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Comment by thematrixturtle | Hacker News Reader

Huh? SpaceX's Starship is designed to go to Mars.

It's... not? There are no allowances in Starship design for long range trip. It could be used to kickstart building a vessel that could do it, by being useful launch vehicle to ship materials, but that's it.

Starship is literally contracted by NASA to land people on the Moon.

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

It appears to be designed to go from lunar orbit to the surface - not to take people to lunar orbit?

Edit: I was referring to the Starship HLS variant linked to

This is lunar lander variant. They just adopted Starship to the NASA requirements.

Starship is first and foremost designed to deliver people and/or 100T of cargo to Mars.

In theory it can do both. However, it is not yet crew-certified.

SpaceX builds Mars Starship in their private capacity, so they don't have to certify it with NASA.

It most likely never will be according to criteria from commercial crew program, because it does not have and will not have an escape system.

I knew about lunar use, and distances for lunar trip are much shorter than distances for Martian one. Somehow I forgot that Musk claims they are going to Mars in Starship - thought it was too small for that, but a good chance of kickstarting the kind of industry you need to build one to take to Mars and back.

Starship is at least 10x bigger than any current NASA plan of sending people to Mars.

For HLS NASA requirement was capability of delivering 2T of cargo to the Moon.

Starship offers 100T or more.

Starship is specifically designed to fly to and land on Mars:

https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/

That's... some chutzpah, especially combined with no mention of specific problems involved. But maybe for a very small crew it will work?

That said, they could update the page, it's 2022 already and promising great things in the future year of 2020 is not a good look.

Musk/SpaceX have been working on Mars for literally decades at this point, and are very cognizant of the incredible difficulties involved. Here's a primer:

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

It might surprise you, but that doesn't make SpaceX's Martian program the longest one, or even in the running for that title.

And while I do not want to besmirch SpaceX engineers working on it, the website is not a statement from them, it's a statement from PR machinery. Which holds similar weight as "FSD is next year" being told for 7 years by Tesla PR.

If they manage it, congrats. If not, I still reserve the right to laugh at the PR machine (not at the engineers, they have a hard problem to solve that isn't helped by overpromising PR).

Its not designed for crew to exit the ship once it lands on mars.

I do not have high hopes in that design.

Anybody can design anything to go anywhere.

Starship doesn't exist.

Starship exists as much as SLS does.

To me it looks very real: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/rvmKpUhryN6qQmNffvqnXH-970...

And Teslas are designed to drive autonomous

"Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for instance, has shown it is possible to build reusable rockets that can send astronauts and cargo into space for around $50m per launch, far less than the projected $2bn (or more) for each ride aboard the sls" - that $50m is not Starship pricing that's the more run-of-the-mill Falcon 9.

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