SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site
faa.gov
faa.gov
I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.
By the way, I absolutely despise the man and his antics, but I don't want to live in a world where SpaceX fails, just to spite him.
Starship and access to orbit, as well as Starlink (which cheap access to orbit enabled) are indeed insanely powerful geopolitical tools. Many of the existing geopolitical engineers would hate to see him not be firmly subordinate to themselves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the FAA’s decision is being used as a bargaining chip here. You don’t get to do things like this in the USA unless you play ball 100% with the existing people who control access to orbit.
Nobody is richer or more powerful than the people who presently control the satellite-based weapons and surveillance systems that the US operates. Nobody will be able to be in a position to replace or supplant them without some sort of negotiation with them.
Imagine it: with a working Starship, Musk could replace GPS, Keyhole, and whatever the rods-from-god system is codenamed, in a matter of months (or perhaps weeks, if the payload design work is already underway), for anyone on the Earth who he thinks would benefit his goals. A lot of the leverage that exists against him (and can presently be used to constrain him) would be gone, never to return. It’s already fairly obvious that the geopolitical status quo on Earth is not very important to him.
The latter is possibly dismissable as "Well, that's just your opinion, man..." but he gives muscle to his opinion by making business decisions with strategic policy implications (e.g. turn off Ukraine starlink service at strategig moments..)
The twitter vandalism is very clearly "his works".
Can you back that up, with actual data, and not the politically motivated articles from democrat aligned media?
The only specific cases of this I’ve seen was an actual bot network saying the n word a lot when Elon took over, which was obviously a coordinated attack.
Other than that, where is this racist hell hole that twitter has become apparently? Where is the proof?
Twitter is irrelevant; he is doing product (read: design for manufacture) design on electric cars, battery systems, rockets, internet access satellites, brain computer interfaces, solar, humanoid autonomous robots, and tunnel boring machines, in approximately that order.
Twitter is like 20th on the list, but it’s a great target for narrative-based outrage (“the bullied one gets rich and buys the playground” etc). Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that. Freedom of expression for all is far more important than censoring racists (which doesn’t stop them from being racist or stop the spread of racism anyway).
What version of Elon Musk are you thinking of here? Read literally anything he says and it's immediately clear that he's always been the bully. He wasn't some underdog who was bullied and pulled himself up by his bootstraps to prove everyone wrong, he's the son of an apartheid emerald mine owner who made some good business bets and has now figured out how to scale up his bullying to a national scale. The already-rich bully bought the playground so that nobody could stop him from bullying everyone even more.
> Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that
Ah, the old "I'm free to publish racism but you're not free to call me out when I do so". These free-speech "absolutists" always abandon their morals as soon as they get the opportunity to censor someone who is making fun of them for being a douchebag. It's always about wanting a spout-racism-free card, never about the inalienable rights of mankind.
> but you're not free to call me out when I do so
in the GP post, literally or in meaning. So... I think you're at least exaggerating too much, at least in some places.
However I do see your point.
People who actually value personal freedoms understand that there are always tradeoffs: you cannot simultaneously have freedom-to-bully and freedom-from-bullying. It's a difficult problem. People who claim it's simple are not actually interested in solving it. The people who say that freedom-to-bully is infinitely more important than freedom-from-bullying (as all "free speech absolutists" are inherently claiming) are, quite obviously, bullies that want to get away with bullying.
> I've never seen a counterexample
Perhaps that Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" was made too much in jest and didn't really correspond to some real events, before or after. Or people like Vaclav Havel, who got to the power from the power's opponents, didn't have opportunity to refrain from silencing a political adversary. I don't know.
Which is petty and stupid. But AFAIK he has not censored political content he disagrees with, so I much prefer it to the previous regime.
And FYI, if your 401k has some index fund exposure you're probably the partial owner of some cobalt mines in Congo that have questionable labor practices.
Social media has always been cancer, some people just want it more preferenced to their sort of cancer by a centralized system.
But otherwise I see little evidence it's actually stopped anyone from using it other than people giving heartfelt anecdotes on HN and lots of talk about Mastodon that unsurprisingly died off quick.
This makes absolutely no sense, yet people keep repeating it
TWZ: Do you trust Elon Musk?
KB: (Laughs) In what sense?
TWZ: There was the discussion over Walter Isaacson’s book excerpt and whether Musk shut off Starlink to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol last year, or whether as he claimed he denied a request to provide it.
KB: Look, [Starlink] is a private property of a private person. Yes we really very widely use his products and services. The whole of the line of contact talks to each other to some extent using his products and services. The only thing I can say here is that without those services and products it would be a catastrophe. But it is true that he did turn off his products and services over Crimea before. But there's another side to that truth. Everybody's been aware of that.
TWZ: So he did turn it off?
KB: This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.
TWZ: But did he ever put it on and then shut it off?
KB: There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/exclusive-interview-wi...
That's my point though. I am not judging the content of his opinions. I am concerned about the fact that he is voicing them with little care. Everybody has some weird opinions and half-baked ideas. It's very different to have these thoughts in your head vs sharing them with friends and family or to to voice them to 160 million followers. He can think in private whatever he wants and I wouldn't care or judge him unless it starts to impact other people. I think lots of weird shit, but it just makes my wife roll her eyes. Nobody is gonna die from it.
On the ocelot question - he will cynically tickle them to death instead.
This is about as reasonable discussion as can be had on the topic of Musk. Which is sad.
- He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
I’m sure there’s plenty more I’m forgetting.
1) It lacks all nuance because your question implies that if a person provides benefits to [whomever] and it's greater than their antics/demons, then you should like them. And that's simply not how the world works. And
2) The comment even said they wouldn't want to live in a world without SpaceX despite his antics.
People are complicated and so too are the views individuals hold about other people. It's not a spectrum where people eventually just dismiss extremely concerning things because someone made something cool.
That's the matter of the question. Elon Musk has some significant achievements which shouldn't be dismissed just because he behaves less than perfect somewhere else.
You don't seem to understand me at all. elteto listed a few things, which can be agreed with, and yet which aren't enough to explain cryptoegorophy's question "Why people hate him". I'm reminding that there's another side of things - people in this discussion generally quite aware of that, and only some focus on a one-sided picture. You don't need to repeat that the question is flawed - you just have to correctly understand the question. That is, it's a reminder of another side, which is necessary for cryptoegorophy's question. It's true that it's a complex question, but you don't understand me if you think I don't leave the room for nuance. Or, in other words, you can just dislike a man - but to explain why people in general have a correlated opinion, you have to look at the whole perspective.
I get a kick out of Elon/Twitter schadenfreude as much as the next person, but I also have to consider that maybe the "growth at all costs" Wall Street mentality has permeated our society and psyches so thoroughly that it triggers a strong kneejerk reaction to anyone going against that grain. Here is a leader who is finally saying, to hell with the investors and the board and kowtowing to the advertisers, I will make the changes I feel are right, and we are rejecting it because it's "mismanagement." Where mismanagement is defined as not playing along with the public market incentives.
I'm sure it's a swing too far in the apologist direction, but you gotta wonder...
Have seen this claimed many times but nothing to back it
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
Mismanaging a company is hardly unusual, nor a reason to hate someone unless you are a shareholder or employee
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
Tesla shares are up massively, so this is not a reason to hate him, even if you are a shareholder. It is a reason to hate him if you are a short seller, I guess. He has Tweeted about crypto, but there is no evidence he participated in any pump and dump
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
Can you cite anything for this? I assume it is just more of the same media hysteria about him being some kiind of right wing fascist with no actual backing.
Why does Starlink work in Ukraine?
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
I think he's posting a lot of crap, and probably doesn't have much of a filter and is impulsive at times. Clearly he's got some mental problems that lead him to say and retweet stuff on a whim that he probably doesn't actually believe. I think we can all understand these imperfections.
At the end of the day, he's an incredible human being, flaws and all. No one's perfect, and he's cocky and pushy and rude and stuff. But he'll be in history books, and mostly for having done a whole lot of good for humanity, while pissing off a lot of humans.
Tesla / Space X are already amazing in almost ever respect, it doesn't need all the silly hype machine on top of it. Yes, it is neat to think about Mars bases eventually but that should be a stretch goal not pushed as "It is 4 years away!".
Starship is an incredible achievement already and I suspect it will come together quicker than we anticipate (less than a decade, probably in the next 2-3 years) but Musk had always promoted time lines and ambitions that were silly. Like point to point public rocket travel by 2030. The thing cannot land yet and they are already thinking 50 steps ahead with a stated date. That doesn't detract from Space X's achievements but it does cast a shadow over them as a whole.
You do know that the next Artemis mission is in 2024? According to your timeline it would be delayed more than the much hated space launch system which actually went to the moon
Yeah, well they're trying but the FAA isn't letting them launch. It's possible the one they want to launch will make orbit, or maybe it will be the next one etc.. The point is it will never achieve anything if it keeps getting delayed by the FAA.
If Elon didn't want things to be delayed so bad by the FAA maybe he shouldn't have launched on 4/20 for the lulz without adequate launch site infrastructure for such a launch.
The FAA shouldn't let them launch until SpaceX has proven they've done the work and have done their best to mitigate these issues going forward - both the actual consequences and the decision processes that led to them. From what I remember the FAA basically rubber stamped SpaceX's incident report (or whatever it was called) that the Internet reported as being from the FAA itself.
It's incredible that we live in a world where a statement like this has at least some veracity.
I was following starship from the time when was still called ITS or BFR.
As for the not adequate launch site infrastructure that had 0 to do with the date, they built the pad long before launch, expecting the fondag to handle the heat/pressure and it didn't work, they didn't suddenly build a pad throw it together and say we're launching cause 4/20 because LOL.
I have great news for you, they have already done that!
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700789411279966339 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cltnwVMcYgw
Forgive me if I'm not going to click on a Twitter link, but the YouTube video only covers site infrastructure. I see no evidence that Elon won't Elon again. 4/20 blaze it.
Besides, I believe their landing method is to catch the booster with the mechazilla which should be quite a show.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9eoubnO-pE&ab_channel=Space...
Shotwell is great, but so are lots of other people that work for SpaceX.
They were once 7 people in a room. If Musk was new CEO that just came in 2 years ago of course he wouldn't get much credit.
But Musk has been leading SpaceX for literally 20+ years. So to just say he has nothing to do with it is stupid, and every single person that worked there and left tells a different story. The same for journalists and other who interact with SpaceX.
If anything people are continually surprised how involved Musk is, when anti-Musk people always stress how he is an absent boss. But then you hear about 5h meetings where Musk and engineering team sit together and go into minute detail and Musk makes decisions in those meetings.
Its really only people from outside who dislike Musk that push this story.
So yes, Shotwell was great. He increased her responsibility over time. And Musk reward that by promoting her. But so were other people that Musk recruited and put into positions, Hans Königsman, Tom Muller, Jim Buzza and so on. But dispite many of them leaving the overall organisation still continues to do well.
So at some point, leadership is something that matters.
> every single person that worked there and left tells a different story.
Is just not true. It's okay if that's your experience talking to people that have worked there, but I have also talked to people working there. As much as you chastise people who dislike Musk, these kinds of absolute statements come from people that seem compelled to leap to his defense.
That’s a weird thing to list as a criticism, the centre core ends up going way higher and faster than a normal booster, they know recovering it is a stretch. One did landed successfully, but was lost on the way to shore due to rough seas. On most flights they expend the core to get additional performance, doing so doubles GTO delivery capacity.
As for ‘delayed for years’ that’s relative to knowingly highly aggressive target timelines. Compared to space industry standards they were still completed at break neck speeds.
Both these criticisms are just attempts to use skewed optics to turn what are actually some of SpaceX’s bigest successes into apparent failures. SpaceX shoots and hits much higher than anyone else. The fact that they aim even higher than that is no sign of failure.
IIRC you need 6 tonnes of food and oxygen just to keep them alive for the transit.
Has that ever been done for human consumption before? Relying on a novel technology in a setup where, if it breaks, everyone on board dies, seems rather dubious.
There were also experiments with "undifferentiated lettuce tissue", using C13-labeled acetate to investigate whether crop plants are able to properly feed off of acetate as their main food source, instead of photosynthesis-based small molecules.
What I'm suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance. Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor.
Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking. Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit. The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation...
[0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.
Build a lab. Run it with things that we hope are good enough, but don't value enough to get home (back to earth) safely.
If we're really smart we can even use the whole thing to bootstrap a useful environment to get to and a far easier environment to get back from.
I mean very different robots from the rovers we've sent to date. Maybe not even more complex robots but definitely bigger (and smaller too) robots.
Their task not to survey with minimal disruption, but to actively disrupt. To build, to transform materials (lab), to create the base buildings and infrastructure of civilization. So there's somewhere with resources to better support humans.
Also, you need a vison to advance things. Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke
Viable electric cars were a thing even way back in the late 19th century [1]. The problem was that burning oil was cheaper (as the users had to pay none of the externalities for decades), and so it lost out for a good while despite being more efficient (i.e. energy contained in the fuel vs distance driven) on paper.
On top of that came the massive, decades-long lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry to get rid of public transit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.
> until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.
I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
1. If that were true, EVs would have been much more successful in America. They haven't been. The Nissan Leaf was around long before Tesla and it never went far, because the range sucks.
2. Back in 1900, 100 miles would have been great. In 2000, it's not sufficient at all for most car-owning Americans.
3. You can't have the same range at higher speeds: energy usage goes up dramatically with speed. So you need much more energy storage, and the battery tech of the time just wasn't sufficient.
>I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
That's a very good point. It would be interesting to see an alternate universe where this was the case.
The problem is that, because of cars, they built everything farther apart, and people willingly chose places to live farther away from work. Just look at a map of the city of Phoenix AZ for instance: 100 miles' range won't cover a trip from one side of the city to the other side and back.
However, for vacations, a rental car is absolutely the right idea. That's what people here in Tokyo do: there's lots of convenient places to rent a car for shopping trips to Costco, or a trip to the mountains, etc., because so many people don't own cars.
Electric cars are nice and all but if you want to credit Elon Musk with contributing to the switch from gas to EV, you also have to credit him with killing high-speed rail with spitballing about the vaporware that is building underground vacuum tunnels to shuttle cars around, aka the Hyperloop (before it became a closed-loop underground taxi service with no regard for fire safety).
Fundamentally the issue with long term Mars habitation is that any technology that allows us to live on Mars full time without support from Earth would make even the wildest 'destroyed' Earths livable. The only thing Mars gives you is there's not going to be people beating on the outside of your trillion dollar dome trying to get in.
The real danger is that life forms hitchhiking the first humans can totally overwhelm any existing life and completely condemn it.
I'm not saying that Musk is perfect, or that you're doing this, but people like to fault this wildly ambitious projects for what they haven't achieved. But when they do work they have an outsized impact on the status quo. When Starship succeeds (and I believe it's just a matter of time whereas Tesla FSD is still an "if") it will revolutionize space travel in ways that seem sci-fi today.
State-of-the-art today is building machines that cost billions of dollars and throw them away after using them one time!
Secondly, you're assuming that reusable rockets are better than one-time use ones. While this may be true for certain kinds of missions, it is not at all clear for many others.
Reusable rockets fundamentally will have lower payload for the same thrust, for the simple reason that they need fuel for the return stage. They will also need to be made from sturdier materials to survive reentry, which again limits their capacity.
The second, I disagree, reusable is definitely better in every way. I'm sure there are edge cases where it needs to be proven or a particular mission, but no other machines are as costly and disposable.
Rocket designs haven't evolved much over the last 50 years. Competitors all claim to want reusability but none of the major players are pursuing it seriously. Engine design and manufacturing is hilariously obsolete. NASA has become a jobs program instead of a innovator. I'm just happy to see a radical new approach to design, manufacturing and testing.
> One explicitly, that Starship will work in anything resembling its current design and promised operational paramters.
We have a test flight behind us, which showed many tens of seconds of the stack flight. That's a big achievement validating the rocket architecture and general parameters. Frankly I'd assume we crossed equator in rocket development here, we're in completion stage more than developing.
> This is by no means as guaranteed as you make it out to be (it's very much an if, not a when).
You know, there are no physical laws which prevent Starship from working. SpaceX shows economics on their side. At this point it's not guaranteed that Starship will fly - because it's hard to predict the future - but it's a pretty safe bet that Starship can be made to fly.
> The promises of rapid reusability are very much up in the air, and the whole many-engine design is also not proven in the slightest yet.
There are many successful many-engine rockets. Soyuz has 5 engines but 32 nozzles firing at launch. Falcon Heavy has 27 separate engines. Saturn-I had 8, Falcon 9, Black Arrow 8 - the last one just 4-5 times less engines than Super Heavy. To say it's not proven in the slightest is bending the reality a bit too much.
> Secondly, you're assuming that reusable rockets are better than one-time use ones. While this may be true for certain kinds of missions, it is not at all clear for many others.
It's important however what those cases are. By now we have a good history of Falcon-9 launches, where for a number of years we have a substantial reduction of cost to orbit for a wide variety of payloads. So maybe - maybe - there are many other kinds of missions where reusability is a disadvantage, but those kinds are clearly in substantial minority.
> Reusable rockets fundamentally will have lower payload for the same thrust, for the simple reason that they need fuel for the return stage. They will also need to be made from sturdier materials to survive reentry, which again limits their capacity.
That's technically true, but arguing this is a bit like arguing that a car made for a single travel would be lighter and cheaper that the one made for repeated use. True, but quite irrelevant for most practical cases.
As became apparent in the post mortems, the rocket lost its chosen flight path the moment it left the pad, probably due to the engine failures. It flew of course, but it was a failed launch from T+3 or so. The safety systems also failed to self-destruct the rocket on command - they thankfully did enough damage for the atmosphere to take care of the rest.
Basically the launch only proved that the parts hold together and the engines produce enough lift. The engines themselves are still far too prone to failure (apparently this was using an older generation, so maybe that part is already fixed).
> There are many successful many-engine rockets. Soyuz has 5 engines but 32 nozzles firing at launch. Falcon Heavy has 27 separate engines. Saturn-I had 8, Falcon 9, Black Arrow 8 - the last one just 4-5 times less engines than Super Heavy. To say it's not proven in the slightest is bending the reality a bit too much.
You're right, I was exaggerating a bit. Still, my layman's understanding is that there is a fundamental difference between Falcon Heavy's multi booster design with 9 engines per booster, and Super Heavy's 33 engine design on a single booster. Maybe I'm wrong on this.
> So maybe - maybe - there are many other kinds of missions where reusability is a disadvantage, but those kinds are clearly in substantial minority.
As I understand it, the disadvantages start once you want to put large payloads beyond orbit. Starship's main goal is to put a payload on the moon (this is what the NASA funding is for) and for this purpose it is much worse than a traditional single use rocket: instead of a simple trip to the moon, the design is to launch to orbit, then do an additional 6 or so launches to refuel it while in orbit, and only then will it have enough power to fly to the moon.
SpaceX is banking on the launch being so cheap with their hopes of rapid reusability that they can do 7+ launches of Starship for less than the cost of a more traditional mission. Falcon 9 definitely is not that cheap compared to other rockets, but perhaps Starship will indeed be.
> As I understand it, the disadvantages start once you want to put large payloads beyond orbit. Starship's main goal is to put a payload on the moon (this is what the NASA funding is for) and for this purpose it is much worse than a traditional single use rocket: instead of a simple trip to the moon, the design is to launch to orbit, then do an additional 6 or so launches to refuel it while in orbit, and only then will it have enough power to fly to the moon.
American plans to go to the Moon in 1960-s included a variant with LEO docking. That would allow using a smaller rocket, as the payload needed to go to the Moon could be assembled on low Earth orbit in several launches. NASA decided to go with one rocket of the size which was very ambitious at the time - about an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest existing one.
The Starship goal is to bring even bigger payload to the Moon. Sure, it could be done by scaling up the Starship. But the fate of big rockets so far - Saturn-V, N-1, Energiya, even Space Shuttle to an extent - is that they suffer from the lack of use. The more they are used, the better and cheaper they get. So, no, the SpaceX goal isn't actually to bring even bigger payload to the Moon - it just happens that this scale, which Starship has, is good to land on the Moon a lot of payload in one launch. So, given that you want to use the Starship which is being created for many different missions, how would you use Starship to fly to the Moon? You'd refuel it on LEO. Noe we can remember the actual SpaceX goal - it's flying a lot of people and cargo to Mars, and SpaceX decided to create the biggest rocket they could reasonably plan, which is still not that large given that Mars wants thousands and thousands tons of stuff, so even this big rocket should be used with refueling on LEO.
Once again - Starship is the biggest rocket SpaceX can build, from technical and economical standpoint (this reminds me the Soviet engineers chain of thoughts when they were planning N-1). It's still small enough for the task (flying to Mars), so LEO refueling is still needed. If it's still needed, it's logical to use it for Moon flights as well.
Yes, instead of one flight (like Saturn-V) Starship needs several, for refueling. In exchange it brings larger payload to the Moon, so since we're planning to go there and stay, it could be justified. So, we're using a universal reusable super-heavy rocket for many different tasks instead of building a system for each task separately. We're losing in time - since we need multiple launches from Earth for single flight to the Moon - but gaining and payload and - crucially - in developing bespoke solutions for different tasks.
I think overall it's an advantageous approach.
Both my rockets and Starship have reached space the same number of times.
Also, Starship is beyond the planning stage
Wouldn't it be more apples-to-apples to compare "all your rockets" to "all of SpaceX's rockets", or "all your superheavy-class rockets" to "all of SpaceX's superheavy-class rockets"?
I'm just facetiously pointing out that Starship hasn't launched yet. There could be major flaws. Someone else might have a better design brewing but with little to show for it. The irony is that Starship's design looks a lot more like the sci-fi futurism of the 50s - we're returning to it after testing out shuttle-style reusable vehicles.
Yeah SpaceX is goat. Between starlink, self landing rockets and this, oh man.
Okay, but SLS got close to the moon. It doesn't matter that it can't do a rendezvous with Starship, because it fulfilled its mission.
Right now they haven't even proven that the many engine design is actually workable, rhier engines failed at a spectacular rate in the single full test launch that they conducted (maybe because of the ill-conceived launch site, maybe for other reasons).
So, no, Starship already has a place in history.
They don't need to prove it to people who accept as the only proof the demonstration of the fact. Remember you can have proofs in different ways, and professionals are fully aware of this.
Its ultimate problem was that it was still ultimately more like a TI-83 graphing calculator than an iPhone. Much as people mocked the handwriting recognition, it was technology which could have been iterated upon. It turns out the key missing ingredient for the Newton was wireless internet access — and of course an internet worth connecting to.
Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon that they would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.
There were several people here on HN screeching that a few lumps of concrete strewn on a beach is an ecological disaster of unfathomable proportions.
Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink affecting their precious telescopes, while ignoring the minor detail that Starship will be able to launch a JWST-sized telescope weekly if they want to get above the atmosphere.
We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.
Or because he constantly stomps on experienced engineers with stupid ideas and puts the whole thing at risk. Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.
Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk. At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions without having to cater to his ego and make him think the idea was his.
Do you have more information on this? My quick googling turned up nothing.
> In addition to the siting and sizing of the pad, SpaceX does not have a flame trench, nor do they have a water deluge system used to suppress heat and sound energy from any launches, as the Army Corps of Engineering permitting required to add these civil engineering systems is itself a multi-year process.
> No large rocket complex on the planet: not in Russia, nor China, and certainly not in the US, exists that doesn’t contain one or both of these energy suppression systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279
https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to
Name one other company, person, or even a country that can and is willing to do that. There are none. As long as SpaceX can and no one else can, the future of SpaceX is on a pretty sound footing in my opinion.
I'm sad about the interference that Starlink causes to ground based astronomy, this doesn't mean Musk is ignoring those issues.
And I value government agencies making sure that business interests are balanced against democratic will of the people, that doesn't mean they're funded at the right level for a rapidly growing industry.
SpaceX knew that the concrete wasn't the final solution, it was always temporary, they had already started building the steel water cooled plate before the first test flight. Based on the data they had available from the series of static fire tests leading up to the test they thought the concrete would ablate and survive one test flight before they took the downtime to replace it. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Elon overruled all the SpaceX engineers on the timing of when to install the steel water cooled plate or are you Literally making things up?
Learning more by moving quickly and taking calculated risks is clearly the better approach, as evidenced by the current dominance of the Falcon 9 and SN 25 and booster 9 sitting on a repaired OLM and being scheduled to make another orbital attempt in less than 2 weeks.
I think most people agree that it's better for SpaceX business, but some don't agree that it's worthwhile for our society with what happens if failed. It's like Tesla's "FSD Beta" situation.
Unfortunately, #LiterallyMakingThingsUp seems to be a trend these days.
Wouldn't that be called working from first principles? Proving it doesn't work can be quicker in the long run than over-designing something based on what you think won't work.
The upside was they got lots of data to improve the next rocket, which they already did. It's ready to go again, just waiting for FAA approval.
Or they could have done that the first time with a flame trench and a water deluge system that prevented the energy of the rockets from damaging the rockets dooming the first stage and making concrete rain on the neighboring wildlife reserve.
Elon could have verified that hypothesis with a full static fire test AND be able to see the damage to both rockets and pad from an actual launch without destroying a rocket.
This is why SpaceX grew from the start with an immune system to prevent Elon from ruining too much stuff.
I believe he’s better observed in Twitter, which is a company that didn’t develop an immune system to deal with him.
It seems that while the explosion would have been avoided with a deluge or flame trench, it could have also likely just been mitigated with a thicker concrete pad or a vent system.
Iterative implementation works very well for many kinds of software development projects. When an iteration involves 200 tanker trucks carrying fuel and oxidizer and dozens of rocket engines and results in destroying launch infrastructure and dumping debris into wetlands and inhabited areas, one might conclude "iteration" has made the jump from sound engineering principle to management fad dogma.
Even Elon said this. It was a gamble, it didn’t pay off.
Not in the least. SpaceX hires a lot of rocket scientists who are industry experts. They're more agile than the entrenched players since Boeing/Lockheed legacy space programs weren't efficient but SpaceX has relied upon expert consultation and expert advice from folks in the industry to build their rockets. I don't see them as building from first principles at all, they're building on what's come before standing on the shoulders of the rocket engineers who've come before.
> Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea
They expected it to break but be ok for one launch. Its a reasonable risk to launch sooner.
> Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk.
And yet the he has lead the business for 20+ years and the company has been getting more and more and more successful. I guess that just happens by magic.
> At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions
When SpaceX does good its because Musk wasn't there, when it does bad its because of Musk. Classic.
Product is way more interesting in this case than BD, considering it's the most badass rockets ever made. But feel free to praise Shotwell too, that's great too.
If 4 of those data points don’t convince you, you obviously don’t want to be convinced even in the slightest
Of course as soon one says this, someone else will misconstrue this as some ridiculous claim that Musk is a singular genius responsible for inventing everything. This is of course silly. He's only one human with a limited schedule. There are surely thousands of things happening every day at SpaceX which he has zero involvement in.
As we often say in computing: ideas are easy, execution is everything. But the biggest successes of SpaceX weren't just about having ideas, they were about having the gumption to fund them, and an ability to recruit the best people so that execution is possible. In fields like rocketry, one might instead say ideas are easy, identifying when an idea should have a billion dollars thrown at it is hard, and execution is damn fucking hard.
Of course everybody who leaves SpaceX tells a different story. Journalists and others who observe SpaceX tell a different story.
Musk has literally been the leader since the company had 5 people, and he always had control of the companies direction. Shotwell is one important part of the team. But she was recruited by Musk and promoted by Musk into the position she now has.
People also used to say 'Musk has nothing to do with engines its all Tom Mueller' of course then Tom Mueller responded saying that was false. And of course once Mueller left, SpaceX is still doing great things with engines.
So the reason why 'Musk is always throwing into the ring with SpaceX' is simply because its the truth and all Anti-Musk Twitter warriors are not actually informed about the topic they simply have to discredited Musk whenever they can. Often they don't even care about spaceflight, they care about being against Musk.
Sometimes you do something against conventional wisdom, and people call you a genius. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off.
I am assuming that you are employed, rather than an employer.
That said, I have nothing but contempt for the man and am petty enough to have schadenfreude in any of his personal comeuppance.
I believe in "free speech" but also think that absolutism in that regard is horseshit.
If either answer is no, then the brag about capacity isn’t really relevant.
Even the researches, unless very selfish, should know that ideally you want many more very powerful space based telescopes if you actually want to do research and not just marvel at the stars from your patio.
We obviously want larger launch capacity in the long run. It's not even a question. Falcon 9 is already the most successful rocket ever on almost all stats of usefulness, why shouldn't we have at least SOME faith that spacex will be able to build starship and use it?
Real terrestrial telescopes are better than hypothetical space-based ones.
And I didn’t say we don’t want more capacity nor that Falcon 9 isn’t the most successful rocket ever, nor that I don’t have faith in SpaceX’s ability to create Starship, nor that Starship won’t eventually add space-based telescopes.
I said that none of that actually addresses the current concerns of people who currently need to do their work, as GP implied their complaints are totally irrelevant because “someday we’ll launch more.”
- Starlink interferes with terrestrial telescopy much less than the baseline issues such as weather, atmosphere, etc.
- SpaceX has already done great work in ameliorating these issues anyway with better non-reflective coatings and design.
- Telescopes in space are orders of magnitude more useful than terrestrial ones, so it would not be a surprising net positive at all.
- Even if the previous point weren't true, telescopes are not really equivalent to taking kids to school. One is a necessity, the other is a nice to have. The truth is that most of the low-hanging astronomical fruit that can be gleaned from the "middle/bottom of the market" has already been picked anyway. Almost all new/significant astronomical discoveries/research are happening with space-based telescopes for exactly this reason. People aren't unraveling the secrets of the universe with a telescope in their backyard anymore.
- This entire situation has really nothing to do with Starship being a good thing. You can argue that Starlink is a net negative (for all the above reasons this seems hard to justify in practice), but that argument is orthogonal to whether or not Starship is good. This isn't really your fault because the parent comment is the one that initially conflated the two, but I felt this point should be made.
In any case the degree of interference thing isn’t too comforting since I would assume these issues are additive to one another.
Thank you for the good counterpoints! Would love to hear an astronomer’s take on whether the terrestrial-hanging-fruit has been picked, so to speak. It would not surprise me for sure.
Worst case estimate for a single Ariane 5: 200 million €.
Average launch cost for Space X: 50 million € (poorly researched I know)
The cost of the James Webb space telescope?
50 worst case Ariane 5 launches or 200 Space X launches.
I don't think the launch vehicle matters here.
Most of the cost was research, development and testing of new technologies. Building 10x JWST would not cost 10x what we paid for a single telescope. A single launch also means everything has to be perfect, there is no prototype in space, no second try and no learning from mistakes.
The project would also probably have made drastically different design and management decisions if they knew in advance they were sending >5 units instead of one.
I am not an expert at all but that at first blush that seems like bullshit. I’m 100% open to sources of info I should check out on this though.
Edit: FWIW another more believable argument than hypothetical future capacity satisfying the same demand would be “global internet is more important than terrestrial astronomy.” Not quite ready to say I agree with it but it seems very compelling!
I have not heard a single one claim that it will 'destroying billions of dollars of equipment'. And most don't want to stop further space craft.
What they do call for is regulation about these things in general. SpaceX is basically doing them a favor by modifying their sats, there is no legal obligation.
https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa...
And I’m not arguing for stopping further spacecraft either.
“Hey they don’t even legally need to mitigate their externalities!” is usually a good sign of “things that need regulation.”
The very broad survey orient visible telescopes are most effected of course.
Regulation both for visibility and for debris is warranted. But getting their by streaming 'earth astronomy is over and Kessler syndrome' is pretty counter-productive. If we can get away from that kind of language maybe we can actually make reasonable progress on these questions.
Unfortunately I can not find the series of lectures from astronomers and SpaceX. That had really go information. But there is an active working group somewhere that is meeting regularly that can probably be found somewhere.
They’ve said: this incurs a huge negative externality on the astronomy community.
The response was: it doesn’t matter because Starship will send up space telescopes at some point hopefully (TBD how long it’ll take, if ever, for them to reach the same availability as extant terrestrial telescopes)
That is the counterproductive response.
Why do they not have access to space telescopes? because they are currently extremely expensive to build and launch. Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper. It would allow them to iterate the design and send more units of the same models/design and reduce the design/research cost per unit.
This seems very handwavy. It appears space telescopes are actually more expensive because space telescopes are really expensive, not because it’s hard to move them to space.
Yes better/cheaper launches would reduce the risk, but that risk is 100% baked into the design and cost of the launch. There’s nothing the payload can do to mitigate the risk of the rocket failing, so there’s no reason to think x% of the telescope’s cost is actually due to the risk of the launch itself.
They could take 10% of the JWST budget (not including launch) and buy back 6+ launches. Seems to me launches are not super relevant.
Everything holds back more space-based telescopes - launch capacity, manufacturing capacity, research ideas. But the cheaper launching becomes, the more funding can be devoted to other parts (although something like Amdahl's law will apply), and may even trigger a virtuous cycle where cheaper launches mean you can get away with more standardised, less hardened hardware, which in is then lighter and can be launched more easily, and...
> are those telescopes going to have the same availability to researchers as terrestrial ones?
No, of course not, space telescopes are massively oversubscribed and difficult for even superstar researchers to get time on. That's exactly why we want to launch more of them.
Just for fun: what exactly could the parent have said to change your mind? Because if the answer is "nothing", then you're a rock.
It’s actually super straightforward.
The response seems “opposite” what was said because if you read between the lines, the whole comment was about hypothetical future improvements to the cost dynamics.
It's perfectly fair to say that constructing a road to a remote community will mean better ... everything ... for that community, but you're blaming them for not also building a hospital and a school at the same time as the road.
I mean, yeah, technically it's possible that we lose current capacity and we never get enough space capacity to make up for it but if you argue for this particular outcome, I think it's rather improbable. The parent made a very good point: cheaper and better lift to orbit means better ... everything. It would mean you have cost and capacity improvements for the whole chain, and yet nobody bothers to use this for JWST successors. That's a very thin line of probability you'd be arguing for.
And no, the condition doesn’t need to be that nobody bothers to use it, it’s that it doesn’t get used at such a scale on a timeframe people care about to replace the infrastructure it destroyed.
There was a man who was massively effective in getting multiple once-in—a-generation revolutionary companies of the ground by sheer grind and lots of luck (yes..both). We should thank that man of yore.
But that man is now a convenient stooge for the right wing and a pointless edgelord whiling away his money on pointless projects.
Both of these can be true. It’s okay.
Here’s to hoping Tesla, SpaceX and all his other world changing companies succeed inspite of him and let him cement his complicated legacy.
Go Starship Super Heavy!!
PS: Shoutout to Gwynne Shotwell for being a massively effective administrator for this incredible rocketship of a company.
She’s the low key (on this forum anyway) hero of human space flight in this decade. Absolute unit.
Can you imagine what things would have been like in Ford's time if he had the internet and Twitter to spread his views?
> Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon
You know, polarization takes at least two poles. If some people are rabidly anti-Elon, so some people are rabidly pro-Elon.
> Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink
They do not complain about the global internet. They have nothing against the global internet per se. They complain about satellites. There are no fundamental physical laws stating that the global internet comes with littering the sky with thousands of bright satellites. They can be less bright at least, or probably one can use some military expertise on making flying objects undetectable by any means. Then come costs/benefits analysis and the question becomes too difficult for an armchair experts to grasp. So they instead prefer to construct a strawman they feel comfortable to fight.
When you allow yourself to use such a rhetoric devices, you shouldn't be surprised when the other side becomes polarized. They reciprocate and then you feel the right or even an obligation to throw some more shit into your discussion, and then you have no chance for a meaningful discussion.
He's legit terrible as a person, someone who spends a significant amount of his time dedicated to trolling is not someone we should look up to
Yeah, no, trolls don't tend to be warm and humane. Trolling is the opposite of that actually. And it usually stems from cowardice because sincerity makes you vulnerable and that takes courage.
However, no matter how much I dislike the person I do appreciate the achievements at PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX in which he took part.
This intolerance to dissent was responsible for billions of innocent people being imprisoned in their homes during the COVID pandemic
People being free to share wrong ideas has social value.
And no, sharing a false or premature report is not extremism. Demanding censorship is.
I mean, he deleted the tweet after it was shown that the article it shared was without merit. What else do you want?
no
Trolling is maximizing for being obnoxious
Dark humor is great, being obnoxious is not
Anyone who doesn't value the attention of their fellow humans is either underdeveloped or evil.
But he gets a special pass from his little cult for being homophobic and having racist overtones.
The same with the FDA - we don't want a repeat of Thalidomide babies do we ???.
lmao, we managed to fuck up our very own perfect planet in 200 years of industrial revolution and the plan is to go transform a dead rock into earth
Elon or others I'll still find it stupid, this isn't minecraft
> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present
It's more like the present is (more than) slightly inconveniencing our future, and ego maniacs like Musk are a big part of the problem
It's the plan to protect humanity (as in the genus) from extinction level events such as asteroids, mega-volcano eruptions or global wars. As a nice side effect, the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.
That's a nice thought but it's 100% sci-fi, we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain. What if this race for survival is exactly the thing that will cause our end ?
> the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.
Except it's literally the opposite... we need a lot of co2 on mars to make it habitable
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-poss...
Sorry but I don't follow. We need to act because it's a real possibility, even though it's uncertain.
> What if this race for survival is exactly the thing that will cause our end ?
... "we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain."
Why would it cause our end?
> Except it's literally the opposite... we need a lot of co2 on mars to make it habitable
Sure, but that's not the only thing you need to do there. You also need to make fuel - out of CO2 that's already there.
This type of false equivalence and extreme hyperbole is why it polarizes people. The preferred terms of the conversation are so insane as to invite that specific outcome.
> affecting their precious telescopes
You also seem to feel entitled to adopt the position of a rank bully. Where does this entitlement come from? While reflecting on that, you might find a more charitable and honest answer as to the sources of polarization on this topic.
> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.
We'll have the future with or without Space X. This type of angry hype and blind argumentation simply underscore the above points.
As for the future... SpaceX has certainly inspired a large number of companies looking to try to emulate it success, but none have really managed to achieve anything comparable to increasingly dated SpaceX tech at this point, let alone where SpaceX is taking us with technologies like the Starship. So with this I think there's also a reasonable fear that without SpaceX we'd relapse back into the past since 1972, in terms of space progress - which is to say near zero.
One really cannot overstate the impact that SpaceX has had on space in the past, is continuing to have on space in the present, and will almost certainly continue to have in the future. That people want SpaceX to fail, and imperil all of this, just because they don't like somebody they don't even know, is such a terrible reflection on the state and motivations of society today.
Which leaves rockertry. Reusable rockets are quite an achievement, sure. So far the real world impact is limited to satellite internet, which is not available globally yet.
Starship still has to be launched successfully to count as rocketry advancement.
When a launch is "only" $50M, you can get away with much fewer redundancies, less testing making the thing you launch much cheaper.
And yeah, the first large-scale change we've seen from it is vastly better / cheaper satellite internet, but there will be others. Axiom space is a good example; a private company sending astronauts on missions.
Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back.
And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.
Where do you see society in 50 years?
That state-of-the-art is still sending rovers to Mars and hoping to achieve a fly-by of the Moon is nothing short of a complete and catastrophic failure in space. People often blame the money, that's not it. The Apollo program, in 2022 dollars, cost about $16 billion a year - starting from absolutely 0 knowledge. NASA's had at least that level of annual funding for the past 60 years. The thing, these great futures we all imagine don't create themselves. Without people, the sort of people who rarely emerge in a society, pushing humanity forward in any given direction, the future isn't going to be any better than the present, and there's every reason to think it may even be worse.
It's not hype. The progress made by SpaceX is demonstrable and profound.
Do you want the future of permanent settles on other celestial bodies in 200 years, or within our lifetimes? Because the latter will almost certainly require SpaceX achieving its long-term goals.
The grievances raised against both Musk and SpaceX are petty next to what humanity stands to gain if SpaceX is successful.
There are good reasons people are anti-Elon, and I don't need to list them here now. Technological advancement is nice, and it can be a good thing that one "eccentric" billionaire puts a lot of money into this. But there are consequences, and it's good that there are people who are critical of this. It's ok that people like Musk are scrutinized. In my opinion, there's way more room for scrutinity by mainstream media instead of them instead of sucking up every word he says.
And yes it is okay for Musk to be criticized. Putting billionaires up on a pedestal is almost as annoying as vilifying them for being successful.
Here comes elon zealot just copy and pasting empty claims and ignoring the actual facts we have. The lack of accountability is just staggering. And the only defense is a cave man ad hominem - oh they are just butt hurt anti-elons.
Elon Musk has a long list of bogus claims, outright lies and now currently on trail for fraud. His shtick is to make semi-revolutionary clam in X years, and before people start asking about that claim in near future he is making new claims about something completely new.
Thats why people are calling him out on his BS claims. So lets have a look:
The re-usability claims are all bogus, a make believe at best. For one, Starship is basically an early prototype rocket. Two, falcon 5 - a much simpler design - has current re-usability window at one month (as far as i remember). How do you go into weekly launches...
Empty claims of Elon Musk that they will work out the kinks are akin to Elisabeth Holmes claims. Or self driving tesla Next Year(tm), or underground tunnels, or hypelink, or amazing AI robot buttler all next year (tm).
Not to mention pretty strong evidence for Kessler Syndrome is already happening. And polluting orbit with starlinks are not helping.
global internet being provided by Starlink - you mean a toy for rich. Right? Cuz even tough it somewhat affordable now, for starlink to actually make money need and will cost way more.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.
SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
Whatever is motivating this narrative you've adopted about Musk, it isn't the pursuit of truth.
Or you know, people acknowledge both but his dumbassery overshadows his genius by a long stretch. Bezos, Zuck &co at least have the decency to shut the fuck up when they should, which is 99.9% of the time on 99.9% of topics. That's all he would have to do to be more appreciated
Twitter/X most certainly not among those accomplishments.
The other side will form the opposite opinion to signal that it is different.
A number of reasons, actually.
- Because the entire idea of "the Earth is fucked, so let's go set up camp on Mars" is a train of thought that's only applicable to the ultra-rich, and in the current economic environment that's (pretty understandably) an unpopular idea.
- Because after Starship's failed attempt at landing and highly-destructive launch earlier this year, people who care about the nearby wildlife refuge at Boca Chica are understandably not thrilled about continued ops there.
- Because the man behind SpaceX -- whose past achievements are admittedly impressive, at least in the spaceflight industry -- is increasingly associated with deceptive marketing, poor design choices, and incompetent product management, and when a corporation like SpaceX relies on significant funding from taxpayers that's a troubling combination.
- Personally, for me, coming from startups, "move fast and break things" scales terribly in terms of (for lack of a better word) social responsibility, and with the company's stated ambitions, I don't see this ending well.
SpaceX does a lot of cool shit, but let's not pretend like they're advancing the state of human existence here. They're a commercial entity, even if not publicly traded, but with Musk at the helm that feels like the tradeoff between being purely profit-driven vs having later-years Howard Hughes behind the wheel.
Anyway, it's pretty disingenuous to call Starship in particular "the most capable and sophisticated rocket ever built." So far it's capable of doing a significantly suborbital hop and failing to land. You could argue that it's failed at the one thing a spacefaring vessel should, by definition, not fail at.
I do trust in the FAA's judgement here, but I hope they work closely with Fish & Wildlife. The effects of climate change are increasingly endangering wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico, and having chunks of concrete the size of a living room flying into the water isn't helping.
Because people like Elon and Gwynne have knowingly lied or purposefully mislead the public regarding Space X.
An example is the Point to Point travel, this is not every going to happen. Anyone with a bit of knowledge about rocketry etc. knows this has a zero percent chance of happening alone because of the noise it would case. In their presentation they had Zürich as a destination, Zürich is so small that you would blow out every window in the entire city. Launching starship in Zürich will never ever happen.
Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_International_Airport
From the Starship Noise Assessment https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/AppendixB_No..., it looks like you need maybe 20 miles distance for a tolerable level of noise (around 100 dB)
So I'm not sure regular launches from the lake will be tolerated by the lake shore's inhabitants. This is why Starship launch platforms should be 30km from shore (not 20km as I wrote previously)
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230306-just-how-loud-is...
>Even 1.5 miles (2.4km) away, the noise from a Saturn V launch was recorded as being 120 decibels
https://www.wkcgroup.com/tools-room/inverse-square-law-sound...
Gets you 101.6 decibels from 20 km away.
Okay, how about 200 km over water? 81.6 decibels. Okay as a yearly event, not something that should happen every week.
Okay, how about 2000 km over water? 61.6 decibels. What was the point of this idea again?
The fact in of itself of polarisation of public discourse exists because there is a polarisation industry innocuously named social media.
It has subverted political discourse and education too.
Despite this, there are still enough reasonable people for science and scientific progress to continue.
However, one may right well feel pessimistic about the future.
There were other sites under consideration, and I'm sure they had their reasons for passing on them, but it's hard to see offhand how they could be worse than Boca Chica.
Will the super heavy need to launch from as near to the equator as possible? Or does it require higher latitudes?
https://spaceexplored.com/2021/07/07/update-on-spacexs-gulf-...
It also doesn't solve the ITAR issues which are strict when it comes to rocket technology because it's so close to the tech needed for ICBMs.
It's hard to overstate how restrictive ITAR is. For example, ITAR covers generation 3 night vision devices. The US is hesitant to allow their export to allies, even for peaceful purposes.[2] When I bought a night vision device, I had to sign an acknowledgement that I wouldn't take it out of the country or even allow non-citizens to look through it (even on US soil). People caught violating these rules can be imprisoned for years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Ballistic_Missil...
2. From page 10 of https://www.aviation.govt.nz/assets/publications/vector/Vect... "New Zealand operators must ensure restricted access to the goggles to comply with the US requirements."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1
There is also the "Kodiak Launch Complex (KLC), is a dual-use commercial and military spaceport for sub-orbital and orbital launch vehicles." Private companies Astra and ABL Space Systems have launched from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Spaceport_Complex_%E2%...
In the big picture though, given part of Starship's goal is intercontinental travel, spaceflight will happen to and from everywhere on the globe.
The only "safe" place to launch is in Florida on land that was grandfathered into being an EPA-free zone back in the 1960s by NASA.
East facing also isn't even remotely a requirement for a launch, Israel launches westward on a regular basis
It's not like the west coast has large stretches of undeveloped unprotected land either.
The only real alternative is Alaska, and that's suboptimal for other reasons.
What's worse is non-optimal launches will have far more environmental impact because you have to do more of them or use more fuel. Talk about cutting off your own nose.
Everything that happens affects the environment somehow, but the scrutiny here is wildly disproportionate to the actual impact, of disrupting a couple acres of beach.
The "corporation" of SpaceX is a unique national asset that no other nation currently has, and it provides incredible value to US citizens to maintain that edge (Starlink alone, and Starship would give us a launch capacity that dwarfs Russia or China).
That matters! That's important! This isn't a "corporations vs the people" issue. Industrial policy requires thoughtful tradeoffs, and this FAA/EPA action isn't one.
I'm surprised the DoD hasn't already overridden the EPA on this for matters of national security.
The administration could massively accelerate it with a couple phone calls, but I doubt they are even aware of the situation.
I understand that there will be a performance penalty at higher latitudes, however that really shouldn’t matter to what bocca chica is used for by spaceX
- FAA would never give licenses 100s of launches from Texas ever, volume is always planned from be Florida , just for experimental flights the penalty shouldn’t be a factor,
- given the order of magnitude change in payload capacity with Starship and reusability the performance factor shouldn’t really be critical even for production ?
The current , past and inevitable future delays at Bocca Chica is costing spaceX a lot , they are cash flow positive and far ahead of competition so they can afford it, but this is certainly does not look like the most optimal plan .
Name a better place.
I feel doubly embarrassed making a grammar mistake, now that you quoted including that mistake and all :)
That's why R&D is in Texas.
Yes, it is hard to believe, if you've done no research and choose to believe whatever you want.
From my own experience:
I drove to Bocca Chica three weeks ago and also took the fantastic helicopter tour from south padre, while it was awesome to get ridiculously close to the launchpad (walking behind the dunes gets you really up close) unlike at Vandenberg, KSC where you cannot get so close from public land this easily it definitely looked like an inconvenient site
- roads are pretty narrow and don’t look to be that high load bearing for heavy traffic and are being worked on (it is single lane in part as they are still working on it piece by piece to strengthen them), it takes a while to go from Brownsville to Starbase
- there is also a border checkpoint that takes a long time to cross during peak hours > 30 mins on the way back.
- you can actually see the Mexico border (a light house) from the OLM, I was getting cell signal from Mexico. It is less than 10 miles, so close to the border comes with its own problems was my impression .
- limited space to expand either Starbase and also at the launchpad. You can fly close only to starbase and it is quite visible from the air.
I am no expert, these are just a tourist’s observations, however in 70 years of American rocketery smarter people than me private and public have done the research and rejected places like Bocca Chica before for good reason.
Claiming that this is the perfect spot and no other feasible location and it is just that I don’t know(which I don’t) better seems a bit silly?
People can make mistakes not every decision makes perfect sense in hindsight. It does not detract from the work they have been able to do so far.
My town has a law where if a tree is over 10" in diameter, there's a fine of 5k if you cut it down. But actually, it's worse, because if they find out you plan to do this, or did it intentionally, they can continue to fine you arbitrarily and force you to re-plant a tree!
So you may own some land and have approval to build human habitation on it... but the tree prevents you, and you simply cannot do it via any legal means.
Otoh if I could... pay the town 5k, and also permanent preserve say 100 trees elsewhere... I could use my own land. I love trees as much as the next one, but it's just a huge risk to allow them to grow on my land cause once they pass that threshold, I irrevocably lose control of land I've paid for and continue to pay a lot of tax on.
It's also funny that if your enemy owns land, and you "help" his trees grow that thick without him knowing, property he planned to use as say an ultimate frisbee field will be permanently unusable for him, with no way out (except begging the city council, etc. and other behavior which is indistinguishable from bribery (money or psychologically))
I am not sure how much surveillance they do - in reality for large lots this restriction may not hold, since trees can disappear at night, be chipped up, etc. But for people in the suburbs, to cut one you need to get a crew in, and there are probably reporting requirements. Also the neighbors love to get involved.
But I do wonder if a tree imperceptibly had branches die, be removed, and then just gradually shrunk over time?
A lot of these laws don't cause much harm in a pre-surveillance world. But once there are full cameras on everything, seeing how they apply at 100% enforcement can be scary. But by that point there are defenders for each one, so they hardly change.
The tree dies, and needs to be cut down because it's dangerous to leave standing
Oh, and when building new buildings, make them as unremarkable and boring as possible, so they won't become historic in the future. Why take the chance? Indeed, make them ugly so the government might decide to pay you to get rid of them.
If you listen really close, you can hear Henry George spinning in his grave from the existence of this comment.
By your logic, restaurant owners should also be compensated for not being allowed to serve spoiled food, and bosses should be compensated for not beating their employees.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/0...
I could see a one time payment when the restriction is first added, but once it's there, that's priced into the value of the property, and influences who will buy it
Why should tax payers foot the bill for somebody who wants land by the wetlands because they're an avid birder?
It might even start a new class of landowner who buy uninteresting land, then cultivate lots of nature and wildlife, then make a profit when the government designates it a nature reserve.
Perhaps someone can expound cos I'm a brit. Thanks
the stereotype of dusty, desert Texas applies only to west Texas
If I correctly recall, Houston has frequent issues with flooding because so much of it is built on basically paved over wetlands.
The distance between Houston and Amarillo, both in Texas, is comparable to the distance between London and Berlin. I have driven at highway speeds for 10 hours without leaving Texas before when crossing it east to West.
US Highway 83 (N-S) is 906 mi, 1458 km.
Our tech circles tend to paint a very one-sided picture of the rules just putting roadblocks in front of us, but there's a lot of good examples both of what unregulated progress can do to natural resources, and of preservation efforts making a real difference.
If I was a professional environmentalist/preservationist, I'd be very frustrated with the total lack of empathy by the tech community and their efforts (often cutting-edge science!) getting described as backwards or in the way of progress almost constantly ...
Before you call my opinion fringe/extreme, go ahead and speak to some low-income folks at your local dive bar. You'll most likely find that 90+% of them are vehemently opposed to space missions in general, and especially SpaceX given the absurdity of traveling to Mars when we have so many low-hanging problems to fix here on Earth.
Would banning space development in the U.S. help us actually fix any of those low-hanging problems?
> go ahead and speak to some low-income folks at your local dive bar.
Are low-income folks at a local dive bar particularly knowledgeable about the subtle tradeoffs involved in effective government regulation?
If they were, they'd be high income. Or be about to be.
I can think of a long list of other things, starting with nuclear war, that are FAR bigger concerns.
Rarely have I seen such out of touch and vacuous opinions expressed with such surety… ;-)
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23733/spacex-exec-says...
Also see Starshield
SpaceX Exec Says Company Would Launch A Weapon Into Space In ‘Defense Of This Country’
It might not be a hypothetical question for long now that Congress has asked the US military to develop anti-missile defenses in space.
Griffin was Chief Architect of the Brilliant Pebbles 'missile defense using weapons in space' program and has been advocating for it his whole life. After NASA, Griffin started the Space Development Agency--what that article is talking about--and gave contracts to SpaceX. When Biden came in he deweaponized everything, and then the lines were clearly drawn between him and Musk.
Check out Michael D. Griffin and also Will Roper.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense...
But you also want to be able to destroy a few rogue missiles, such as from North Korea. If NK nukes Los Angeles, the argument that 'we must adhere 100% to the principle of no missile defense' would be unconvincing.
The problem with space-based orbital missile defense is it necessarily threatens the entire planet while being predictable and easy to shoot down with relatively small missiles. Those anti-satellites attacks, which are justified by threatened countries, lead to a cascade of space debris, that leaves an unusable space environment for centuries and may in itself trigger nuclear conflict.
Not everything has a technological solution. Staging weapons in space is not a path to world peace, it just heightens the stakes and shortens the escalation. As Israel learned, you can try to seal off your border and your sky, but there are always holes. There are many ways NK or Russia can deliver nukes besides ICBMs. Dreaming of a shield in space is a false promise. Building bridges rather than walls is the only path to peace.
If the U.S. can be a model for the world, it is not it's military might to emulate, but the idea that people of all nationalities and backgrounds can come and live together and resolve their differences. It is possible!
> Not everything has a technological solution. ...
> If the U.S. can be a model for the world, it is not it's military might to emulate, but the idea that people of all nationalities and backgrounds can come and live together and resolve their differences. It is possible!
Here I abolutely agree. Even warfare ends with political solutions. It is possible, especially today. It's not the 19th century any more. It just needs us. Thank you for posting that; people need to hear it much more!
The idea is decent, and Australia has that mostly working ok.
Isn't the the US though well known for it's internal racism issues?
If MAD was what was preventing them from being used, and MAD is no longer a thing, it's no longer fine that we have them. Anybody pushing to destabilize that balance of terror is going to need a damn good and through review of that question.
But what's certain is that it's politically polarized. SDI has support from [some/most?] republicans but not from [most/any?] democrats.
Now ask them for their opinions on fossil fuels.
Sorry, I don't mean to be gatekeepery here, but "low income folk at my local bar" is the last demographic I would seek the opinion of on anything scientific or of broader scope than car maintenance.
Anecdotally, my experience is that many of these people love conspiracy theories, and applying "common sense" to global problems like climate change. For example, I've heard these people say that because we got snow in October climate change is a hoax.
It's easy to rationalize writing off others - for politics, education, etc. - but I find they have insights that I lack, and I learn a lot by listening (and do bad things when I ignore them). Also, they don't go away, and then you're shocked and outraged when the vote doesn't go your way.
The government treats them as being equally valid for the purposes of elections (as it should), but that doesn't mean "people at your local dive bar agree with me, therefore I'm right" is a compelling argument
You don't think reaching out further into the universe will give more people the pale blue dot viewpoint and could cause more people to care more about earth when they realize how fragile and insignificant it is?
What about moving industry off the earth in the distant future? Wouldn't that be good for earth in the long run?
The on-the-ground reality is that concern for and protection of the natural environment are relatively recent practices and must be balanced against the continued technological and sociological progress of humanity. Otherwise, the answer is easily that the best thing for "the environment" is the complete extinction of humans. While some people may want to give that a serious treatment, I've always wondered why those people don't volunteer to go first.
Likewise, poorer societies produce less pollution than wealthier ones, so environmentalists willing to forego any kind of human progress in favor of protecting the environment should at least consider migrating altogether to countries without telecommunications infrastructure.
We don't yet know what all of the benefits and costs will arise from a lower barrier to space exploration. But, humans exist all over this planet right now because exploration is part of our nature. Rejecting space exploration out of hand is to reject our very nature -- a curious argument, from a naturalist.
What do you call "relatively recent"?
Also, abusing environmental regulation to set space policy is just straight up a bad idea. It's fine if you think we shouldn't be investing in space, but don't try and force that belief on the rest of us in an undemocratic manner. It's very NIMBY-esque
[1] https://www.space.commerce.gov/doc-study-on-economic-benefit...
SpaceX and the super heavy payloads are a massive massive massive strategic advantage for the defense department. Imagine:
You want a functionally operational combined arms battalion deployed within two hours to the middle of Siberia? And then regularly supplied? Forget about having expensive foreign bases. You can deploy boots on the ground forces within hours.
Starship is a cheap platform for 100-150 tons of ... whatever ... deployed ... whereever ... whenever. To say nothing of orbital battle platforms or other stuff, simply the rapid deployment alone makes SpaceX absolutely critical to US "defense".
I can imagine the US DoD taking renewed interest in those midwestern remote ICBM sites as ready launch sites for rapid deployment forces. That's right, launch from Kansas, land whereever in hours. Australia? Africa? Antarctica? Sure.
Imagine fighting a conventional war and local general thinks they have a US affiliated fighting force pinned down. Suddenly, a combined arms battalion appears right behind his lines. The mobility Starship would provide the US military at very palatable costs is a battlefield revolution.
1) 100-150 tons is the estimated payload to LEO, not back down to the ground. For Starship to land (on Earth) it will need to be mostly if not entirely empty.
2) Even if Starship could get that much payload down to the ground, how do you unload vehicles from an upright Starship? A built in crane maybe, but it sounds like a recipe for disaster.
3) Once you land a Starship somewhere remote, how do you get it back? It can't fly back (from Earth). It's too big to realistically airlift unless maybe you have a very large runway nearby for something like a supped up Super Guppy / Airbus Beluga. Do you plan on just leaving this cutting edge hardware in Siberia?
4) Missile defense systems could easily shoot down a Starship landing near enemy territory.
5) Why is this needed? Wars tend to have weeks of warning, at least for those who need to plan them. This is plenty of time for military planners to get their assets prepared to be deployed from nearby military bases or navy ships, both of which America has in spades around the world. American military logistics are already so excellent, there doesn't seem to be much margin for improvement.
>Suddenly, a combined arms battalion appears right behind his lines.
That "suddenly" is pretty funny. Can you imagine trying to sneak up on someone from aboard the loudest vehicle in the world as you're trying to gently guide it to the ground to avoid exploding? If the enemy has SAMs or artillery, your rocket and everyone in it is toast. Even if you successfully land, you better hope you've used all your fuel before the enemy has a chance to start shooting small arms. Even if a mostly empty rocket can't explode, it can still easily be engulfed in flames.
You don't have free air; you need to find a way to reuse it, or you'll die.
You can't simply source water from a river; if you don't find a way to reuse the same water multiple times, you'll die.
You can't just eat vegetables and rely on cows that graze on open land; if you don't figure out a way to produce food without using vast expanses of land, you'll perish.
You can't just build a house from a few sticks from the nearest forest or rely on minimal heating from drilled gas or oil. If you don't find a way to protect against radiation and heat your home efficiently, you'll die.
You can't rely solely on oil for energy; if you can't move between structures, sooner or later, you'll die.
Mars represents a global rethinking of our entire way of living, pivoting to a sustainability-only approach.
In many cases, the sustainable approach is also cheaper. After all, reusing resources tends to be more economical. Consider solar energy as an example. It's booming not just because of its environmental benefits, but because it's cost-effective.
And why are we building solar panels? Because NASA needed it before for space exploration.
So when I hear, "Let's not focus on space; let's fix Earth," I can't help but think of a Luddite who's inadvertently advocating for our planet to remain in its current, unsustainable state.
"Lets fix Earth". The issue is the small wee number (what, almost 8 billion) of humans on the Earth and getting them to cooperate. So far, notsomuch, and the beloved economic structure to every Hacker News, capitalism, does not have practical structures to accomodate conservation, environmentalism, restraint, or valuation of nature.
Capitalism essentially is a structure that maximizes resource use. The entire ruling elite was determined by the winners of capitalism, and their psychology is not of rational restraint, respect of the world, respect of others, or even respect for their children.
Capitalism has a side game of converging to maximal sociopathy for the individual (greed is good, selfish is good per microeconomics, that is the definition of a rational consumer) while not overly crashing the whole system, except maybe after the next quarter's earnings report.
Capitalism and the "economics intelligentsia" have no workable theory for transitioning our current economic structure to a different one. The notion of an "externality" (note that the verbiage directly places concerns of environmentalism and long term survival as a phenomenon outside/external to the functioning of economics) has only existed in a widespread fashion in the last decades, and really only begrudgingly to address the impending reality of global warming. Thus, there is no real development of economic (and certainly no practical political ones) to transition to some restrained model.
The current economic plan: let it get so bad that the actual supply/demand curves of markets are "disrupted" enough. This probably means war, famine, displacement of billions, loss of arable and livable land, etc.
The fact the elite have increased their wealth share shows that since the rise of widespread science on sustainability, the power structure has doubled down on sociopathy, selfishness, denialism, and procrastination.
This is not good. The only positive trend is the miraculous fact that EV drivetrains and solar/wind turned out to be cheaper than ICE/fossil fuels once sufficient infrastructure and research had been performed.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, stops habitat destruction, soil erosion, squandering of water resources, pollution, and mass extinctions.
Happy days!
You’ll also find that 90+% don’t care about research into basic science at all, art preservation, art creation, environmental preservation, or even obscure medical research.
It’s a bad signal because it’s from a bunch of reactionary people.
We, uh, have yet to meet that line in most of the world. Pretty much anyone draining an aquifer, or having to import more soil nutrients than are produced by their land year-over-year, is doing something that's unsustainable.
Impossible. It's not how the universe works.
The degree to which we normalize unsustainable industrial activities is impressive.
We're not talking about the heat death of the universe here. Industrial society (especially industrial agriculture) is counting down toward auto-destruct sequence on a time scale of decades, not billions of years. Look at trendlines for soil erosion, aquifer depletion, cadmium soil buildup, land salinification, etc.
It's oddly one-sided how people always ask if sustainable agriculture can replace industrial agriculture. By the very definition of the word "unsustainable," industrial agriculture cannot replace industrial agriculture.
The impact of rockets is a tiny speck by comparison. In this case rockets will effectively preempt the slow encroach from land privatization lobbying and housing development, which would be far (far!) more destructive to the wetlands than the occasional rocket detonation or ten...
Anyone who loves preserving wilderness should love rocket launch sites, as shown by the history of Cape Canaveral vs surrounding land.
Not just me, this is the mainstream business-as-usual expectation. Collapse of breadbasket regions tends to be a Very Bad Thing.
What did you think "unsustainable" meant anyway?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
https://theconversation.com/farmers-are-depleting-the-ogalla...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
> will lead to society's destruction
Technically by "self-destruct" I mean that the agriculture system destroys itself, by somehow undermining its own mechanisms of support. How much of 'society' gets pulled down with it? That's up to us to decide.
97% of our farmland uses no groundwater. None.
If US lost 3% of its agricultural output tomorrow, we'd still be growing more food than we can possibly eat; still be filling our cars with a mix of gasoline and corn liquor as we do today.
Perhaps I should have asked this question instead: Is there any evidence that would cause you to change your belief that society is on the brink of collapse, or is that belief unfalsifiable like religious faith?
How much of farmland is situated close to cities (main cause of aquifer deterioration)? Would that farmland still have enough water after aquifers are caput?
Nonetheless, it is prudent to preserve those water sources.
re: farms near cities, I think it varies a lot by region. Growing thirsty crops near LA is going to be a lot harder than near Houston.
Groundwater degradation is just as bad of an issue - in the US [2], in Europe [3] and APAC regions [4]. The sole exception is Africa, but if they follow the same pathway as everyone else in exploiting and managing it, it's not going to be sufficient [5].
[1] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/lln-20... (full report: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/LLN-...)
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groun...
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...
[4] https://www.asiapathways-adbi.org/2022/11/the-invisible-wate...
[5] https://phys.org/news/2023-03-africa-aquifers-scarcity.html
Please list out all of the other wetlands being destroyed by space exploration. Then list them as a percentage of global wetlands or list out what would be endangered by this one location being used as a launch site.
Maintaining some basic protections on remaining wetlands is probably a good idea.
There are many things society can do without. Water is not one of them.
But then, Texas politics is Texas politics, so I wouldn't be surprised if there indeed turned out to be significant abuse of protections laws for political gain...
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-454_4g15.pdf
It's actually kind of disgusting how transparently the EPA has been playing their hand to maximize exploitable/monetizable authority and jurisdictional area without regard for real environmental concerns, development impact, or indeed their own legal mandate.
There's absolutely an element of that organization that doesn't care either way what happens to the environment or community, they just want infinite authority under the guise of environmental protection so that you to have a reason to bribe them.
You're implying corruption for monetary gain, that is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
I'll be that person and ask "do you have evidence of this"?
The hypothesis that "money talks" is usually enough to explain stuff like this. Perhaps instead of political favoritism I should have simply said corporate power is always able to find a way around such obstacles and the little guy never is.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration...
The laws waived:
National Environmental Policy Act
Endangered Species Act
Federal Water Pollution Control Act (Clean Water Act)
National Historic Preservation Act
Migratory Bird Treaty Act
Migratory Bird Conservation Act
Clean Air Act
Archeological Resources Protection Act
Paleontological Resources Preservation Act
Safe Drinking Water Act
Noise Control Act
Solid Waste Disposal Act
Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act
Antiquities Act
Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act
Farmland Protection Policy Act
National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act
National Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956
Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act
National Trails System Act
Administrative Procedure Act
Eagle Protection Act
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
American Indian Religious Freedom Act
Federal Land Policy and Management Act
I know that if I was a turtle at Boca Chica I would rather deal with the occasional rocket launch than the ATV's that also use the beach.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/10/05/real-w...
Ah, yes, as we all know, Americans are unique in the entire world for their lack of knowledge of chemistry.
It seems that the toxicity of methane should be discussed not alone, but rather with respect to the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere in question.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208285/#:~:text=Thus%2....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth:
“As of 2023, by mole fraction (i.e., by number of molecules), dry air contains 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases.”
Did they take out nitrogen, added 7 parts nitrogen to 10 parts of air, use something else than mole fraction, …?
1) regular spills of fuel, that
2) aren't burnt up in the air before they hit the ground and
3) are liquid, not gaseous, and
4) are hypergolic.
Boca Chica doesn't have any of those 4 requirements.
2) Even if a rocket explodes in the air it is unlikely all of its propellant will completely burn up (fuels aren't mixed, the ratios are optimized for a specific combustion conditions, and there are multiple tanks, etc), and there are many failure modes besides "massive explosion"
3) Just because the main component of a fuel will boil off eventually doesn't mean chemicals added to the propellant or produced in side reactions will
4) Hypergolic just means chemicals spontaneously combust on contact with one another; it has nothing to do with environmental risk.
What do you have in mind that exists in quantities large enough to make things "extremely toxic"?
> 4) Hypergolic just means chemicals spontaneously combust on contact with one another; it has nothing to do with environmental risk.
Nothing except if you look at the actual list of rocket fuels that get used.
I don't know where you are quoting "extremely toxic" from but even small quantities of toxic chemicals can be cause for concern.
> Nothing except if you look at the actual list of rocket fuels that get used.
Just because a square's a rectangle doesn't make a rectangle a square. Hypergolics are toxic does not equal non-hypergolics are non-toxic. For example, hydrazine monopropellant.
Look up a couple comments in the thread. "I was under the impression that regular use of rocket fuel made a lot of land extremely toxic."
And we can't just assume there are harmful additives in meaningful quantities.
> Just because a square's a rectangle doesn't make a rectangle a square. Hypergolics are toxic does not equal non-hypergolics are non-toxic. For example, hydrazine monopropellant.
Okay, technically it spontaneously decomposes upon contact with a catalyst. That's so close to the definition of hypergolic.
Also it was pretty clear what they were saying. You can nitpick the wording, but their underlying point is still valid. SpaceX isn't using toxic fuels.
No one's assuming there are, but the onus is to prove that there aren't.
> Okay, technically it spontaneously decomposes upon contact with a catalyst. That's so close to the definition of hypergolic.
But that's not WHY it is toxic. A substance can be not only non-hypergolic, it could be completely non-flammable and still be toxic, like say Carbon Tetrachloride, which is why the parent comment that I was replying to saying "since it's not hypergolic, it's therefore not toxic" is wrong, which was the thing I was trying to correct. SpaceX isn't using toxic fuels, but not because they are not using hypergolic fuels.
For an environmental assessment, yes. For someone casually arguing against the area becoming "extremely toxic" then we should need a reason to suspect large amounts of very bad additives.
> But that's not WHY it is toxic.
Yeah but nobody said that.
The post was giving reasons the area isn't being made toxic, and one of those reasons is because out of the list of normal rocket fuels only the hypergolic ones are terrible, and they're not using those fuels.
It's fine to point out that it's not directly because of hypergolic or not (though there are strong correlations based on how reactive things are), but it doesn't affect the actual point they were making. You made it sound like a rebuttal when it's not a rebuttal. At worst they worded it badly.
Lmao, what are some hypergolic propellants that aren't toxic? They're insanely reactive by their very nature, that means they will react and fuck with anything that's alive. They're intrinsically incredibly toxic.
That being said, there are plenty of propellants used as part of hypergolic combinations that aren't toxic. For example, oxygen, used as part of the hypergolic ignition system for SpaceX's merlin engines.
Merlin engines combine TEA-TEB with liquid oxygen to start the engines but do not use TEA-TEB as a propellant. TEA-TEB also spontaneously ignites with air; that shit is insane but you deliberately chose not to mention TEA-TEB because you know TEA-TEB would fuck you up (presuming you could even consume it without catching fire first!) Leaving out such a pertinent detail leaves it hard to believe you're not arguing in bad faith.
Why are we even talking about hypergolic propellants? Because a fear mongering comment upthread suggested that rocket propellants are extremely toxic. Scratch hyperbolic propellants off the list and what are you left with? Kerosene, methane, hydrogen, and oxygen. None of these present a significant toxicity threat, the worse of them is kerosene which can contaminate the soil and groundwater but all of the others vaporize harmlessly. So the fear monger was trying to cash in on the toxic reputation of hypergolic propellants to insinuate that Starship presents such a threat itself. This is complete nonsense, a bad faith argument that even a single minute of research can refute.
No, I said they use liquid oxygen as a propellant, and they use liquid oxygen as a hypergolic. The fact that this doesn't make LOX a hypergolic propellant is precisely my point.
> TEA-TEB also spontaneously ignites with air
> you know TEA-TEB would fuck you up
EXACTLY. Hypergolic is a property of the combination of chemicals, toxicity is a poroperty of a single chemical. Air is non toxic no matter what you combine it with. TEA-TEB is toxic no matter what you combine it with. Air being hypergolic with TEA-TEB does not suddenly make it toxic, nor does it suddenly make TEA-TEB non-toxic.
I'm not arguing in bad faith, you just are fundamentally misunderstanding what point I am trying to make, which again is that hypergolicity != toxicity. No more, no less.
> Scratch hyperbolic propellants off the list and what are you left with? Kerosene, methane, hydrogen, and oxygen.
You are repeating the misunderstanding about hypergolicity. Scratch propellants that can be used in hypergolic combinations off the list and you have nothing. Scratch hypergolic propallant COMBINATIONS off the list, and you still have non-hypergolic combinations of all those highly toxic propellants. Methane and oxygen are both non-toxic, but that has nothing to do with the fact that they need an ignition source to burn with one another.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole."
Isaac Asimov, from the leading words to John D. Clark's "Ignition!"
While technically true, in rocketry - where the term was born - "hypergolic" mostly mean "of hydrazine family", which are (almost all extremely) toxic.
So it's a moot point to talk about the fine print. What was meant is that SpaceX doesn't pollute the land with poisonous fuel of the Starship, and the one argument is that the fuel isn't poisonous to begin with.
(And I'd really like to know what kind of additive would be in liquid methane - medium cryogenic - which Musk hopes to keep adding on Mars and which is toxic.)
SpaceX does use hydrazine-related components in Dragon and Crew Dragon, but they don't launch from Boca Chica (and rather small by mass) - AFAIK Starship is planned to be 100% methane-oxygen vehicle, justification for Mars flight.
The goal with Starship is to try to use Methalox everywhere so that's the only thing that needs to be resupplied. Long term this would be meaningful for ISRU, but short term this would be meaningful for in-space refueling and propellant depots. A more typical approach of using different fuel types for different things would create all sorts of restrictions on capabilities and would make in-space refueling more complicated.
The SpaceX tests at Boca Chica have been almost entirely oxygen, methane, and RP-1.
[1]https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/PEA_for_Spac...
Also, they're expanding their factory in Florida, so they could be built on site.
They have mentioned recently that they do still plan to go to barge launching when they get to 1000 flights per year.
The idea is not crazy, at least not any more than anything else related to Starship. But it is not needed right now.
Chernobyl also demonstrates this effect that humans avoiding the place are beneficial to the wildlife. While both Bhopal and Chernobyl events are pretty horrible, I think the GP has a point.
I guessed 1989 for Chernobyl, at least I got the decade correct (remember it happened in either Jr High or High school for me).
I was a year off for the Challenger disaster (I remember riding the school bus to high school when it happened which narrows it down to about 3 years).
Let Musk buy up land a few miles away, convert it to more wetlands w/government help, permanently endow & protect it. The gov't could get 10x as much land protected as before - in exchange for giving up the few small acres near the launch facility.
It seems like everyone wins this way! Musk & SpaceX can do their work, environmental protection of land for the future & birds etc. has improved locally and nationally on net. The only ones who don't win are the bureaucrats who have approval over other people's productive work. So... this type of deal rarely ever happens.
2) the FAA's concern is protection of humans, and the FAA is the lead agency.
If only it were that simple. If the occasional rocket launch is what causes that turtle's species to go extinct because it damages the shells of their eggs or the bright light disrupts their mating schedule or whatever that is all that matters to the turtle.
Nah, that's crazy talk. Instead let's just speculate wildly.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/PEA_for_Spac...
Boca Chica is perfect.
The major issue with Boca Chica was the (literal) handful of residents who lived there, some of which refused to move when SpaceX first came around with offers to buy their land. I don't know what is the current status of them.
The bonus velocity you get for launching further south can end up increasing payload mass by significant percentages or giving a smaller mass more velocity to achieve higher orbits with the same amount of fuel.
But, same as Boca Chica, it is on US soil, relatively close to the Equator and you can launch rockets eastwards over the sea. And in both cases, closures of the sea for launches don't disrupt important sea lanes.
TBH, I find this sad. I remember when Marcus Lemonis got into trouble for a fairly benign off-hand remark. It really drove home the point how fickle people could be at the slightest perceived slight.
Then add the media that loves to fan the flames and it ends up being a really unfortunate system.
We need to find a way to get people back to honest and open dialogue.
When have humans EVER had honest and open dialogue about anything?
Seems like the intolerance of the left goes a lot further and is a lot more effective.
Amazing that the one time a tech billionaire is vocal about their views which lean right (sorry, second after thiel), suddenly everyone wants politics out of boardrooms?
There is no shortage of Republican billionaires having their way with American politics for personal gain and anyone who is paying attention is repulsed by it.
Look at Harold Hamm of Continental Resources oil company. He was asked to be Trump's energy secretary but he didn't want to leave the company he started which made him worth $25 billion.
Instead he has a superpac that funds Republican candidates and causes, and he flies his jet to Washington to schmooze politicians into supporting the oil industry through policy making.
He busses employees to the capital and hands them signs to protest bills which would raise taxes on the oil industry.
He emailed employees encouraging them to vote against medical marijuana because it's corrupting society.
I wanted politics out of boardrooms a long time ago!
This does assume the rocket can refuel on Mars.
No other ship can launch 150+ tons in a 9m-diameter payload bay, use propellant that can be created on Mars, and can vertically land and take off again.
It seems all of these are required optimizations for Mars colonization or Moon missions. The fact that NASA selected Starship as its human landing vehicle for the US's return to the moon strikes me as a remarkable vote of confidence by a highly qualified organization with far more data than we have and a lot at stake.
Could you elaborate on how they got it so wrong?
Yet Starship is costing SpaceX a whole heck of a lot of money to develop. I don't think that makes any sense unless they have some other business plan in mind for it. Launching massive constellations of satellites is that plan, there's a huge amount of profit potential in the near-term if they can make Starship work. Starlink alone might make Starship worth it, but fulfilling SDI contracts could be the real money cow (incidentally, SDI is politically polarized, and this might be part of the reason why Musk has "gotten political". If Musk really wants SDI contracts then he needs republicans to fund it.)
If you're inclined to believe Musk is sincere with the Mars colonization talk, then perhaps you could conclude that the plan is to make insane amounts of money building huge LEO constellations and then use that to fund Mars colonization. But from what I understand, Musk has said that SpaceX won't be building colonies and is focused on building the ships to get there instead. Who's buying?
> The fact that NASA selected Starship as its human landing vehicle for the US's return to the moon strikes me as a remarkable vote of confidence by a highly qualified organization with far more data than we have and a lot at stake.
Maybe. I'm very surprised SpaceX won that contract, maybe people at NASA really believe they can do it. Or maybe they decided to give SpaceX enough rope to hang themselves. Or maybe nobody really expects Artemis to get that far and the whole thing is basically a joke at the taxpayer's expense. Or maybe there are people at NASA who believe in SDI and want to make sure Starship is successfully developed. In any case, even if they can actually do the moon missions there's a huge gap between hanging out on the Moon for a few weeks and making a serious go at a long-term Martian colony.
Frankly, as someone very interested in Starship (and SpaceX in general), I don't disagree with you. But this isn't really a revelation - the strategy has always been Starlink first, HLS (NASA Human Landing System) second, Mars third. Due to delays and NASA-driven deadlines, it's arguable that HLS has moved into the top spot and limited launch activities will need to focus on fuel depot milestones instead of Starlink launches.
The Starlink business model is impressive. Two million people worldwide (as of Sept 2023) paying $200/month grosses $4.8 billion in revenue - about what NASA paid for HLS, IIRC. I don't see why pursuing that is a problem, and spending $5B on Starship to get a 30,000 satellite constellation in orbit to expand the capacity to 20 million subscribers per year or more is a slam dunk financially.
As for Mars, we know one thing: nothing will happen without a new heavy lift rocket similar to Starship. Once that's in place, doors will open - one may be to Mars, but I agree it's much further down the road than people think.
But I do believe that Musk's goal is Mars, and he's willing to spend a large percentage of his fortune to get there. In the meantime, he's betting that a lot of people will come along for the ride and address the challenges of a Mars mission (not even "colony") with new innovation.
Without Starship, there's no reason to research ISRU technologies like efficient Sabatier reaction equipment, or automated assembly, or million other Mars-specific technologies because we have no vehicle to get there.
With Starship, he's able to pull an entire industry forward. Maybe it is made of crazy dreamers, but crazy dreamers are often needed for a step-change level risk.
I don’t think the area around Boca Chica is very important and the land around is not special or worth more than having a launch facility.
The FAA will complete a Written Reevaluation (WR) to the 2022 Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) evaluating the new environmental information, including Endangered Species Act consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If the FAA determines through the WR process that the contents of the PEA do not remain valid in light of the changes proposed for Flight 2, additional environmental review will be required. The FAA will post the completed WR on this site.
Not even a due date. Not sure it qualifies as "news".
This does NOT mean a launch license has been granted but is a good sign one could be granted very soon!
(I think we could get a launch license announcement today or tomorrow, just my opinion though)"
You think the US government would allow that? Or are you under the illusion that SpaceX doesn't have close ties with the DoD?
I don't know how any of this works though; assuming everyone else was cool with it, does the FAA need to be consulted in such a scenario? Does the FAA have worldwide jurisdiction over launches by/for USA companies?
This will presumably matter in the (IMO unlikely) case of suborbital city-to-city civilian transport via Starship launches.
Yes it does. Per https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/commercial-space-transportation... "An FAA license is required for any launch or reentry, or the operation of any launch or reentry site, by U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, or by any individual or entity within the U.S. "
Details matter
Yes, SpaceX is a private company, and no, they're not a weapons manufacturer at the moment... but only because the DoD has only asked them to loft surveillance equipment and not told them to launch warheads, and only because they've aimed for orbital targets above the atmosphere rather than on a different continent.
They've no doubt signed their life away on not exporting Merlin, Draco, and Raptor engine designs. You may be annoyed at the NSA's attempts to control and restrict "military grade cryptography" in the 90s, or at various bureaucracies that attempt to license which trades and businesses are allowed or not allowed to do various kinds of work. But in rocketry, they're deadly serious about their job.
SpaceX cannot run to Mexico.
I am actually reasonably familiar with ITAR, including part 121, category 4 (or IV). And Mexico has 'special trading partner' status under the USMCA (formerly NAFTA) and there are carve outs between the US and Mexico.
I recognize the reality of such a move would be complicated, require licensing and review, and have geopolitical consequences that everyone would want to weigh in on.
All that said, SpaceX could start that process in earnest (which is to say, announce it, start knocking down the regulatory hurdles) and that would give them tremendous leverage in their discussions with the FAA. It would take a while, it would take persistence, but the longer they pushed for it the closer it would get to reality. It would create a credible alternative (if somewhat longer) path to launch against the push back by the US Gov't agencies.
The politics of space flight are complicated, but they are politics.
I would think that the people here who watched Uber take on the politics of the cab monopolies, or the EU's politics of privacy reaching in and impacting US companies, would begin to understand that laws and regulation are an expression of the prevailing politics and when the politics change the laws change to support the current point of view. Those examples are clearly not as significant as national security politics but history tells us that even those change.
The crypto wars, which I was in the middle of, are a good example of going from "you can't do that" here are the laws, regulations, etc. To "okay fine."
To be clear, I don't expect SpaceX to advocate for building a launch facility in Mexico. Their somewhat mercurial "technical guy" with the billions of dollars at his disposal however doesn't seem to shy away from politically difficult strategies if he sees an advantage in them. That makes betting against SpaceX opting to build a launch facility further south not as safe a bet as it would be say for Blue Origin doing something like that.
There's precedent for these sort of foreign enclaves that would still be a part of the host country but fall within the geographical borders of another. Mexico could be open to some sort of agreement.
France keeps French Guiana and the ESA gets to launch rockets there. It's strategically valuable.
The FAA directions explicitly tell them they're bound, obligated to seek clearances from Mexico to do work which impacts Mexicans. I read the doc:
The VLA is approximately 2.2 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border and the LLCC is approximately 1.3 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border. ... SpaceX would coordinate with the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation–Mexico if any airspace, land, or water access restrictions in Mexico were required.But, wrapped up in nicer language.
SpaceX must obtain a modified license from the FAA before it is authorized to conduct a second Starship/Super Heavy launch. The modification must address all safety, environmental, and other regulatory requirements. As part of that license application determination process, the FAA will review new environmental information, including changes related to the launch pad, as well as other proposed vehicle and flight modifications.
Noting:
The VLA is approximately 2.2 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border and the LLCC is approximately 1.3 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border. ... SpaceX would coordinate with the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation–Mexico if any airspace, land, or water access restrictions in Mexico were required.
It sounds like a lot of words to say that they need more time.
It feels like if a prototype Toyota had a wheel fall off and everyone immediately assumed Toyota was incompetent and incapable of making cars. It just makes no sense.
I think it’s plausible that they can make it work, but I don’t think it’s a certainty that it’ll work out. I don’t really know what the backup plan is, if they can’t get the belly-flop and flip to a high enough level of reliability.
I also think the development timelines promised to NASA seemed… overly aggressive (as if they were Musk timelines, which never hold instead of Shotwell timelines, which usually only slip a bit)
It seems likely that they’ll get there, but “hit it once” is not demonstrated to my satisfaction.
When they can hit it 3 out of 4 tries, I’ll believe they can get to a place where it’s reliable enough for cargo missions (95%). When they land it 50 times in a row without a failure, then I’ll believe they have a good shot at putting people on it eventually.
It took _20_ launches to get a successful Falcon 9 upright landing. By 2021, across 31 launches they had a single landing failure. Across all of 2022 and 2023 YTD, 137 launches, their success rate is 100%.
By comparison, the shuttle program had 2 failures across 135 launches.
SpaceX is achieving higher levels of reliability for way less cost than anyone else.
Failure is part of the process and the process is clearly working.
I wasn’t saying that the failures indicate that the process isn’t working. You’ll notice that wasn’t my initial point at all when I expressed my skepticism.
I only brought it up to respond to the point: “They have already flight tested the belly flop flip and had no problems with it.”
That isn’t true. They have had problems with it. That’s why I mentioned those tests.
Could they continue to iterate on it and work out those problems? Yes! They could. Could they continue to iterate on it, and find the problems to be very hard to overcome? Yes, that kind of thing has also happened in SpaceX history.
I’m not saying they’re doomed to fail. I’m saying there’s something that seems to me relatively high risk, and a core part of their plans. I don’t think that aspect has been fully de-risked, and I don’t understand what the alternative option would be if they can’t make it reliable enough.
If you call that unfounded skepticism, then I’d turn around and say you’re being overly optimistic.
> It took _20_ launches to get a successful Falcon 9 upright landing.
I know. I watched every single one live. As I’ve watched every single Starhopper test live. I remember exactly where I was for their first successful landing of each.
I’m not hoping they fail. I desperately want them to be successful. If you asked me to bet on it, I’d say more likely than not that they get it sorted. But I’m less confident than I was for the F9 landings.
The same is true for all good R&D projects. If there is no real risk of complete failure, you are not being ambitious enough.
“Elon is not some futuristic space god” and “Elon has achieved some cool stuff” are perfectly compatible concepts
I’m not sure what it is about him that seems to trigger an immediate leap to either fellating him or fellating yourself
He seems to care for future humans, current humans can suffer, it doesn’t matter because everything will be so great in 100 years. But wait, maybe it won’t be so great because another great leader will disregard current humans, for humanity?
The next question is if we are able to afford everyone the freedom to separate actions from character then would we be better off?
Probably since they could always go back to the pacific islands like in the Falcon 1 days, but logistics to there are even worse.
> In the Written Re-Evaluation, the FAA concluded that the issuance of a vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, that the data contained in the 2022 Programmatic Environmental Assessment remains substantially valid, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action. Therefore, the preparation of a supplemental or new environmental document is not necessary to support the Proposed Action.
The biggest issue with their last launch was that the flight termination system failed to destroy the rocket in a prompt manner and needs to be re-certified, regardless of where they launch from.
I remember one professor in our university who did post-mortem analysis of the program failure.
He compared that setup with 3-body problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem) where system exhibits nearly chaotic behavior on small disturbances - not stable. 30+ driving engines just multiply the severity - extremely not stable. Plus parasitic resonances in engines and all such wonders.
N1 had very fat backlink (for that time) to base where control system / computers of the engine pack was located. Sure, computers are better now than when but I suspect problem of controlling such pack is not really solvable due to instability of physical system.
I really want to be mistaken but here is my educated guess - this thing will not fly.
All successful designs so far have one or two main engines, may have additional engines but of significantly lower thirst.
> All successful designs so far have one or two main engines, may have additional engines but of significantly lower thirst.
What? The SLS has 4, and its the highest tonnage rated operational rocket in existence. The Falcon Heavy has 27 engines and flies commercial NASA missions
Falcon 9 has 9 engines and launches weekly...
The N1 failures were attributed to the engines, NK-15, which had too aggressive parameters for the time. The next generation of engines, NK-33, showed much greater reliability.
With the system of such complexity, which was planned to get to work with test launches - because ground-based test systems didn't exist (for the first stage) - it's no big wonder first four launches weren't successful. Even with them the 4th almost completed the 1st stage burn. The chances for the next flight, with NK-33, to be successful at least for the first stage were rather good, and in few more flights they could get to operational reliability.
Time and money were against the engineers, however.
This all doesn't prove ~30 engine stages can't fly. They are more complex - sure, but still.
What a ridiculous falsehood. Every manned rocket to reach orbit since 1966 has used 5 or more engines. Of those that are currently operational, none have fewer than 8.
Each engine has 4 main combustion chambers and four nozzles so it looks like 20
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/19853973575/in/pho...