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Starship is still not understood

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Re: Starship is still not understood

#151

Post by ncallaway »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #128
ARandumGuy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past success does not guarantee future success. And when you're dealing with space travel, which is inherently expensive and extremely dangerous, then you can't afford to buy into any hype.

If they were trying something genuinely new - like falling out of orbit and making a propulsive upright landing of a wingless booster - then some skepticism would be justified. But what's new in Starship?

> But what's new in Starship?

The planned recovery mechanism (the aerodynamic fall, with a very late righting maneuver and landing) is still quite new. They've successfully tested it once (which is great!), but the Starship concept really hinges on that being an extremely high reliability maneuver.

I would argue that, until SpaceX can demonstrate that landing maneuver is high reliability, that the Starship concept isn't proven.

I say this as a massive fan of Starship, and someone who is extremely excited by the promises of Starship of they come to fruition.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#152

Post by marktangotango »

nine_k wrote: post #124
marktangotango wrote: post #13

Spacex is building the transcontinental railroads of the solar system. There is mind boggling upside for them. I'm kinda disappointed Blue Origin seems to have fallen in a rut. I'm sure Musk will be happy to provide transportation for Bezos space colony construction projects! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon Edit My point isn't to disparage Bezos, but to highlight the fact that anyone with grand aspirati…

Transcontinental railroads provided routes between already populated areas, with viable trade between them. Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be worth carrying by a starship. The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be economical.

That doesn't really hold up though. California has a lot desert and was sparsely settled until the gold rush for example. Also, in situ resource utilization is an area where technology and innovation are certain to provide advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization

Re: Starship is still not understood

#153

Post by GDC7 »

oxplot wrote: post #138
GDC7 wrote: post #64

Space is becoming a religion for atheists, with SpaceX serving the role of the church and Elon Musk in charge of it as the techno-utopian Pope. No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros are staying out of it. The amount of mass that we have to bring up there to live and thrive and be happy is so enormous that Nobel astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Christopher Nolan had to essentially…

Even if a religion, sure as heck the best out there, by a large margin: 1. Got the best miracles (two building sized Falcon 9 boosters landing side by side after an orbital launch). 2. Promises exciting future, full of explosions, adventures and memes. 3. Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence (already delivers the cheapest and slickest rides to space).

> Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence

What about the promise that you'd be able to have your present day quality of life on Mars?

That's basically the equivalent of "if you pray enough and donate X money to the church , you'd go to Heaven".

Ironically the same people who stand behind the concept of "the big lie" and categorically deny the "lab leak theory" , have no problem believing in the above nonsense, even though the probabilities of that happening is many orders of magnitude lower than an election being stolen or a viral agent being accidentally released in the external environment.

Curious.

Nothing in the entire world is more dangerous than a person with lots of book smarts but zero street smarts

When lots of book smarts people with zero street smarts are being recruited by a cult leader the most terrible things happen.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#154

Post by panick21_ »

onepointsixC wrote: post #82
bryanlarsen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA just announced that they want to spend $1B per launch for SLS once a year until 2050. For a capability less than what SpaceX might provide for $10M. That's not sensible risk management, that's head in the sand denialism. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sl...

While I have much dislike for SLS, there is just no way in hell SpaceX will charge $10M for a launch. SpaceX have their own goals which they need funds for and they're not going to under cut their Falcon 9 that intensely like that. That's not to say that Starship won't be the best price per ton of payload to orbit. But let's stay reasonable here. As for NASA remaining with SLS, for now at least, is due to a mix of co…

Even with Starship not existing SLS is a mistake.

It doesn't do anything that you can't do in other ways. We already have distrusted rocket launch.

SLS is holding the moon architecture hostage. There is simply no need for it.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#155

Post by JulianMorrison »

onepointsixC wrote: post #82
bryanlarsen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA just announced that they want to spend $1B per launch for SLS once a year until 2050. For a capability less than what SpaceX might provide for $10M. That's not sensible risk management, that's head in the sand denialism. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sl...

While I have much dislike for SLS, there is just no way in hell SpaceX will charge $10M for a launch. SpaceX have their own goals which they need funds for and they're not going to under cut their Falcon 9 that intensely like that. That's not to say that Starship won't be the best price per ton of payload to orbit. But let's stay reasonable here. As for NASA remaining with SLS, for now at least, is due to a mix of co…

> they're not going to under cut their Falcon 9 that intensely

Once Starship is tried and tested, I strongly suspect they will flat out deprecate Falcon. Fly the missions that have been paid and scheduled, and then bin them.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#156

Post by vanattab »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #137
ceejayoz wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Propulsive landing of an orbital stage is pretty new. (You can make an argument for Soyuz's just-before-landing rockets, but it wouldn't be a fair one.)

Okay, I'll grant you that. Not a huge step from what they already do, but it is a step.

Orbital flight vs suborbital flight is a bigger step then you might think. For orbital flights the vehicle is traveling at least 28,000 km/h where as to reach 125 miles above Earth, a suborbital vehicle only needs 6,000 km/h. This can dramatically effect the survivability on reentry. Orbital and sub orbital flights are very different.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#157

Post by panick21_ »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #86
panick21_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it, There are always other people who think 'maybe those Alabama $ could go to Texas instead'.

SLS pork is spread to all 50 states. Texas gets a good chunk of it. A small fraction of $2B is more than all of $10M.

NASA budget will not change that much so the money will still be spent. You can compare launch cost like that.

And while it might use all 50 states, in reality the waste majority of money is spend in a very few locations as paying labor is huge part of the cost.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#158

Post by brianwawok »

vanattab wrote: post #123
gremloni wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what, your gut feel? 12 launches per hour does not seem insane at all.

In 2020 there was 114 orbital launches supporting all space missions around the world. That's 0.013 launches per hour. 12 launches per hour to support a single mission does not seem at least a little insane? I love SpaceX and am hopeful for their Mars plans but we are scientists and engineers let's think with our brains and not our hearts.

if computers taught me anything.. it's if you can do 1 thing really really well perfectly, it's not a ton of work to do it 10x or 100x in parallel.

We don't have enough data to know reliability of say Falcon long term. Is it 99% successful? 99.9%? 99.999999%? Doing a ton of launches, you really want to work on the 9s, so 0-1 of your launches blow up, not 100+. But once you do, you just copy paste it baby and go to town.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#159

Post by basementcat »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #20
ncallaway wrote: post #8

I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that Starship is, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises, they to fundamentall…

I'm not sure that NASA designs much. JPL designs and builds most of the probes launched by NASA. JPL is an anomaly in the Federal Government where it gets good results. It would be interesting to look into how JPL does so well relative to other agencies and contractors such as Boeing (which is a national embarrassment).

JPL is the only NASA center that is staffed by non civil servants and managed (under contract) by a private organization (Caltech). By law this gives them certain flexibility that other NASA centers aren’t afforded (e.g. Caltech has lobbyists in Washington DC). It may make more sense to categorize JPL with other Federally Funded Research and Development Centers such as Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#160

Post by brianwawok »

abledon wrote: post #127
altcognito wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blue Origin said it would be 16, Musk has claimed it won't be more than 8. https://wccftech.com/musk-rejects-blue-origins-claim-of-16-s... It ends up being ~100,000 launches over 10 launch windows. Elon has talked about building 1000 starships (presumably you would need less boosters) https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/1000-starship... Anyway, it's absolutely the case that transferring a million tons of c…

> It ends up being ~100,000 launches over 10 launch windows. Elon has talked about building 1000 starships managing that many launches...spaceships mid-journey, refueling in space ETC... would the 'head count' at spaceX have to increase greatly, or would they keep a relatively small crew and just 'scale out' having it mostly controlled by code/automation

For sure both.
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