Starship’s second flight test
61–70 of 235 posts
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would this ever be possible given the volume of fuel a starship launch entails?
It would carry 1000 people, so divide by 1000, and methane is cheap, plus it's going to save up to 16 hours or so on long haul routes so people may be willing to pay a reasonable premium. The much bigger issue, to me, is safety. I don't see how the Starship design could ever be anywhere near as safe as regular air travel. There are also issues with noise requiring the launch and landing to take place far away from yo…
> landing to take place far away from your destination, reducing the travel time benefit.
Thats where you get on your private jet to fly the last 10 miles. Simple.
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#63Re: Starship’s second flight test
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Can you give an example of 1 thing Elon said that hasn't become a reality and cannot become a reality in the next 10 years? 1 engineering or physics related thing. Deadlines don't count. I'm waiting...
HW3 Teslas will not reach robotaxi-level self-driving without hardware upgrades.
I also don't believe commercial Earth-to-Earth passenger service will ever be viable with the current Starship design. Certainly not in the next 10 years.
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sure sapceX don't have department of wildlife. we don't have enough research on this issue, I don't know why it is OK to do anything before we do not have information. maybe just like old Big oil companies, just do it before people found what do they do?
I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets. And then I wonder if they would have to cancel multi-billion dollar missions to deep space if the answer is non-zero. People really need to get a grip and use their common sense for a bit. A hundred workers — humans — died in the construction of the Hoover Dam, and that was considered…
This. A thousand times this.
Even for just US itself, the Spaceship program might well have a chance to prove to be as existentially important as the Bikini Atoll tests (if we consider that it increased the believability of MAD and prevented nuclear holocaust).
If not that, it will likely still make US have an incredible lead in mass to orbit capability which might lead to dibs on, well, whole stellar objects like moons to mine, planet to realistically colonize ...
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I bet the chance would be low even if Starship somehow "flew" on the surface of the water for the whole boost period. 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 b…
Navy submarines regularly deafen all sorts of animals with their sonars and are implicated in whales beaching themselves to escape the noise.
But let’s make Elon Musk put headphones on seals (plural) because it’s funny to make the billionaire jump through hoops.
If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away.
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#67If 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).
But more important first is to put headphones on seals and play sonic boom sounds to test and make sure they aren't startled by the scary rocket sounds. (Ok, stretching a little. That is what a seemingly similar survey did at Cape as a part of some similarly goofy bureaucracy thing that has been holding Starship back the last month or so. For Starship they're worried for the risk of what happens if Starship literally…
The Twitter mobile player displays no timestamp so seeking is pointless. Here it is on YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?t=1h18m. And here’s the transcript: https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-4-transcript#chapter12_ai_r....
I listened to the relevant section and there’s no indication that the shark question is what is blocking launch. In fact it is clear that question was already answered.
> One of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about a rocket hitting a shark.
> Eventually they managed to solve the internal quandary, and indeed the probability of us hitting a shark is essentially zero.
It’s not clear to me that Fish and Wildlife has actually behaved unreasonably. I would expect them to ask about fish and wildlife.
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Can you give an example of 1 thing Elon said that hasn't become a reality and cannot become a reality in the next 10 years? 1 engineering or physics related thing. Deadlines don't count. I'm waiting...
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I bet the chance would be low even if Starship somehow "flew" on the surface of the water for the whole boost period. 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 b…
Said carrier battle group is just waiting on Fish & Wildlife approval to sail to Japan.
Re: Starship’s second flight test
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Can you give an example of 1 thing Elon said that hasn't become a reality and cannot become a reality in the next 10 years? 1 engineering or physics related thing. Deadlines don't count. I'm waiting...
Coast to coast self-driving by late 2017.