331–340 of 348 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man If I could fly (rocket?) to AUS from the UK in a handful of hours I'd be all over that vs. the 24+ hour flights + connections. Sure it doesn't make sense for all routes but for super long distance I can see it being competitive for some section of the market.
27 hours of travelling in a first class suite isn’t that bad
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like how small and slender Raptor 2 is compared to Raptor 1. The turbo pump looks even scarier than usual though. It's amazing that something so small is producing 100k HP (the pump turbine).
I thought 100k HP was either too incredible or a typo. Then I looked it up: “You def don’t want electric pumps on a rocket engine! Raptor turbopumps alone need 100,000 horsepower per engine. That’s not a typo.” —Elon Musk x 32 engines. Amazing! For comparison, this is an internal combustion engine with 100k HP: https://www.zmescience.com/science/biggest-most-poweful-engi...
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron has them and made it to orbit
"It's gonna be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work. You might die." -- Elon's sales pitch for Mars, in his own words. I wonder if any billionaire (or their children) will be doing the early work. It's an interesting game of "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future. Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that there will be a disaster. But over the cours…
Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress? I suppose there's an idea we could apply everything done on Mars to Earth, but like... seriously, what we just took all the prep for mars and just put it in the middle of the Empty Quarter, the Saraha, Antarctica? People barely want to live in the arc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but that hasn't stopped him from trying to stop others from benefiting from the same. That's complete nonsense. Unlike others SpaceX has never really attack other space companies. Musk has been supportive of other space companies. SpaceX busted open the establishment in both DoD and NASA so the contracts are fairly competent, and everybody coming in the industry benefits from that. SpaceX just recently lost a contr…
In a recent WSJ he, Musk, spoke out against government subsidies. I don't mind such subsidies but I do mind when people who benefit from government help want to stop others from doing the same.
And he multiple time argued against subsidies that Tesla would benefit from more then anybody else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that this will ever be viable for the general population. Think about the acceleration at launch and reentry. It's more an amusement park experience than travel by car, ship or plane. There will be people mentally and physically fit for that (past some age and before another one) and people that will never be. Other problems like cost, time from home to spaceport and boarding can be fixed or be irrelevan…
Man If I could fly (rocket?) to AUS from the UK in a handful of hours I'd be all over that vs. the 24+ hour flights + connections. Sure it doesn't make sense for all routes but for super long distance I can see it being competitive for some section of the market.
Would it be easier building a huge habitable space station near Mars than on the surface of Mars itself. Reason why near Mars if because we want redundancy for life. So at a safe distance from Earth.
It might be that once starship works, we do all kinds of things, and it turns out that asteroids work better than planetary surfaces. So the belt becomes the focus of economic activity, and the mars colony is just a novelty kept alive by the Musk Foundation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ability to make methane on Mars is pretty huge, though. If you're mining the asteroid belt and need to refuel your ships, it's a lot easier to ferry fuel from Mars to the belt than haul it all the way from Earth. And methane/oxygen production is likely to be one of the first things we get going on Mars because we'll want our rockets to be able to make return trips back to Earth and we really don't want to haul th…
Again though lifting methane off of Earth is expensive, but ships from the Asteroid belt will naturally be coming back to Earth, so refueling around the Earth or Moon doesn't go out of the way. Mars is a detour, and you have to sink the costs to sustain the colony which offsets the smaller gravity well.
Earth would probably continue to manufacture high-value, complex machines like rocket engines and computers and robots. Earth would receive high-value minerals from the asteroid belt like gold or platinum or silver. Maybe nickel or copper. Iron wouldn't be worth it unless shipping costs were really low, aluminum would probably be the same. On the other hand, iron and aluminum might be worth enough on Mars to be worth shipping there. It'd be cheaper than shipping from Earth, anyways. And hauling rocket fuel/oxygen all the way from Earth really doesn't make sense if you can get it on Mars.
Basically, you'd have ships going back and forth between Earth and the belt delivering equipment and bringing back high-value metals, and you'd have another set of ships going back and forth between Mars and the belt hauling fuel and oxygen and maybe bringing back low value metals to be used on Mars. If there are people living in the belt, the ships can bring them whatever else is easier to make on Mars than in space. Maybe food.
It's kind of a weird thought, but I would suggest that a lot of the output of industrial infrastructure in space is going to be used in space rather than returned to Earth. What's the point (you might ask) if it doesn't come back to Earth? Well, people on Earth might for various reasons want to expand their foothold in space, and then once it reaches a certain critical mass those footholds in space become their own thing. Like Europeans coming to America and eventually rebuilding more-or-less what they left behind, but with some differences.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard him speak. Is he always this awkward? Based off of the 5 minutes I watched, he clearly hasn’t gotten to where he is through charisma and public speaking skills. I’m just wondering if this is typical for him. Also, a million tons to Mars? If each starship lifts 100 tons, that is 10,000 launches. I think he said launch windows only come around every 2 years. He is either planning…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man If I could fly (rocket?) to AUS from the UK in a handful of hours I'd be all over that vs. the 24+ hour flights + connections. Sure it doesn't make sense for all routes but for super long distance I can see it being competitive for some section of the market.
27 hours of travelling in a first class suite isn’t that bad
Earlier quoted context omitted.
27 hours of travelling in a first class suite isn’t that bad
People able to afford first class are mostly time constraint, not money constraint. If you offer something using only 1/10 the time, they will buy it.