Starship is still not understood • Hacker News Board

Re: Starship is still not understood

#191

Post by SECProto » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

altcognito wrote: post #91

qayxc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 90,000 launches over 10 launch windows is 9,000 launches per window. Launch opportunities are about 30 days max per window (depending on the flight profile) so that'd be 300 launches per day or over 12 launches per hour . I'm not saying this is bonkers, but this is completely ridiculous and it doesn't matter whether it's 90,000 or 180,000 or even "just" 45,000 launches - it's completely impractical. Not to menti…

Don't assume that launches for refueling operations happen during the launch window. The window is really as long as you want it to be for refueling. Yes, there are engineering challenges associated with having fuel in orbit over a longer period. I'll agree there is a shortage of plans and an excess of hope in what you're going to ship to Mars in the near term. But I can also see where others are saying -- something…

> Don't assume that launches for refueling operations happen during the launch window. The window is really as long as you want it to be for refueling.

Indeed, the parent comment was making a bad assumption. If you look at it that way, refueling can happen anytime in the 2-years between windows. So say 10,000 launches over 730 days is 13 or 14 launches per day. Given multiple launch sites, seems feasible enough (in the same sense of feasible as producing 100,000 tonnes of goods destined for mars every 2 years).

Re: Starship is still not understood

#192

Post by panick21_ » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

oxplot wrote: post #126

lquist wrote: post #90

What am I missing here? Why is spacex valuation 100bn if this is true? I would think it would be 1tn easily in this kind of capital abundant environment. Is the risk that high? Is the market size being overestimated?

I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm i…

> but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit

You can actually figure out how much of a stock is traded and if your assumption is true then there would have to be far more trading.

> one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends!

How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear?

Re: Starship is still not understood

#193

Post by vanattab » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

panick21_ wrote: post #184

vanattab wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They did one test launch where the FAA inspector wasn't there. You are being deliberately misleading with this statement. You say that as if SpaceX accidentally launched while the inspector was in the bathroom. When in reality the FAA explicitly told SpaceX not to launch BEFORE the launch. And that doing so would be a violation of their launch license. The fact that the FAA reviewed the situation and then allowed to…

> You are being deliberately misleading with this statement. No, I wasn't. I simply stated he wasn't there, and he wasn't. I didn't imply anything beyond that he wasn't there. > proves the parents point. No it doesn't. People violate different things and are allowed to continue to operate. Virgin Orbit was just stopped from operating and had to go threw review. Doing a review of company and its safety culture is stan…

>No, I wasn't. I simply stated he wasn't there, and he wasn't. I didn't imply anything beyond that he wasn't there.

Honest communication is about more then just making sure your statements a factually correct, context matters.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#194

Post by panick21_ » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

lquist wrote: post #186

oxplot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm i…

Sure, but SpaceX trades on the private markets, not public. The minimum to get into SpaceX is $1m.

This is flat inaccurate. There people on YT who showed how they got involved for much less then 100k.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#195

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #158

vanattab wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

There is a literally a book called “The Mythical Man Month” about the limits of parallelism in computer engineering. It’s arguably one of the fundamental texts of the discipline.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#196

Post by oxplot » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

GDC7 wrote: post #171

oxplot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm i…

> People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history Tesla was founded in 2002, during the same timespan Facebook became ubiquitous in our lives, Google became the homepage of the world and Amazon became the go-to place to make purchases. Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. The world was much larger and disconnected back then and yet they managed to became so ubiquitous to reach t…

That’s not apple to apple comparison. Try other vehicle manufacturers and see where your numbers end up. Ramping up a multi thousand part product with hundreds of suppliers is a whole different ball game than scaling an online website.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#197

Post by modeless » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

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?

Nitpick: the booster does not achieve orbit. If it did it would need a heat shield like the upper stage.

What's new in Starship? Rapid turnaround. Catching the returning rocket with the launch tower. A durable heat shield that needs zero refurbishment for back-to-back flights. The sheer number of engines on the first stage and the volume of engine production needed for that. Orbital refueling. The landing flip maneuver.

There is a lot of new stuff in Starship, and not all of it is proven yet. Personally I think the biggest remaining risk is the heat shield. I'm no expert, but my speculation is that there will be several reentry failures, and refurbishment will limit turnaround speed for a long time. I've also heard a lot of people saying that orbital refueling will be very difficult. I'm also worried that landing failures will wreck the ground support equipment. And I think it's very unlikely that the reliability of the whole system can ever be good enough for the airliner-like earth-to-earth passenger service that SpaceX has proposed.

All that said, I'm very much in agreement with the article that NASA needs to radically change their future plans, because while Starship is not completely proven, it is clearly derisked to the point where it's going to be revolutionary, even if some of the above risks prevent the total potential from being realized. HLS was the first time NASA showed that they realize this, but they are still doing tons of stuff outside HLS that makes little sense in a Starship world.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#198

Post by panick21_ » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

GDC7 wrote: post #171

oxplot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm i…

> People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history Tesla was founded in 2002, during the same timespan Facebook became ubiquitous in our lives, Google became the homepage of the world and Amazon became the go-to place to make purchases. Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. The world was much larger and disconnected back then and yet they managed to became so ubiquitous to reach t…

Are you comparing software companies to a manufacturing company?

They were making new technology that people basically thought was impossible. By 2012 they had only sold 1000 vehicles. That how hard it was.

Since Model S however they have grown about as fast as any manufacturing based company in history and they have very clear potential to continue to do so for a few years more at the very least.

Tesla basically invest huge into growing a chemical industry to make the batteries. That simply not something that just magically happens within a few years.

> Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995.

Because Microsoft was running on ALL computers designed from lots and lots of companies. Rather the computers were designed for it.

> such a dominance that the US government had to step in like they did with Standard Oil.

They didn't 'had to' they wanted to.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#199

Post by theshadowknows » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #21

theshadowknows wrote: post #6

I know that going into space is sexy and nerdy and cool and that it’s a difficult problem. What I don’t get is why so many people think about going to space and spend so much money on it when there are people in the US who drink water that catches on fire..and people elsewhere who don’t have access to water at all. Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than the ones that are basically “just go u…

This is a difficult argument to argue with because it doesn’t have any constraints. Instead of doing X why don’t we do any of the Y other things we could do? Surely, at least some subset of Y is more important than X, right? …but, is it? Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields…

I'm not arguing that no one should focus on space and I'm certainly not arguing that no one should focus on science..it's the opposite in fact. It just seems to me that going to space is sort of a solved problem, and that now we're just trying to figure out how to do it a little bit better and in a way that generates revenue. But since there are problems that remain unsolved, you'd think that people who are bright enough to tackle admittedly difficult problems like going to space better than we already do would want to tackle really hard problems, rather than just sort of iterating on an existing design.

Right now we have a new space race, it's just between companies instead of countries.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#200

Post by panick21_ » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #177

panick21_ wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was just 'hype' why did NASA select them for HLS? They had all the data and they officially declared it was very doable and that SpaceX had a path to get there. So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for everything else.

> So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for everything else. No one here is saying "NASA should ignore Starship for everything else". I'm saying that NASA isn't "failing to understand" Starship when they don't push all their chips to the middle of the table on Starship. You can't use the fact that NASA was willing to make a $2.9B bet on Starship a…

The point is that you have to start to think differently.

Not just have the same circle of programs, selecting a launcher and on.

You need to fundamentally rethink how you approach space.

And there is little evidence of that happening, specially from a leadership standpoint.