"We could see people flying next year".
O_O
This is "Elon Time" at its best, but worth keeping in mind how fast Starship development has actually gone. Elon Time is becoming more realistic.
O_O
This is "Elon Time" at its best, but worth keeping in mind how fast Starship development has actually gone. Elon Time is becoming more realistic.
Are there others where you don't have to put money into predicting?
He expects a Starship successful orbit in 6 +- 3 months. Demonstrating human capability with non-reusable hardware means building and throwing away hardware 10 times. A rocket capable of rapid reuse would be able to do about 3 flights a day (due to orbit time + needing to align to landing site again + some downtime) Even at the "low" rate of 1 a day, that's less than two weeks of flights. If they're way off their mark, one launch a week is 2.3 months.
Not that I would take your bet, but it's not unthinkable.
The Boeing Starliner was supposed to fly uncrewed in 2018, then October 2019, and now Boeing is shipping it to the launch site but not giving a date.
Fundamentally, humans could have flown to ISS with the Dragon 1 capsule, but hopefully, the Dragon 2 flies manned next year.
But as Elon said, progress with Starship should be faster, as they can fly the first human-rated one many times in a short time to demonstrate its safety. The space shuttle did 135 flights over its entire life-time. A single Starship could do that in a year, if needed.
He was giving you literally the picture in his head of what could theoretically be possible if everything came together perfectly.
Then people go and quote just the last sentence which was ...[so that could mean there’s at least a chance we might even see] humans in orbit on Mk4”, take the last part out of context, and run wild with it.
It’s like the “1 million robotaxis” comment. What Elon was actually trying to explain in that moment is that the day the software is ready, they push it to the fleet and every Tesla with AP3 can immediately be a robotaxi. The point is to convey the enormity of the architecture that’s been built and what it enables if the software can be made to work.
I think the way Tesla is managing safety relevant things is the way forward for automobile safety which can save 30,000 lives a year, and not to mention countless maimings, injuries, and hundreds of billions in property damage. Roads are dangerous and lethal for humans, and IMO Tesla will be the company which makes them orders of magnitude less so.
In both sectors, aerospace and automotive, you simply cannot ignore existing regulations. Regardless if they are stupid or not. If you try look no further than the 737MAX to see what you get.
Regardless of feasibility and everything else concerning Tesla, Musk and SpaceX all this is at least a risky way to do business.
Curious thing is that while the pro-faction of these arguments accepts all this and the other side doesn't. And everyone is calling the others out for it.
Of course, the non-reusable boosters had an advantage too where they were only subjected to the insane stress of a launch once, but I'm guessing that's a smaller advantage than what I said above or else we wouldn't have modern airlines.