201–210 of 348 posts
This dude is genuine and it's fucking great. Love it. Inspirational dude.
This dude is genuine and it's fucking great. Love it. Inspirational dude.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard him speak. Is he always this awkward? Based off of the 5 minutes I watched, he clearly hasn’t gotten to where he is through charisma and public speaking skills. I’m just wondering if this is typical for him. Also, a million tons to Mars? If each starship lifts 100 tons, that is 10,000 launches. I think he said launch windows only come around every 2 years. He is either planning…
Yes, he does have a plan to build thousands of spaceships. See previous presentations of his from 2016, 2017 and 2019.
Starting a self sustaining civilization on another planet is not a walk in the park. It will take decades and a lot of $$$.
The chamber melting on raptor2 is concerning. I hope they find a solution
I am sure they could run the engines at a lower chamber pressure with massive amounts of film cooling and have it be safe for a single launch. It would still be a very high performance engine by today's standards. 330 bar chamber pressure is just nuts.
Also, if the biggest remaining problem is the chamber melting, that means that they think they have the pumps under control. Which is a major achievement on its own.
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My theory is that they aim to disrupt Earth travel (airlines). Elon pointed out that the reliability of Starship would exceed that of commercial airplanes, and the fuel costs are not that different than, say, a 747. Fewer moving parts than an airplane, less human costs, order of magnitude faster...
I'm not sure that this will ever be viable for the general population. Think about the acceleration at launch and reentry. It's more an amusement park experience than travel by car, ship or plane. There will be people mentally and physically fit for that (past some age and before another one) and people that will never be. Other problems like cost, time from home to spaceport and boarding can be fixed or be irrelevan…
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The basic idea is to not have all your eggs in one basket. We are one asteroid strike away from losing all human life on earth. Having 2 habited planets spreads the risk. Obviously having those planets in different solar systems would be even better, but we don’t have the technology for that, yet.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. Our options aren't only (a) live only on Earth, and (b) live on Earth and Mars and potentially other planets. There is, for example, (c) live in man-made structures orbiting the sun at a distance of 1AU, which is debatedly much more sensible than trying to live on Mars.
It's more sensible if you plan to keep a bunch of people there with constant supply from Earth. Elon wants to build a *self-sustaining* city on Mars. There isn't any other choice of location, be it man-made, or in the solar system:
- that has enough resources, atmosphere, gravity, water to allow a non-trivial population to survive without help from Earth
- that is hospitable to life
I suggest you watch his previous presentation where he talks exactly on why Mars is the destination, and not somewhere else.
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I completely agree with this line of reasoning, which is why I called the fixation with Mars Quixotic elsewhere in the thread. I was discussing this with some friends. Why not just pick some other totally inhospitable environment and try to live there instead? I mentioned inside a volcano lower in the thread. It seems to me you'd get all the same side-benefits of technological development.
Because if an asteroid destroys earth, your volcano base ain't gonna save life as we know it. Because any such project is going to require herculean effort on the part of many humans, and many humans are interested in colonizing Mars but not so many are interested in colonizing volcanoes. Your question is basically: why do people care about this thing I don't care about and instead care about this thing that neither…
If an asteroid destroys earth, your Mars base won't save life as we know it either. There's a lot of handwaving in this thread on the technologies required to bridge the gap between Starship existing and self-sustaining life on Mars. Paradoxically, self-sustaining space manufacture/Mars colony will obviate the need for frequent heavy-lift rocket launches.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that they aim to disrupt Earth travel (airlines). Elon pointed out that the reliability of Starship would exceed that of commercial airplanes, and the fuel costs are not that different than, say, a 747. Fewer moving parts than an airplane, less human costs, order of magnitude faster...
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you explain what you are comparing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust-specific_fuel_consump... My understanding is that rockets are good at getting a small mass to move really quickly. They will never win moving a lot of mass within the atmosphere. The fuel costs are radically different. A 747 can lift and land ~80% of Starship's design cargo but uses something like 7 time…
That's why something like the Sabre engine will always be of interest for a proper space plane.
"It's gonna be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work. You might die." -- Elon's sales pitch for Mars, in his own words. I wonder if any billionaire (or their children) will be doing the early work. It's an interesting game of "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future. Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that there will be a disaster. But over the cours…
Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress? I suppose there's an idea we could apply everything done on Mars to Earth, but like... seriously, what we just took all the prep for mars and just put it in the middle of the Empty Quarter, the Saraha, Antarctica? People barely want to live in the arc…
In the late 1500s, why set sail across an ocean for weeks that no-one has ever successfully crossed (that we know of).
Someone would want to do it, and then want to do it regularly, and regularly means commercializing it, which means reduced cost and innovation. Better ships crossed the Atlantic, trade started and so on. Europe (and the world) is richer after the "discovery" of America and Australia, for example.
There are so many 'unknown unknowns' that until we settle on Mars we just... don't know: some mineral on Mars that might be useful for... capturing CO2 somehow? Lower gravity to grow novel crystalline structures that do... something. Basic life? Who knows?
Mars exploration excites me and many others.