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Starship’s second flight test

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Re: Starship’s second flight test

#101

Post by maxlin »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #92
maxlin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-Not being dependent on Earth for survival of the species as Starship in its huge capability and reasonably cheap cost, among with refuelability on Mars begins the road to believable planetary colonization -Asteroid / Moon mining -Overally, being capable of going to space with more than just miniscule science-oriented payloads. FYI, ISS has cost us over a 100 billion dollars. When Starship hauls its worth in volume i…

I feel there are 100 more scientific/engineering breakthroughs greater than Starship between where we are now and off-planet habitability/asteroid mining. Of course it's an important step but by far I imagine it won't be the most important.

I feel Starship is going to be one of those "hey we figured out how to get 4x more processing power out of a new chip" lynchpins after which a lot of things that were infeasible and tossed early in planning / ideation, suddenly become possible if not even relatively easy.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#102

Post by duccinator »

XorNot wrote: post #75
satvikpendem wrote: post #60

I finished reading the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, and, for all his faults, Musk really knows how to get shit done. I was constantly amazed by his ability to strip a process to its essentials before embarking on its construction. SpaceX single-handedly* brought down the cost of space flight by using off-the-shelf and custom-created-from-metal components, where they only had to pay for the raw cost rather…

Elon Musk's biggest problem is his chronic inability to shut the hell up. No one would care who he was as a person if he just let his media people do their jobs, and stuck to corporate press releases to respond to things. Plenty of people say they dislike Jeff Bezos, but barely anyone even thinks about Jeff Bezos or knows what he sounds like.

I wonder though, considering the amount of other popular people who do not share the same achievements who you probably just ignore anyway (think some influencers and youtubers), do we really want him to shut up? His opinions and promises might not sit well with everyone but I definitely think you can learn a lot by analysing him.

I personally prefer him over the random billionaire #362682 who haven't achieved half as much and won't share anything.

Also, I would recommend reading his biography, changes your perspective on a lot of things.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#103

Post by rich_sasha »

modeless wrote: post #16

If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).

Agreed it would be absolutely seismic.

How well does that look, from a cold, objective, non-Elon-hype point of view? I mean, he might happen to be 100% correct in his optimism but by now I learned to trust nothing that man says.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#104

Post by maxlin »

enneff wrote: post #98
maxlin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-Not being dependent on Earth for survival of the species as Starship in its huge capability and reasonably cheap cost, among with refuelability on Mars begins the road to believable planetary colonization -Asteroid / Moon mining -Overally, being capable of going to space with more than just miniscule science-oriented payloads. FYI, ISS has cost us over a 100 billion dollars. When Starship hauls its worth in volume i…

What would have to happen to earth to make it less viable a place to live than mars? An asteroid rendering earth’s surface uninhabitable? Even that wouldn’t be enough - there’s still so much more on earth to sustain human life than any planet in our solar system. Apart from proof of concept I just don’t see any practical reason to colonise mars.

I don't get your point. Having a self-sustaining colony on Mars ready when suddenly the brother of the Chicxulub impactor appears on the radar and will hit in less time than it would require to create massive underground cave systems utilizing geothermal power would take to build, will literally save the species.

And that is just one apocalypse variant. Nuclear holocaust. Antimatter bombs. Possibly even a massive gamma ray burst, are all safe from Mars even if they might kill everyone on Earth.

Our species took an incredible amount of time to evolve, likely long enough to not re-appear in this solar system if lost. Which is a very weird point for me feeling that I have to argue for lol

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#106

Post by modeless »

rich_sasha wrote: post #103
modeless wrote: post #16

If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).

Agreed it would be absolutely seismic. How well does that look, from a cold, objective, non-Elon-hype point of view? I mean, he might happen to be 100% correct in his optimism but by now I learned to trust nothing that man says.

Personally? I think it's quite likely they will get it to work. I don't know about the timeline though. Explosions at the launch/landing pads could delay them a lot. I think reliability is likely to be an issue for a long time, and I don't see commercial Earth-to-Earth passenger service happening for that and other reasons.

They will have trouble getting customers who can actually use the capabilities Starship has. Seems like everyone is still designing missions for status quo. Luckily they already saw that issue and created their own launch customer in Starlink. And HLS with orbital refueling will also be key.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#107

Post by yetihehe »

radu_floricica wrote: post #80
XorNot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk's biggest problem is his chronic inability to shut the hell up. No one would care who he was as a person if he just let his media people do their jobs, and stuck to corporate press releases to respond to things. Plenty of people say they dislike Jeff Bezos, but barely anyone even thinks about Jeff Bezos or knows what he sounds like.

I mean, what's the point of getting where he is and shutting up just to make random people happy?

Making random people happy means having less people unhappy about you which increases your global status, which gives you more ability to extract resources from the world to augment your goals. Yeah, it's very long reasoning, but it is why most people try not to offend others.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#108

Post by solarkraft »

tornato7 wrote: post #51
cryptoz wrote: post #12

I can’t wait for the time when Starship is proven and launching frequently - though there is a lot to be said about the excitement of right now, when it hasn’t yet had a successful launch. Really got my fingers crossed for a true rapid drop in cost to launch mass to orbit.

I just looked it up and was stunned to see a target of $13/kg cost to orbit. That's insane. A human could go to space for under $1,000 (hand waving away the life support systems)

Those are still Musk numbers. But even 10x of that would be quite good.

Pretty crazy how nobody seems to even try to compete.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#109

Post by maxlin »

clort wrote: post #90
maxlin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Elon actually promised something concrete about this? Elon's not the first guy ever to hype the hyperloop idea. On its basis it is hard to think we won't this at some point as it promises essentially orbit-like capability on the surface, so everyone has the right to dream we'd get this sooner.

"Can you give an example of 1 thing Elon said" ..well known example is given.. "Has Elon actually promised something concrete about this?" you can see that those things are different.

I think the reasonable limit is when something sounds like that he argues it is possible "soon" instead of not being thought about. Like, I don't think we'll have AGI or gene-modified catgirls in 10 years but those dont count as an answer to this.

Hyperloop was always being to be extremely expensive and Elon's role on it was never but just try to be a catalyst for more innovation towards it. He used terms like "open-source idea" and did that student competition to try to kind of drive other people to grab the idea. Things like FSD are instead considered concrete and produced by his companies.

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