What am I missing here? Why is spacex valuation 100bn if this is true? I would think it would be 1tn easily in this kind of capital abundant environment. Is the risk that high? Is the market size being overestimated?
Isn't SpaceX privately held?
Starship is still not understood
291–300 of 364 posts
Re: Starship is still not understood
#292Earlier 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…
Jeez dude, these were just random programs off the top of my head to illustrate industry distrust of launch vehicle promises. My comment wasn't meant to initiate a debate but offer the perspective of someone who is quite literally writing proposals about launch vehicle selection for NASA missions. But hey, you can read Wikipedia, so...
In any case to those reasonable out there, don't worry. If SpaceX can prove reliable launch to orbit and deliver on their promises, change will come. It's kind of silly to write articles about how everyone should change the way they operate NOW because change is coming. Of course it's coming, everyone accepts it's likely, and things will move quickly once it does and is proven. What more do the fanboys want!?
Re: Starship is still not understood
#293> The Artemis program to the Moon requires a Gateway and separate Human Landing System (HLS) because even the SLS doesn’t have enough lift capacity to be execute the mission on its own. The Artemis programme requires a Gateway because senators decided it would be cool to have a gateway. AFAIK, anyone with actual technical expertise thinks it's stupid. There's a bunch of logic in this piece i just can't follow. Like:…
Why was this downvoted?!
Re: Starship is still not understood
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. And my point is that, for an organization like NASA (which is basically our government's "approach to space") "fundamentally rethinking how you approach space" is basically saying: "fundamentally transform everything about how the organization operates". Which, if Starship delivers on its promises (and I'm quite optimistic and hopeful that it will!), then NASA will have to fundamentally transform everything abo…
> But that's a huge transition to make on the back of a program that hasn't proven its key value proposition yet. The article agrees! Author's point, as I read it, is that if NASA does not plan for the transition now, then by the time Starship "has proven its key value proposition", both NASA and its usual contractors will be out of the game, as a new breed of private companies takes over most of space activity. The…
Exactly, the could keep a small budget aside already to do feasibility studies, along the lines of “instead of 50T a year, what and how do we approach the ability to shift 100,200T etc, to the moon?”
Re: Starship is still not understood
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they were trying something genuinely new - like falling out of orbit and making a propulsive upright landing of a wingless booster - then some skepticism would be justified. But what's new in Starship?
Nitpick: the booster does not achieve orbit. If it did it would need a heat shield like the upper stage. What's new in Starship? Rapid turnaround. Catching the returning rocket with the launch tower. A durable heat shield that needs zero refurbishment for back-to-back flights. The sheer number of engines on the first stage and the volume of engine production needed for that. Orbital refueling. The landing flip maneuv…
Even for some reason Starship can not return in its early development, it still triumphs SLS by a wide, wide margin.
Re: Starship is still not understood
#296The article is really interesting, but the stress the author expresses about the potential downfall of NASA seems misplaced. This is just creative destruction at work. If NASA can adapt to capitalize on the new paradigm, then it will, and there will be NASA logos everywhere in future space stuff. If not, then NASA will fade away, and some of us will wax nostalgic about how cool NASA seemed when we were kids but nobod…
The problem I have with that analysis is that there’s little commercial value to purely scientific missions. What will we lose if NASA isn’t sending (much bigger!) explorers to all corners of the solar system? Maybe mining companies will pick up some of the slack, maybe that’ll be enough.
There’s a lot of research done today that has no commercial value. Ideally the commercialization of space will make it cheap enough that institutions can fund their own research without needing the government.
Re: Starship is still not understood
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing and certifying scientific instruments. It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able to cheaply launch probes. You spend all of this time researching and developing a scientific instrument only to make two of them. One to launch the other to go on a diagnostic model (maybe a third for a launch backup). You spread out the cost of development over…
> It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able to cheaply launch probes. Is it, though? Let's do a quick and very superficial analysis of the costs here. Say we want to send a probe the outer solar system, like the moons of Jupiter or the Saturn system. There are two unique challenges that such probes are faced with: • on Jupiter, the magnetic field of the planet requires hardened electronics and shieldi…
> The cost of hardening electronics and shielding is also not going away even if launch costs were non-existent.
Of course, but what about hardened electronics exempts it from the principles I discussed with scientific instruments in general?
> the cost will still be orders of magnitude higher than comparable commodity options.
Irrelevant, no one is comparing the cost to commodity hardware, we are comparing it to what the cost would be if we don't increase the number of scientific missions and continue with the current demand.
> in order to get RTGs you need to build, maintain and operate an entire specialized nuclear facility.
Yes, needing more material is going to cost more money, but does the cost per unit stay the same or go up the more you buy? We are going to need to increase production Pu used in RTGs anyways, if we are going to build facilities to might as well utilize them to the max.
> How exactly would a cheaper launch cost solve the problem of a Venus sample-return mission?
There will be unique engineering challenges that require unique solutions, but engineers will have a large shelf of parts to choose from if they have a specific issue they don't have to invent the wheel for.
> that cost is also unrelated to launch costs
That one is true. Missions that involve complex maneuvers, landings, driving rovers, etc, will require large amounts of staff and engineers. Other missions that don't involve those things could utilize a shared staff, so something like a general purpose probe network taking measurements across the solar system. Fleet management tools, policy, and procedures need to be developed so we can manage assets like we do with other LEO constellations.
Re: Starship is still not understood
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transcontinental railroads provided routes between already populated areas, with viable trade between them. Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be worth carrying by a starship. The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be economical.
I often think of this observation by Bruce Sterling: > I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly,…
Though both are probably apocryphal:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,"
and:
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
We're really bad at predicting how things will change. Who would have thought that Tim Berners-Lee would be a link in a chain to Donald Trump's election?
Re: Starship is still not understood
#299Spacex 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…
Can we just build private space, lunar, and martian colonies? They could be financed by Tesla shareholders.
The colonisation of the world by Europeans started with government investment, but eventually became self-sustaining.
If these offworld colonies are free of political correctness, crime, taxes, welfare systems, and disease, and contain only beautiful, healthy, and intelligent people (via careful selection, including genetic screening and IQ tests, of permitted colonists), they could draw the best of humanity to them.
Re: Starship is still not understood
#300Earlier 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…
> I commute 25 miles back and forth to work and I am lucky if I see one Tesla . Where on earth do you live? I can barely walk down the street without tripping over one. It's not a stretch to say I'd see several dozen on a short morning run.
Not the original poster, but I'm guessing they live somewhere other than California or New York. The nearest Tesla supercharging station to myself is a two-hour drive away, for example. While I could use one to drive to and from work or to businesses in the area, I won't be using it to go almost anywhere else any time soon. At least, not without planning my routes around that availability. As a contrast, the small town I live in has six gas stations.
I'm looking forward to the day that the infrastructure is ubiquitous enough that I can buy a fully electric vehicle, but that day isn't here yet.