361–370 of 455 posts
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> Detonating something in orbit could trigger Kessler's Syndrome Unlikely in general, no at LEO and definitely not at the suborbital velocities IFT-6 contemplates.
Even at suborbital velocities, putting debris into the path of an existing satellite that is traveling at orbital velocity is enough to trigger a cascade.
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Honestly of very little significance to the typical individual. It isn't going to pay my bills or provide for my kids. It does nothing for people suffering war and genocide. Nothing for poverty, access to health care and education. Nothing for the biggest threats facing our civilization. It is still a remarkable technical achievement and I think the people who have designed and built these systems deserve some celebr…
Your posts reminds me of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. It had many fits and starts, and people thought it would take decades to pay off. But just as soon as it was completed, it changed everything overnight. This is what Musk is doing.
An operational Starship should be very impactful on space exploration but it won't be shipping cattle back from Mars. There is a difficult to discern line between reality and bullshit that Musk likes to blur. The "vision" stuff is there to hype up the troops and investors. You don't need to swallow it to appreciate the technology. It isn't narrow minded to reject stuff that just doesn't add up. The scales, time, distance, energy, investment involved in space colonization are incomparable to settling the USA. The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
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Honestly of very little significance to the typical individual. It isn't going to pay my bills or provide for my kids. It does nothing for people suffering war and genocide. Nothing for poverty, access to health care and education. Nothing for the biggest threats facing our civilization. It is still a remarkable technical achievement and I think the people who have designed and built these systems deserve some celebr…
Your posts reminds me of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. It had many fits and starts, and people thought it would take decades to pay off. But just as soon as it was completed, it changed everything overnight. This is what Musk is doing.
Quite bizarre how some people genuinely think he's just some guy who allocates capital. Or rich dad or whatever. I guess his dad was probably rich but that's clearly not enough.
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I’ve liked some of his other videos and made it in twenty minutes. He has three arguments: SpaceX is late and over budget on HLS, booster recapture is the easiest part of Starship’s technical risks and Starship is bad value for money. On the first two he’s right. Starship was, per SpaceX’s proposal to NASA, supposed to be almost ready by now. It’s not. But neither is any other leg of Artemis, and there is no unforgiv…
> I stopped watching when the criticism of Falcon 9’s pricing came up. Why should SpaceX, a private company, undercut itself? It’s already the cheapest (relative to mass; PSLV gives it a run for some orbits), most reliable and most frequent launch provider in the world. It makes sense for them to capture the delta as profit versus cut prices for the sake of it. (There is also no inflation adjusting done.) Exactly, th…
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Your posts reminds me of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. It had many fits and starts, and people thought it would take decades to pay off. But just as soon as it was completed, it changed everything overnight. This is what Musk is doing.
SpaceX are not building a transcontinental railroad. I think that is a false equivalence. An operational Starship should be very impactful on space exploration but it won't be shipping cattle back from Mars. There is a difficult to discern line between reality and bullshit that Musk likes to blur. The "vision" stuff is there to hype up the troops and investors. You don't need to swallow it to appreciate the technolog…
> The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
That's what people thought before the railroad was completed.
See "Nothing Like It In the World" by Stephen Ambrose:
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1...
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> It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit Require, or just make comfortable? Saturn V had the lift capacity of "only" a couple of Falcon Heavies, but was enough to carry astronauts, a car, a lunar lander with enough fuel to take off, and a command module.
It's necessary because the Starship upper stage is so heavy. With a non reusable upper stage Starship's capacity would be enormous.
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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…
> A 100x reduction in costs means that it becomes a fundable endeavour that countries like the US could still justify. 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 bud…
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I think that's the last thing they need to do before they can actually launch satellites. I'm surprised there was no attempt on the last launch. Glad to see it this time. The improved Starlink constellation that Starship will enable is going to be awesome.
I think they will want to deal with heatshield first. As of now, it hasn't survived deorbiting. SpaceX can launch satellites using Falcon9 and do it routinely. Starship needs to be developed and reach milestones, so they can get paid by NASA. Having a payload is a complication (unless it's a fun payload, remember the roadster car :D)
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No, absolutely not! Almost exactly the opposite meaning was intended, and I didn't think for a second that it could be interpreted as you say there. I wrote the comment quickly, thinking the sarcasm was obvious, I apologise for not being more explicit. The comment I responded to (which has now been removed, I think?) referred to how proud the commenter was that Musk is "American". I found this to be totally preposter…
I would think that NOT claiming him as an American is an even stranger thing to do.