraction, so the solution is straightforward. In principle, a ballistic trajectory is super fast, but that is a tiny piece of the transport puzzle. Even if it were to come out relatively cheap, this rocket must be rebuilt for every flight and do extensive checkouts before launch. The ultization factor will be terrible compared to airplanes. Are they going to load you into this thing 30 minutes before lift-off through clouds of cryonic gas exhaust from the tons of explosive propellant being actively loaded below? When the launch gets scrubbed, are they going to move you over to another tower a mile away that is somehow also just about ready to take off? Are you going to build giant launch tower farms to support, at mInimum, dozens of launches per day from each origin, so that the short travel time actually exist in practice rather than waiting a day or or more for your flight to come up? Will these tower farms be built near urban area subjecting them to regular massive explosions and clouds of debris? Will the launches go out directly over populated regions where failed boosters crash into your house? You can go on and on with this.

Traditional supersonic flight as a fast transport option actually works, and it died out largely due to insufficient demand. It’s possible it will make a comeback with one or more of the new designs in development, and that is the means any high speed VIP travel market will get served, not this ridiculous giant ballistic missile idea.

If the system does work, it will be quite useful for space access, but as you say, that’s likely to continue to be a fairly limited market.

Edit: Hyperloop and Boring Company are also both excellent examples of Silicon Valley brain ideas. Notice that Boring Company’s big project is a gee whiz Vegas tourist attraction.

[Arthur Dent]

They just 2x’d nasas most powerful booster. As a private company with a contract to land people already in orbit on the moon. Just can’t muster up the incredulity some people have I guess.

If they land on the moon with a version of this thing, that will be a stupendous achievement, and I think they’ve got a shot at it.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Musk and misplaced priorities imo.

[Arthur Dent]

From a kid who was completely enthralled by the Gemini and Apollo space missions, my response to this is...

Don't we have more important things to spend our time and money on?

The original space race consumed a shockingly large fraction of overall productive capacity. This one does not. The utility is debatable, but I don’t think it ranks especially high on the spectrum of things resources are wasted on.

[ghostrunner]

I’m confused with all the skepticism.

Is the outrage due to this vehicle not being able to make it to mars? Or false advertising? Or because it’s an attempt to revolutionize travel but not go to mars?

Or simply because of musk?

One seems more plausible than the other

I just want to hear how a private company is plausibly going to make money from it. Building the ship/tech is one thing. Everything else involved with taking, sustaining and returning people to Earth repeatedly is a whole other problem. If there’s a resource on Mars we knew was there that can be exploited at scale then I can buy it long term. Someone might put up that money.

But to get there and keep people there - where does the money come from? It can’t just be space tourism.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. It’ll happen but it’ll be a partnership between NASA and maybe SpaceX and others.

- Also, all the more modest goals seem doable. It’s useful and beneficial but I also think Musk uses the proposed Mars mission as marketing.

[ghostrunner]

This might be an issue. That’s a ball cap in the quoted tweet/pic

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

I’m confused with all the skepticism.

Is the outrage due to this vehicle not being able to make it to mars? Or false advertising? Or because it’s an attempt to revolutionize travel but not go to mars?

Or simply because of musk?

One seems more plausible than the other

I just want to hear how a private company is plausibly going to make money from it. Building the ship/tech is one thing. Everything else involved with taking, sustaining and returning people to Earth repeatedly is a whole other problem. If there’s a resource on Mars we knew was there that can be exploited at scale then I can buy it long term. Someone might put up that money.

But to get there and keep people there - where does the money come from? It can’t just be space tourism.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. It’ll happen but it’ll be a partnership between NASA and maybe SpaceX and others.

- Also, all the more modest goals seem doable. It’s useful and beneficial but I also think Musk uses the proposed Mars mission as marketing.

I posted that astronomer talking about the economics and need to get stuff into low orbit which at least illustrates the demand for that.

How going to mars is economically viable, I have no idea. It’s so far in the future. But the funding could plausibly be provided/supplemented via the functional capability of transporting a bunch of stuff into low orbit, in the short term at least.

If mars could be terraformed, no idea if possible, I don’t know why anyone would want to go anyway. The benefits of living on earth are so immeasurable. And now is bar none the best time to be alive. You can get to most places your want to go on the planet above sea level within a day or two for $1k while constantly having internet/data access in an air conditioned ride with relatively cheap food and water. Everything you want at your fingertips.

Going to mars would be like going back to the 1920s at best. In a [expletive] hole climate and landscape. [expletive] that.

But it beats extinction if it ever came to that.

[ghostrunner]

I totally get wanting to go.

Elon is definitely part of the reason I’m skeptical about the Mars part. He’s got a pretty lousy track record outside of Tesla in terms of promises and predictions. I just read an article from 2017 or so with him predicting flights could be off the planet by 2024.

His hyperloop, which AD mentioned, is a total scam. He personally seems most interested in Twitter right now, which is bizarre for someone like him. He’s currently giving random celebrities and accounts free blue checks, having just pulled all the non-paying blue checks on 4/20 (har har). Probably so people don’t use online tools to mass block Blue accounts.

Why anyone would take him seriously is beyond me. Mercifully SpaceX seems to have fairly little interference from him. Though the launch date was 4/20, so…