Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars • Hacker News Board

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#231

Post by aguyfromnb » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

zchrykng wrote: post #120

aguyfromnb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges. Isn't weld strength something engineers would know/understand in advance, though? How would it come as a surprise that the welds would fail under pressure? It seems strange to me that Musk could be spending so much time working on Starship, and somehow a "badly designed, badly built, and badly checked" rocket makes it to the platform and exp…

Welding by hand is both an art and a science. There is going to be variability in the quality of the weld, which will introduce variability into the strength. Machines can be far more precise and consistent compared to humans. They probably designed their tolerances assuming perfect welds and then didn't have them.

>They probably designed their tolerances assuming perfect welds and then didn't have them.

This sounds like terrible engineering practice.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by BigBubbleButt » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

Tsarbomb wrote: post #125

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #2

Excerpt: "Just iterate, baby" "I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a re…

Iteration is what originally gave the Soviets the advantage in the space race.

I always found the dichotomy of Soviet culture interesting - that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots.

The best example being Korolev, possibly the greatest rocket designer in history (certainly up there with Von Braun and Xuesen, and in my opinion more impressive), who died because he was sent to the Gulags by a bitter politician (this is an incredibly short edit of the full story, but that is a factual statement).

Korolev built working rockets the US said were theoretically impossible, and he did it because he couldn't afford to build the rockets the way the US were doing it. So he got resourceful.

Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by s_y_n_t_a_x » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #206

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first? I don't see why we can't do both. Maybe if you come up with an actionable plan you can start your own company like Elon and tackle that problem. 2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, el…

You can't start from "scratch" on Mars with respect to mining or industry. Cavemen wearing mammoth pelts won't work on Mars. In order to simply survive people would need high levels of technology. Even the most basic living on Mars would need steel and glass and equipment to machine both. Making a steel or glass plate requires a lot of industrial capability and a capable supply chain to say nothing of raw materials.…

You're taking it too literally. No one is suggesting we wear mammoth pelts, only that our efforts will have to be gradual.

If we want to survive as a race in the long long term, we have to start colonizing at some point.

I just don't see why you're so pessimistic. Let these people go after their dream.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by Florin_Andrei » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

zshrdlu wrote: post #165

Why Mars, specifically? Why not "settle" Antarctica or Marianna's trench? Aren't these orders of magnitude easier?

It's unfathomable to me how you're missing the fact that we're literally talking about different planets, and why that is the crucial difference.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by thu2111 » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

KoftaBob wrote: post #203

zshrdlu wrote: post #165

Why Mars, specifically? Why not "settle" Antarctica or Marianna's trench? Aren't these orders of magnitude easier?

The overarching goal is to have a "backup" of humanity so to speak. Having some of society living on Mars so that if something were to happen to Earth, humanity wouldn't cease to exist. Settling Antarctica doesn't solve that problem.

I'm a huge Musk fan and would love to see us settle mars.

But. Really. What's the threat model here?

Mars is meant to be a backup of humanity. OK. Against what threat? We can think of many, but a self-isolating base in the Antarctic would survive nearly all of them with better conditions than a Mars base.

Nuclear armageddon? Not much fallout over Antarctica and OK, you can't go outside of a while. Still better than Mars where you can't go outside ever.

Runaway global warming? The ice will melt but at a slow pace that leaves plenty of time for adaptation, the climate will become more hospitable at the poles rather than less, and at least you will have lots of fresh water. Unlike, say, on Mars.

Global pandemic? An Antarctic base can self isolate, no problem. Just lock the doors and let anyone who tries to reach you freeze to death. A serious Mars base would need some sort of border control policy too, if Musk had made it cheap to get there.

Massive asteroid strike? I guess it'd wreck the atmosphere but ... well, then you're no worse off than on Mars which doesn't have one to begin with. And you're much more likely to get nuked by a 'roid on Mars where there's no atmosphere to burn it up.

I dunno man. I'm trying to think of a problem that a serious Antarctic city couldn't solve and coming up blank. Short of Earth getting sucked into a black hole or something, what scenario is survivable on Mars that isn't at the poles?

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by Florin_Andrei » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

justapassenger wrote: post #4

Is it me, or does this article basically romanticize abusing workers and glorifies running projects without a plan, just with a goal?

If you want to change history, you'll put up with a brutal working schedule.

If you want a cushy 9-5 job, just apply to the nice big corporation down the street. At the end of the day, you just go home and enjoy your comfy bunny slippers.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by mr_luc » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #96

virgilp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK they work in shifts, non-stop; crazy hours & weekend is irrelevant in this context.

This part of the article is about shifts for assembly workers: So Musk is making the machine to make the machine. Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla’s assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they’ll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a da…

I'm happy with my 9-to-5 schedule now -- I can stop work at a specific time, and mostly stop worrying. Mostly. But it's not the same kind of freedom as knowing that the weekend has started, and that there is a multi-day period where you can start forgetting about that whole world (barring emergencies, of course).

Rotating between three and FOUR-day weekends? Wow.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by nixpulvis » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #230

nixpulvis wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite inspiring to see a real goal and drive towards it. I'm throughly uninspired... As a friend of mine once said: "progress when you're going the wrong direction, is turning around". The idea that we'll settle Mars while the Earth burns in borderline sinister. It reminds me of the elite outpost from Kingsman (the movie). We have a planet that is in dire need of this kind of motivated action, and yet Elon wou…

The person who is doing this is also very concerned with the state of affairs on Earth. He owns SolarCity, a solar panel company, Tesla, an electric car and battery company, and Boring Company, an attempt at creating a transportation system that mandates the use of EV. The fact that all of this technology will benefit human existence on Mars should go ahead and show you how developing technology in order to survive a…

That's a fair point, and I'm not trying to say everything Elon is doing is bad or wrong. I wish his other projects got even a fraction of the attention his space project gets.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

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Post by airstrike » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

StaticRedux wrote: post #148

airstrike wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do they have to? Not speaking about (or judging!) anyone individually, but because if none of us did, we'd still be living in caves. Or, more likely, be extinct. The reason all of us are having this conversation now is because many people before us had purpose and built something

The question posed was why do they Have to? Not why Should they. Of course we need people driven to move society forward. But there is a stigma in modern society it seems around people who are perfectly happy being who they are and not "striving to be great". And that's ridiculous. The previous poster asks all his potential dates, with what seems to be a fairly heavy helping of disdain for the "wrong answer", what th…

I'm not saying this is wrong or right, but perhaps some people feel everyone has a duty to do something meaningful to push society forward, otherwise they are essentially free-riding on everyone else's sacrifices.

And that something may very well be as broad a goal as "do your very best, everyday".

Sure, you can't force people to see the world through that same lens, but you can certainly pick partners based on traits which you admire, ambition / grit presumably being one of such traits.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#240

Post by paulsutter » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #90

ajnin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not in aerospace. The common approach is to spend years designing, simulating, and then actual tests come at the very end, and sometimes you don't even test because you can't or it would be too expensive. That's what Boeing are doing with their own rockets; Mars missions until now didn't really go through an iterative process; satellites are usually manufactured only by one and they better work once in orbit.

SpaceX built an incredible custom simulator in order to design the methane engines used in Starship[1]. Right now they are experimenting with manufacturing techniques, which is much less amenable to simulation [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2zhad6/spacex_at_gp...

Starting around 3:40 of the video in that link, you can see simulation of hypersonic combustion turbulence