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Starship is still not understood

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Re: Starship is still not understood

#211

Post by ben_w »

ceejayoz wrote: post #100
vanattab wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 737-800 has a max take off weight of 175,000lbs Super Heavy Dry Mass: 350,000-440,000lbs Super Heavy Fuel Weight: 7,500,000lbs Starship Dry Mass: ~200,000lbs Starship Fuel Weight: 2,600,000lbs Starship+Booster total: 10,695,000lbs 175,000lbs vs 10,965,000lbs! There is no such thing as a similarly sized aircraft!

A 747-8's MTOW is about a million pounds. Ten-ish 747s for a Starship, as a roughly worst case estimate. Only so much carbon you can stuff into a ton of fuel. A single-digit percentage global increase in aviation emissions. (I'm also very skeptical of that level of Starship launches. By the time you're getting anywhere near that, you're likely to have captured some comets and are processing fuel for interplanetary mi…

> By the time you're getting anywhere near that, you're likely to have captured some comets and are processing fuel for interplanetary missions in an orbital refinery.

I think you’re underestimating both the mass of a comet and that the geopolitical implications of a private company being one industrial accident away from replicating something several orders of magnitude closer to Chicxulub than to Tsar Bomba would prevent them being allowed to even try it.

I did a napkin estimate a while back, and even optimistically 10,000 Starship launches is just where you start going “hmm, perhaps we should think about starting to seriously plan the basics of an orbital ring or a launch loop” — a 40Mm circumference steel loop with a cross section of 1m^2 is still about 30 times less massive than 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#212

Post by d33 »

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…

Do we know the Chinese part of the story? I feel like the western media hardly report anything on them while e.g. Wikipedia suggests that there are new developments happening all the time:

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

How significant are those in practice?

Re: Starship is still not understood

#213

Post by GDC7 »

panick21_ wrote: post #198
GDC7 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inv…

When you advertise yourself as a tech company you are bound to be compared against other tech companies.

More generally companies from every sector are compared against each other to see which one provides the highest improvement in citizens' quality of life .

Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in citizens' quality of life is basically none or negligible.

Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#214

Post by rbanffy »

pintxo wrote: post #130
sailingparrot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does. For example, NASA could start allocating a small-ish budget (e.g. 50M$) to design a parallel mission to their Artemis-IV mission that is currently scheduled for 2026 (but will slip) and that should deliver the Gateway i-HAB module to Moon's orbit. While 50M$ (excluding launc…

Isn't the point of most/all big NASA projects to distribute as much money as possible into a specified number of states? Kind a hard then to get political backing to move to a quicker + cheaper project.

A less cynical person would say that NASA’s role is to employ as many highly qualified aerospace workers as feasible to both keep the workforce updated and advancing space applications and to do the things private companies don’t want to. Now that it seems SpaceX is willing and able to fulfil part of NASA’s mission, maybe it should refocus a bit.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#215

Post by twic »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #134
h2odragon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to conceive a vacuum capable hydraulic cylinder. As someone who has used backhoes to dig in water then helped refurb the cylinders afterwards. I'm not seeing any happy possibilities, myself. I agree that it should be possible to make things work at cheaper prices than NASA, but that's still a long way from "easy" or "Commercial off the Shelf"

I'm curious in what ways a industrial cylinder wouldn't be vacuum capable. Pressure shouldn't be a concern. they operate at 5-10,000 PSI above the ambient environment, so an additional 14 PSI differential shouldn't matter. I'm guessing operating temperatures would be a big concern What failed in water?

I am very much not a rocket scientist. But off the top of my head:

Cooling. In space there's no ambient cooling by air. If you want to cool something, you have to pump heat out of it and into a radiator. And since that is energy-intensive, you want to minimise heat production as far as you can.

Volatiles. In a vacuum those will boil off and not come back. All sorts of polymers, possibly including those used in seals and bearings, suffer from this.

Electrostatic build up. Again, there's no route for this to escape into the air, so you need to make sure that anywhere it can build up is grounded, i suppose.

Maintenance. Depending on where you're going to use it, you might not be able to depend on some guy with a socket set and ungloved fingers being able to fiddle with it whenever necessary.

Gravity. I don't know much about hydraulics, but all sorts of machinery is designed around an unstated assumption that liquid will drip downwards given a chance (sumps etc).

Some of these problems go away on the moon (which has gravity, and potentially pressurised garages for maintenance) or Mars (which has the above, and also some atmosphere).

Re: Starship is still not understood

#216

Post by p_j_w »

panick21_ wrote: post #113
spacemark wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked on NASA contracts pretty much my whole career, you're quite right. Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout. The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive. Everyone…

> The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive. > Makes me wonder how old the author is. The author works for JPL. > Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout. How many of these had 10+ prot…

>The author works for JPL.

As a software person. JPL employs over 5000 people. The vast majority of them don't have knowledge of the sort of systems and business dynamics relevant to the matter of NASA using Starship.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#217

Post by ncallaway »

shalmanese wrote: post #210
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…

In the days of steam powered factories, a central power plant was used to drive belts that would power various machines. More power intensive machines were sited near the central power plant to maximize efficiency and parts were moved to where the machines were. Electrification allowed the replacement of belts with motors but machines were expensive so they were upgraded in place and electricity was thought of as jus…

I agree with all of this.

I think Starship, if it pans out, will be exactly as disruptive as the author of the post thinks it will be. I'm very very much hoping that is the case.

And if it delivers on its promises, it will be a revolutionary change in how we think about space exploration, space tourism, space manufacturing, and other things.

But, I strongly suspect that many very smart people at NASA also understand this. And that the reason NASA isn't retooling everything that they do around Starship has more to do with the risk of that future not panning out, and less to do with the people at NASA not understanding that there's a massive economic change at hand if Starship delivers.

> Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.

Yes! Exactly! The old space industries (and NASA) derive significant benefit from the status quo, and fully transitioning to the new system risks many those current benefits in the event that the new system fails to materialize.

For someone like NASA, they have many resources, so betting everything on a 95% chance of success may be a bad bet. While a start-up that has very little status quo resources, it's a really really really good bet.

However, I have a problem in characterizing that as "not understanding" the opportunity. NASA, and plenty of old space companies can recognize and understand the opportunity, while it's still a bad bet for them to make at the current development point we're at.

It's more a matter of strategic risk, and current positionining. An organization like NASA isn't in a good position to bet the farm on Starship yet, even if they fully understand the benefits of the bet if they knew the bet would pay off.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#218

Post by TeMPOraL »

ncallaway wrote: post #141
sailingparrot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does. For example, NASA could start allocating a small-ish budget (e.g. 50M$) to design a parallel mission to their Artemis-IV mission that is currently scheduled for 2026 (but will slip) and that should deliver the Gateway i-HAB module to Moon's orbit. While 50M$ (excluding launc…

> I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does. NASA has taken a cautiously optimistic stance on Starship. The assignment of the HLS to Starship and no other provider was an aggressively optimistic stance from NASA that surprised many of the space industry observers at the time of its announcement. The expectation (and…

The only way I can reconcile this is political constraints - perhaps they can't feasibly do what the GP proposes, but they could assign HLS to Starship and have some idea on how to capitalize from it "unexpectedly" exceeding expectations.

But then, I know nothing about how NASA operates internally.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#220

Post by stohk »

baggachipz wrote: post #93
dangerbird2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that for Starship to hit that $10M price point, SpaceX will have to demonstrate several as of yet unproven capabilities: In-space refueling (required for any missions outside LEO), safe and reliable re-entry from orbit, and fast turnaround for Starship to be launch-ready after landing. The last thing NASA needs is a glorified Space Shuttle 2.0 that takes months to be rebuilt after each re-entry, and ha…

> NASA is right to not put all of its eggs in the Starship basket. The problem is that not only are they not putting any eggs into the Starship basket, they aren't even aware (or admitting) that the basket even exists.

The SpaceX HLS bid relies on starship working and they won* that award. I think NASA acknowledged the basket and threw 2 billion into it.
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