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Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

arstechnica.com

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Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#131

Post by kaycebasques »

kiba wrote: post #84
kaycebasques wrote: post #81

I respect the clarity of the vision and the drivenness to make the vision a reality. I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now. There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us. And yes when I say “there is no Planet B…

We can do both. Cheap and rapid space launch may allow us to put polluting industries where they belong: in space.

Ah, yes, the old “just shove it under the rug” strategy.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#133

Post by _Microft »

kaycebasques wrote: post #81

I respect the clarity of the vision and the drivenness to make the vision a reality. I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now. There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us. And yes when I say “there is no Planet B…

We do not backup our data because we are planning to wreck our harddrive. We hope to never have to use it but if things go awry, it will be there.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#134

Post by ceejayoz »

ash wrote: post #113
ceejayoz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not biologically adapted for surviving in Siberia, but we manage it. Hell, you'll get hypothermia on the French Riviera in winter without clothes. Technology has always been our way of expanding into spaces we're not otherwise evolved to cope with.

In Siberia you can have: breathable air, drinkable water, edible food, safe radiation levels.

Siberia is not survivable without technology.

Mars requires more technology, but that's a matter of magnitude, not impossibility.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#135

Post by Ajedi32 »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #70
Ajedi32 wrote: post #56

The pace of innovation here is absolutely ludicrous. They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom x-ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks ? They've gone from a production rate of one prototype in 8 months to one prototype every 2 weeks in less than a year. They doubled the size of their workforce in less than 48 hours. I'm gonna have to agree with the article author here: this is absolu…

> They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom X-Ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks? Can any engineer speak to whether this is actually progress, or even necessary? It seems like every time something goes wrong, Elon "invents" a way to do it better. I'm old enough to remember rescue subs, battery swaps, brain implants that will cure autism, factories spitting out factories, solar shi…

I can't speak to how common that sort of custom tooling is in the industry, but as to whether it was necessary the article already explains that pretty clearly:

> The current process for building a pressure dome takes about a week; 1 or 2 days to tack up and fit steel sheets, 4 days to weld the sheets together, and 1 to 2 days for X-ray inspections and repairs.

> [...]

> The knuckle seamer looks something like a giant zipper that articulates over the front and back of a dome, like a taco shell around its filling. [...] Then, in about 10 minutes, an automated torch will trace down the length of the curve, providing a precise weld. Following this, the dome is rotated to bring the next seam into view.

> [...]

> With this new X-ray machine, SpaceX hopes to compress a process that can take a day down to a few hours.

So the new machines reduce the amount of time needed to weld and inspect a pressure dome from several days to several hours. I'm certainly no expert, but that seems like a pretty big deal to me.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#136

Post by missosoup »

CydeWeys wrote: post #127
Ajedi32 wrote: post #56

The pace of innovation here is absolutely ludicrous. They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom x-ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks ? They've gone from a production rate of one prototype in 8 months to one prototype every 2 weeks in less than a year. They doubled the size of their workforce in less than 48 hours. I'm gonna have to agree with the article author here: this is absolu…

It's really helping them that they have some of the most motivated employees on Earth. Their people absolutely believe in this vision of colonizing Mars just as much as Elon Musk does. (Hell, I do too, I just don't work there.) Meanwhile I'm working at an advertising company.

> Meanwhile I'm working at an advertising company.

That's a funny way to spell Google.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#137

Post by kaycebasques »

_Microft wrote: post #133
kaycebasques wrote: post #81

I respect the clarity of the vision and the drivenness to make the vision a reality. I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now. There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us. And yes when I say “there is no Planet B…

We do not backup our data because we are planning to wreck our harddrive. We hope to never have to use it but if things go awry, it will be there.

It will be there for a beautiful cross-section of humanity for a while so long as Musk controls it (but even then he surely has some unconscious biases that will limit certain segments of the population from being there) and then nuclear war will break out on Earth and it will be there for whoever is well-connected to whatever government seizes control of it fastest.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#138

Post by Miraste »

addisonl wrote: post #101
Miraste wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simulation is not the same as trial and error. There's no such thing as a perfect simulation, and imperfect simulations without real world testing and iteration result in disasters. There are many examples, but the Mars probe that crashed because of a unit conversion error comes to mind.

> Mars probe that crashed because of a unit conversion error comes So a trial and subsequent error.

You're not differentiating between an iterative design process, during which failures are expected, and a monolithic one where the end product is final. When Starships blow up, Musk can build new ones and try again. When the probe crashed, that was the end of the mission and there was no more Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a one-off. This is a common problem in spaceflight.

The Webb Space Telescope is another example. If it eventually does launch and something goes wrong, we'll have paid >$10 billion for absolutely nothing. These aren't trial and error because the designs are never improved based on the errors. They're just scrapped. SpaceX works in a fundamentally different way.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#139

Post by scrumbledober »

recusancy wrote: post #77

Has he ever talked about how people would survive on Mars without a magnetosphere?

most likely using martian soil as a radiation shield. Either built up in mounds around structures, or by tunneling under the ground (boring company?)

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#140

Post by kaycebasques »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #126
kaycebasques wrote: post #81

I respect the clarity of the vision and the drivenness to make the vision a reality. I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now. There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us. And yes when I say “there is no Planet B…

Developing technology for surviving outside Earth's atmosphere contributes to advances in sustainability tech. It also opens up huge amounts of clean energy resources.

> Developing technology for surviving outside Earth's atmosphere contributes to advances in sustainability tech.

Good point, thanks.

> It also opens up huge amounts of clean energy resources.

Sustainability research is making it clear that we already have an abundance of clean energy resources here on Earth. If Mars does indeed flood the market with cheap clean energy and makes clean energy the overwhelmingly obvious choice, then I agree that will be a net win. But the problem doesn’t appear to be a resource scarcity issue here on Earth so I’m unconvinced that the solution is more resources.

Also, what clean energy resources are you referring to specifically? We essentially need something that can be substituted into our existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Mars provides something like that?

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