Starship Update [video]
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If it can actually launch multiple times a day without any refurbishment, it will simply totally break space travel as we have known it. This engine makes everything else possible.
Arguing the merits of these activities is beyond the scope of this thread.
From the presentation, development costs will be 5-10% of the Saturn V program (2020 dollars adjusted). Thats a bargain for the capabilities delivered.
Where have you got this idea from?
SpaceX are a haulage company: they currently haul crew and cargo to and from Earth orbit (plus a few deep-space probes, and one deep-space car); Starship will extend this further through the solar system (Moon, Mars, asteroids, etc.).
At the moment, their main "destination" is the government-run ISS. There are no off-world colonies (public or private); there aren't even any private space stations yet. (NASA recently funded some private space station proposals; SpaceX made a token effort, which was rejected).
Musk himself has stated that he wants humans to be multi-planetary, and doesn't care who does it; that he would be happy for someone to out-compete SpaceX, since that would mean the goal has been achieved. SpaceX will gladly help governments set up off-world colonies; in fact, that seems like the only feasible way to build them. The problem is the cost was too high, even for government; the point of Starship is to reduce that cost.
The only reason Musk started SpaceX was because the Boeings/Lockheed Martins/etc. were happy to keep prices high; and Russia wouldn't sell him a Mars-capable rocket.
Elon Musk will be the world's first trillionaire and he also got Tesla's FSD to pull out of the hat.
The limits on launch weight means enormous costs to remove every single grma they can. This makes the launch cost go down in percent. If thy could just make it 50% heavier they could cut development costs by a lot. They could also build one much faster and allow it to fail constructively where you learn a bunch and then build number 2, 3, 4 with the things you learned. So now you have 3 telescopes instead of one.
Launch cost changes everything.
If you don't recognize him, one of the authors of this paper is Swedens only astronaut :)
“You def don’t want electric pumps on a rocket engine! Raptor turbopumps alone need 100,000 horsepower per engine. That’s not a typo.” —Elon Musk
x 32 engines. Amazing! For comparison, this is an internal combustion engine with 100k HP:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/biggest-most-poweful-engi...
Edit: What I meant to ask was: Can one use "whatever is powering the turbopumps and delivering the 100k HP" to power say a ship propeller, instead of that 2.3k ton internal combustion engine. Like, make some variant of raptor engine that delivers this power to a shaft.
Yes it's less efficient, you spent all this energy cooling off all the fuel and oxidizer to cryogenic temperatures before using it. The turbopumps in the raptors are also running very far off from stochiometric fuel mixtures (which is fine in the rocket because they're exhaust is used as fuel for the next stage) - which means if you're just using it for the pump your not actually burning most of the fuel. The exhaust is also really hot, and if you're not somehow using that energy it's definitely inefficient.
None of those issues matter to the rocket. Energy used on the ground to cool down propellants is "free", the colder the better because it means you can fit more propellants in the same tanks. The exhaust is just being piped into the main combustion chamber, so it will eventually be fully combusted extracting the left over chemical energy. The heat of the exhaust (after the main chamber) is the whole point, with a nozzle converting it into kinetic energy.
You've also got a bunch of safety issues. High pressures, liquid oxygen, and so on.
Yeah, plus, there’s no fixing a broken or poorly running turbo pump turbine. It either works or explodes, no inbetween.
RL-10 can avoid too big stresses, at least not heating to high temperatures, so this is another hint on possibly long working rocket engines...
Think of it as an engineering tradeoff where you get to pick 2 things to optimize for: weight, efficiency and size. A turbopump (and preburner) optimizes for weight/size. A ships engine picks efficiency twice, making it massive and heavy.
Commercial jets use the same mechanics with their turbofan engines. That is why they are growing huge, we're just encasing the propeller inside the cowling, with some other nice side-effects.
For now there's already a lot of momentum with ICE and they are very polished products. But I think the potential for turbine is there given the shift towards electrification.
Some hurdles include working with materials that can tolerate very high stress, and finding ways to improve efficiency from significant heat loss.
And some other images https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Rolls-Royce+MT+30&sxsrf=AP...
It's not as small and powerful as the SpaceX one but I guess it needs some extra bits. Also it runs off air rather than liquid oxygen which must reduce power a tad.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron has them and made it to orbit
Its doable if you throw batteries out of your second stage when flying.
But no company that makes a rocket payload then maybe a few 100kg would ever use them. And for sure not launch humans or go to Mars.
Even if you assume gigantic improvements in batteries by 400% you wouldn't use if for anything major.
It has potential for in space applications as there you can charge it with sunlight.
So a trip from NYC to Rome of 4,300 miles in a 777-300ER with 350 passengers would cost in the ballpark of $225k.
LA to Shanghai at 6,500 miles in the same capacity plane would be more like $350k.
$1M wouldn’t make much sense because with 350pax you’d need them to pay $2,900 each leg just to cover the operating costs. So a round trip flight to Shanghai that was completely sold out in both directions would need to have an average ticket price of nearly $6k.
Several airlines have tried all business flights. I’ve taken some - Qatar to London for example, Paris-NY I think was all business too when I flew it, and there a London-New York one
But they are rare exceptions. Yes if you can fill a 787 with 100 first class passengers paying 5k each way you can make money, but the demand isn’t there.
$1M for an orbital flight strikes me as an insanely aggressive target, but if they can achieve that, they can probably achieve half that, or less, for suborbital hops.
Perhaps I still have the “rockets are inherently dangerous, mitigate bad outcomes by isolating them” mentality. Maybe designs will get the the point where the likelihood of a bad outcome is so remote that it would make sense to locate a spaceport in the same way one locates an airport. Or maybe the spaceport could be way out there and just connected to the urban center with high speed ground transportation. Either way, if spaceports become commercially viable, it’s an interesting thing to consider from an urban planning perspective.
Others involve more mundane risks that are pretty much guaranteed to occur once in a while. Things like losing cabin pressure or something catching fire. How do you deal with such situations, how quickly can you get the rocket to land safely, and how quickly can you evacuate the passengers?
https://interestingengineering.com/chinas-new-winged-rocket-...
And SpaceX won a contract to transport cargo: "SpaceX wins $102 million Air Force contract to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world in a rocket"
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-wins-air-force-contra...
It's also a great way to fund the development of starship.
Other problems like cost, time from home to spaceport and boarding can be fixed or be irrelevant (if I live too far away, too bad for me, I'll fly.)
But due to noise protection regulation on both sides of the Atlantic, there where not enough profitable routes available to be able to recoup development costs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust-specific_fuel_consump...
My understanding is that rockets are good at getting a small mass to move really quickly. They will never win moving a lot of mass within the atmosphere. The fuel costs are radically different.
A 747 can lift and land ~80% of Starship's design cargo but uses something like 7 times less fuel.
That's why something like the Sabre engine will always be of interest for a proper space plane.
Reading the recent heat exchanger news [1] the are very careful to talk about Mach 5 airflow temperatures, not velocity. Surely it the product of these two that produce the mind-boggling heat flux that the pre-cooler is tasked with cooling. It feels like they're going to keep carving out smaller and smaller targets until they run out of money.
[1] https://reactionengines.co.uk/reaction-engines-test-programm...
And when I listened to some presentation with the people involved, it seem they had no real understanding of some of the complexity involved. Their history is mostly in academic and British space industry, and all the project they worked on before are canceled paper studies that were kicked around in Britain.
When asked about the structure of Skylon the answer was vague hand waving about some new materials that might exist. Nothing at all concrete that has even begun being tested for high complexity air frames and high requirements.
Elon himself was asked about this when he presented in Britain. And he answered by saying that investing massive amount of complexity in the easiest part of your flight was counter productive.
Pushing the thrust of your traditional rocket engine a little bit higher, is far, far easier then engines.
And if you are really optimizing to that kind of extreme, doing even more advanced version of second stage engines and structural optimization on the second stage would likely always have a higher pay off per complexity invested.
He was saying that flying to the other end of the world will be 20x faster vs. airplane.
So if you move 20x more cargo per unit of time, then cost of cargo per vehicle + static infrastructure are proportionally lower.
But we need to take into account that number of cycles of a rocket engine may not be as good as jet engines, ground / water infrastructure seems a lot more complicated, fuel costs are higher etc. etc.
I doubt the math will close on it taking everything into account, but maybe there will be some limited use cases. USA army seems to be thinking about it. Extremely rapid deployment capability all around the world may be worthwhile for them.
I don't think he said that. Maybe you're thinking of:
>44:31 "so the interesting thing is that the
capital efficiency of
of a rocket is is is much better than
the capital efficiency of a plane for
long distance flights"
There are countless dystopic futures (they sell better) we already avoided so I prefer optimism.
Sounds idyllic.
The rest I find just realistic though. I do not expect humans in space to behave much differently from humans on earth.
However, these "locusts" can discover and create. We can do art, science, understand the Reality and the Universe. I find this absolutely beautiful and breathtaking, especially for a "swarm of locusts".
Citation?
I have seen lot of tweets ( from highly intelligent people and engineers ) suggesting Starship is not possible. Raptor 2 is not possible.
But now it seems it really is coming.
It is easy to fault him for robotaxi and FSD, which a lot of people do. But sometimes he really does the impossible.
Of course RUDs of engines happened but they were the exception and not the norm.
Check out the talk about elevators from Mars Society conference.
They are just iterating each individual part pushing towards ever higher performance.
The movie Avatar made in box office $2.9B. This is exactly the same amount of money as SpaceX asked for the Moon landing - $2.9B.
Have you asked people who watched Avatar what is the purpose of watching Avatar?
Instead of making a fiction about going to a moon, we can actually go to the Moon.
It really is the question - why do you live? What is the purpose of anyone life?
There does not seem to be any purpose to anything in the universe. But we can choose what we want to do.
So the answer: Because we want to, because it is exciting, because it inspires, because we can.
Because this is what life is about.
I wonder if any billionaire (or their children) will be doing the early work. It's an interesting game of "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future.
Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that there will be a disaster. But over the course of 200 years of constant space travel, it seems incredibly unlikely that there won't be some kind of disaster. The question is, how will we react?
I hope we don't give up. And I hope billionaires risk their children alongside the working class.
I suppose there's an idea we could apply everything done on Mars to Earth, but like... seriously, what we just took all the prep for mars and just put it in the middle of the Empty Quarter, the Saraha, Antarctica?
People barely want to live in the arctic circle, yet believe that our salvation comes in Mars? I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.
No one wants to live in those places because currently they have a choice. But if our planet becomes irradiated, or hit by a meteor, or suffers a sun burst — all very realistic concerns — then those choices become more limited. And it’s good to have options.
Now I'm for walking and chewing bubblegum. But if you believe in opportunity costs and care about navigating that, it feels like the same problem.
Our planet becoming irradiated is actually not a huge problem! It would still be easier to live on Earth than on Mars! An irradiated radioactive hellscape of Earth would still be more survivable than Mars.
(my more nuanced take is that we have so many basic hospitability problems that need solving, and Mars have all of those times 100, so it would be very good if most of those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems more than the logistics of shooting a bunch of stuff into space for long term transit)
We have like a million PHds telling us what to do about climate change for 50 years, and nobody is listening
"The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built"
And it's 100x cheaper than the Iraq war or 2008 crisis, both entirely preventable manmade disasters. Or to put it into different perspwctive: ISS costs as much as cleanup of 3 oil spills, and we've had quite a few.
It's not a zero sum game. The space industry employs a lot of people.
Some of the stuff they put into orbit are satellites that literally save lives.
A Mars colony is an exciting problem for smart people to work on that can inspire them. You can't put a dollar value on that.
Most of that cost was in the cost of launching it (and the inflation in the price of the modules knowing that they are "priceless" and "can't fail" and "we can only build one copy of it"). Further it's all engineered to very fine margins. The more you get your margins down the more cost these things take. One-offs of anything tend to be expensive. One-offs of very tight margin things are even more expensive. There's nothing in the ISS that is especially exotic. It's copper wiring and aluminum pressure vessels.
I have always maintained that a settlement on the moon makes a lot more sence - fortly you have much better access to space for industry, secondly, help can reach you withing days at any time or you could be in earth hospital withing days if you need surgery.
That being said, there are a number of reasons why Mars is preferable to the Moon if your goal is a totally self-sustaining colony.
And the technology to manufacture fuel from solar and nuclear energy, building advanced life support system, advancing the state of rocket technology, allowing much more use of sat technology, massively advancing science planetary/biology/(and more), controlled high efficiency farming, human health science, mobile hospitals and so on, will all be developed and have many applications. Even things like battery technology for this use case will have interesting question to ask and can have impact on batteries on earth.
So if it was literally just the backup to life, it wouldn't be worth it, but its not done in a vacuum.
And its inspiring. A whole generation of engineers all around the world were inspired. And the moon landing did bring humanity together to an extent, many people even in the Soviet Union talked about 'we' landed on the moon.
Seems to me to be worthwhile to push at the very least to a small settlement, and from there you can see if its makes sense to continue.
But gonna have to disagree with GC here and say that I think a self-sustaining Mars base is worth it entirely for having a backup of intelligent life, which the deep ocean base doesn't deliver.
From Mars its effective to launch to Orbit. Its easy to transport and move around on Mars, Supersonic electric flight is very doable for example.
Low density makes super fast trains very doable as well, massive movement of resources on Mars is orders of magnitude easier on Mars then even in deep water.
I think we should figure out how to exploit resources in space: asteroid mining, space-based solar power, etc. Even if it's all woefully unprofitable and inefficient at first.
And I think we should figure out how to eventually get another self-sufficient lump of humanity off this rock, but that seems like it could be 150+ years out.
But there's no reason, other than the exploration of Mars itself, to go down the gravity well to Mars.
> I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.
It's not like these are really the same resources.
A moon base is the precursor to a base on Mars and having humans get anywhere near Mars in the next 50 years (if they return or not) is a PR stunt.
On Mars they can make methane with the Sabatier process.
So you have:
- LEO/MEO - vulnerable to asteroid impact ejecta
- GEO/moon/L-points - avoid ejecta, but need regular refueling. If Earth is toast, there goes resupply
- Mars - close enough to the sun for solar, able to conceivably bootstrap in a few centuries
You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from sunlight.
In long term, most likely both Hydrolox and Methalox will be in use.
Ceres also seems to have a lot of water: https://astronomy.com/news/2020/08/ceres-an-ocean-world-in-t...
Putting more material between you and radiation by burying into the ground is a good idea, especially when your concrete-pouring capabilities are limited.
None of that is true in space, unless you're thinking of something I'm not, but like another poster has said, none of this is zero sum. The technology developed to try to settle on mars can be devoted to building large, habitable objects in space if people think that's a better plan. We should also have a moon base, etc. etc.
The resources still need to come from somewhere. Either we mine them on Mars, asteroids, or the moon. Mining is a lot easier when you have gravity you can push against to apply force. Rather than move the resources off-body though, its easier and cheaper to use them directly in-situ.
It's more sensible if you plan to keep a bunch of people there with constant supply from Earth. Elon wants to build a *self-sustaining* city on Mars. There isn't any other choice of location, be it man-made, or in the solar system:
- that has enough resources, atmosphere, gravity, water to allow a non-trivial population to survive without help from Earth
- that is hospitable to life
I suggest you watch his previous presentation where he talks exactly on why Mars is the destination, and not somewhere else.
Atmosphere is possible in man-made structures.
Gravity can be simulated in man-made structures.
I don't believe water is particularly scarce, and it is reusable except for when it's used to create fuel.
With the Sun + plants a lot can be done.
Mars, on the other hand, has low gravity and is far away from the Sun.
Of course, we can (and should, eventually) do both.
We're one asteroid strike from losing all human life in the solar system even if you had a bunch of people living on Mars. It would take a very long time to get even a single Mars colony self sufficient. Without resources of Earth supporting the colony it would die out the first time the air conditioner broke.
Putting people on Mars isn't putting our eggs in a second basket. It's putting an egg in a wet napkin on a mouse trap positioned under a precariously balanced boulder.
The technology to be self-sustaining won't exist without demand for it, and starting to setup a colony creates a lot of demand.
Even if Starship was ready to go tomorrow zero percent of any of the infrastructure needed to keep humans alive on Mars exists. The infrastructure needed to let some Martians be self sufficient only exists in artist renderings.
Getting a hundred tons of crap to Mars is the easiest part of the problem. Building a reliable toilet that won't clog and kill everyone or an air filter that never breaks is hard. Having enough food and medical supplies to keep people alive after a crop fails is hard. Building a factory that doesn't need a huge supply of oil-based lubricants is hard. Crowing crops in shitty soil is hard. Shit just building a big sealed structure is hard.
I don't find any claims of colonizing Mars believable because there's only lip service paid to boring infrastructure. Infrastructure can't just be patched in later.
If the toilets on a Starship get clogged [0] the crew can't wear diapers for a year and a half on their way to Mars. In space a clogged toilet has the fun side effect of aerosolizing feces that the crew will then breathe in, likely killing them.
Big talk about colonizing Mars is just talk without any actual movement on important infrastructure. A big rocket is only the first tiny step on a very very long road and itself is not really all that useful.
If you want to make pithy statements about not trying, direct your energy towards everyone fantasizing about Mars colonies with zero intent to tackle any of the Hard Problems involved.
[0] https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-tourist-toilet-alarm
Are there any economic incentives for colonizing Mars? Asteroid mining makes sense and bases on and around the Moon make some kind of economic sense at least. I don't know how Mars fits into that picture in the 50-100 year "medium" term picture.
About all I can see is producing methane for rockets in Asteroids and being in a much shallower gravity well than Earth. That assumes having an economy established in the Asteroid belt already though, and the cost of sustaining a colony on Mars is going to be its own kind of high overhead. It may be expensive to ship fuel off of Earth, but the people to support the refinement process already exist.
At some point there will be a flip where a Mars economy becomes self-sustaining, but so far I'm not seeing it during my lifetime. My guess is that we're going to be tethered to the Earth for a lot longer.
(Basic science is also great but that's the kind of things that governments support and its not self-sustaining any more than Antarctica is -- which I suspect is closer to the model for Mars in the next 50 years).
Most of the economic incentives I suggest don't really start paying off until you have at least some decent infrastructure and a population of semi-permanent residents, though. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but you never know. Once the technology exists, it's just a matter of whether someone has deep enough pockets to make human settlement of Mars a reality. Once someone has a foothold, it gets easier for others to expand on that.
Earth would probably continue to manufacture high-value, complex machines like rocket engines and computers and robots. Earth would receive high-value minerals from the asteroid belt like gold or platinum or silver. Maybe nickel or copper. Iron wouldn't be worth it unless shipping costs were really low, aluminum would probably be the same. On the other hand, iron and aluminum might be worth enough on Mars to be worth shipping there. It'd be cheaper than shipping from Earth, anyways. And hauling rocket fuel/oxygen all the way from Earth really doesn't make sense if you can get it on Mars.
Basically, you'd have ships going back and forth between Earth and the belt delivering equipment and bringing back high-value metals, and you'd have another set of ships going back and forth between Mars and the belt hauling fuel and oxygen and maybe bringing back low value metals to be used on Mars. If there are people living in the belt, the ships can bring them whatever else is easier to make on Mars than in space. Maybe food.
It's kind of a weird thought, but I would suggest that a lot of the output of industrial infrastructure in space is going to be used in space rather than returned to Earth. What's the point (you might ask) if it doesn't come back to Earth? Well, people on Earth might for various reasons want to expand their foothold in space, and then once it reaches a certain critical mass those footholds in space become their own thing. Like Europeans coming to America and eventually rebuilding more-or-less what they left behind, but with some differences.
Because any such project is going to require herculean effort on the part of many humans, and many humans are interested in colonizing Mars but not so many are interested in colonizing volcanoes.
Your question is basically: why do people care about this thing I don't care about and instead care about this thing that neither I nor they care about.
If an asteroid destroys earth, your Mars base won't save life as we know it either. There's a lot of handwaving in this thread on the technologies required to bridge the gap between Starship existing and self-sustaining life on Mars. Paradoxically, self-sustaining space manufacture/Mars colony will obviate the need for frequent heavy-lift rocket launches.
Nobody is arguing that Starship is sufficient, just that it is necessary.
No, it's the yet-to-be-invented tech that is necessary. Your unstated prior is that this non-existent tech will in turn require heavy-lift capacity, and there is no evidence for that. Maybe we can bootstrap space manufacturing off 2 Arianne 5 launches, or 50 starship launches, nobody knows because it's all make-believe atm.
What Starship is good for, is frequent supply runs to a dependant Mars base, with today's technology - but that's nor what people are saying because that's not sexy.
> If constructed, the shield may allow the planet to restore its atmosphere. Simulations indicate that within years, the planet would be able to achieve half the atmospheric pressure of Earth. Without solar winds stripping away at the planet, frozen carbon dioxide at the ice caps on either pole would begin to sublimate (change from a solid into a gas) and warm the equator. Ice caps would begin to melt to form an ocean. T
Of course there is much difficulty and unkown unknowns. Maybe this is truly impossible. Maybe this will take a million years. Maybe Mars soil is too toxic for plant growth.
But the upshoot of terraforming Mars is so fantastical, that it is at least worth dreaming about.
Why do we need to pick?
Also the Earth has limited resources and even of the resources we have, people are already attacking the idea of mining on Earth more and more, even when it's for things like stopping global warming by creating EVs. At some point it's going to be considered downright evil to dig into the ground to pull resources out of it with how things are going. The only alternative will be to pull it out of space.
A good comparison would be for settling the Americas. Although they obviously weren't as inhospitable as Mars, it was still a months long trip that was often one way to a destination with none of the comforts of their previous homes. Yet people came and worked to build. There was plenty of land and plenty of resources in the old world, yet we chose to go through the challenges of settling the new world. Should they also have waited to solve all their problems at home and utilize all their resources and land before looking outwards?
It's the same with Mars, plenty of people get bright-eyed at the idea of going to Mars and helping build a colony because it's a challenging task that would give meaning to many of us. No matter how often you say that Earth is more hospitable, the fact stands that if we do succeed at setting up a self-sustaining colony on Mars, we'll be more secure than just on Earth. Those are way higher stakes than living in Antarctica/the Sahara etc.
Hell, SpaceX essentially gets its pick of top engineering talent because of inspiring people towards the goal of Mars. Is that not already evidence that people are interested in going? It isn't like they're making significantly more money taking on the large workloads expected at the company. There are plenty more cushy jobs available at ULA, Blue Origin etc and plenty of technical challenges at all the space startups. Yet SpaceX gets its pick to the point that their technological lead over everyone else is only increasing.
Quote from my past posts [1] on this point:
> It's impossible to predict what tech can come out of such efforts that will be of use here on Earth in the future. The amount of money going to space exploration is peanuts so I think it's well justified if it has even a trace of potential to improve future of humanity and that has been true historically - e.g. satellites (GPS, weather, etc), medicine (MRI), and whole bunch of NASA spinoffs and more.
> I think SpaceX to date has received less than 10 billion (say 20 to be safe) in total for everything! That's 20 years of research, development, coming up with never done before re-usable rockets, etc.
> People spent nearly half a trillion dollars (not billion) on cosmetic products in a single year! You want to point fingers, point at something you can actually locate. Money spent on space is negligible to the point that it doesn't even warrant justifying spending it.
In the late 1500s, why set sail across an ocean for weeks that no-one has ever successfully crossed (that we know of).
Someone would want to do it, and then want to do it regularly, and regularly means commercializing it, which means reduced cost and innovation. Better ships crossed the Atlantic, trade started and so on. Europe (and the world) is richer after the "discovery" of America and Australia, for example.
There are so many 'unknown unknowns' that until we settle on Mars we just... don't know: some mineral on Mars that might be useful for... capturing CO2 somehow? Lower gravity to grow novel crystalline structures that do... something. Basic life? Who knows?
Mars exploration excites me and many others.
And then there was ethnic cleansing of native population.
Anyway, this won't be an issue for Mars.
There does not seem to be any purpose to anything in the universe. But we can choose what we want to do.
So the answer: Because we want to, because it is exciting, because it inspires, because we can.
Because this is what life is about.
The movie Avatar made in box office $2.9B. This is exactly the same amount of money as SpaceX asked for an actual moon landing of $2.9B.
Have you asked people who watched Avatar what is the purpose of watching Avatar?
Instead of making a fiction about going to a moon, we can actually go to the moon.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that is unprecedented in the history of immigration but it does seem pretty uncommon.
[1] https://midwestepi.org/2017/05/08/construction-fatalities-co...
Workers will spend all 24 hours of every day in risky circumstances, and the quality of aid will be worse. For example, even if there is a MRI machine, will there be surgeons? A small population simply cannot support a wide range of medical specialists.
100% yes, there will be surgeon(s). Likely cotasked with other roles (medical studies etc?) until the population would get significantly larger. Antarctic missions have performed surgery (and everyone gets their appendix removed before going on an overwinter).
I expect he’ll share some of the risk (though not the super early super high risk) because the settlement will be risky for the first hundred+ years.
I think the pioneers will go there for a sense of adventure, not for a monetary reward or out of some sense of "sacrifice for the future". There will be enough people who want to go that you can select a great crew from that group, and there is no reason to send people who don't want to or have to be convinced with money.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people who will go to Mars because it is a fantastic adventure.
However, i doubt that many will want to stay there for more than 26 months. If too many pioneers choose to return to Earth, the project fails. You need a fairly large number of settlers to create something self-sustaining.
Also, a million tons to Mars? If each starship lifts 100 tons, that is 10,000 launches. I think he said launch windows only come around every 2 years. He is either planning on building thousands of Starships or taking many years.
It’s good to have an entirely different brand of bullshit out there and a person demonstrating that a different type of brain can fit in any role.
Now the more confident-sounding and charismatic someone is, the less I believe there will be anything interesting I can learn from them, and the less I trust them!
Probably a good metric anyway; if someone puts all their points into charisma, they have opportunity costs in other dimensions (excluding any "natural" charisma that some people may arbitrarily have, to the degree that's actually a thing or not).
He got to where he is through a combination of hard work and luck (a large part of which was the birth lottery), like everyone. Imagine if Woz was intensely interested in building Apple, and had Jobs' judgement.
As far as I know, he's planning on a time frame of 200 years to build a sustainable city. He's also intending on building thousands of Starships, by making them as rugged and as cheap as possible without sacrificing safety.
There are plenty of people born into more favorable conditions than Elon Musk, who haven’t had 1/10,000th of the success that he has had.
It's largely a necessary, but not sufficient condition for major success.
People that rise from nothing to achieve massive success are the exception that prove the rule.
That said, the average westerner is not struggling to survive, and the average westerner does not end up founding 3 world changing companies and amassing a wealth of $200 billion. Not even the average birthright 1%er achieves that.
Also, Musk was not a founder of Tesla.
Lawsuit says otherwise.
What doesn't change regardless of that settlement is the fact that Musk didn't actually found (or "start" if folk wanna get all nitpicky bEcAuSe SeTtLeMeNt SaYs So) the company, invested a year after it was founded, and didn't become CEO for another four years.
If I incorporate a company and then bring my friend onboard a day later, is he a founder? Why or why not?
Early investor is what he was, along with chairman, then CEO, but it's disingenuous to call him a founder. The settlement you referenced is really just dick swinging.
You may personally feel he's not entitled to the title, but that's just it, a personal feeling. He's literally legally entitled to have this title. Why contradict people on the internet, and say "actually, Musk is not a founder of Tesla"? If anything, it is (right now) disingenuous to claim he is not a founder, given that maybe not all people know the full history and some may believe that he didn't (legally) earn the title.
I think pg would agree. He’s made the distinction in the past, and he knows more about startups than pretty much anybody. You can’t onboard a founder; it’s not a personal feeling, and some legal ruling doesn’t change that.
And if we appeal to authority, there's actual evidence that Musk (who knows a lot about startups!) feels he was a founder. So should we believe Musk, until pg says otherwise?
Americans have a lot of discretionary income. While there is a part of the population that cannot afford an unexpected $400 expense, that only applies to 10-15% of the population, per Federal Reserve studies.
none of these people are building a rocket company in their lives.
Also Jeff Bezos was born to a high school attending mom who worked as a secretary and went to night school after she quickly became a single mom - he built a rocket company
I can’t figure out if this is an HN thing, but this cult mentality of “anyone can do it” needs to die out.
How do you think this works? Do you think 'anyone can do it' means winning the lottery? It means working really hard, getting lucky along the way, and being smart - that likely means getting into finance if it's the 80's and early 90's and tech if it's late nineties and aughts. It doesn't happen overnight.
The reality is, though, that you don't have to be born to millionaires to be one of the richest people in the world.
You’re quoting the fed and seem a little out of touch with the realities that most Americans face on a day to day basis. I didn’t grow up in a bad part of town. I’m a successful programmer.
The Federal Reserve and BLS data accurately reflects the realities average Americans face day to day in my experience. Individual situations are always somewhat unique and varies a bit depending on where you live in the US, but the statistics are broadly correct.
Musk was a co-founder. He joined the company as effectively employee 4. He became chairman of the board after employee 3 (including the two original co-founders) and was the primary designer of the Roadster from that early point. He basically bankrolled the entire original set of funding (around 90% of it).
The universe actually did run that experiment: Kimbal Musk is the younger brother of Elon. He too was born at the right time, the explosion of the word wide web, and made very favorable investments and is presumably filthy rich. But he doesn't have the drive to build rockets.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2021/11/11/the-ot...
It is similar to Jeff Bezos brother Mark. Mark Bezos lead by every conventional measure a successful life: high managing career in advertising and at a charity non-profit, wife and 4 kids. But without his brother he wouldn't have a Wiki entry.
I think this mindset is mistaken.
This is an extremely privileged and out-of-touch POV.
I've never seen someone use the phrase "exception that proves the rule" non-ironically. Why is it more than just a class of exceptions? How does it prove anything?
So, our awareness of a small number of exceptions proves the fact that there is an underlying rule that applies to the majority of non exceptional instances.
Apparently there have been only nine people between 1750 and 1950 worth over $100 billion dollars. (Wikipedia, so who knows) Of them, 6 were not born into privilege:
Cornelius Vanderbilt, Stephen Girard, John D. Rockefeller, Carnegie, John Jakob Astor, and Henry Ford.
Including the modern era adds another 9, only 2 of which were not born into privilege - Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos. You could argue definition of privilege and add Sergey Brin in there maybe.
So depending on your definition of privilege and 'massive success,' you might be only just correct, with 10/18 people worth over $100 billion in the last 250 years or so coming from privilege.
Elon Musk was born in South Africa so compared to anyone born in the USA or EU he has lost the birth lottery, I guess.
The inequality is much more severe meaning that you might actually have access to more resource and power.
The window to Mars opens every two years or so, but it doesn't need to start at the ground. You can park the payloads in orbit over months or years waiting for the chance to boost to mars. The vehicles themselves are intended to be just shuttles (in the way that the actual Space Shuttle, ironically, was not).
Elon Musk did a Joe Rogan podcast where they smoked a blunt and drank whiskey. Elon went on random mumbling stoner pontifications. It was cringe. It was so bad it made Tesla stock tank.
His brand really is the super awkward nerd who's somewhere on the spectrum but technically brilliant. This is part of what creates such enamor for him in the engineering/tech community.
He's the king of nerds, and to a community of nerds who are sick and tired of being led by wellkempt MBAs who don't have any deep understanding of the technology they make leadership decisions for, he's a breadth of fresh air.
I'm not making a judgement on whether this brand is actually accurate of who he really is, but that's true of any brand.
Here's an alternative though where he can talk intelligently and clearly about a subject: https://youtu.be/da3iF2Np51A?t=944
Yes, he does have a plan to build thousands of spaceships. See previous presentations of his from 2016, 2017 and 2019.
Starting a self sustaining civilization on another planet is not a walk in the park. It will take decades and a lot of $$$.
How many people in England invested in the exploration of America and got a return on their investment?
And in today's political landscape it seems even less likely you'd get a decent return on investment - the days of high taxes on the colonies to pay for expansion are over...
Like, what!? That's not how C-suite bigwigs talk. That's primo enginerd banter.
Edit: The answer to this question will be highly relevant during the lawsuits that will follow, the first time the Beta FSD kills somebody.
And any driver facing several years in jail for an accident caused while using the Beta FSD, will engage a proper legal team. Any legal team worth its salt, will immediately subpoena Tesla for documents.
They will present a legal case, that will include past YouTube videos and Tesla company presentations. They will state that their client was misled by the company statements, Twitter and YouTube endorsers, and the contents of the car documentation were minor standard disclaimers.
Contrarily to what many think, most legal teams are actually pretty smart and astute;-)
Further, car accidents in general have relatively low payouts even when someone is blatantly at fault. Even being held responsible for say 10 fatalities per year would be a rounding error on their balance sheet, which is consistent with other industries that have killed vastly more people via things like pollution.
It’s reasonable to suggest human lives should have more value, but when you look at an airplane crash that kills hundreds it’s mostly an issue for an airlines reputation.
"Two people killed in fiery Tesla crash with no one driving" https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/18/22390612/two-people-kille...
Aka people did dumb thing in car, and then died. But again even if they are held either 100% responsible or say 50% the payouts on such lawsuits don’t amount to that much.
"Ford Pinto" https://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-matteson/module-1-why-do...
"...Thus, Ford knew that the Pinto represented a serious fire hazard when struck from the rear, even in low-speed collisions. Ford officials faced a decision. Should they go ahead with the existing design, thereby meeting the production timetable but possibly jeopardizing consumer safety? Or should they delay production of the Pinto by redesigning the gas tank to make it safer and thus concede another year of subcompact dominance to foreign companies? Ford not only pushed ahead with the original design but stuck to it for the next six years.
What explains Ford’s decision? The evidence suggests that Ford relied, at least in part, on cost-benefit reasoning, which is an analysis in monetary terms of the expected costs and benefits of doing something. There were various ways of making the Pinto’s gas tank safer. Although the estimated price of these safety improvements ranged from only $5 to $8 per vehicle, Ford evidently reasoned that the increased cost outweighed the benefits of a new tank design...
How exactly did Ford reach that conclusion? We don’t know for sure, but an internal report, “Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires,” reveals the cost-benefit reasoning that the company used in cases like this. This report was not written with the pinto in mind; rather, it concerns fuel leakage in rollover accidents (not rear-end collisions), and its computations applied to all Ford vehicles, not just the Pinto. Nevertheless, it illustrates the type of reasoning that was probably used in the Pinto case.
In the “Fatalities” report, Ford engineers estimated the cost of technical improvements that would prevent gas tanks from leaking in rollover accidents to be $11 per vehicle. The authors go on to discuss various estimates of the number of people killed by fires from car rollovers before settling on the relatively low figure of 180 deaths per year. But given that number, how can the value of those individuals’ lives be gauged?..."
I don't know how that plays into legal ramifications at all; I'm sure there will be the inevitable "well Elon said it can drive itself and make breakfast and solve P=NP!" but I have no clue if that carries any legal weight and frankly I don't care. He's a bit of a massive douche (no worse than bog-standard billionaires) but he has nerd chops and done a good job of hyping electric cars and space.
Honestly I kinda wish he'd just focus on the rocket stuff and lay off the FSD until it's a bit more mature exactly because of the media and lawyers chomping at the bit.
If I had to guess his technical competence is somewhere in the middle of the distribution of opinions on the matter. I’m sure he’s fine.
He shows a lack of rational thought in regards too SpaceX that is sometimes rather worrying. Take, for example, the time he smoked a blunt on camera which isn't exactly what one of his largest customers likes to see in their executives they are entrusting with launching one of a kind national security assets.
I'm glad SpaceX has an actual professional management team to run most day to day operations.
That's complete nonsense. Unlike others SpaceX has never really attack other space companies. Musk has been supportive of other space companies.
SpaceX busted open the establishment in both DoD and NASA so the contracts are fairly competent, and everybody coming in the industry benefits from that.
SpaceX just recently lost a contract about Commercial Leo Destination but unlike BlueOrigin they didn't release a pamphlet, an army of lobbyist and a bunch of lawyers.
Can you be specific of what actions SpaceX has taken to prevent others space company from gaining government contracts (other then competing for them)?
> Take, for example, the time he smoked a blunt on camera which isn't exactly what one of his largest customers likes to see in their executives they are entrusting with launching one of a kind national security assets.
Something that had basically no impact other then some not really serious slap on the wrist because the military is federal and not state law and they had to pretend to give a shit.
It wasn't the smartest thing to do but to hold that up as some great example about how he is a bad manager is ridiculous for a company that has been as successful as SpaceX.
> I'm glad SpaceX has an actual professional management team to run most day to day operations.
A lot of those manager are engineers that came up in SpaceX. Early on it was basically Elon and his secretary and a group of senior technical team lead that did everything. Musk was heavily in involved in recruitment, supply chain and other typical management things.
He is very capable of doing management work for small or large company but whenever he can avoid it, he doesn't do it, because its not where he adds most value beyond overall strategy.
I mean, Musk hasn't called Bezos a pedo (yet), but you haven't been paying attention if you believe that.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-mocks-jeff-bezos-aft...
After all of that, with SpaceX never actually doing anything to Blue, all they did was offer a way better option to the government.
And he multiple time argued against subsidies that Tesla would benefit from more then anybody else.
That is false. The only companies he has objected to are ULA which was getting a 1 billion dollar a year retainer (effectively a subsidy) from the US government, which is rightfully bad, and Blue Origin which basically wanted NASA to bankroll it's entire development program with little of their own money spent. SpaceX spends a lot of it's own money on things and then is thankful for the little bit on top that NASA has provided to them for portions of development. In no case that I can remember has SpaceX investment on a project been less than 50%, and it is often 100% but with a guaranteed government customer.
https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA?t=3760 1.02.40
and
https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA?t=5641 1:34.01
looks more like the case of the manager repeating stuff heard from the engineers discussion.
Lex Fridman asked the questions, was the one that clearly layout the challenges, and kindly enough repeated the answer that Elon Musk was not providing. Meaning its not a problem of "vector space". Humans interpret the world and give semantic meaning to the scene in front of them.
He repeated it several times as Elon Musk answers completely missed the critical challenges, until he was perceptive enough to pick and regurgitate back the examples Lex Fridman was providing. Like the one where a human would not miss the fact that although some children temporarily disappear from your field a vision as you overtake a school bus for example, they are likely to appear in front of you as they will try to cross from the front of the bus to the other side of the road.
The interview is actually concerning, as its basically Lex Fridman explaining to Elon Musk the challenges and points he is supposed to address, and throwing him a soft ball while he was running around as this is simple, easy problem of creating a "vector space".
Curiously he does pick up on hints a bit later, but still concludes and reluctantly goes on to declare the problem will be fully solved by middle 2022... At 1:26:48: https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA?t=5206
Have you had an experience like that?
The problem with Musk is that when you ask him an even slightly open question, he always basically goes to the what he considers the fundamental answer. That's why so many of his answer are the same and people who know him well can already tell what most answers to most question will be.
However good interviewer can actually lead him into explaining into going into actual detail and ask smart follow up question and his answers are usually very good. The problem is, far to often he is either doing presentations like this with Q/A or he does podcast aimed at general audiences.
The best interviews with him are with people like Everyday Austronaut where he gets to follow up multible time to actually get out really good information.
I wish he would do more interviews like that, where people can prepare questions and be more direct at what they want to learn. Musk comes of much better in interviews like that and its where you actually learn more of the technical information. We understand that reusable rockets are important, but not why the engine doesn't blow up after 5 runs.
I mean, despite all the violent optimism from the Elon Musk fan base, I'm pretty stoked to see how this will pan out. Historical game changer and within a decade everyone will wear Made-on-Mars space foam sneakers to their annual vacation to orbit? Incremental and boring like, neat, Netflix has its own fleet of broadcasting satellites and Adidas is saving 3% annually due to some R&D they do in orbit? Or will it fizzle out entirely, great tech but arrived too early?
Demand is often a chicken-and-egg problem. Having the capacity available will go a long way to creating the demand. There are plenty of incredibly wealthy people who could be persuaded to build the first moonbase, space hotel, low-gravity manufacturing plant, manned Earth observatory ... and a practically endless list of things we've not thought up yet ... but they can't do those things now because even if they paid the money there just isn't the launch capacity to do it. Putting the capacity in place fixes that problem and frees those people to start spending.
What is the source for this and how was this calculated?
I am sure they could run the engines at a lower chamber pressure with massive amounts of film cooling and have it be safe for a single launch. It would still be a very high performance engine by today's standards. 330 bar chamber pressure is just nuts.
Also, if the biggest remaining problem is the chamber melting, that means that they think they have the pumps under control. Which is a major achievement on its own.
The sheer raw complexity of the human built environment and traffic is very daunting for computing. Calculating orbits and rocket burns seems trivial by comparison.
Twin launch music composed by Vangelis /s
Wow, hope they keep succeeding as they have
Reason why near Mars if because we want redundancy for life. So at a safe distance from Earth.
It might be that once starship works, we do all kinds of things, and it turns out that asteroids work better than planetary surfaces. So the belt becomes the focus of economic activity, and the mars colony is just a novelty kept alive by the Musk Foundation.
If you don't like trillion dollar annual defense spendings, here's the cheapest way to get rid of that: make sure you're the only guy with nukes.
In which case, you will stop seeing things like Russia wanting to invade Ukraine.
Link to Common Sense Skeptics channel shredding the whole idea of Starship starting from the rocket to logistics of Mars settlement to bits where even one point means total dealbreaker for the whole idea.
TLDR The whole thing is a wishful thinking at best if not an outright scam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDYt-phUAxY&list=PL-eVf9RWeo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_observation_satellite#En...
It's a relief that it's not some slick slide deck.
Not my strong suit. My writing is fairly decent, though.
He can suck at all these things but you know he's one of a kind. Or maybe you don't think it. But it doesn't matter. There's enough people who do. And they'll listen.