41–50 of 235 posts
If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).
"Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner." Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.
Launching multiple times per day was never a design goal of Falcon 9 but it is explicitly a design goal of the Starship program. They're going to need fast turnaround for all the orbital refueling missions they've already sold for HLS.
The entire industry said they'd never land, then they'd never be able to reuse, then they'd never reuse 10+ times. They're up to 18 reuses. Now they'll never reuse twice in the same day? There's no physical law preventing it, it's just a matter of good engineering. It's not a sure thing but I wouldn't bet against them.
Also, Falcon 9 has been turned around in 21 days, with a significant chunk of that being shipping. And there's no indication that they've hit any limit, they simply don't need to go faster right now given their fleet and launch cadence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded, definitely need to watch or listen to a few minutes of that link.
I loved the bit where Fisheries and Wildlife refused to provide the shark density information because they didn't trust their own department with it! Apparently SpaceX must wait patiently to take humanity to the stars because sharkfin poachers have infiltrated spies into a wildly unrelated government agency. I feel like SpaceX should just launch the damned rocket and then if anyone from the government takes issue jus…
If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).
Non-space nerds don’t quite understand why it’s so exciting. But I can’t imagine how much this is going to change the world, and civilization. It’s kind of the equivalent of going from local freighters to the Seawise Giant in one iteration.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner." Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.
Starship is designed with way faster turnaround time. Falcon 9 had optional reuse, while Starship aims to be the 747 of space access. Elon said in 2020: > Starship is being designed to be relaunched an hour after landing, with zero nominal work Now while that might take some time to reach, before that the pad itself is likely going to be capable of many launches every day given there's more ships. Starships seems to…
To be fair, Elon has said _a lot_ of things about his various projects and not all of them are based in reality.
Did Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation? https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742
It would be about the same chance of hitting a shark or whale when driving a boat for about 10 meters. Footage of a boat hitting a shark - https://youtu.be/yYuh_TNLThg?t=332 this unusual event being .1% of their trip for the day.
And even then it should be ridiculously easy to determine it is more beneficial for humanity to revolutionize mass/cost to orbit even if one or a few animals get hurt during many years of operation. If the US government truly cared this crazy much about sharks and whales we would have sent a carrier battle group to sink all Japanese whaling vessels already for example, or at least funded some black ops guys to sink them while keeping deniability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner." Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.
Starship is designed with way faster turnaround time. Falcon 9 had optional reuse, while Starship aims to be the 747 of space access. Elon said in 2020: > Starship is being designed to be relaunched an hour after landing, with zero nominal work Now while that might take some time to reach, before that the pad itself is likely going to be capable of many launches every day given there's more ships. Starships seems to…
And he said that the Semi will be competitive with rail and could already operate in follow the leader convoy mode back in 2017: they were just waiting on regulators to give the ok! Never seen testing it but I guess they did the whole project in secret and shelved it without applying to regulators in a public way.
If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).
"Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner." Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner." Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.
Starship is designed with way faster turnaround time. Falcon 9 had optional reuse, while Starship aims to be the 747 of space access. Elon said in 2020: > Starship is being designed to be relaunched an hour after landing, with zero nominal work Now while that might take some time to reach, before that the pad itself is likely going to be capable of many launches every day given there's more ships. Starships seems to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starship is designed with way faster turnaround time. Falcon 9 had optional reuse, while Starship aims to be the 747 of space access. Elon said in 2020: > Starship is being designed to be relaunched an hour after landing, with zero nominal work Now while that might take some time to reach, before that the pad itself is likely going to be capable of many launches every day given there's more ships. Starships seems to…
> Elon said in 2020… To be fair, Elon has said _a lot_ of things about his various projects and not all of them are based in reality.
And Starship seems to really be the main focus of Elon where he doesn't just lead but is in the weeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY73exaVpyw