Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

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Mass production of Starship is essential to their strategy. The way in which you build a one-off rocket is totally different from how you build an assembly line of rockets. This is more true of rockets than any other industry. I'm talking about what materials are used, how they are shaped, etc. Look at all the "weird" stuff SpaceX is doing with Starship (stainless steel tanks, the types of welds they're doing, etc.) and you wouldn't want to be doing it that way unless you were manufacturing a rocket assembly line.

So it seems smart to say, "why don't they just build and test one, then figure out how to manufacture it at scale?" But to do that would be even harder because you'd have to redesign everything from scratch the second time around, while maintaining component compatibility... much smarter to design for manufacturing from the get-go and treat the test articles as expendable.

BTW, ULA is doing something similar with Vulcan & Centaur V. The design of the rocket itself is deeply related to the assembly line they are producing.

> Mass production of Starship is essential to their strategy.

Yep, but if a "quickly" built Starship lander makes SpaceX a few billions, so they can invest it into the Mars program, then that may be a good option. For the same reason they are doing the Starlink network.

On the other hand if spacex gets massproduction and reusability right then they can provide any number of rides for NASA/the other participants while only paying for fuel costs and pocket the difference.

Agreed... Mass production needs to be designed-in and developed with the whole system.

Related question: Just how many Starships do you think will be necessary to fulfill all our launch demands? Given that it's designed to be reusable and it has a huge payload capacity, perhaps there is less need to mass-produce them, since fewer vehicles will be able to do the same job as many expendable vehicles...?

That's a question about demand. My goal is to move all resource extraction and heavy industry off-Earth, and to open the space frontier to permanent and self-sufficient human settlements. For that many, many Starships will be required.

Note that the killer feature of Starship, IMHO, is in-space refueling. This isn't a Earth-based heavy-life vehicle... it's a re-configurable spaceship able to explore the entire solar system through fuel depot staging (with Starships themselves serving as both tankers and fuel stations).

It's not just re-usability, but turn around time as well.

I think launch demands might expand to fit the capacity. It’s hard to predict what uses people will put a new technology to.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Plan is to get a million people to Mars within a few decades. You can only fly every other year when orbits sync up. Initially, I imagine many Starships will stay on Mars as shelter and raw material.

Then there is the idea of using Starships for very fast transport on earth. Fly from NYC to Sydney in half an hour. If that catches on, they may be replacing part of the airplane fleet.

Then there is lunar shuttle services, satellite transports and asteroid mining.

My guess is: a lot.

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