Man, Elon Musk is awesome. Just putting the fact that I just downloaded a user manual for a multi planetary spacecraft in PDF format into historical context, if you think about how thus all came together it really is amazing.
We went from "this guy is nuts" to "oh yeah this is probably going to happen." When Tesla first came into public view, the idea that a car entirely electric powered that drives itself developed by a brand new car company was ridiculous to most people. This guy just said it matter of factly and everyone just kinda said OK dude. Then it happened. Then he said that there was going to be a rocket that lands itself, run privately. Then he says that they are going to build a human settlement on mars. Then worldwide high speed satellite internet. Now you can actually get it in some places. Now, they're going to high altitude test this giant rocket that will be able to carry 100 people tomorrow morning.
100 people. That's insane. Everything this guy says he's going to do is insane, the timelines are insane, but now everyone is kind of like "yeah, sounds about right" as if the world has always been like this. In 20 years this guy and all the engineers he hired have done absolutely incredible things that we take for granted. Tomorrow they're going to perform a high altitude test of a rocket designed to take 100 people to mars. I just read a user manual for an interplanetary spacecraft with the capacity of a small commercial airliner. I'm glad to be alive in this age.
He has flaws. It's fine to recognize that. We all have flaws though and it's unrealistic to expect perfect opinions from anyone. Who decides what perfect is anyway?
I absolutely think there is something to learn from his approach, though I think he has much in common with other highly successful people. My old boss actually had a similar attitude and she accomplished amazing things in her life. In the same way the person you replied to was describing, she would say she was going to do something and people would go "yeah sure." And then she would do them. It seemed like bullshit, then it was real.
First and foremost, it's not about money or opportunity, those are just amplifiers. Without the money it wouldn't be Mars, it would be a local bike co-op. The magic is in an attitude that is low on fear, high on hope, unconcerned what others will think, and always reaching for the most awesome outcome, right on the edge of what seems possible. My old boss had a moment where her son had just started working mall retail, then suddenly he was meeting the CEO and becoming a brand ambassador. She said "he's starting to realize he can do awesome shit," like she was Obi-wan teaching Luke about the force. Most people have set an artificial cap on their potential and accomplishments by believing that the world is a harsh and shit place and that something truly good happening is an impossibility. And then all the opportunities to change their world in big and small ways sail right on past them.
Put another way, I think it's about learning how to be a creator of new realities and not just living in other people's realities.
What a positive and uplifting comment, thank you! I love the idea of amplifiers... it's a great counter-argument to naysayers, that it just changes the scale.
What annoys me that I would want to be a fan of someone like him but I just find his personality and behavior repulsive. After Jobs and Musk many people will now think you have to be an asshole to be successful and will try emulate the bad parts too.
People are biased towards simple explanations of the world so they're biased towards either either Musk is amazing or Musk sucks. The reality is that he's a great enterpreneur but shitty human being.
To be an effective leader you have to be willing to take risks. Most of those risks are interpersonal in nature. You run the risk of offending people when you tell them they can do better than they currently are. You’re essentially calling them out for not working hard enough, or having wrong assumptions, or any of the other normal human failings that everyone is subject to. If a leader doesn’t call those things or then the whole team slips and backslides until all progress stops. Doing the right thing as a leader often earns you the title of asshole and you have to be ok with that. It isn’t carte blanche to be petty and cruel for no good reason though, your actions should reflect the needs of the project not your own whims.
I agree with the first part. But you can have high standards, call out incompetence and fire people without being an asshole (or without being perceived as one). A good example is Ray Dalio.
The thing is, Elon Musk is emotionally immature. He's extremely thin-skinned and narcissistic. He likes to take revenge. There's a difference between firing someone because it will help the project and doing it because you're angry and it will make you feel good.
The personality and behavior that you find repulsive is probably the most conducive to progress. I am not one of those (if I do say so myself). I don't like to step on other peoples' toes or piss people off. I value the happiness of certain other people over my own, mostly. I am unwilling to sacrifice certain things (family) for other goals that I might have.
These traits (some might say virtues) are limitations on what I can accomplish. People without these limitations are often perceived as assholes, but with the right combination of other traits/virtues, they can really do great things.
That's how I see it anyway. I'm not making excuses for myself, and I still intend to do something great, but I don't have expectations of changing the world or being the greatest.
I mostly disagree. Acting in a way that is optimal for the project doesn't require you to be narcissistic, thin-skinned, revengful, etc.
Empathy can be a hurdle in making the right decisions, for example firing a low performing employee. You could argue that someone who takes pleasure in the pain of others could be a better leader. Possibly. But first, I would still find them repulsive and second, I think you can be both decent and a good leader who makes the right decisions. Personally if I were in a leadership position I would try to "hack" my emotions and convince myself that e.g. firing someone who doesn't do a good job is a good thing overall.
I think people that become prominent, especially businesspeople, get accused of being bad people for the rest of their lives. Their lives are scrutinized, other prominent people that control newspapers have friction with them, they do something not too nice at some point and can never live it down. It is easy to call someone a shitty human being, but is he a better person than say, your neighbor down the street? Have you ever done or said anything that, if you were to become prominent tomorrow, people would call you a shitty person for? I think almost everyone on earth has.
Einstein's breakthroughs happened alone, in a tiny window of highly productive years in his twenties. The rest of his life contained little of note and he never needed to build a huge/excellent team to accomplish what he's famous for. The "asshole" aspects of famous business leaders occur because they need to drive enormous groups of people beyond what they thought they were capable of.
>And more importantly, how do we make more Elon Musks?
You take rich families from apartheid states that made their wealth of gems trade & slavery, get the kids excited about space, and give them a world-class education and a huge supply of slaves mining cobalt in africa.
It is, but there's way over a million families in america with a net worth over $10 million.
Bezos is rich. He started a rocket company. Blue Origin has done nowhere near what spacex has done, and that difference isn't down to just throwing money at a problem.
Don't get me wrong, throwing money at the problem is important, but it's just one ingredient.
There are some rich people who have made a difference -- Bill Gates comes to mind as someone that put money and effort in. Chuck Feeney on the "throw money at a problem" side.
But for every Bill Gates there's a Larry Elison, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergy Brin, and dozens more that don't seem to do much.
When it comes to the next generation down, it's even rarer to find kids who are driven to make such a success.
If Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk can be trusted, he worked different jobs as ancillary worker doing things like selling fruits, cleaning grain silos or even ovens in a factory.
As student he is said to have hosted parties for students in a house he and a fellow student had rented to pay for the rent (same source).
Not trolling, but the second point casts doubt on it all, given that I have a hard time imagining Musk hosting parties, let alone getting people to pay for them. This is also pre-hair, pre-money Elon Musk we are talking about.
Absolutely no irony. That's how Elon Musk happened. If you want more Elon Musk that's how you can get them I guess.
Soon you'll have an army of geniuses building that cool space utopia for billionaires while the rest of us can stay in the dying world they left us. Our NeuraLink(tm) units will get us through the day, rewarding mining enough rare earth metals with dopamine hits and pain suppression! (That, that was irony. I hope it'll still be funny in 50 years).
We should tell the kids mining cobalt in congo that Elon Musk's family wealth is in fact, not from an emerald mine and that Elon is a good guy after all!
I wonder why his family got out of South Africa as soon as the apartheid ended and hasn't got back since at least once tho.
I think most people get into business to make money, but that he makes money because he needs it to accomplish a goal. Every decision he makes is to accomplish that goal. For most rich philanthropist types, they only come up with those goals after they make money. I think that plays a big role.
Also the guy is methodical about it. He starts with first principles. That also plays a big part.
And he takes risks. Not just risks with his money, but risks with everything he has going on. And calculated risks.
You don't make more people like him, you can't. People like that make themselves.
What has Elon Musk done for humanity? He got extremely wealthy from a payment processing website. Now he runs a company that makes luxury cars and another one that is or aims to be a global military arms logistical network [0].
If I had to pick amongst the exorbitantly wealth, without any serious research I'd say we need more people like Bill Gates.
Wait, did that "payment processing website" not do something for humanity already? Maybe you are a young person without an appreciation for how that "website" changed the world and enabled new worlds of human activity stifled by the previously available payment options.
"A company that makes luxury cars" alright I'm going to ask you an honest question, 20 years ago would you have been on a website such as this, had it existed, talking about how we need electric cars? Or about how the US car industry is a cartel and we need new innovators to break into the industry?
Its easy to call them luxury cars now, in hindsight, now that Elon Musk started the tech revolution that brought us full electric cars and a disrupted auto industry.
That's not to point out that "a payment processing website" made the lives of millions of people easier, as will global wireless high speed internet and cheap, civilian access to space.
I think you have an axe to grind, and it is clouding your ability to think rationally. There's a rule on this site that you're supposed to add to the discussion. I kindly request that you follow it.
I guess you missed the decades before Bill went big on philanthropy and was much reviled as an anti-social workaholic, tyrannical CEO, and rabid monopolist.
And Elon Musk is not much of a philanthropist that I am aware of but is a guy who claims to care about the future of humanity so he builds luxury cars & rockets instead of doing things for humans alive today with difficult lives. Gates wasn’t always the Gates of today but whats good about Musk outside of the people who fantasize about living his life? The degree to which he’s any better for humanity than literally any other rich businessman seems dependent on buying into his marketing uncritically.
I think you're strawmaning Musk's popularity. People aren't fantasizing about living his life, they're adoring him for building the future that a lot of people want to live to see. Honestly, philanthropy should not be the main concern of billionaires. They should put their money and expertise to work running and funding businesses that have a direct impact on people's lives. Throwing money at problems is an incredibly inefficient and wasteful way to solve them since it more often than not gets vacuumed up by intermediaries and managerial bloat. If you really want to fix something you need to do the work yourself. Gates is actually quite good at this because he's very hands on, he personally researches (as in actually learns the science behind things) and visits the companies and orgs that he donates to. Guess what, that's also Musk's approach. The only difference is that Gates is retired with little interest in starting new companies, Musk is still young enough that he's in the thick of it managing his existing companies and occasionally starting a new one. That's what people with the means to should be doing, rolling up their sleeves and grappling with the problems themselves not throwing bags of money over a wall and hoping it lands on someone competent.
The man has no wealth outside the companies he has built. There’s no cash just sitting in an account that he’s withholding from the poor cowering masses.
He’s put every penny of his net worth into building companies which he believes will tremendously benefit humanity. From sustainable personal transportation, to clean energy, to space exploration, to human augmentation.
If you think other things would be good for humanity, I encourage you to devote every waking hour of your life to pushing technological progress in those areas which you feel would be beneficial.
If he never created SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, Neurolink, and just called it quits after PayPal he would have $180 million, let’s say he donates $160mm and funds the Red Cross for ~2 weeks. How is this better?
In the meantime he’s parlayed $180mm into over $150 billion of value by significantly advancing technological progress in several major areas of global human concern.
Fully agree and I think it is important to point out, that while he created $150 billion of value for himself, at the same time he created even more value for a lot of people, like any Tesla shareholder. Most of the value of Tesla is not owned by Elon, but by shareholders, often holding only small amount of stock and gaining directly.
Also, of course those companies pay salaries and other companies. A lot of wealth was created for society.
Not to mention the beneficial effects of the operations. Teslas have started as luxury cars, but they have clearly paved the way for electric cars for everyone. And while electric cars by themselves won't save the climate, without them, we could not save the climate.
Very soon a lot of people are going to enjoy fast internet across the globe, that is a very tangible benefit for every single customer and a lot of economic growth will be enabled by that, especially in countries which are currently lacking communications infrastructure.
You’re absolutely right, it’s not turning $180mm into $150 billion, it’s turning $180mm into $1 trillion of total value created, most of it not for himself.
What really stands out is the impact of this guy, too. Imagine he just wouldn't have done those things. Imagine no PayPal, no Tesla, no SpaceX ... it's easy to say "Yeah, someone else would have probably done it then." but that's just not right. Otherwise we'd see a lot more of those things by now. Sure, there are some now, but most if not all are the result of him setting the bar in the first place.
"People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better" - Elon Musk, at Ted 2017
Tesla and SpaceX were definitely years or decades ahead of their time, but PayPal would have happened without Musk. There are lots of competitors. PayPal was the one that hit the right features in the right place at the right time (with the right lawyers to talk to the right regulators), but it was far from unqiue.
Yea, politics are hard to avoid. This is one reason he wants to create a city on Mars. Having a frontier again where some people can build up society from scratch could be great for humanity. Time will tell.
All the references like "Please contact sales@spacex.com to evaluate how Starship can meet your unique needs" are pretty funny.
I'd like to imagine some mid-level manager working on his little satellite project browsing this pamphlet, thinking, "Hmmm, this 'SpaceX' company looks interesting. Let me send them an email."
I had a similar giggle reading about the "rideshare opportunities"
> This large deployable envelope allows for the design of novel payloads, rideshare opportunities and entire constellations of satellites on a single launch.
I'm totally looking forward to hailing a Starship in the Uber app. (I actually don't know what they mean by ridesharing)
In this context, ridesharing means piggybacking one or more small satellites on the launch of a larger, primary satellite. It can be close to "free" because the primary is going to launch anyway.
In the context of space launches, ridesharing means that multiple satellites share a single launch as opposed to the traditional 1 satellite 1 rocket approach.
All Starlink satellites have been launched via ridesharing missions, with ~60 satellites per launch (and sometimes with satellites from other companies!).
> All Starlink satellites have been launched via ridesharing missions, with ~60 satellites per launch (and sometimes with satellites from other companies!).
Actually aside from the first couple of Starlink test units, it has been the other way around. SpaceX launches dedicated Starlink missions on a regular cadence using previously flown boosters, and offsets the cost somewhat by offering rideshare opportunities. There will be 60 Starlink satellites per launch, but sometimes less if they find a rideshare.
The definition of rideshare is that they ride with multiple other satellites. 60 satellites means that each are ridesharing with 59 other ones.
The ridesharing program is what SpaceX offers to outsiders, but the concept of rideshared rocket is whenever a rocket ferries multiple satellites to save cost.
Rockets that size cannot be launched anywhere near populated areas, so they'd have to launch from off-shore platforms; outside of Australia, USA and Russia there are no worthwhile destinations that can safely host on-shore rocket launch complexes for that class of rocket.
This poses quite complex logistical challenges that enthusiasts just love to handwave away. But there's even more to it: airspace needs to be closed on both launch and target sites.
Weather will lead to scrubbed flights as rockets have much tighter weather parameters than aeroplanes and are incapable of changing routes mid flight or divert to alternate airfields.
The most ridiculous part, however, is passenger logistics: every astronaut/cosmonaut/taikonaut wears pressure suits during ascend, since otherwise there's no way to breathe in case of a loss of cabin pressure once you're above 20km. Oxygen masks just won't do anymore at such heights.
This means passengers would need to wear and familiarise themselves with pressure suits, unless SpaceX can convince the FAA somehow that even fewer failure modes can be mitigated while still being safe for passengers...
Getting onto the rocket is another point that's far from trivial - one doesn't simply walk into Starship and pick a seat. The seats wouldn't be upright, so passengers would need to climb into them and be secured by personell. Not to mention the elevator ride and the long wait during fuelling (remember: SpaceX are the only ones who do "dry-loading", that is they only start fuelling once the passengers are on board).
So your 30 minute short trip from LA to Paris would in reality consist of a 1 hour drive to the port, followed by 1 hour check-in and a 1 hour boat ride to the off-shore launch facilities. Next you'd have at least 1 hour of boarding procedures (limited elevator space, pressure suit fitting, seating) followed by fuelling (maybe another hour?). So after about 5 hours or so you are finally clear for launch and arrive somewhere off the coast of France 30 minutes later. From there it's another hour for unloading, an hour to get to the coast and another two hours from the coast to Paris.
In total, best-case scenario travel time would be about 9½h - better than the 16h via plane (12h flight + 4h getting to-/from airport plus boarding time), but a far cry from Shotwell's "business meeting in Abu Dhabi in the morning and back in Vancouver for dinner".
The off-shore launch platform idea isn't mine, by the way - the concept was brought forward by SpaceX themselves and presented by Glenn Shotwell who said "the longest part of the ride is be the boat out and back" [1].
I'm highly sceptical of the idea - not because I think it's impossible, which it isn't - but because the logistics, regulatory conditions, and economics behind it just don't make sense. I could be wrong, of course, and stranger things happened, but realistically, the odds are very much against this ever going to happen[+].
[+] using Starship/Super Heavy as envisioned and developed today
> would in reality consist of a 1 hour drive to the port, followed by 1 hour check-in and a 1 hour boat ride to the off-shore launch facilities. Next you'd have at least 1 hour of boarding procedures (limited elevator space, pressure suit fitting, seating) followed by fuelling (maybe another hour?). So after about 5 hours or so you are finally clear for launch
I see that the TSA mindflayers have not been kind to you. Many of those steps do not have to be performed sequentially. For example check-in and suit-up could be performed on the ferry. And if you're already throwing stupendous amounts of money at travel then you also don't have to pick a slow ferry, consider jet hydrofoils. And you don't even have to start at some port far from a city. If the city has a major river it could take up passengers in the middle of the city, travel down the river and on towards the launch platform.
And if we're talking about strapping hundreds of people onto rockets then the safety margins on everything would have to be improved far enough that the dry-loading probably is not needed anymore either.
As far as logistics go it seems hard but possible. But you may be right that regulatory conditions could prove prohibitive since not everyone will just go along with musk's plans.
The ferry doesn't deliver individuals. It carries a passenger seating/baggage module. People get themselves strapped in on the way out. At the launch site the module is hoisted and locked into the vehicle. On arrival, the module is extracted and lowered to the boat deck. People come down to the deck during the boat ride.
Probably their "pressure suits" are the same as the seats, just clamshells with room to scratch, and (often enough) barf.
But scheduled passenger service is 15-20 years off, if ever. They only talk about it now to make the whole enterprise seem inclusive, and not just billionaire playtime. It's even money that civilization will collapse, first.
We're still talking about international flights here - 90 min pre-flight arrival on international flights is standard. There won't be any less rigorous security checks because you're flying a rocket.
Parallel procedures might sound fine in theory, but it's way simpler to just have people onboard the ferry who are good to go and don't need to be kept there, make a scene, etc. Security personell and access to information systems is much simpler to come by in the port, which incidentally already has customs facilities anyway.
> And you don't even have to start at some port far from a city.
Yes you do, that's the whole idea of safe distances with rocket launches. We're talking about a vehicle that basically can be as devastating as a small tactical nuke in terms of destructive potential. Especially during launch, you'd want that thing as far away from densely populated areas as possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gklVhRzkVqA&feature=youtu.be... that's what happened last time a 30-engine rocket failed...
> consider jet hydrofoils
That might be an option, but then again even Shotwell explicitly mentioned the boat ride to be longer than the 30 min rocket ride even at just 10 miles out, so I don't think fast ferries are the most realistic option (mostly for safety reasons).
Commercial aircraft were also totally unreasonable for quite a time after Wright's first flight in 1903.
Musk has explicitly stated that a "safety first" attitude does not get people to Mars. His hierarchy of action is "don't panic", not yet specified, "safety third, maybe". This philosophy is hard to implement in modern day America, but the attitude is part of what allows Elon Musk and the people that work with him to do what they do.
> Commercial aircraft were also totally unreasonable for quite a time after Wright's first flight in 1903.
That's comparing apples and orangutans.
This isn't a 1903 situation at all - we've launched rockets on a weekly basis for 60 years and operated crewed reusable spacecraft for more than 30 years.
This is well known territory. All limitations, possibilities and risks are well known and documented.
If you have to make a comparison, choose the Concorde versus Ju-52 or something. But even that's flawed because it doesn't fit at all.
The concerns I mentioned aren't going to magically disappear - even a "perfectly safe" (by whatever definition) rocket still has to deal with these. A 30-engine, 122m, 65MN rocket will generate a literally deafening blast and for that reason alone cannot be launched near cities. This is a fact of nature, not just a simple engineering problem or overly cautious safety concern.
Same goes for airspace closure, weather on both ends, and simple things like customs and security checks.
Starship won't have any cross-range capabilities, full stop. That's how rockets work and one consequence of this is that bad weather means a scrubbed launch, simple as that. Nothing to do with attitude or "modern America".
That's just physics and natural phenomena that exist and cannot be wished away.
Again, none of this prevents point-to-point travel from being possible, it just demonstrates that it's likely not going to be an everyday occurrence like long-haul flights. A novelty, maybe. Another option for the rich and important, sure.
A viable alternative to regular jets, I think not. Time might prove me wrong, but I'm fairly certain the odds are stacked against regular point-to-point passenger flight service using huge rockets.
>Weather will lead to scrubbed flights as rockets have much tighter weather parameters than aeroplanes and are incapable of changing routes mid flight or divert to alternate airfields.
This part is not true.
Weather plays a significant role for thin rockets.
This one is thick enough to be launched during usual weather fluctuations.
Of course, a tornado or cyclone might be disruptive, but that's also true for normal airplanes.
Yes it is. A wider rocket has more generous margins when it comes to wind, sure, but thunderstorms, heavy rain, storm with strong gusts (doesn't have to be extreme either), sudden ice, heavy snow, etc. etc. will still prevent launches and especially landings.
> Of course, a tornado or cyclone might be disruptive, but that's also true for normal airplanes.
Normal aeroplanes fly around unfavourable regularly and flying holding patterns is normal procedure anyway. None of that is possible with rockets, no matter how wide.
The situation is worsened by the fact that pilots have the luxury of time when planning their route, e.g. bad weather at the destination during launch isn't a big deal for long-haul flights, since there's often 10 hours or more until it even becomes relevant.
With a rocket, weather at the launch and target site have to be favourable at pretty much the same time, since you'd get there in well under an hour.
We'll see later today how well the aerodynamics might work and how the rocket behaves. I remain very sceptical about the point-to-point idea.
There aren't enough customers to justify building something like Starship, so SpaceX created their own biggest customer with Starlink.
They are also hoping to provide Earth-to-Earth passenger service to compete with airlines on long distance routes, which would be orders of magnitude more launches than any other use. It seems quite unlikely that they could compete on safety though.
Not enough customers yet - if they can get it working its just a total money printer. Orbital refueling, tourism, cheap microgravity research, manufacturing and material processing or even early solar farms and habitats!
Or you might even just start by launching 20 tons of coffee beans, roasting them in orbit and selling them as "Space Coffee" - it migh still be worth it with the per launch costs they have mentioned.
DOD is already talking to SpaceX for rapid cargo transport applications.
“A military team is working with SpaceX to flesh out the prospect of shipping routes that pass through space, the head of U.S. Transportation Command said Oct. 7.”
“That group could demonstrate as early as 2021 whether quickly sending cargo around the globe via space is feasible, Army Gen. Stephen R. Lyons said.”
“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said at a National Defense Transportation Association event. “Think about that speed associated with the movement of transportation of cargo and people. There is a lot of potential here.”
Isn't that going to trigger icbm monitoring systems? NASA works in concert with hem and schedules, etc., but military use that needed readiness like this seems like it would be asking for accidents.
This is a very good point. If transportation through space becomes routine, does that affect the ability to detect nuclear first strikes, and what does it do to the calculus of mutually assured destruction?
Hopefully this can be solved with comparable improvements in monitoring and/or adjustments to second strike capabilities.
ICBMs are far smaller and designed to travel far faster than any rocket carrying people would presumably go. It doesn't seem likely they could be easily confused.
MIRV warheads are smaller than regular nuclear warheads. The launch platforms for MIRVed nuclear warheads are the same as those for regular nuclear warheads. But on a MIRV, instead of one regular nuclear warhead there are multiple small nuclear warheads.
I'm thinking of things like r36m, but I guess it is used for non-mirv too. Warhead size is irrelevant as they use Mylar radar decoys or something right? Those can appear as any size so I was focusing on the launch vehicle size for monitoring.
Speed may be a differentiator like you originally said, I'm not sure if they need to end up around the same speed anyway for reentry or not (ones targeting high altitude blast for EMP maybe don't need to reentry at all?).
Anywhere on the globe in less than an hour... plus months of planning and days of preparing the launch vehicle. How fast can one "scramble" a Starship off the ground?
I assume fast turn around times from the Boca Chica (Texas) spaceport. Pick whichever Starship SN is refreshed and ready to go. Less Space Shuttle, more Southwest Airlines. Vehicles on the ground are vehicles not generating revenue.
Given the drone ship landings of the Falcon first stages, I wonder: could you land a Starship on a US aircraft carrier?
And the obvious next question: given Musk is happy to take ship names from pop culture and sci-fi, might he name one of the Starship vehicles “Enterprise”, and could the Starship Enterprise land on the USS Enterprise (CVN-80)?
The cost is likely to fall in the 1%-3% range of that of a C-17. The War Department could buy 100-200 of them for the cost of 2 C-17 Globemaster IIIs.
I would be interested to see if some form of portable, quickly constructed landing pad could be deployed, much like the mats used as runways during WWII.
Do they need a landing pad? They have to be capable of landing on unimproved martian or lunar rock, with enough spare capacity for either the fuel for a return flight (from the moon) or a local fuel generator (from Mars).
That should work, but it will likely not be able to safely launch again even if you managed to refuel it.
The engine power needed to launch in Earth gravity, even with a small hop fuel load might be too much for engines so close to the ground & with thick atmosphere preventing the exhaust from dissipating.
Oh... I forgot about the noise from launch, which is loud enough that echos could damage the vehicle if not damped.
Some form of tower to stand off the exhaust would be required.
So, the one way cost to get a C-17 full of cargo anywhere in the world is about $500,000
1 Million round trip.
I had the cost wrong, I thought it was per vehicle, it's per launch... $2,000,000. If it could fly back, it's only $4,000,000 per round trip.... just 4 times the cost of a C-17 delivery and return.
A C-17 load that doesn't require a ground stop in a foreign country or a tanker based in another country to refuel that same cargo plane. Advantage indeed.
Realistically this means Orbital DropShip Trooper as a role designation is probably 10-20 years out. Launch a Starship, kick out the drop pod "over" the target and then coast suborbital to landing zone (or go orbital and return to launch site).
A one-hour deployment capability anywhere in the world would revolutionise special forces.
Yuri Gagarin technically performed the first “orbital drop” style manoeuvre if you want to get into the semantics. The Soviets were concerned about the efficacy of the landing systems and made the decision (and designed the capsule to facilitate this) have him egress the and parachute to a nearly guaranteed safe landing rather than accept the risk of his death in an accident on landing.
It's getting real. 12.5km hop test hopefully happening within the next 24 hours. 3 Raptor engine launch, free fall in "belly-flop" orientation and powered landing with 2 engines at launch site. Proceedings scheduled to start at 1400 UTC (0800 at Boca Chica, Texas). Official SpaceX YouTube stream from 1200 UTC https://youtu.be/nf83yzzme2I
Their channel is still quiet, maybe coming up at 4:00 CST, but Lab Padre is showing now. The channel is saying target time is 4:30 CST; NASA's WB-57 is in the air; and they've been doing some venting so far.
"The cargo version can also be used for rapid point-to-point Earth transport."
Why no one is talking about this. This will be game changer if can be done with bigger payload. There are models created earlier that using rocket technology/mechanism, LA-HK can be reached in 2 hours. This can have huge impact on avionics esp with trade.
Ask yourself -- what object would be so massive and heavy and yet needed with such immediacy that a company would be willing to pay millions -- perhaps beyond the cost of the object itself -- to ship in a sub-orbital manner? Large and critical infrastructure components like generators, large piping and ducts, etc. are already transported at a fraction of the cost by the likes of the AN-225 Mirya within a matter of hours. What would shaving 15-24 hours in shipping times do for a project?
You are concentrating only on speed and possibly cost. But there is another thing to consider.
For military use, the fact that you do not need consent of third states to use their infrastructure and can support operations on the other side of the globe directly, is golden.
Remember the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Everyone who helped Israel was subject to Arab oil embargo, AFAIK including countries that just allowed American Israel-bound planes to land and refuel.
Similar things may happen again somewhere around South China Sea.
> what object would be so massive and heavy and yet needed with such immediacy that a company would be willing to pay millions -- perhaps beyond the cost of the object itself -- to ship in a sub-orbital manner?
I mean there's not _no_ market, but I agree it's specialized. I could see this capability making sense for high-value, time-sensitive construction projects, such as oil rigs or wind turbines.
Also, the "global" nature may lend itself to container ship salvage or search and rescue. Esp. if the Starship doesn't need to turn around immediately, I can see a market for that.
All of these seem like they will need special-purpose custom Starships operated by a non SpaceX entity.
power station transformers? not sure if they are too heavy for starship, but loosing enough of those can take hundreds of millions of households offline for a long time.
also, in a much darker turn of events: organs for billionaires and political leaders.
reply to self: I wanted to write hundreds of thousands first and then changed my opinion to millions. hundreds of millions is probably hyperbole except for a solar storm or a global nuclear war.
That seems very expensive and inefficient compared to planes or ships. What's the use case you're imagining where a plane is just too slow?
The only thing I can think of is if some service like FedEx can amortize the cost of the launch across a very large number of low-mass items and charge a premium for fast delivery.
Still, I'd assume that this would use vastly more fuel per mass of cargo moved than a plane, and should probably be avoided for CO2 emission reasons even if it works out economically. Is my assumption wrong?
The last time I remember seeing calculations on this, it worked out that it does use more fuel per kilogram than a cargo plane, but only about 1.5x as much - the reason being that the starship spends most of its flight coasting with nearly zero drag, which an airplane has to fight drag in the atmosphere the whole way to its destination.
Huh, that's interesting and completely at odds with my intuition. If it works out like that maybe it is an economically and (sort of) environmentally viable option.
For cargo I don't really see how it could have that much on an impact. Using aircraft we can already transport large volumes of items fairly quickly around the world, yet most freight is still transported by sea because it's cheaper.
A standard '96" pallet' on aircraft is 317cm x 244cm x 244cm (125" x 96" x 96") and can hold 6,804 kg (15,000lb). Specialised aircraft can carry even more - some aircraft can transport trains!
The only place where I could see needing to ship stuff quicker - that could actually afford it as I'm guessing it won't be cheap - would be the military. I'm not sure that's nessasarily a good thing though...
I'd expect loading+unloading to be similar in duration once the program has developed far enough.
The limiting factor that I think is prohibitively limiting starship from dropshipping cargo, is the need for a landing (and launch!) site, an optional SH booster for the return flight and 1200 tons of methalox fuel to get the ship back to base for reuse (4800 with SH booster). So it'd need the rocket equivalent of an airplane carrier, which has not been developed yet.
Man, people have been citing "basic economics" at musk for over a decade. You can't break into the US automotive industry with an independent startup, you can't cut launch costs by an order of magnitude, there's no market for a global constellation of LEO networking satellites, you can't double the number of sattelites in orbit in 5 years, the list goes on.
I don't bet against Elon Musk anymore.
If you've ever paid more for quicker shipping, there's a market for this.
To be fair, SpaceX hasn't cut costs by an order of magnitude. They've made things significantly cheaper, but the list price for a barebones Falcon 9 is about $50-60m, while an Atlas V is around $100-120m.
Well, they’re targeting launching much more mass than F9 for a much lower cost with Starship (<$10M). So not done yet, but it seems like they have a good shot at it. And if they pull off orbital refueling, then they can take those huge amounts of mass to geo and beyond.
Yeah, you're right, I put some "haven't quite happened yet" stuff in there, but the point I was making was that there was a time when discounting the man was the rational thing to do, at this point I think he's proven his ability to do what he says he's going to do, and the ones I stretched a little are well on their way to happening.
That doesn't take into account the speed of delivery. There may be some customer out there that doesn't know when they need something delivered, but once they know, they'd be willing to pay an extravagant amount of money to have whatever it is there in 30 minutes.
The most immediate thing I can think of is a bomb, which is pretty much exactly that need :) But there may be other use cases with similar required delivery times.
To quote Crocodile Dundee: "that's not a user guide".
SpaceX do amazing things, and shows that private space is good. But you have to admit that government space programs have better public documentation. The ISS operating guide, in all it's glory:
Squeezing 100 people into this thing for a multi-month journey continues to give me pause. It has smaller internal volume than the ISS, which has never had more than 9 people, and it was considered uncomfortably crowded when that happened.
ISS is stuffed with research equipment and made out of much smaller modules which makes their space-optimal layout impossible.
Starship has 825 m3 habitable volume vs 9.3m3 for the Dragon Crew, which carries 4 people. That's 3.5x more volume per person. Yes it is a 6-month flight vs 6-day flight (tops), but i believe the volume is good enough.
If you think about how big many ocean going sail ships have been, its not that different. The Viking Dragon ships didn't even have decks and they went all around the world with them.
Do any other launch service providers, like United Launch Alliance, make these specifications publicly available (without needing to sign an NDA or whatever)?
Indeed. I expect a user guide to have exact instructions on how to use a device. SpaceX's brochure doesn't even go far enough to call it a specification sheet.
Yes, and usually with much more detail (and in SpaceX's defense, the Falcon 9 user guide is also much more useful than this). This is super light on technical info in comparison (really the only specs are fairing size, very little about orbits)
Why does it seem so hard to get good looking justified text? It appears to me that only (La)TeX manages to get spacing 'correct' / aesthetically pleasing (IMHO). Going from the metadata, this file was generated by "Microsoft Office Word": you'd think MS would have the resources to figure this out.
Not sure it's theoretically possible. What you can do in an interactive WYSISYG editor like a word processor and what you can do with batch typesetting program are two different things.
When you edit in a word processor, you have different expectations about the interaction speed, and the locality of changes. A typesetting program can spend two seconds optimizing word spacing when you "render" the document. Word can't. It could spend those 2 seconds when you hit print - but then it's no longer WYSIWYG! It could also apply "TeX-like" typesetting changes (jumbling the spacing around in the whole document on every keystroke) but that also breaks the user's expectation.
TeX does do a good job, but it is not totally unique in this, and it’s not perfect because it doesn’t know enough about glyph shapes to avoid creating rivers.
The thing that TeX, InDesign, and other systems that can do really good layout often allow is hints for ways to fix otherwise difficult cases (where it might be good to hyphenate or introduce a line break).
Word is in a tricky middle ground where it is ostensibly concerned with the pure content of the document (where you shouldn’t be worrying about line justification issues) but is being used to produce final output where you would expect to be providing those fix ups.
Okay. So what's good looking? This is inter-word spacing with emphasis to justification without hyphenation, last line excluded. This is the standard of justified text. We can't adjust hyphenation, because hyphenation rules are a quirk of not just language but pronunciation (the hyphen goes between syllables), so it's nearly impossible to find a universal ruleset. Let's mess with some of the other things.
First: why have justified text? What if we just had a ragged right-hand column, not caring where that ended up? Let's just ignore that the user asked for justified text.
Or take the completely opposite approach - what if we also distributed some of the spacing in between the letters?
With all the positive talk on here, I shall present a contrary point of view on this.
This is the YouTube channel Common sense skeptic, that seems to be doing a good job if trying to test Musks/SpaceX claims, typically it is not positive at all.
It is clear they have an axe to grind with Musk but they seem to doing a very good job of backing up their criticism s.
No one cares about this shit anymore. Everyone and their uncle had a Youtube channel telling us why Crew Dragon would fail because they used electron for their interface or Tesla would fail because they don't understand what Real Car Companies™ do or Tesla is just a bunch of techies who think they can solve other problems because they can write software or Space X is doomed because their rocket exploded once.
Well, it's over. The naysayers know fuck-all. They just know how to talk and talk. Meanwhile someone out there is walking the walk. It's over. The contrary position is dead.
Musk makes the one in a million shot nine times out of ten.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
It is all very well to quote Roosevelt and yes he is correct. But there is a difference between putting in the hard work and trying achieve something great, SpaceX have done that and will continue to do great things, and the difference between claiming a million people on Mars.
The thing is there are many folks out there that were the nay-sayers and were completely wrong but also many that were completely correct. They are typically not remembered. It is one thing to make bold claims, it is another to out right deny the realities of the universe because they get in the way of a vision.
Why are people even interested in peoples' opinions on how other people might fail? Musk has said that he thought SpaceX had a less than 10% chance of even getting a rocket to orbit when he founded it, but trying was worth it anyway. Now that SpaceX has built an orbital booster that comes back to land at the launch site like in the fucking cartoons in the 1950's, why would one spend time thinking about if they will fail instead of how great it would be if they succeed. You can't short SpaceX stock.
It isnt so much a case of schadenfreude but more a case of seeing what issues still need to be addressed.
Personally I would love nothing more that to see the doubters get shown up by the likes of SpaceX actually going out there and making it all actually happen.
It is when legitimate issues are being brought up but arent being actively addressed by the likes of SpaceX that is when one has to wonder about how the upper ends of the business is skewing the marketing/output of the company.
I am reminded about the slogan of r/realtesla - revolutionary technology, awful company. I fear that, what if a company like SpaceX over promises and under deliv ers and causes more damage to the field long term than if they had not done anything at all?
"I fear that, what if a company like SpaceX over promises and under delivers and causes more damage to the field long term than if they had not done anything at all?"
Not sure how you think SpaceX could cause more damage than doing nothing. They are the only group for the last two decades, besides Blue Origin, that is trying to advance the technology of heavy lift rockets past what we had with the Saturn V. Just imagine what $30/kg to orbit instead of $10000/kg will open up. They have are half way there with booster recovery and now just need the size of StarShip and the recoverable second stage.
If a company is creating revolutionary technology, why is it an awful company? Under what metrics are you judging it by? Lots of people get "burned out" working at SpaceX, but others also thrive in the environment.
It can cause more damage than good by making people doubt the entire mission as a whole. Funding will dry up pretty quick if folks think it is just another dead end.
And $30 per Kg would be nice, the last figure for SpaceX is $2,720 per kg. That is a very big difference.
I have nothing against revolutionary technology. The thing is, when it comes to the reusable rockets and near earth orbital stuff - I have never had much doubts that SpaceX would achieve this outside of earth based political issues. I worry that they are pushing an image of what they want rather than what they will achieve.
Look at Blue Origin, I actually don't have a problem with them as they seem to be taking the more cautious approach. It could be a Turtle and the Hare situation going on here.
There's a difference between discussing legitimate issues versus going on a tirade rants full of misinformation to prove your point. That's what these channels do.
For example one of their videos says that Starship isn't possible because of space radiation. Which is a much discredited idea and has been for years.
The issues of space radiation is far from discredited. It is one.of the major issues that still doesn't have an elegant solution. One.idea that SpaceX is proposing is to try and get the trip to Mars to 6 months. It will still be a serious issue but it would at least be better than the typical trip proposal.
One of the reasons I posted that channel was because they seem to have really done their research far beyond the typical "it wont work, just because". It is biased still but at least they arent just firing blind.
It does have a pretty elegant solution: water. Water is an excellent shield against radiation, and any long duration mission will have a large amount of water on board for the humans. With proper positioning of the tanks, said water can do double duty as a radiation shield.
Water does work, it is also astoundingly heavy. That is the major issue. Elegant but impractical.
It simply blows out any useful payload volume and costings because of the amount of water required. Last estimate I have seen is they would need 1,500 tons of water to make Starship radiation resistant (80% decrease in exposure). Even at $300 per Kg, about 1/8th the cost of current launches, that is still approaching a half billion dollars per ship with a significant lost of internal space.
Technical viability and economic viability are two very different things as well. This is going to be the thing that I feel will eventually limit our travel outside of the earth system.
I suspect we will see rampant use of Starship in orbit, the occasional run to the moon and maybe once or twice to Mars but beyond that. It will be just another technological lead that ends up in civilizations recycling bin.
One possibility is the use of a cycler - in other words, putting only a couple Starships with massive amounts of water onboard in an orbit that loops back and forth between the Earth and Mars. Passengers would board it for the transit, then transfer back into an unshielded starship that flies in formation for the journey. This way, the shielding mass only needs to be launched once, and can be reused for an arbitrary number of flights.
I got really excited that the PDF download seemed substantial as it took relatively longer to complete. Only to be mildly disappointed that it's only 5 pages long...
Amazing how this is all quickly coming to fruition that there isn't enough time to fully assimilate.
Wikipedia says that the shuttle's payload to LEO is 24,310 kg, at least 4x less than Starship (currently quoted at "100+ tons", meaning it could be somewhat higher, probably depending on where the booster lands (boostback to shore vs autonomous droneship vs no recovery).
The additional on-orbit refuelling capability that will be developed will enable large mass delivery around the solar system, as well, though it's pretty purpose-built for sending people to other bodies.
> SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled revised plans to travel to the Moon and Mars at a space industry conference today, but he ended his talk with a pretty incredible promise: using that same interplanetary rocket system for long-distance travel on Earth. Musk showed a demonstration of the idea onstage, claiming that it will allow passengers to take “most long-distance trips” in just 30 minutes, and go “anywhere on Earth in under an hour” for around the same price as an economy airline ticket.
Yup, they got a contract with the military to send weapons anyone on the globe.
> This week, the space exploration company signed a contract with the Pentagon to jointly develop a rocket that can deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world in just one hour, Business Insider first reported.
I am so happy Elon Musk exists today. The world is a much more interesting place to live in. I was outside the other night on a walk and all the sudden I see a 60 satellite Starlink fleet above me and it honestly brought me to tears. He has made science fiction real and has progressed all of humanity more than anyone else alive today IMO. I can't wait for the Elon hate replies.
I think discussions about Elon used to be quite positive here on HN which detriorated over time - partly due to the things Elon did (calling cave diver pedolphile and his Twitter rampage), but I suspect also due to how fragmented we've become in last few years. Downvotes have been omnipresent, there is no nuance in arguments, its either black or white. Left or right. I personally think Elon is a great, smart enterpreneur who has a genuine passion for engineering, science and benefit of the world. He is also arrogant, self-serving and inconsiderate jerk at times. I think this was true for Bill Gates until he retired and mellowed out.
Anyways, I am curious if people here have observed similar trends in all areas of public discourse? There is so much division in the world and I am not convinced it is 100% due to the merit alone - it is sort of this ugly evil tribalism of humans that have recently kicked in.
It's not like people had no idea about sharing stuff on the network before him, though. Tim Berners-Lee made the first web browser, but it was evolution of previous ideas and the third small step of a revolution, not a gamechanger by itself.
When I lived in China I felt like I was in the Jetsons- 200 mph trains, gleaming airports more skyscrapers in Shanghai tahn in the Ten top US cities combined. Plus new mission to the Moon every year.
In American I feel like the Flintstones- so backwards.
Japan is also very SF yet very fantasy/historicall all at the same time! 300 km/h trains, 30 milion people megapolises but also ancient shrines, temples and vulcanoes, often right next to each other (at least in Kagoshima :P)!
Still, I would welcome more ambitious space stuff being done in space in Japan. Hayabusa and Kibo is nice and cool, but we need more! :)
Sure would have been nice if all of that had been co-ordinated with astronomers so we wouldn't have to impose the negative externality of not being able to observe the heavens anymore as a price paid for faster internet.
Why can't astronomers have algorithms that selectively throw away data from pixels that are known to have a satellite or a plane in then? It seems like a problem that software can solve. Granted it's more effort on the side of astronomers.
It depends on how the picture was captured - if it's merging many pictures it's possible to throw out ones with Satellites. However if it's a single long exposure, then that won't work. I think a shutter on the telescope that automatically closes when a satellite is in the viewing area is a more approachable method.
The latest batch of satellites are already much improved in that regard compared to the earlier ones, and it's still early days. I am hopeful that things will continue to improve as the things proceed.
My personal opinion is that access to the global internet is important enough to justify the light pollution in the night sky. But I understand that not everyone thinks so, and regardless, steps to limit the constellations' impact are important to take.
It is really only competing with existing internet service providers and likely will not be profitable to roll out to even the rest of Australia let alone places like Africa.
According to this link (short on details, unfortunately) at least a couple of the sats currently in orbit have laser hardware functional enough to test with. I'm looking forward to hearing more about what kind of bandwidth they're expecting.
They're already testing satellite-to-satellite, which for long hops, has the potential to actually be faster than terrestrial fiber, since light is significantly faster in vacuum. Access won't be limited to those near ground stations.
Most places that will be Starlink customers have no internet of any kind available, and the situation even at maximum possible negative observation impact of Starlink is not accurately described as "not being able to observe the heavens anymore".
a) Even in the outbacks of Australia people still have access to the internet via satellite services. In fact very few places in the world, if any, have access to no internet at all rather it's just slow and expensive e.g. Iridium.
b) Starlink needs ground stations to work which means it isn't going to be usable in totally rural areas. And even then it will be interesting to see how it competes with fixed wireless e.g. microwave.
Currently you are correct in that the ground station and the end user need be in sight of the same Starlink satellite. In a future revision, the satellites will be able to bounce traffic between them in a mesh, thus allowing coverage in the most remote regions.
Is there anything stopping the ground stations from being a ground based relay between different starlink satellites, basically beaming down from one and up to another? It would increase latency but could serve the same purpose as the lasers, and all they would need at the intermediate ground stations is reliable power. Eventually you get back to one that has fiber.
We went from "this guy is nuts" to "oh yeah this is probably going to happen." When Tesla first came into public view, the idea that a car entirely electric powered that drives itself developed by a brand new car company was ridiculous to most people. This guy just said it matter of factly and everyone just kinda said OK dude. Then it happened. Then he said that there was going to be a rocket that lands itself, run privately. Then he says that they are going to build a human settlement on mars. Then worldwide high speed satellite internet. Now you can actually get it in some places. Now, they're going to high altitude test this giant rocket that will be able to carry 100 people tomorrow morning.
100 people. That's insane. Everything this guy says he's going to do is insane, the timelines are insane, but now everyone is kind of like "yeah, sounds about right" as if the world has always been like this. In 20 years this guy and all the engineers he hired have done absolutely incredible things that we take for granted. Tomorrow they're going to perform a high altitude test of a rocket designed to take 100 people to mars. I just read a user manual for an interplanetary spacecraft with the capacity of a small commercial airliner. I'm glad to be alive in this age.