191–200 of 431 posts
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weren't shuttle flights $2B each? List price of Falcon launch is <$70MM.
I think there's a difference in methodology here. When those numbers of the shuttle are listed, they're including all the upfront R&D spread across the life-cycle of the program. I believe the Falcon costs disregard all those as a sunk cost and only list the actual "launch" costs
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One of my favourite passages in the SpaceX book is from Gwen after working with Elon for a couple of weeks. She worked really hard on a proposal about how they would go about selling the Falcon rocket to potential customers. Elon took one look and said "That's great. I don't want you to write reports and proposals, I want you to do it.". My god, I would give anything for a boss like that.
> My god, I would give anything for a boss like that. You probably wouldn't. A boss that won't give explicit approval for aspects of a project is going to throw you under the bus at the first opportunity. They're not going to take any responsibility if you miss a target. They will however take all the credit for your success.
If you're ever in the Houston area, I highly recommend going to see NASA Johnson Space Center. They have a full-size replica (?) Saturn V rocket on its side, you can see. You simply can't grasp how big these rockets are until you see it up close. It's like a tall building blasting off into space. They're humongous. I hope to one day see Starship up close in person as it takes off to space.
This is a fact a lot of people don’t realize. The Saturn V was 363 feet long. I tell my kids to look at the highest building in town we have it is 12 stories and about 150 feet tall. The rocket was well over double that. That is insane! I would do anything to go back in time to watch that thing launch. Absolutely incredible in size.
What's the best thing I can do to help out with this as a software engineer? Is SpaceX in need of any critical software components? I think this is honestly the coolest thing to happen in my entire lifetime so far, and I would love to be a part of it, but I'm not sure I'd be useful since I'm not a mechanical engineer.
What's the best thing I can do to help out with this as a software engineer? Is SpaceX in need of any critical software components? I think this is honestly the coolest thing to happen in my entire lifetime so far, and I would love to be a part of it, but I'm not sure I'd be useful since I'm not a mechanical engineer.
Ask them and see, I guess. There are software positions listed on their page.
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I found it depressing. Ships aren't built to stay in the harbor, and rockets aren't built to lie on their side rusting. They say we couldn't build another Saturn V if we tried. Apparently that old saw is true enough, at least for the original contractors.
Nah, it's historic. We have better stuff now. It's like a Model T. The best place for it is in the museum.
The real problem for Starship (IMHO) is Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most reliable launch vehicle ever created. With reuse the may well be $10m per launch or even less by now and likely to continue to drop. F9 can deliver ~22t to LEO and smaller payloads to geosynchronous orbit. The payloads F9 can't deliver are quite small. What people forget is that payloads are deeply coupled to their launch vehicles. The launch…
> The evidence for this is the relatively few Falcon Heavy launches we've had and are planned.
I don't think that's very good evidence. The first Falcon Heavy flight was only 4 years ago and there have been 3 launches until now. Presumably people design their missions around what's available and proven reliable so I would expect it to ramp up. Looks like there are 5/6 Falcon Heavy launches on the cards for this year.
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The space shuttle is a human-rated launch vehicle capable of taking 7 people into orbit at a total cost of $445M per launch, or about $65M per seat. When subcontracted to Russia, the charge was about $85M per person. Crew Dragon costs about $55M per person - which is one place my 10% number comes from. Cargo flights are different, and you should also look at total program costs from the deal with NASA. The NASA contr…
The $445M number doesn't count the total cost of the program, which put each Shuttle launch at ~ $1.5 billion. Average cost of a SpaceX resupply is $152 million. That's the total amount the US government pays per mission. You couldn't send the shuttle up with 10% of the cargo capacity and only pay 10% of the cost. The Shuttle was $1.5 billion whether it was 16,000 kg to the ISS or 2,000 kg. Nor could you just use it…
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I suspect it could disrupt at least some form of earth transportation. The fuel costs are not that different than a transatlantic 787 flight, and it's likely simpler and with fewer moving parts. In similar style to Tesla's vertical approach, they could own the full stack (rocket, fuel production, launch/landing facilities).
A Starship can't land at any random commercial airport, a 787 can. The 787 can also divert to any other airport due to aircraft issue, weather, or whatever. Starship doesn't have anywhere close to the same cross-range capability.
We are moving from being able to crawl to walk with this new capability. What happens when we can run?
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Their goal is to create a ship that‘s up to the task of setting up colonies on Mars. Their estimate is that at least 1 million metric tons of cargo to the surface of Mars are required for that. Favorable launch windows to Mars are occurring every two years. With a cargo mass capacity of 100t per ship, over a span of 20 years (=10 launch windows) that would still require 1000 launches per launch window in average. Let…
I'm not all that familiar with orbital transfers and costs. Given the 20 year time frame and launch quantities needed, is a favorable transfer window always needed (I'm probably asking if it is always cheapest)? Seems like there's going to be stuff being sent up that would be totally fine slowly cruising to Mars in three years instead of one. Receiving a thousand shipments from space sounds approximately as hard as s…