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

arstechnica.com

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

#41

Post by elteto »

wolco wrote: post #20
detritus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can always leave. I'd presume that many of them are on-board in the first place because they're engaged by the idea.

I suspect we have a few groups. Those who drank the kool-aid and liked it. Those who used to believe in it but after abuse are now stuck in an endless cycle where they have no time for job searches. And those that never drank the kool-aid and will leave after getting time on their resume. It takes a great mix of super smarts and super stupid to work there.

No engineer that works at SpaceX and is actually good at what s/he does would have an issue finding a job somewhere else. Having SpaceX on your resume is a guaranteed door opener. Everyone that I knew did it because they believed in the company's mission. Eventually, many went on to other places, many others kept on.

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

#42

Post by daxaxelrod »

PedroBatista wrote: post #18

I don't know about the Starship a week but he definitely fulfils his hyperbolic bullshit per day quota. And it's mostly "our" fault, "we" let him getaway with so much shit ( from market manipulation to criminal workplace offences ) because he entertains our egos with the promise of getting all our problems solved ( which is ridiculous at so many levels ). OK let's pretend Elon builds one Starship a week, at which cos…

The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.

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

#45

Post by ajnin »

addisonl wrote: post #6
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…

"Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design" This how everything is made. Revolutionary.

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.

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

#46

Post by ceejayoz »

chottocharaii wrote: post #26

Humans are not biologically adapted to surviving on Mars, and for that reason, any settlement to Mars is bound to fail in the long term.

We're not biologically adapted for surviving in Siberia, but we manage it. Hell, you'll get hypothermia on the French Riviera in winter without clothes.

Technology has always been our way of expanding into spaces we're not otherwise evolved to cope with.

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

#47

Post by Udo »

retSava wrote: post #21
WoodenKatana wrote: post #10

Elon Musk is beyond obsessed with reaching Mars. I feel bad for his employees

I'm happy Musk _is_ obsessed. The world would be a worse off place without SpaceX and Tesla, who both are what they are to a large extent because of him.

> I'm happy Musk _is_ obsessed.

I can definitely empathize with that, I'm happy with what's being achieved as well. Seing how SpaceX and Tesla are routinely achieving their goals and arguably change the world, I often can't get over the fact that the output of our civilization seems to hinge on the iron will of a few billionaires.

Elon Musk (and SpaceX as his tool) is just an extremely illustrative example of this, because we can directly see what our space capabilities and ambitions would look like without him.

I wish there was a Musk-like figure focused on transhumanism, but sadly it may genuinely be too early for that in my lifetime. Or not. And that's the frustrating thing: we wouldn't know until one appears.

I know this sounds like I'm writing a love letter, but it's really not meant that way. I would rather live in a civilization that has its own momentum and a better-distributed capacity for achievement, as opposed to putting my hope for the future on a few tenuous human pivot points and their whims.

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

#48

Post by aphextron »

amelius wrote: post #28
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…

> for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?

>Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?

Rocket efficiency scales infinitely with size.

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

#50

Post by m4rtink »

amelius wrote: post #28
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…

> for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?

It turns out orbital launchers scale rather well with size.

The rocket is already 90+% propellant (fuel & oxydizer), with the few percent left being the engines, structure and payload. So if you want the rocket to have a meaningful payload, it needs to be big.

For example the Falcon 9 weights 350 tons and can place 22 tons to low earth orbit (LEO). So about 6% of initial launcher weight ends up in orbit.

If you want to place the 100+ tons estimated for a reasonable Mars trip, your launcher will be either huge or you will need to do a lot of launches and assemble your ship in orbit with all the overhed that requires.

Starship also aims to be fully reusable, which will eat to your payload yet again but provides a huge benefit of not throwing away any part of your rocket, just burning a lot of propellant, which is dirt cheap compared to rocket hardware (estimates say about 5% of conventional rocket launch is fuel, the less is hardware that you normally simply crash into the ocean after use).

So in short - big payload -> big rocket. Reusable rocket with big payload -> humungous rocket that is really really cheap to operate.

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