291–300 of 455 posts
Thread devolved into petty politics quicker than expected.
I tried to search faq how to block people but couldn't find any info. How do I do that? If it's not possible, I'm pretty sure this site is breaking the EU social media laws.
news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^/item\?id=/) tr a.hnuser:has-text(/^dpifke$/):upward(tr)I imagine SpaceX is on for some pretty juicy government contracts now!
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Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right? This is exactly what Starship will do to space travel. Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality. Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space or nestled in a crater on the Moon. We might finally figure out dark ma…
See this is the kind of thing that's not helpful. It's just an outlandish overly optimistic mishmash of different concepts. Let's start with your analogy: > Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right? If you mean to use this to explain that what today costs X will in the future cost 0.01X, you're probably right. But a more accurate analogy is "Imagine if a…
Don't forget the dynamics. Costs of all such projects drop further when early steps become affordable. Like, with 100x reduction on the sticker price, US might feel Mars colony is still too expensive a project, but 100x reduction on trying out some adjacent space tech may just be in range of NASA budget or some private interest. Steps get made, iterated on, making next steps cheaper and more likely to happen. Derisking compounds.
I do agree it'd still be a decades long project at least (with a settlement established early on; it's the tail end that will drag on).
>> or nestled in a crater on the Moon.
>..why?
Having some gravity and hard surface to build on simplifies engineering challenges, particularly on large scales, as in free space, tension becomes a big issue. And, perhaps more importantly, the Moon would shield the telescope from all the electromagnetic noise produced on Earth, and also by the Sun.
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Starship is an enabling technology. We can easily imagine the things it will make possible.
Please list them because right now it is a hugely costly project that has shown no significant capital advancement for society beyond propping up Elon Musk and a “someday the average man will walk on the moon” dream. If anything of capital gain comes from it, it will never actually benefit the financial bottom line of the middle and lower class.
Launch costs significantly reduce what we can build in space and what research we co do there. Decreasing launch costs makes our research funding more effective and reduces the capital costs and projected profit margins needed to build space based infrastructure.
SpaceX has already enabled significant economic growth and innovation with the launch cost reductions brought by the various falcon rockets and their reusability.
If Starship can accomplish it's reusability goals, an ever greater reduction of launch costs is possible. This would jump start an even bigger space industry boom than the one we are in today.
Love the diamonds in the exhaust!
I'm just going to choose peace today and say: the SpaceX engineers who've been at this forever and have shown that crazy stuff is actually possible are seriously amazing humans, and I do hope they are successful.
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> go again the same day. That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
It's a good question. The hurdle to clear for same-day reuse will be the heat shield. SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that Starship can reenter the atmosphere and remain fully intact. Doing it while sustaining near zero wear on the heat shield will be even harder. But I think it is not impossible, and I don't know of any other obvious blockers for same day reuse.