Love it, great job SpaceX! I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his dire…
> The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. > The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that! What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And the…
SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
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Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Starship is such a fantastically dumb idea I'm sure there could be better rocket configurations than Starship - but so far Starship is better than other existing schemas. Starship is really good comparing to others - getting the cheapest kilogram to orbit cost in perspective.
That's assuming it can carry the payload envisioned, which seems iffy at this point.
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#223Love it, great job SpaceX! I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his dire…
> The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. > The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that! What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And the…
At a minimum, it would be a major test of the habitat's ability to support human life for 5 years.
A major activity for the Martian would be exploring the location and prospecting for necessary raw materials, like digging for water.
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#224Starship is like AI/LLMs in that success would revolutionize the world, but technological failure is very possible. And despite the confident predictions on the internets, we don't know which it's going to be. After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governm…
> After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades Did it really stop for decades? I think SpaceX and Blue Origin were both already working on re-usable launch systems around that time
After the Challenger disaster (1986) it was clear that the Space Shuttle was never going to accomplish its cost and reliability goals. The US military had bet everything on the Shuttle, so it needed a new launch vehicle. The one clear requirement of the new launch vehicle was that it had to be expendable. In fact, the name of the program was "Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle"[1]
Remember also that when SpaceX started to develop Falcon booster reuse in 2011, every major aerospace company said that reusable vehicles would never make economic sense. Even after the first Falcon 9 recovery and re-flight, most aerospace companies thought reusability was a dead-end and that belief came from the refurbishment cost that Shuttle had to go through.
I count from 1994 (start of EELV) to 2021, when NASA launched astronauts on a reused booster and Peter Beck famously fulfilled his promise to eat his hat if Rocket Lab ever worked on a re-usable launch vehicle.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Space_Launch
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm surprised they didn't take less risks just to avoid a narrative of failure. That's the advantage of being privately owned. "Vibes" (hah) don't matter. Public opinion doesn't matter. What matters is executing on your vision / goals. And they're doing that. The fact that they're bringing in loads of cash from Starlink surely helps. They haven't had the need to raise money in a while, now.
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Selling rockets to the government is not receiving gifts of taxpayer money.
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the mountain of prior art to work off of... It's way harder to do it the first time.
The mountain of prior art being... one rocket that had very different requirements?
Apollo also invented, funded and productized a lot of modern embedded computing and computer manufacturing, to keep in our lane here. Obviously SpaceX has access to a very different tech environment that yes, Apollo helped push forward.
Manufacturing the Apollo Guidance Computer (which wasn't in the rocket per-se, but was wired up to it and could fly the rocket in certain scenarios) alone consumed around 40% of the US' entire IC production capacity at the time.
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#227Love it, great job SpaceX! I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his dire…
> SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?
If Earth and Mars are on opposite ends of the sun, nobody is going anywhere within 30 days. I do not see how anything will change from the one transfer window per ~2 years for the foreseeable future
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
But who will get to 100 launches first? 1000? Saturn V was in one way a great success that will be remembered for all of history. But in another it was a failure due to your exact statement. It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible.
Neither will. >It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible. "There aren't many uses for such a gigantic rocket. Let's make an even bigger one and hope it works out!"
Actually, "let's build a cheaper one and hope it works out" is the design philosophy here, and it's a very effective one across pretty much all domains. The fact that it's bigger too is mostly incidental to its economic case. You think we would have stopped at Apollo 17 if the same Saturn V was capable of flying Apollo 18 - 30?
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#229Incredible achievement, but what is more incredible is how many people (including almost all of my friends circle) have started rooting for SpaceX to fail due to the shenanigans of its founder. I think as a culture we've lost the ability to compartmentalize. We should be able to criticize and even despise the head of a company, and at the same time celebrate when the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart…
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Did you ever make the effort to ask why he did those things? There’s a possibility that the person who aimed high for team humanity with SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink was doing exactly the same thing in the examples you named.
Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither will. >It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible. "There aren't many uses for such a gigantic rocket. Let's make an even bigger one and hope it works out!"
Actually, "let's build a cheaper one and hope it works out" is the design philosophy here, and it's a very effective one across pretty much all domains. The fact that it's bigger too is mostly incidental to its economic case. You think we would have stopped at Apollo 17 if the same Saturn V was capable of flying Apollo 18 - 30?
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