The US military is starting to get interested in Starship

Rocket Special Forces. Might as well slap an Amazing Stories cover image on the report.

I believe these and other similar logistic considerations are precisely what this funding is to study and try to solve.

I'm pretty sure they'll at least need to load cryogenic fuel wherever they're trying to relaunch.

For military operations it might actually be a possibility to just not relaunch though. Explode the engines/anything sensitive and just leave it there. They're surprisingly cheap to build (compared to a lot of the expenses incurred during combat operations), at a (public and old) target of $5 million/ship.

Starship could theoretically launch, refuel in space, and then land (on Earth) and take back off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propellant_depot

It would have to deal with the extra weight of all the fuel on landing, but it would enable operations in completely remote areas.

More realistically, if you have access to methane, you can just refuel the rocket. Theoretically if you had access to water for hydrogen and atmospheric carbon dioxide, you could manufacture artificial methane - needing just electricity.

Musk has mentioned that before: https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/elon-musk-plans-to...

Why does it need to relaunch? You now have a forward operating base that can secure the rocket. You can break the rocket apart and truck it back. Or put it on a ship. Lots of options here. The important part is probably getting there in 1 hour not necessarily getting back quickly.

Being able to drop a tank anywhere in the world for ~$10m is likely a very desirable thing.

(Whether Starship will ever quite reach this price, I don't know, but that's Musk's aim)

Special forces are pretty decently distributed. Highly specific teams and equipment isn't. Something like this would eliminate the need to try and guess what region of the world you're gonna want some special stuff.

Imagine a Kursk type rescue scenario where you need special people and special hardware somewhere quickly.

I wonder what type of environmental damage that would cause. I'm under the impression that it would poison the environment in multiple ways.

I would think something like delivering 4 or more HIMARS systems, munitions, some troops, and medium-sized combat drones to boot. The HIMARS system can currently be transported on a C130, and they weigh 24,000 lbs each (12 shorttons each). The concern I have is how easy would it be to take out a very expensive, very big target like Starship.

Thus power armor soldiers becomes a lot more interesting from a funding/design/research perspective. Compress as much weaponry, mobility, and armor into one soldier as possible since space launch will be expensive and limited.

It's 100 tons to LEO. A lot more on ballistic flights.

Given the predictability of ballistic paths and the intercept-ability of a landing Starship, maybe it would be advantageous to launch to elsewhere and drop something undetectably smaller to an unexpected location in the near vicinity of the path.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_diving

I hadn't even considered that.

Starship as General Utility (Somewhat Expendable) Space Truck has a myriad of military uses, I now realise.

Is he any more erratic and outlandish then anyone else? Or is it simply his life is under a microscope, and every mistake gets amplified by a media hungry for clicks and willing to exaggerate or embellish itself?

I like Elon. What inspiration does, say, Sundar Pichai bring to the world? Do kids look at Tim Cook in awe?

Elon is unique, eccentric and wild. I bet if Feynman was around today on Twitter, he would have been cancelled many-a-times.

People who love/hate him with passion - why? Why are you spending so much personal energy for activism? Has Elon affected your life in a profound way? Why are so invested?

Some people blindly love him like the second coming of Jesus. Some think he is the worst of what the world has to offer. I blame Twitter and social media for this. Populism is a shitty trope. We are also destroying the society for conformism - I personally want the world to be full of wild eccentric people that don’t have the microphone of Twitter to start forming factions. I know so many weirdos in life that definitely have something to offer to the society, despite of their illfitting personalities. Stop cancelling them.

Imagine Elon existed in 1970’s without the internet and Twitter. There would be no activism unless you get together in person. There would be no vile unsubstantiated hatred. He wouldn’t have the social media amplifiers and the public would be mostly interested in the outcomes of their achievements. Everything would be peaceful.

There are similarities and differences enough similarities that I wonder if Starship or some other project is just a new Glomar Explorer for the current day's Project Azorian.

GSF Explorer, formerly USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193), was a deep-sea drillship platform built for Project Azorian, the secret 1974 effort by the United States Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division to recover the Soviet submarine K-129.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer

Not enough Hollywood involvement. I rather think of him as a 21st century Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

(Or maybe the world is simply bound to host one of them per century)

The best part about Elon is the story in the new Eric Berger SpaceX book.

Gwen had just started at SpaceX and spend a while coming up with a big plan for what she was going to do there - how she would sell rockets, etc. etc.

In response to this plan, Elon said "I don't want you to spend time making plans about doing stuff. Just do stuff."

Obviously there is a time and a place for planning, but after working at a monster Telco that is utterly consumed by archaic process and plans and documents, I would kill to work for a boss that prioritized doing stuff over planning doing stuff.

But is a space rock with a thruster a weapon? Technically yes, but so is a car. They can put nominal functionality (a swarm of internet satellite) and have kinetic rod as an "antenna".

Supposedly Saddam Hussein's air defense was to sleep in a different house each night. I wonder if this would still work in the age of so many cell phones.

There's not even a need to worry about separation or anything, just load up your tungsten as cargo and point the nose on your target from orbit. Half the ship might burn away but the rest will keep going 28,000 kph and someone will have a bad day.

And this is why spaceforce was a stupid idea

serious Q: how is that any different then from a normal starship launch or starship type system for travel? or is your agrument that starship for travel will never work for the same reason and/or the only reason current return systems don't trigger MAD is because the launches are a) known and perhaps b) for some reason are easy to distinguish from a normal ICBM launch (perhaps due to the way the launch / return)

I presume a starship trajectory is not the same as that of a ballistic missile payload?

It's true, but this concern is losing relevance as hypersonic missiles that can carry a nuclear payload come online. You could also argue that stealth bombers like the B-2 and nuclear submarines obsoleted MAD a long time ago.

If you have to drop tanks from space, things may be equally dire.

Does North Korea notify of launches, or are there special procedures for dealing with them?

It isn't the stupidity of the US military that's the problem. It's the stupidity and greed of their "civilian" leadership (most of whom come from general or fleet officer ranks). Back in the 1958 Ike denied requests to use nukes on China over the Taiwan Strait, but still let the services each run their own failing space programs. Kennedy foolishly greenlit the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but did reorganize US space efforts under NASA, which was at least formally a civilian agency. The reason "Space Force" is a bad idea isn't just that it will probably be a monumental waste of money, but as you write, that it will almost certainly lead to a disaster of global proportions. Winding up where the Kessler Effect denies humans access to orbit for a century would be getting off lightly.

What? The location and thermal plume should be plenty of indication that it's a Starship and not a Minuteman. You could also post a live broadcast to tell the world exactly what you're doing. You'd also call China and Russia to tell their air defense folks.

Outside of maybe Russia and China I don't think any countries have the ability to detect launches, so from the military's perspective it could still be incredibly valuable to be able to send 100 soldiers as backup to a remote cave system in Afghanistan or wherever.

On top of that, this could also have a lot of value even if it's only launched at US-held locations. Logistics can be a big deal: IIRC there were a few years around 2010 where the amount of money that the United States spent on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan was actually larger than NASA's budget. The biggest part of that cost was in transporting fuel for the generators. If some of the worst convoy trips were replaced with rocket resupply missions you'd be potentially saving lives and money.

The USAF is acutely aware of the risk, and there are already policies in place, according to articles I read a few years ago, limiting usage of the anti-ballistic missile defenses for this reason. For example if North Korea launches a missile at the US, they will only attempt to intercept it using anti ballistic missile interceptors based in Alaska. Launching from ABM sites in the lower 48 at a target coming from the DPRK would result in interceptor trajectories crossing China, and no one wants to take that risk (the launch of an ABM interceptor looks a hell of a lot like the launch of an ICBM).