211–220 of 420 posts
Metaculus shows a 74% chance Starship reaches orbit in 2024, and a projected date of March 26 for the next launch. That seems pretty bullish to me! Next year (2025) will probably see the beginnings of practical customer usage of Starship. [0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?status=open&has_group=f...
How does Metaculus make such predictions? I assume it can't be in the reliability engineering fashion used in industry.
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How does Metaculus make such predictions? I assume it can't be in the reliability engineering fashion used in industry.
Wisdom of the crowds.
Should be much more accurate than a simple poll, because people with the belief that the odds are undervalued will put money in the game to hopefully profit off their belief
It's more like the Efficient Market Hypothesis
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But what is the benefit of these result? At the moment we put more debris into Earth's orbit, Star Link is nice but not a sustainable solution, same with many other satellites
In what way is it not sustainable?
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Even here on HN plenty of people seem to misunderstood the fundamentals of "hardware-rich development" and assume that it must be fantastically expensive and/or reckless. It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.
Even SpaceX's methods of fail fast (and often explosively) is relatively cheap. SLS is doing it the hard and expensive way.
E.g.,
Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first time, it's much harder to understand if those failure modes are fully mitigated.
Personally, I think the ideal approach is to have SpaceX continue the rapid enginneering iterations, but give NASA (or some other entity) the resources to research the rest.
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Asteroid mining I think is one of the most interesting initial space industries. Something silly like a single asteroid having metals with current valuations of a million times the global GDP. Obviously you can't sell for that much but asteroid mining could make a lot of commodities become insanely cheap, and that would enable some pretty amazing things here at home, and in space. Like what if steel were cheaper than…
Yes, send up the robot miners. Plow the results onto the moon a safe but close distance to a base. Manufacture parts in lower G and far easier vacuum (it's super useful for MANY industrial things). Possibly even use solar collector ovens to melt/cook. Returning bulk products to earth might not be viable in the short term, but this could really bootstrap what we do off planet and I'm hopeful it might eventually make s…
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Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much. But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just prob…
> When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space. It almost sounds too good to be true or something.
Metaculus shows a 74% chance Starship reaches orbit in 2024, and a projected date of March 26 for the next launch. That seems pretty bullish to me! Next year (2025) will probably see the beginnings of practical customer usage of Starship. [0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?status=open&has_group=f...
Even if there is a catastrophic failure that destroys the launch tower, they are building another and will still likely get 2-3 attempts.
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Do tell, who’s doing the hard work, and why do they only succeed at anything “impossible” if Elon is there?
The engineers who build the rockets, and they didn't succeed and anything impossible. Building landing rockets was thought to be too expensive not impossible. Why is Tesla's FSD still not working? Wasn't Musk around? The Spaceship is also nothing impossible, let's wait for his Mars colony.
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How does Metaculus make such predictions? I assume it can't be in the reliability engineering fashion used in industry.
Wisdom of the crowds.