
The SpaceX Starship is a big deal - mrfusion
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/
======
avmich
> If each Starship manages 300 flights per year, each carrying 150 T of cargo,
> then we are talking a yearly incremental cargo capacity growth of 22 million
> tonnes to orbit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade)

> One proposed sunshade would be composed of 16 trillion small disks at the
> Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian point, 1.5 million kilometers above Earth. Each disk
> is proposed to have a 0.6-meter diameter and a thickness of about 5
> micrometers. The mass of each disk would be about a gram, adding up to a
> total of almost 20 million tonnes.[3] Such a group of small sunshades that
> blocks 2% of the sunlight, deflecting it off into space, would be enough to
> halt global warming, giving us ample time to cut our emissions back on
> earth.

~~~
willis936
A sunshade seems like a horrible idea. There are obvious implications from the
increased motivation to use fossil fuels. Biodiversity will continue to
plummet until there is an ecological collapse. The people with the keys to
enable or disable the shade will be influenced by short term profit. Then once
fossil fuels are gone there will be a giant energy crisis. Buying time is good
only if that time is properly paid for. And there is the risk of unintended
consequences.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences)

~~~
WhompingWindows
Are you really going to link to wikipedia's unintended consequences page? How
about the unintended consequences of historical emissions - we have already
put enough in the atmosphere to devastate Shanghai, Miami, Manhattan, and all
of the coastal nations of the world. Are we going to throw up our hands and
take a potentially life-saving, civilization-saving tool off the table?
Species -- those are already dying off hugely, if anything the sunshade will
slow this decimation by slowing warming.

Also, how do you imagine that Elon Musk is somehow going to elongate our usage
of fossil fuels? Elon Musk has done more for EVs than any single person in
human history, and you claim he's going to do something which will extend
fossil fuel use?

Your post just doesn't add up, it sounds like you want further warming to
occur?

~~~
willis936
Your post doesn’t add up. You start by pointing out the unintended
consequences of burning fossil fuels, then continue to say that we should
pursue solutions that allow us to continue burning fossil fuels sans serious
short term repercussions. I think continuing to kick the can without proper
longview regulation is only putting money in the disaster bank.

~~~
zaroth
This mindset is a huge reason why so many people are skeptical of the climate
change movement.

It’s not that climate change isn’t real, or even a question of whether human
activity is the root cause. But faced with a _solution_ which doesn’t require
massive societal change of a particular sort, the solution is rejected out of
hand.

Just because it doesn’t force a specific set of political changes which up
until now have been punctuated by the threat of nothing less than
Armageddon,... we cannot actually _reject_ a cheap solution that takes
Armageddon off the table, just because it may make the other goals harder to
accomplish.

It is morally unacceptable to let the Earth burn rather than be left to solve
issues of pollution and clean energy _independent_ of the almost unfathomable
toll of a 3°C future. That to me is frankly an untenable position when you
contemplate the actual number of lives in the balance.

~~~
phs318u
I’m sorry but you and many other posters are missing two key and obvious
things.

1\. The single cheapest and quickest way to make a difference is to - en-masse
- moderate our behaviours. But guess what? People are so wedded to their
monster-truck-driving, plastic-consumable-disposing, distance-product-
shipping, holiday-air-travelling lifestyles that they won’t (on the whole)
bear even the slightest personal “burden”. The relatively moderate costs
associated with behaviour-modifying policies (eg a carbon price), are
vehemently and successfully opposed (or neutered) by governments all over the
world. And the reason they are free to do so is because there’s no political
cost to doing so. Given all that, why on earth would anyone think it’s going
to be politically acceptable to fund even costlier and potentially fraught
geo-engineering responses?

2\. Shades will do nothing at all for the ongoing acidification of the oceans
and the consequent marine species destruction.

~~~
zaroth
I don't think it's simple, or easy, or inexpensive even, to achieve an _en-
masse change in global behavior_. To me that seems like the most difficult,
most expensive, and most costly way to try to solve the problem. Asking the
world to "just consume less" is a very nice way of asking the world to enter a
global depression. If the only answer is massively moderated consumption, the
direct result is actually a lot of pain and suffering and destitution.

I am very much a technology optimist. I believe that technology is the route
to providing sustainable solutions across the board in energy, transportation,
agriculture, and materials. Even more, I believe that the _only_ solution is
for technology advances to make the _sustainable_ solution to be the
_preferred_ solution. When going green is also cheaper, faster, better, then
everyone goes green by default.

The role of government here is to align incentives and subsidize market-driven
R&D efforts which result in technologically superior products that also happen
to be sustainable which can win in a competitive marketplace on their own
merits. The perfect example of this is EVs. EVs will totally supplant new ICE
vehicle sales in the next couple decades because they will ultimately be a
better vehicle in every possible metric.

I think we are seeing the same effects in terms of renewable energy that can
now compete on cost even without subsidies, and we are in the beginning stages
of where we need to go with agriculture (I'm sure actually much progress has
been made, but I'm less familiar with that tech).

From a materials science perspective, we need better alternatives for clothing
fibers, and better alternatives for plastics in our products and packaging.
Cotton is biodegradable but takes far too much water to produce -- possibly
something that further genetic modifications to cotton could reduce. Plastic
blends in textiles are great for performance, but end up as microplastic in
our waterways and oceans. The alternative isn't that everyone is going to
switch to hemp. The alternative must be a better material developed that
provides superior performance, longevity, texture, carbon footprint, and
ultimately clean disposal or recyclability. Government's role is to align
incentives for this R&D to occur by taxing externalities or subsidizing new
products that present lower externalities.

As to the queston of controlling the effects of increased CO2, one of which is
global warming, and another of which is ocean acidification, I think we will
come to a point where we need ways to effectively reduce atmospheric CO2
independently of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, and technology will
ultimately afford us that.

I think it's an open question whether the timescale over which atmospheric CO2
may ever be brought back below, e.g. 300ppm, will require engineering a more
direct solution to both ocean acidification, and global warming. Even if
tomorrow anthropogenic CO2 emissions dropped to zero, how long would that even
take? Solar shields and atmospheric CO2 extraction are technologies that
warrant future research and discussion.

~~~
pms
It is easy -- tax the pollutants and ban greenwashing marketing/lobbying. I am
not the first to propose this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bxgd5p/single_mo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bxgd5p/single_most_important_stat_on_the_planet_alarm_as/eq6bvl0/)

The real obstacle is the confusion in the public opinion spurred by big oil
marketing and lobbying. It's really hard to find quality information online,
but it exists since many years and it's pushed down on purpose by interest
groups. Here is an example:

Exxon, a big oil corporation, had accurate predictive models of climate
change, agreeing with scientific consensus, already in 1982 and confirmed "it
will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050".
[https://twitter.com/i/status/1187719206562910209](https://twitter.com/i/status/1187719206562910209)

Shortly after Exxon began to deny global warming and started "greenwashing"
marketing campaigns, which today show up directly in the news articles on
global warming, e.g., in The New York Times:
[https://twitter.com/status/1187435336185581570](https://twitter.com/status/1187435336185581570)

------
chasd00
to me, it's the Raptor engine that is the big deal. And within the Raptor,
it's the alloy developed on the oxidizer side pre-burner that's the big deal.
I wish i could have been there the moment that alloy was conceived and the
moment it past the first round of testing. I would have poured so much tequila
it would have had a budget impact.

~~~
Robotbeat
It's the whole architecture: a two-stage, rapidly reusable rocket with as much
cargo capacity as anything to ever fly. And just as important for
interplanetary flight: The upper stage is refuelable and is integrated with
the passenger compartment and has a large delta-v capability as well as
aerobraking/capture/entry.

It really breaks basically every human spaceflight architecture. It's a two
element architecture (with common propulsion, simplifying development for the
booster) that accomplishes every goal of virtually every other interplanetary
human spaceflight architecture conceived. This simple architecture (while
avoiding the huge penalties of single-stage vehicles) means that it can be
developed extremely cheaply.

It really is a gamechanger in spaceflight. All of spaceflight.

400 satellites per launch? For maybe an incremental price of about $40 million
near-term and $4 million long-term? That's, um, $10,000 per satellite. That
breaks every model of space development.

And it's not like all of this was unforeseeable. Even Werner Von Braun
proposed refueling-dependent human spaceflight architectures in the 1940s (in
his fictional book about exploring Mars) that would enable low cost. But for
historical reasons, human spaceflight took another path.

~~~
chasd00
yeah, you're absolutely correct. It's the whole package. I want to know what
went so right at SpaceX though.

from wikipedia "In late 2001, Mueller began developing a liquid-fueled rocket
engine in his garage and later moved his project to a friend's warehouse in
2002.[1] His design was the largest amateur liquid-fuel rocket engine,
weighing 80 lb (36 kg) and producing 13,000 lbf (58 kN) of thrust.[1] His work
caught the attention of Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors,
and in 2002 Mueller joined Musk as a founding employee of SpaceX."

that's a hell of a lucky find by Musk and a hell of a roll of the dice by
Mueller. Around the same time is when Shotwell joined, she's equally
incredible but in a different way. i don't now how Musk found her.

Even then, what followed has been black swan territory. Every major
development announcement at SpaceX is met with "you're crazy" and laughter
from the industry and yet, a few years down the road, there it is working.
Again, i really want to know what went so right.

~~~
cstross
The path taken in the 1950s for spaceflight was dictated by its funding source
-- missile development. Missiles were optimized for high performance and were
single use devices.

Even when dedicated non-military rockets began to appear, e.g. the Ariane
range and the Space Shuttle, they had dependencies on legacy infrastructure
that was originally designed for strategic weapons (i.e. it was intended to
work at peak performance, just once). The payloads evolved to reflect the
launch system constraints, so very expensive, one-of-a-kind comsats and earth
resources satellites, each of them a bespoke design (or at most one of a dozen
or so).

SpaceX isn't building missiles; it's optimizing for reliability and cost
(which means reusability). More like airliners than missiles. This doesn't
mean low performance (the efficiency and power density of a modern civil
airliner turbofan would have been a jaw-dropper to 1940s military aviation
engineers) but it _does_ mean the performance goals are different.

I am still extremely skeptical that Heavy/Starship will facilitate a Mars
colony ... but that's because I'm skeptical about the economics and
practicalities of building an off-planet colony when the externalities we
normally take for granted (like a compatible biosphere) aren't available and
nobody's really done the necessary R&D work on self-contained biospheres --
even the ISS is effectively an open-loop system dependent on constant
resupply. (Biology and ecology are much harder than they look to a naive
outsider.)

~~~
noodle_face_
I have the same doubts. I think it'll inevitably happen, eventually, but the
timeline may be wayyy longer than people seem to think.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a small settlement for research or something in
my lifetime. Maybe something like what we have in Antarctica.

~~~
cstross
We really, _really_ need a second run at Biosphere 2, only this time
integrating what the failures of the first run taught us. (Only 25 years ago,
with no serious follow-up!)

The next step would then be something like a Bigelow B330 module in LEO, which
is close enough to get the astronauts home from in a hurry if something goes
badly wrong.

(These steps can be commenced with current tech: Heavy/Starship not required.)

Step 3 would be a bigger test hab out beyond the Van Allen belts, preferably a
couple of habs revolving around a hub to provide centrifugal "gravity" at
Lunar or Martian levels. Goal is to test systems for use on planetary surfaces
exposed to cosmic/solar radiation (because outside our atmosphere). Starship
is probably mandatory for this phase, because it's a lot more massive and a
lot further away. Alternatively: conduct this experiment on the Lunar surface,
once astronaut return capability is available (but why waste expensive
reaction mass if you can simulate a gravity well?)

Without a lot of R&D work under these conditions, a closed-circuit life
support system for Mars is a huge safety risk for the astronauts who set it up
(and who are too far away to rush home in a hurry if it goes badly).

And without closed-loop life support, a Mars "colony" is no more a colony than
an Antarctic research station reliant on resupply for everything except air
and water.

------
PaulHoule
The lunar mission profiled in there takes 15 tanker launches, which is a lot.

As for in-situ resource utilization, how about this: Apollo astronauts found
nearly 40% iron ore in some areas of lunar regolith. That may be unusually
high, but you can do magnetic separation, then pass hydrogen gas through the
ore to get iron and water. Crack the water molecules, recycle the hydrogen,
and then use the oxygen to refuel "starships", where it accounts for 4/5 of
the propellant mass. In the meantime you get iron by the hundreds of tons on
La Luna that you can use to make pressure tanks to store that oxygen, live in,
etc.

(It's been a long trope in sci-fi and speculation that a lunar economy would
be an aluminium economy, and that people who seek iron will go for the
asteroids, but it is very easy to get iron + oxygen as described on the moon,
it is much harder to reduce other common metals on the moon.)

Here is the mass driver that Gerard K. O'Neill told you about, available off
the shelf:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58MmOpSm4LY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58MmOpSm4LY)

That can send a 10kg projectile at 2.5 km/s which can get to the Earth-Moon L1
or L2 points.

If you can increase the velocity to 3.1 km/s you could graze the Earth's
atmosphere and deliver oxygen and other materials to LEO. Either way you need
something that can soak up excess momentum at the end, but you could greatly
reduce the need for tanker launches.

~~~
whatshisface
Pure iron is a poor material. You would want some carbon to turn it in to
steel, and that would have to come from another process.

~~~
PaulHoule
If your space economy is driven my methane (e.g. the Starship fuel) you could
ship methane to the moon, separate the carbon from the hydrogen, recycle the
hydrogen and mix the carbon in with the iron. Mild steel might have 0.1%
carbon so you get a multiplication ratio in the 100's.

The main trouble is you also want to build up a carbon stock for biological
applications... But it is the nitrogen stock that I haven't figured out.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Ship some hydrazine along with the methane?

~~~
PaulHoule
Or maybe just ammonia.

------
Tepix
I wonder if we will revive O'Neill's idea of putting a mass driver on the
Moon.

That would potentially enable getting mass (like water or lunar regolith) into
space (alas from the Moon, not Earth) at even lower cost than Starship.

Recommended related link: [http://ssi.org/ssi-supermodels-part-2-make-your-
own-ssi-mass...](http://ssi.org/ssi-supermodels-part-2-make-your-own-ssi-mass-
driver/)

~~~
skykooler
The big limitation for constructing something like that is setting up a
manufacturing industry on the Moon: even with Starship, a mass driver requires
far more processed material (mainly refined metals) than can be practically
shipped up from Earth. The tipping point for a Lunar mass driver will be when
we've created enough of an industry on the Moon to construct it out of local
materials.

~~~
wolfram74
Obviously complicated metallurgical alloying processes takes a lot of
baseline, but fabricating pure metallic elements might be tractable. And I was
under the impression that pure aluminum and magnesium were actually pretty
useful structural elements if you don't have to worry about oxidation?

~~~
jandrese
They're useful structural elements even in the presence of oxygen. In fact
they're better than steel because they form their own protective coating that
doesn't flake off and expose fresh metal underneath.

The moon has other challenges, like the slow day/night cycle, radiation, and
the damn dust.

------
sveit
_Starship is a devastatingly powerful space access and logistical transport
mechanism that will instantly crush the relevance of every other rocket ever
built._

If I am a launch provider other than SpaceX, I'm out of business in probably
3-5 years.

~~~
xgbi
Don't forget that China is launching more rockets into space than the US in
2018, and is close to be the same in 2019:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_spaceflight#By_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_spaceflight#By_country)

SpaceX still has about 10 launches officially scheduled in 2019, but I'd be
surprised if they launch half of it. And in total, for SpaceX, this represents
less launches than in 2018, not to mention some of these are test launches and
others serve their own Satellite venture.

Does this mean that the market is contracting? Is there less money in space
launches?

I personnally find this fact more disturbing; SpaceX is a very successful
venture, but the US is second in terms of launches anyway (of which SpaceX
represents only about 50%) behind China, and I feel like 2019 will be a small
year. Their last launch was 84 days ago (!!
[https://spacexnow.com/stats.php#Turn_Arounds](https://spacexnow.com/stats.php#Turn_Arounds)
), and the back order sheet is not gigantic either.

~~~
peteradio
Why does launch count matter?

~~~
agildehaus
Should we tell him that Russia has been outpacing us in launches per year for
pretty much the entire existence of space travel?

[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-launches-
per-y...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-launches-per-year-ref-
DISCOS_fig4_266556917)

------
jagger27
> Starship is not just a huge fuel tank and some kick ass engines, it’s also a
> reusable honest-to-god Mars landing system for >100T payloads that doesn’t
> require any parachutes. This is a big deal.

No parachutes, landing cushions, skyscranes, or other crazy ideas. Just a big
fat cross section to slow it down.

~~~
branchan
Starship still needs to fire rockets in order to land. I would say it's a
crazier idea than the ones you have mentioned. The previous solutions you have
listed were used precisely because they were less crazy ideas.

~~~
DuskStar
Curiosity used aerobraking, parachutes AND a skycrane to land. There's a great
video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s)

Previous solutions weren't used because they were less crazy, but because they
were more mass efficient for "small" payload sizes.

~~~
branchan
I think we have been desensitized by all these SpaceX rocket landings.
Propulsive landing is not as easy as it seems.

------
crease
>Mars city building is about robots building potato farming robots and humans
facilitating a nearly-automated industrial stack.

Who's going to build these robots? This sounds like something I would really
enjoy working on.

~~~
0xffff2
You might have second thoughts when you read about working conditions at
SpaceX and Tesla. It's a job I'd love to do and I have enormous respect for
Elon Musk, but I have no desire to work for him.

~~~
DennisP
Yes but so far, Musk has been saying SpaceX plans to let other companies build
most of the stuff needed to live on Mars.

------
avmich
> It turns out that landing on Mars is really hard. Of 17 attempted landings,
> only 8 have been successful, all built by JPL.

This is practically offtopic, but this is technically incorrect.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3)

> ...the Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to attain a soft landing on
> Mars, on 2 December 1971. It failed 20 seconds after landing...

~~~
branchan
I mean, the whole statement is not correct. Sure JPL manufactured some things
but it also acts just like NASA, managing the Mars projects. Most of the
spacecraft I would say were manufactured in partnership with other industry
aerospace companies.

------
skybrian
There seems to be a lot of wishful thinking in this article? You don't get the
Berlin airlift unless someone is willing to pay for it, and that only happened
in an emergency.

Getting into communication satellites is smart and sounds like it will be big
business, but it only goes so far in increasing demand. It should be great in
remote and rural areas, but most cities already have Internet.

~~~
ebetica0
According to the ITC, only 11.9% of the world has "Fixed broadband" aka wired
internet. 30.1% in developed nations. There's a big gap, especially when the
world catches up in a few years.

~~~
skybrian
Good to know, but it might not be the most relevant metric? In many places,
wired phone service got bypassed by cell phone service. I'd guess a lot more
people have cell phones and are usually in cell phone range, so what we really
want to know is coverage, cost, and quality of the data services that people
already use to access the Internet, and how big a role satellite service would
play in improving that.

------
sidcool
SpaceX is just a phenomenal venture. It's inspiring. I cannot imagine how
someone could think of starting a space company.

~~~
avmich
There is a saying "the first trillion of personal wealth will be made in
space". Musk seem to be on the way there.

Why you "can't imagine" if there is a seeming counterexample - a successful
rocket company?

------
carrozo
_Starship is a cargo conveyor system. The Starship is comparable in complexity
to a 737, and so it’s not unthinkable to have a construction rate of 500
/year. If each Starship manages 300 flights per year, each carrying 150 T of
cargo, then we are talking a yearly incremental cargo capacity growth of 22
million tonnes to orbit. At this point, the most meaningful constraint on
launch capacity might be launch pad construction rate._

This made me think of this shot in Star Trek: Into Darkness

[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/127311/why-is-a-
mo...](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/127311/why-is-a-model-of-the-
secret-starship-in-plain-view)

~~~
gameswithgo
why?

~~~
carrozo
It's that tracking shot where it starts with spaceships we're familiar with in
our own "timeline" like the Space Shuttle and works up to larger and larger
vessels, including Enterprise. Suppose having the ability to ferry more and
more cargo to low earth orbit means we can start creating much larger
structures in space?

------
bryanlarsen
> With an eventual flight rate of once per day per Starship,

Gwynne Shotwell said that their business plan for using Starship to compete
with long-distance airliners involved making about a dozen trips per day per
Starship.

~~~
avmich
> about a dozen trips per day per Starship

Gagarin flew for around 108 minutes, so orbital velocity allows longest trip
between two points on Earth in about 54 minutes. Shorter trips could be less,
but liftoff-landing take roughly a fixed amount of time.

Twelve trips per day is 2 hours per trip. Taking 40 minutes of flight, there
are 1 hour 20 minutes to get onboard, to get off board, to handle luggage (if
needed?), to refuel and check systems. Wonder how does it look from airlines
operation prospective.

~~~
Consultant32452
Do all orbital flights take off in the same direction due to the rotation of
the Earth?

~~~
gpm
"Most" would be more accurate.

Flights that want to orbit over the poles take off aiming perpendicular to the
rotation instead. A few satellites have been launched backwards intentionally.

~~~
isostatic
I think sun synchronous orbits are retrograde

P2P sub orbital hops are either direction, 30-40 minutes, maybe 25 for shorter
trips like London to New York.

~~~
gpm
Agreed that P2P sub orbital hops are any direction.

Low sun synchronous orbits are approximately the same as polar oribts, more
perpendicular than retrograde. I'm not sure if we use high sun synchronous
orbits for anything?

~~~
isostatic
Sun sync is approx 98.7 degrees at 800km - so slightly retrograde (prograde
being 0-90)

Majority of LEO sats are sun sync

------
haack
I'm surprised there's no mention of Kessler Syndrome[1]. Launching, possibly
multiple, high volume satellite networks is worrisome to me. Is the increase
in number of satellites negated by the reduced launch debris from using
reusable rockets?

Is there an implication that an increase in global cargo capacity also
increases our ability to "launch" debris reduction/removal efforts?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)

~~~
klohto
There is not a mention of that because the author knows what he is talking
about - [https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/space-
debris-p...](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/space-debris-
probably-not-coming-to-a-backyard-near-you/)

~~~
haack
Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen this

------
trhway
>Next, let’s consider Mars. Mars is the underlying design case for the
Starship, although Starships that go to Mars will probably be of a customized
nature. While the Moon takes about 3 days to get to, Mars takes 4-10 months.
Launch windows to Mars only open every 2 years, so even if Elon has 1000
Starships ready to go, they can only go every 2 years.

and here i think Musk genius of targeting Mars instead of Moon shows again.
Moon business case wouldn't support, while Mars does support the nuclear
powered ships. The Starship is of the size to allow sufficient shielding for
propulsion reactor. To avoid the "once in 2 years launch window" limitation an
additional 3km/s delta-V is needed, and nuclear will get you that and would
speed-up the flight in the standard window. Cutting some time from 3 days for
Moon isn't really worth the nuclear hassle, cutting half from months long
jorneys to Mars and ability to launch practically anytime - that changes
everything for Mars. Stacking several Starships - lower ones with reactors,
the upper - with people, one can decrease the amount/weight for the shielding.
Going ionic thrust propulsion powered by the reactors one can get even faster.
All this tech - nuclear propulsion and ionic thrust - had been tried already,
so i think it is no less doable for SpaceX than the Raptor with its hot oxygen
resistant superallow.

------
namirez
> _Indeed, the marginal cost per flight could fall to $5m or below, reducing
> launch costs to the neighborhood of $35 /kg, or 1000x less than Shuttle._

The keyword here is "marginal". You can achieve the $35/kg if you only account
for the fuel. In other words, the entire rocket must be retrieved intact and
launched again with no maintenance whatsoever.

In reality, this will never happen and most likely the cost will be a few
hundred dollars per kilogram. For Falcon 9, this number is still above
$2000/kg, but even that is way better than other existing launch systems.

~~~
avmich
> In reality, this will never happen and most likely the cost will be a few
> hundred dollars per kilogram.

SpaceX has a history of proving skeptics wrong :) . You didn't elaborate why
your opinion is better than those skeptics'.

~~~
namirez
Well, it's not about my opinion. The cost of launching 1kg to LEO on Falcon 9
is $2700 which is a far cry from $35.

Please note that $2700/kg is still great since older launch systems cost about
$5k-$10k/kg. We are still talking about a factor of 2-4, not 100.

~~~
avmich
> Well, it's not about my opinion.

It is. You're making statement about the future - what SpaceX will achieve or
demonstrate - as if it's a fact. There are plenty of people who disagree with
this statement, who have another opinion about the future and who will point
out that SpaceX did several times something what was considered at least
unlikely.

> Please note that $2700/kg is still great

When Proton launcher debuted on world market in 1990-s, the price (not cost)
for a launch was about 30 millions, which, given payload about 20 tons to LEO,
gives price per kg of about 1500 dollars. $2700/kg isn't bad, but isn't
record-shattering either. As for costs - as opposed to price - of Falcon-9, we
may have only estimation.

Two orders of magnitude difference won't likely be achieved immediately, but
the potential is here. See the evolution of airlines.

------
davidhyde
I hope SpaceX figures out how to make hydrogen more feasible than methane if
they plan to scale up to such high emission levels. I know why hydrogen is not
used today. Primarily because of the cryogenic storage requirements in the
rocket itself and the requirement to have much larger tanks. Also because of
heat problems in the combustion chamber. There are a handful of other reasons
but really, the human race should be able to overcome them.

~~~
brunoTbear
Don't forget the impact of hydrogen on metals: turn everything brittle. For a
company founded on reusable componentry, Hyrdogen in your turbopumps, fuel
chambers, combustion chambers etc. is kind of a deal breaker.

~~~
black6
The SSME (now the RS-25 engine) seems to handle the H2 just fine.

~~~
DennisP
They only flew each Shuttle an average of 34 times, with months of
refurbishing between flights. SpaceX wants to fly each engine hundreds or even
thousands of times, with turnaround less than a day.

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QuesnayJr
This is far from something I know anything about, but is it really plausible
that the Starship is the same complexity as a 737?

~~~
jacobush
My very backseat driver feeling is a Starship is lower complexity?

~~~
QuesnayJr
Really? The 737 is from the 60s.

~~~
CydeWeys
Spaceships are surprisingly simple. Starship has much fewer control surfaces,
for example.

It does have a lot more engines though, and these Raptor engines aren't
trivial, so I'm not sure it's actually true.

~~~
TremendousJudge
As far as I know liquid propellant rocket engines are notoriously complex, and
operate under even more extreme conditions than modern airplane engines

~~~
CydeWeys
Don't underestimate how complicated modern high bypass turbofan jet engines
are. Way more R&D money had gone into the latest designs than went into e.g.
the Raptor engine.

A crazy random fact is that there are entire turbine parts that are a single
molecule, yet are bigger around than you are tall.

~~~
jacobush
Single molecule _thin_? Or is it something polymer like? That's intriguing.

~~~
CydeWeys
No, the entire thing is a single large molecule, despite however many
kilograms it weighs.

~~~
jacobush
Intrigued! (I thought some plastics, polyethylene for instance was always
single molecule, but it's seems I'm mistaken.)

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ncmncm
Before colonizing Mars, colonize Antarctica. Antarctica is an overwhelmingly
better place to live, and to move to, than Mars, on any axis you can name.
Actually has air. Has lots of surface water. Has gravity. Is warmer! A flight
there or back costs N thousands of times less, and you can get there in a day,
not 4-10 months.

That's not to say Antarctica is an appealing place to colonize. It's much,
much worse than almost any other place on earth. But it's way better than
Mars.

Even the cloud tops of Venus are way better than Mars. But Antarctica is a way
better place to be than Venus, too.

Central Australia or the Taklamakan desert would be a picnic compared to
Antarctica.

Instead of making self-replicating potato-farming robots for Mars, make some
for Earth, first. Turn them loose in a desert somewhere: Antarctica, the
Sahara, Wrangel Island, or central Australia. I guarantee overwhelmingly
better chances for success at any of those places than on Mars. If it would be
too hard to do at any of those places, then it will be impossible on Mars.

BFStarship has an interesting value proposition for something. Almost anything
is a better choice than Mars missions. Delivering milk is a better value
proposition. Blockade busting is a better value proposition. Launching
communication satellite swarms looks like a good idea, but a viable use for
the next dozen vehicles is harder to guess. A space elevator would use up a
lot of launches, but that begs the question.

Asteroid mining actually seems kind of plausible, in principle, but only if
you have something to build out of it, there, like an interstellar generation
ship. Nobody has any expectations for those to produce any value.

------
ryan93
How much of the worlds fuel would be used doing hundreds or thousands Of
launches a year

~~~
wolfram74
according to this [1] the US consumes ~8E6 million cubic feet of methane a
year

which is ~ 2.3E11 cubic meters

which is ~ 1.5E11 kg of methane

1% of that would be 1.5E9 kg

total fuel load of starship+super heavy nominally 4.5E6 kg

just the methane is about 30% of that, so 1.4E6 kg

so 1% of the total methane consumption of just the US is about a thousand
flights a year. As other people have said, minimal.

[1]
[https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3035us2a.htm](https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3035us2a.htm)

~~~
ryan93
Thank you very much for the response. I assumed it would be way more.

~~~
wolfram74
Yeah, it's one of the reasons why reusability is so important. When you don't
have to rebuild the rocket each time it gets a lot cheaper to use than current
intuition would suggest.

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abakus
Since we are at the dawn of the space era, I have always wondered if earth
mass loss due to massive space exploration will become a problem.

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hsnewman
Lets not get ahead of ourselves. The ship hasn't flown once. Also, there is an
design issue with the Starship, there is absolutely no redundancy with the
fins on the ship. If any of the fins aren't working as planned, prepare for a
disaster.

~~~
gpm
By the same logic there is a design error with a boeing 747, if even one wing
falls off everyone dies.

A wing's controls failing (on either vessel) might be recoverable depending on
the details/if the other control surfaces can compensate...

~~~
hsnewman
It hasn't even flown yet. How can you compare an unproven rocket to a Boeing
747, which has millions of hours of proven flight hours on it with something
that has none? I realize that the 747 has had failures over the time too, but
I'd happily get on a Boeing 747 but would not get on a Spaceship until it's
been flown several, if not 100's of times (without incident, as can be said
for the 747).

~~~
Robotbeat
Because of engineering and analysis.

I don't know where the anti-science "it's impossible to speak meaningfully
about anything in the future that hasn't yet been built" idea came from in
Internet rhetoric, but it's absolutely ridiculous.

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Animats
Space-X has to deal with a PR problem right now. Boeing is going to launch
their crewed capsule in December.[1] Space-X isn't ready yet.

[1]
[https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/crew/index.html](https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/crew/index.html)

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Boeing is doing BOE-OFT, or their uncrewed flight test. SpaceX has already
done this. (It was the flight with the earth plushie.)

Currently, SpaceX needs to do an in-flight abort, and Boeing needs to do an
uncrewed test flight before they can fly crew. Which will be first to the ISS
with crew is still up in the air.

