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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

>Starship, if it works, will give us so much launch capacity that we'll be unable to fully utilize a handful of vehicles for more than a decade

humans are really good at finding ways to use excess anything. Look at the explosion of software use cases thanks to improved hardware

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The production chains for aerospace are very long. It takes time to absorb extra capacity even if no other step in the chain were not constrained. We'd need more exoric alloys (or just use steel, weight be damned, as SpaceX is doing) and reinvent a lot of industries to be able to match that capacity to put stuff in orbit.

We'd also need to invent new uses for sattelites, things we don't do now because launching is too expensive. Their suborbital passenger transportation is one such new demand generators, but only if they can solve launching and landing near population centers.

Production chains would get a whole darn lot shorter if they didn't have to machine everything to spider thinness from exotic metals and build it to fold inside a thimble.

> if they can solve launching and landing near population centers

They are planning a solution for that: offshore launch platforms [0] 30 km at sea, directly accessible by high-speed train, à la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_International_Airport

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_offshore_platf...

Trains huh? I'm pretty damn skeptical of that; those sort of semi-submersible platforms move around a whole lot more than your typical train station. Helicopters are the obvious choice, or ferries if you need a greater capacity. I'm more skeptical of trains to offshore platforms than Starship itself.

Electric helicopters may be a good option for this and a great opportunity for Tesla’s battery operations.

Regular helicopters make more sense to me. They're already used extensively with offshore platforms, so why invent the wheel? The jet fuel they burn is a pittance compared to the hydrocarbons being burned by the rockets. And they have a much better carrying capacity; a Sikorsky S-92 can carry 19 passengers in one trip. Electric helicopters could do what, two or three per trip? Maybe a few more with future battery tech, but I don't think conventional helicopters will be phased out anytime soon.

> They're already used extensively with offshore platforms, so why invent the wheel?

Because that's Tesla's business. Plus halo effect - you don't want to board a spaceship by flying on a helicopter designed 30 years ago.

Remember that battery weight scales linearly with number of passengers, so building a larger battery operated helicopter just needs more motors and batteries. We don't have large e-copters because it costs a lot of money to certify one for 20 passengers and, until now, there is very little demand for that.

Could use a high-speed hydrofoil too. Helicopters aren't the safest mode of transportation, and are horrible in bad weather that a boat would brush off with ease. Plus if we're sending 100 people on a flight, that's quite a few large helicopters plus landing facilities.

Absolutely, a high speed ferry could have great throughput; it seems like a great choice if they're going to put a few dozen or more people onto one of these rockets.

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