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Don’t stage off Starship

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Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#101

Post by disambiguously »

samatman wrote: post #86
snowwrestler wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ll get downvoted but I largely agree with you about the futility of the exercise. The complexity of the Earth’s system for sustaining life still far exceeds our understanding, and I think going to Mars will at best turn out to be a powerful way to learn that we cannot replicate it. The typical moral justification is that the Earth may be threatened and so it would be prudent to have some humans somewhere…

> Well the number one threat to Earth is an impact event. If we can hypothesize a rapidly growing lift capacity, why not use that mass budget to develop a solar-system-wide system for detecting and if necessary altering the trajectory of potential impacting objects? It would be WAY better to protect the Earth than any other backup plan. Detection is a solved problem. Altering the trajectory of an asteroid requires a…

Conversely, of course, the trajectory of a non-threatening near-Earth asteroid can be known well in advance, but there’s no obviously benign reason for anyone to bring a lot of delta-v to one.

So having a steady traffic in commercial heavy lift could be a positive externality as well, for whoever wants to find a close-call asteroid that has been recently marked as 100% safe and give it a little nudge.

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#102

Post by projektfu »

fit2rule wrote: post #81
sp332 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that the Starships need to refuel very quickly after landing to hit their return launch window. If you need to generate all the fuel right then, you need a much larger fuel plant. If you can store the fuel ahead of time,before the Starship has arrived, you can use a much smaller fuel plant, but you need storage space.

You build a version of Starship which produces fuel. You launch a fleet of them to Mars and have them operate for a year or so. Then, you send the human-carrying version. I think the way this is going to work, is when there are 1000 Starships on the surface, some of them with workshops, some with power plants, others with science labs, human quarters, and so on .. and they land in a big field. Humans arrive, string t…

Similar to the approach seen in "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#104

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

setr wrote: post #89
ppaattrriicckk wrote: post #53

Personally I think it'd be interesting to compare the expected price/weight to how much it cost to cross the Atlantic back in the 1600s. Does anyone happen to have any good references for goods/people crossing back then? For instance, one person writes on Quora[0] that between 1600 and 1800 one could cross the Atlantic from Europe by becoming an indentured servant, working 4-7 years for someone. By looking at the ave…

I imagine indentured servitude path should be dramatically more expensive by the end of it than paying straight up -- it's like taking money from a loan shark; it's not actually a good deal -- but you don't have the resources to get anything better. I imagine the actual cost of buying a ticket would probably be like 50÷ the cost of indentured servitude

The slavers businesses gotta make up their money somehow /s

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#105

Post by MPSimmons »

smoyer wrote: post #16

I have a few interesting questions ... to be fair, I've done no science or math to make a conclusion but there would certainly be a sense of irony involved. 1. Could the green-house gases produced to launch a civilization to Mars be the final straw that breaks our eco-system's back? 2. What are the moral implications of terra-forming Mars and moving a small population there, knowing that the population remaining on E…

The system is harvesting methane from Earth and converting it to carbon dioxide (another greenhouse gas, but less potent).

If the system uses the Sabatier method to produce methane from CO2, then it's using solar power (I can't imagine doing it in any other way sanely) to convert CO2 to CH4, which is then converted back to CO2 by the rocket. Net gain of no greenhouse gas.

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#106

Post by iso1210 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #95
missosoup wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Kardashev scale is essentially sci-fi. Okay. And we're embarking on a mission that would achieve an 'essentially sci-fi' objective. With the funding of a billionaire that you chose to shit on over the rest, that instead embark on.... Sex crimes? Petty regional politics? Rent seeking? Expanding their empires? Setting their offspring up to follow in their steps? I don't follow.

Again, I'm not particularly hostile to Musk, he was just the one who came up. Do you want me to list some others I dislike? The surviving Koch brother, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and many others are very bad as well. To me, a Mars mission is going to be as impactful to the vast majority of humankind as a fraction of how important the discovery of the Americas was the peasantry of Europe (since the Americas were at l…

For Musk's plan to succeed he needs to advance solar power and co2 extraction.

Those two things alone will massively help the planet.

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#107

Post by pmontra »

mechhacker wrote: post #90
moneytide1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the iron core of Earth imply magnetic repellent of the sight of these Cosmic ray retina inducing sparkles?

No, the atmosphere blocks almost all of it. If it weren't for that, we'd be hit constantly. Their influence on weather/cloud formation is an active area of research https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/cosmic-rays-clouds

I stood by this cosmic trays detector [1] in a station of the metro of Naples, Italy, for a few minutes. I saw quite a few cosmic rays passing through the detector.

[1] https://www.researchitaly.it/en/news/surprise-in-naples-subw...

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#108

Post by aperrien »

ppaattrriicckk wrote: post #53

Personally I think it'd be interesting to compare the expected price/weight to how much it cost to cross the Atlantic back in the 1600s. Does anyone happen to have any good references for goods/people crossing back then? For instance, one person writes on Quora[0] that between 1600 and 1800 one could cross the Atlantic from Europe by becoming an indentured servant, working 4-7 years for someone. By looking at the ave…

I'm incredibly curious as to how much that cost will be vs. a mid-career employee's 401k. If a middle class family with a decade or so of experience could cash theirs in, would they be able to afford to go?

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#109

Post by rbanffy »

setr wrote: post #89
ppaattrriicckk wrote: post #53

Personally I think it'd be interesting to compare the expected price/weight to how much it cost to cross the Atlantic back in the 1600s. Does anyone happen to have any good references for goods/people crossing back then? For instance, one person writes on Quora[0] that between 1600 and 1800 one could cross the Atlantic from Europe by becoming an indentured servant, working 4-7 years for someone. By looking at the ave…

I imagine indentured servitude path should be dramatically more expensive by the end of it than paying straight up -- it's like taking money from a loan shark; it's not actually a good deal -- but you don't have the resources to get anything better. I imagine the actual cost of buying a ticket would probably be like 50÷ the cost of indentured servitude

> like taking money from a loan shark

A loan shark that owns the air you breathe.

Re: Don’t stage off Starship

#110

Post by rbanffy »

Since it seems we are on the verge of having an off-planet colony, I'd like to launch a couple questions:

1- What are the colonists' fundamental rights and who protects them?

2- Under what jurisdiction will they be?

3- Who owns the air?

4- If someone can't pay for their air or food, what happens?

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