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Starship’s second flight test

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Re: Starship’s second flight test

#201

Post by tim333 »

mtsr wrote: post #38
pests wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The seal story is amusing as well. Isn't there some other way to figure that out besides a real test? Does no one know the hearing ability of seals before?

I think the effects of noise on sea mammals is a fairly recent area of research. I know of a researcher who has been working on this as part of research into offshore wind environmental impact. But they were already researching porpoises and this was just a new thing to keep track of.

I was wondering after playing a recording of a boom to the seal how they figured out if it was distressed by that, as opposed to being stressed by being strapped to a board. Also how they figured the effect on it's romantic life. The mind boggles.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#202

Post by happytiger »

ric2b wrote: post #134
modeless wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the biggest impact for normal people is that Starlink is going to get a whole lot better. Truly worldwide satellite broadband for unmodified cell phones. Faster speeds, lower latency (lower than fiber for intercontinental traffic), smaller/cheaper antennas, better reliability especially with limited view of the sky, and more support for areas of higher population density. More esoteric: Commercial space stations.…

None of that sounds like a big impact on the lives of most people, who are already living in areas well covered by cellphone networks and will never afford to travel to space.

You could say the same thing about early airplanes, early computers, early radio, early cars… in fact many people did.

This bias doesn’t reflect the reality of technological revolutions but is very common. Be mindful of this.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

- Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

- Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

- Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

“Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

- Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995

“Apple is already dead.”

- Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, 1997

“None of that sounds like a big impact on the lives of most people, who are already living in areas well covered by cellphone networks and will never afford to travel to space.”

- hackernews user rick2b in 2023

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#203

Post by averageRoyalty »

somenameforme wrote: post #197
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any hints on how this is going to change civilisation, for non-space nerds?

How much do you think it would cost to send a bottle of water to space? Even on a Falcon Heavy you're looking at spending around $700 [1] to send one 16oz bottle of water. That's a far better than past times, where it'd cost around $25,000 to send it up on the Space Shuttle. But with Starship? You're looking at that price drop to as low as $5! Because of this, trying to meaningfully predict the future is not possible…

That's about 480ml for anyone struggling to follow the example like I was.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#204

Post by modeless »

philistine wrote: post #185
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).

The big caveat are the heat tiles. They were not a part of the very early design of what was then the BFR. They went with tiles when the liquid heat shield proved impossible, and they will probably need to be inspected after every flight. The shuttle's tiles had to be manually removed and inspected. It took months to do. I don't know if Starship can escape that requirement.

I agree. I'm not an expert but the heat shield looks to me like the most uncertain thing about the project. I'm sure they can do better than the Shuttle, especially since stainless steel can go much hotter than aluminum, but I don't know if they can achieve reliable reusability without refurbishment.

Heat tiles were part of ITS though, and Dragon has them, so SpaceX has been thinking about them a long time.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#205

Post by IshKebab »

maxlin wrote: post #155
martin8412 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is nowhere near the leader. The problem is hard, who could possibly have known? Oh right, any person with a bit of knowledge of how computers work and drive a car. Tesla can't make it reliably work in the car-centric USA. I'd love to see it perform in a busy Indian city or even just any old European city. Tesla cars do not last long, and the battery costs a fortune to replace when it dies or gets damaged out of…

Lol what. It's like you'd be trying to convince everyone Bing has been the leading search engine for the last 10 years. You don't even mention who would be ahead. Cruise, having to intervene every 5 minutes (literally, look it up) and basing on unscalable HD maps? Get real man. Tesla has even custom HARDWARE for their NN's even, designed by the chip designer that has created some of the greatest designs BOTH at Intel…

> Tesla has even custom HARDWARE for their NN's

Their chips are actually nice, but you're betraying your lack of knowledge here - the compute hardware isn't remotely the hard part about self driving cars.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#206

Post by redox99 »

Shawnj2 wrote: post #179
redox99 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am convinced that > 1. A city-to-city Starship shuttle passenger service will never happen. > 2. A self-sustaining colony on Mars will not happen in the foreseeable future. Both are in my opinion completely technologically feasible. Just not economically feasible. If we had another space race I could see a mars colony in the 2040. But I don't think it will happen.

We will probably put people on mars eventually but a Mars colony is basically just not going to be self sustaining. We have Antarctic bases that are definitely not self sustaining which is a similar thing

Depends on what you consider self sustaining. Food, water and energy would be enough for me to call it self sustaining, even if it depends on Earth for things like computer chips.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#207

Post by Shawnj2 »

redox99 wrote: post #206
Shawnj2 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will probably put people on mars eventually but a Mars colony is basically just not going to be self sustaining. We have Antarctic bases that are definitely not self sustaining which is a similar thing

Depends on what you consider self sustaining. Food, water and energy would be enough for me to call it self sustaining, even if it depends on Earth for things like computer chips.

Sure but that means it is reliant on earth for replacement parts for the habitation modules/structures so not self sufficient.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#208

Post by pests »

tim333 wrote: post #201
mtsr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the effects of noise on sea mammals is a fairly recent area of research. I know of a researcher who has been working on this as part of research into offshore wind environmental impact. But they were already researching porpoises and this was just a new thing to keep track of.

I was wondering after playing a recording of a boom to the seal how they figured out if it was distressed by that, as opposed to being stressed by being strapped to a board. Also how they figured the effect on it's romantic life. The mind boggles.

I believe the romantic life parts were just in the yearly observed population counts increasing over the last X years.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#209

Post by melagonster »

jiggawatts wrote: post #58
melagonster wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure sapceX don't have department of wildlife. we don't have enough research on this issue, I don't know why it is OK to do anything before we do not have information. maybe just like old Big oil companies, just do it before people found what do they do?

I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets. And then I wonder if they would have to cancel multi-billion dollar missions to deep space if the answer is non-zero. People really need to get a grip and use their common sense for a bit. A hundred workers — humans — died in the construction of the Hoover Dam, and that was considered…

>Be specific you look so angry.

I just don't like the attitude that treat all investigation as joke.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#210

Post by SergeAx »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #78
happytiger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s bonkers. It’s absolutely bonkers. I feel like I’m witnessing the creation of the wheel. Non-space nerds don’t quite understand why it’s so exciting. But I can’t imagine how much this is going to change the world, and civilization. It’s kind of the equivalent of going from local freighters to the Seawise Giant in one iteration.

Any hints on how this is going to change civilisation, for non-space nerds?

We will colonize the Moon.
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