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Starship V3

spacex.com

371–380 of 667 posts

Re: Starship V3

#371

He again mentions data center in space. He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet. It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place... But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something? Are we now in th…

Elon is smart and employs many smart people. If the thermodynamics didn't work, they would know.

I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.

Re: Starship V3

#372

I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.

There's a whole book positing that a permanent settlement on Mars is unlikely to work, and I have not seen their arguments debunked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars

Is it possible that their arguments haven't been noticed to be debunked? These are apparently the authors:

> The book was written by married couple Kelly Weinersmith, an adjunct professor at Rice University in the BioSciences Department, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist known for the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Re: Starship V3

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that they're absolutely not in isolation from other challenges because designing something to radiate heat at maximum possible radiative cooling efficiency is not considered to be a problem, solving the unit economics of launching the required radiators tonnage and burning 100 tonnes of rocket fuel to per tonne launched that's the problem. I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. Th…

> I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more fea…

One issue with this argument is that there are very few engineers that have had the opportunity to design satellites that are; this large, are designed for mass manufacturing, rapid iteration, failure allowance, and with access to a reusable launch vehicle with the capability of Starship (where it's also unknown what launch mass capability they will end up reaching).

The satellites built by SpaceX so far, and their engines, are quite unlike most previous space engineering due to these reasons. Given the undeniable success they've had in building Starlink, with each version growing considerable in size, I just don't see which engineers would be able to fully rule out the math that SpaceX might be working on here, exactly because there are so many parts of the total equation and where SpaceX are moving outside the previous design envelopes in many dimensions.

Of course I'm personally not convinced or able to know whether this is economically sensible - I just believe it's very difficult to fully rule out given the track record of SpaceX - and given that there doesn't appear to be any singular insurmountable thing that needs to be figured out here. Hence why I said in my original post that this is why I'm excited to see the design space explored.

Re: Starship V3

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, they will be in a low earth orbit that will decay and enter the atmosphere without maintenance burns

And it will impact negatively humanity's health. https://engineerine.com/starlink-satellites-harming-human/

Not a single source to a claim in sight.

Re: Starship V3

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only cool by radiation in space. You may get more energy from the sun but how are you going to get rid of all the heat fast enough?

How hot do you think black objects in space get? Something like 10°C. Look up thermal equilibrium of an ideal black body.

But are they doing work internally that generates heat? Genuine question.

Re: Starship V3

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno if it's that clear cut. In space with a shadowless orbit you get 5x more solar energy per day than the sunniest place on earth. And it's always on, so you don't need batteries. Also, the lack of gravity and weather means that the structures can be a lot more brittle - I imagine something like a gpu on the back of a large thin film solar panel, where the panel also acts as heatsink. Could be pretty cheap!

Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do. The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able t…

The always on orbit exists and is called a dawn-dusk Sun synchronous orbit. It is an orbit that is always above the terminator (line between night and day) where it can face the Sun 100% of the time.

This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.

Re: Starship V3

#377
post #315

He again mentions data center in space. He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet. It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place... But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something? Are we now in th…

Data centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.

This sadly has the core vulnerability of a child accidentally flying a spaceship on autopilot into it and firing mistakenly torpedoes while trying to deal with a few defense drones on board.

Re: Starship V3

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.

The engines for New Glenn ain't bad either. Competition does improve products.

I agree, but I think SpaceX is doing it for goals rather than competition.

Re: Starship V3

#379
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sick of living in this world where the richest scam artist can get richer and richer and richer with lies and lies and lies and empty promises and there is no SEC, no anything to stop him.

What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws. For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a…

> What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws.

Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Re: Starship V3

#380

Quick update for the folks passionate about space things (since this thread is full of unrelated comments): V3 is their first Starship family big upgrade, containing lots of learnings from previous tests, and the big engine upgrades. V3 engines are the first iteration of a production engine, with lots of sensors and auxiliary systems integrated into the engine itself. Besides the improvements in thrust, they've strea…

"New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them." Is that confirmed ? Will be truly amazing to see.

It is confirmed they'll attempt it, hopefully we also get to see it on the broadcast.

> The Starship upper stage will target multiple in-space and reentry objectives, including the deployment of 22 Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test. The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship.

This is from the dedicated flight 12 page, not this article. https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12

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