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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

>"We're going to putting down a lot of steel" under the launch tower before the next Starship flight.

I understand that Starship needs the ability to operate in places where launch infrastructure can't exist. But that's a problem for another day. Put in a flame trench + water suppression system and get the thing to orbit.

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The main problem isn't Starship with its six measly engines on a lower-gravity celestial body (e.g. faster lift-off).

The main problem is the Super Heavy booster, tearing the ground apart with 33 engines at full thrust while struggling against 1 g downwards. This is a very Earth-specific phenomenon, because of our relatively high gravity. You can easily do a Single Stage to Orbit launch with just Starship on Moon, Mars, Europa etc. It is very likely that Super Heavy boosters will never leave the Earth.

A flame trench would probably be a lot more inconvenient to them. Right now they can freely move around most of the launch pad. This is probably important for their rapid iteration, which is what is going to get them to orbit as quickly as they can. If a big chunk of the launch pad is consumed by a trench, that area becomes inaccessible by their platforms, cranes, etc.

Plenty of types of cranes can span a trench.

Not really. As far as I understand, the booster is only for launching from Earth. From elsewhere (moon, Mars) Starship can launch alone.

Then maybe it would also require that much less thrust?

Isn't the water table too high at that location? If that's true then it was never a realistic possibility to build a trench.

That's not an insurmountable problem, it just costs more money to deal with. People have been building structures below the water table for hundreds of years using cofferdams and caissons. Very realistic, just a bit pricey.

I thought the issue with throwing up a bunch of dust is that the planet this rocket was starting from is inhabited.

Not quite. It is speculated that the rocket engines were damaged by chunks of the pad hitting them. That is a danger to the launch itself even if the dust wouldn’t bother anyone else.

The dust is a problem for the community in that immediate area on the order of miles, but on a planetary level it's nothing compared to the dust the mining, construction, etc industries produce. Per the ATF: "In 2015, the latest date for which statistics are available, the U.S. used slightly less than 4.5 billion pounds of explosives." Of course measures are often taken to reduce rock dust falling on people, but away from populated areas it's common to blast rock in the open air, in vastly greater quantities than the debris lofted by this rocket.

The upper stage, with 6 engines, is the part expected to land on the Moon and Mars and take off. Still, that's going to be challenging: Lunar regolith wants to clog and grind everything it gets into.

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