Next year, SpaceX aims to average one launch every 2.5 days
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
We're swiftly moving towards a cislunar civilization.
"Not dealing with climate change" is quite a misleading characterization of Elon Musk, his actions, and his "cares."
If Elon Musk doesn't "care" about climate change just because every actions in his life isn't 100% devoted (monk-like) to maximum action on that issue, then I think you can successfully argue that nobody in human history has ever "cared" about anything. The word becomes meaningless if you redefine it that hard.
Bmitc, while cowering behind a rhetorical question, claimed that Elon Musk doesn't "care" about climate change because his rockets also emit carbon.
However this posits a ridiculous and unattainable purity test (which would only be satisfiable by the aforementioned "monk-like" life) that disingenuously ignores Musk's overwhelmingly net positive work toward carbon reduction via Tesla products.
As for the actual uses besides beaming power down, providing additional power to spacecraft in deep space, powering lasers for light sails, or maybe as a directed energy weapon.
> providing additional power to spacecraft in deep space
Very likely an extreme niche application or wont happen.
> powering lasers for light sails
Again, an extreme niche or wont happen.
> or maybe as a directed energy weapon.
Same thing.
In a world where Starship exists, you can throw a deep space probe with gigantic amounts of solar panels, that seems cheaper then having a separate space craft.
So... time may easily slip. Milestones - less so.
I’m not familiar with that prefix in this context
Whatever you think of Elon, or even people like Trump for that matter, you'd have to be an idiot to cheer this kinda stuff on.
Their last launch attempt, they couldn't even get a tank of fuel to explode reliably for crying out loud.
And that's why they're currently being held back. It's not related to some silly DOJ lawsuit. It's because they messed up the basic rules governing their primary business.
You seem to be suggesting that residential areas were impacted, which was not the case.
> and the worst part is that SpaceX didn't even expect that sort of damage could happen.
While it's true that they didn't expect the launch pad to shatter, the damage was all contained within the evacuated 'hazard area' and their mistake did not endanger the public: "Chunks of material were blown high into the air, with debris striking at least one car near the pad. Although that sounds wild, this appeared to be within the known danger zone of the rocket, called the hazard area, which is an area along the rocket’s planned flight path that is cleared for safety." [0]
> It's because they messed up the basic rules governing their primary business.
Which rules did they break?
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/26/23699365/spacex-starship-...
Objectively false, reporting by NYT, WaPo, and the DO confirm that debris from the explosion blanketed residential and commercial areas as far away as 6 miles, and the protected nature area surrounding the launchpad.
Which rules did they break?
A lot of them, which is why they haven't been able to conduct another launch since then, despite originally planning a launch to have had several additional launches by now.
> bullshit lawsuit about SpaceX not hiring enough foreigners (ITAR regulations specifically ban hiring of foreign nationals).
Matters are more complicated. Many companies are sued by the justice department, it very common. Its just not news usually. And very often its pretty baseless, just as with SpaceX.
More so, not talking about several launches per day is becoming more and more naive. Do you remember the Lockheed's ad where the page was vertically split, and on one side there was a rocket and on another - similarly scaled image of microphone, with wording like "while classical rocket companies launch, Elon Musk talks"? People rarely remember that ad, Lockheed is quite small in launch business these days in comparison to SpaceX. So, when - and if, if you want - those 10 launches per day will be achieved, will you get caught empty-handed? Or do you start preparing for that "pure fiction" right now, even just in case, so you'd have a viable business plan, a product riding on the possibility of massive and frequent launches, or will you retire at that time, as somebody who's left behind by the pace of the progress, with stories for grandchildren about how you programmed equivalent of COBOL on equivalent of DEC?
Our days pure fiction has a habit of becoming reality unexpectedly fast. Better be prepared.
A single SpaceX Starship rocket has a mass of 5k tons, virtually all of it propellant, about 1000 tons CH4 and 4000 tons O2. When you burn that much CH4 you end up with more than 2500 tons of CO2. In reality, about 10% of the CH4 is not burned (the mix is fuel rich rather than stoichiometric), and because CH4 is about 25 times more potent than CO2, you end up with a total of about 5000 tons of equivalent CO2 greenhouse gases.
50k launches of 5k tons CO2e each is 250 megatons. That is about 5% of the total US greenhouse gas emissions.
That is, we'll have the ability to do science in space in much less restrictive environment, from technical, organizational, financial standpoint. We still haven't studied large centrifuges and their effects on health. We could afford much better space telescopes much cheaper. We could significantly advance material science - how materials behave under different gravity levels. We will be able to launch interplanetary unmanned probes with vastly superior capabilities. Even help with climate crisis on Earth. Spaceship will likely be far less wasteful, even per launch, and per kilogram on LEO it's going to be less wasteful by a decimal order or two of magnitude - e.g. around 30 times. Starship can be enabler of exactly that, fundamentally new science, coming from significantly improved tools - not only in capabilities, but also in availability.
For example, SpaceX could be paid to launch a telescope with a bigger mirror than JWST, which will be owned and operated by a science-focused organization, without concerns about will SpaceX share anything or not.
Yes, rockets produce CO2 today, even though comparing to other industries - like intercontinental aviation - the amounts are rather small. Yes, planned Starship launch rates will significantly increase that. We can work on this, while also having benefits of a quite more advanced LEO delivery system. It would be sad, to say the least, to have this significant engineering achievement closed down just out of fear of assumed drawbacks.
Space launch capacity has a long sales cycle. There should be customers for 10 launches per day lining up. If you believe a Mars colony is realistic, OK, it will take that kind of capacity to build it. But that, like Starlink, sounds like another SpaceX project without outside launch customers. I would applaud taking thousands of Elon's fans to Mars to build their paradise, but there are plenty of reasons to think that will not happen in time to be relevant to Starship.
Why? What's the point? What needs to go into space every 2.5 days? What's the co² footprint of each flight.
Fuck off Musk, you child.
Humans. It's an absolute requirement.
What's the upside of this delusional enterprise? We get better at sending rockets a pathetically short distance from the planet. Great. Space is extremely vast and mostly empty and it takes an incredible amount of finite energy and creates an incredible amount of co² emissions to do this. I'm not a Luddite, I just think that this is extremely wasteful and harmful, and in the grand scene of things, pointless. A pointless pissing contest, and an ego vehicle for Musk.
I suppose I'm also a Luddite because I don't babble about crypto.
For each kilogram of kerosene burned, 3 Kg of CO2 goes into the air.5
112,184 Kg x 3 Kg CO2 = 336,552 Kg
That means 336,552 kilograms of CO2 go into the atmosphere every time Falcon 9 is launched.
Source: https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-foot...
Unfortunately there is no real way to do rocketry without burning fuel. We will have to offset it with carbon capture.
True, but NASA uses hydrolox for the SLS (apart from the uber-polluting SRBs). At least it doesn't dump CO2 in the high atmosphere.
144 Falcon launches is less than the emissions of just the flights that take off from O'Hare in a single day.
1) Fully fueled Falcon 9 uses about 180,000kg of RP-1
2) 144 flights totals 24,920,000kg
3) O'Hare has about 1000 flights a day (about 900 domestic, 100 international)
4) 737 holds about 20,000kg of fuel (The 747 can hold 160,000kg)
5) 90/10 split gives a total of 34,000,000kg
The rocket gets past 10 km (troposphere) in about a minute, 50km (height of stratosphere) in a little over two minutes and is over the Karman line by the three minute mark. The total burn time may be 9-10 minutes (or maybe a bit more, if there is a circularization burn).
So it's not like that entire fuel load is getting burned at sea level. Majority of the CO2 is going into the vacuum of space - which is a pretty good place for fossil fuel CO2 to go to.