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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

If they can pull this off I think we may enter an age with a clear "Before super heavy reusable launch" and "after".

It's mind boggling how much stuff a Starship will be able to chuck into space and come down and then do it again and again.

Consider this, the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment anywhere in the world within 90 minutes using this kind of capability. International Space Station sized habitats are a handful of launches over months, not dozens over decades. A single Starship launch could place multiple hubble-sized space observatories up in a single launch.

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> International Space Station sized habitats are a handful of launches over months, not dozens over decades. A single Starship launch could place multiple hubble-sized space observatories up in a single launch.

Even if they just stacked a modified Starship designed to stay in orbit (just enough fuel to get into orbit, ability to jettison engine section, some solar panels bolted on) and shot that up, that'd get you as much or more internal pressurized volume than the ISS in a single launch.

Absolutely insane. Wonderful way to communicate it, too - makes it trivial even for people with only a passing interest to understand what a step-change this is.

>Consider this, the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment anywhere in the world within 90 minutes

How reliable would this really be in practice? I'm thinking of all the times a projected launch has to get scrubbed and rescheduled days later. Not exactly the type of delivery uncertainty you'd want for critical equipment.

What if you have that equipment in a Starship already in orbit?

That's a good point. I would imagine that might violate some of the international laws about militarizing space, but I don't know.

Edit: it looks like conventional weapons are not banned by treaties. But I suspect that would make Starship an easy target as well.

> What if you have that equipment in a Starship already in orbit?

Way cheaper to have redundant assets at multiple sites on the ground.

lol - wat?

As a former air force contracting specialist... This is completely wrong. Bases are not cheap to build, maintain or defend (Politically, physically and fiscally).

Also, no matter how much money you spend or how many bases you build, you can't get 90 minute asset delivery EVERYWHERE ON EARTH, which is every military strategists' wet dreams since alexander.

Lastly, if you haven't noticed the military doesn't really care about 'Cheap', or they wouldn't have spend ungodly numbers on the f35. They care about effective. The check book is infinite, and slight advantage is everything.

> Lastly, if you haven't noticed the military doesn't really care about 'Cheap', or they wouldn't have spend ungodly numbers on the f35.

Being cheap was the motivation for everything that led to the F-35 being expensive, so, no, this is wrong: the military cares a lot about cheap, they are just very bad at doing it.

Being cheap is developing a next generation war-fighter that blows every other aircraft out of the water? next generation halo lenses, with advances stealth, manuverability, and rate of weapon deployment? With multiple different variety's and add ons to enable all weather and VTOL? What is cheap about the initial contraints of the project?

The F-35 (more specifically, the JSF program out of which the F-35 was the successful contender) was conceived as a comparatively cheap multiservice, multirole fighter to reduce both initial development and ongoing operational costs by having a high degree of commonality between the conventional air force model, the CATOBAR navy model, and the STOVL marine corps model; It was also supposed to replace basically every US fighter and strike aircraft except for the F-15 and variants, which the F-22 would replace, and the F-22 itself.

As it turned out “do everything" and “be cheap” turned out to be less compatible goals than originally envisioned.

This is also part of the problem with the shuttle. It was forced to have many masters between the DoD and NASA

> completely wrong. Bases are not cheap to build, maintain or defend

Nobody suggested building more bases. The proposed problem was launch reliability. A major reason for launch scrubs is weather.

AustinDev proposed staging in orbit [1]. I said it’s cheaper to have more than one launch location on the ground over more than one launch location in orbit.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35485273

You're correct, I know that DARPA is evaluating this same equation right now.

Tbf, DARPA researches all kinds of approaches that never turn operational.

also: this model is 9 meters in diameter, and will already be more robust to weather effects than the f9, the 18 meter diameter model would be a beast if ever built.

Sorry, I didn't necessarily mean from a physical reliability perspective. I was speaking to launch/timetable reliability.

I’d be curious how many scrubs are technically necessary, vs precautionary.

If war is afoot you’re willing to take far more risks, with the weather and with sensor glitches.

I imagine there's a lot to go into it. For example, if it's a one-of-a-kind weapon with a long lead time to develop, they probably have a pretty low risk threshold.

Exactly, but what if you're sending dumb munitions, a couple of tanks, or relief to a disaster zone?

You could spare to blow all that during takeoff. Whatever, let's try again in four hours.

Launch windows generally aren't open-ended and typically only last a few hours because they are orbit-dependent. That's why when a launch is scrubbed, a window often doesn't open again until days later.

I doubt that matters for point-to-point deliveries like this.

The GP comment was making the point of keeping Starship in orbit for deliveries to mitigate the launch window risk.

Clearly there remains legitimate skepticism on both fronts, but it’s pretty crazy to think that we might get “AI” (or at least, the first widespread use of something ordinary people might reasonably call “AI”) and reusable, economical heavy-lift capability all within the same calendar year.

> the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment

The killer app for the military is missile defense. Currently the US has about 4 dozen ground based midcourse interceptors. Each costs more than $100 million and carries one single exo-atmospheric kill vehicle capable of destroying one single incoming threat. The kill vehicle weights 64 kg.

A single starship could carry more than 1000 kill vehicles. A dozen or two starships on standby could carry enough kill vehicles to defend not only against all current intercontinental ballistic missiles, but against all that Russia, China and North Korea could conceivably build in a decade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle

Cryogenic liquid fueled rockets don't make good standby vehicles. There is a reason they use solid fueled rockets primarily.

There could be a case made that Spaceship will fly so often to allow novels method to eliminate most problem related to that.

The advantage would be pre positioned orbital interceptors could effectively reach some percentage of missiles in the boost phase rather than later on when intercept is harder.

Starship also allows for enough mass to orbit to make Star Wars legitimately viable.

Yes, it's preferable to have solid propellant missiles. But that does not mean it's impossible to use liquid, and even cryogenic liquid fueled rockets for deterrence missions. The first American ICBM, Atlas, used liquid oxygen, and was used for 7 years. Its contemporaneous soviet counterpart, the R-7 Semyorka, also used liquid oxygen and was in service for 9 years.

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