Starship’s second flight test | Hacker News Reader

Starship’s second flight test

spacex.com

156 pointshi227 comments

If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).

It’s bonkers. It’s absolutely bonkers. I feel like I’m witnessing the creation of the wheel.

Non-space nerds don’t quite understand why it’s so exciting. But I can’t imagine how much this is going to change the world, and civilization. It’s kind of the equivalent of going from local freighters to the Seawise Giant in one iteration.

Any hints on how this is going to change civilisation, for non-space nerds?

How much do you think it would cost to send a bottle of water to space? Even on a Falcon Heavy you're looking at spending around $700 [1] to send one 16oz bottle of water. That's a far better than past times, where it'd cost around $25,000 to send it up on the Space Shuttle. But with Starship? You're looking at that price drop to as low as $5!

Because of this, trying to meaningfully predict the future is not possible. You're looking at a incomparably large revolutionary leap being made overnight. Up until now costs have made any significant scale space project a complete non-starter. If Starship succeeds, then costs will instantly become almost entirely irrelevant. Space colonization, industry, tourism, mining, and so all become completely viable - instantly. Really, everything becomes viable. Space just becomes another domain for casual exploration, exploitation, and expansion.

I think this is why everybody is waiting before adapting. So many industries are simply impossible to even toy with, without Starship. And while it seems ever more imminent, there is of course still the possibility that it somehow ultimately proves unviable, or perhaps it only sends that bottle of water down to $300, which would still be a great leap forward, but probably not far enough ahead to really open the door to space, just yet.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...

Cheaper to buy a bottle of water on the ISS than at a concert or sportsball game. Epic.

A similar dynamic happened with railroads. It's hard to predict just how much change this could cause!

That's about 480ml for anyone struggling to follow the example like I was.

Beautifully, elegantly put. Thank you.

My feeling is we're going to have a change similar to what aviation had in 1930-s. Before that we had everything on the ground and sea, and both land and sea transportation were quite developed. The 1930-s, roughly, had a visible birth of the industry of air transportation - more people flew because they needed to get there, not for the thrill of the novelty, and more people worked in the industry - making airplanes, airports, operating them.

Similarly, here we so far have less than 1000 people - or so - who flew to space in their lifetime, over last 60+ years. We're going to see it changing in a few years, less than 10, and to see the growth of a whole new industry, which routinely builds stuff for space - be it spaceport-specific equipment, or some hardware for spacecrafts, or hardware intended to work in space. Also we're going to have more professional occupations - hardware designers and hardware manufacturers on Earth, operators of space assets, like fueling stations, orbital stations, constellations, scientific laboratories - manned and automatic - and some orbital manufacturing facilities. And also we'll see professions related closely to the Moon in a few years - since it's going to be cheaper to fly to the Moon, more people are going to go there working on exploration and resource utilization, for lunar and orbital infrastructure.

So in our minds today we have "everything anybody does is of course on Earth" with some quite small exceptions for those who flies to orbital stations, or for short tourist flights above the atmosphere (so far, I believe, we never had even 25 people at the same time above 100 km) - and there are, of course, many people on Earth who work exclusively to support such space-bound activities, but it's still more of exception. We'll soon get to the state "some remarkable number of people are working in space, in many different locations and on many different projects", and on Earth a rather large industry supports their activities, just like we have industries supporting sea transportation or automotive industry. We'll get used to add this new dimension into our considerations, our plans, we'll see more opportunities pursued in this area, more attention paid to space - significantly more.

Space will become another (much more) routine part of life.

Exactly. It holds the promise to shrink the earth as well, just like commercial air travel. It’s not just space that opens but space tourism and ridiculously fast terrestrial travel as well.

Drop the cost like this and entirely new industries are possible and brand new never considered doors open.

-Not being dependent on Earth for survival of the species as Starship in its huge capability and reasonably cheap cost, among with refuelability on Mars begins the road to believable planetary colonization

-Asteroid / Moon mining

-Overally, being capable of going to space with more than just miniscule science-oriented payloads. FYI, ISS has cost us over a 100 billion dollars. When Starship hauls its worth in volume in one launch with just just methane and maintenance costs, it's a whole new space age.

I feel there are 100 more scientific/engineering breakthroughs greater than Starship between where we are now and off-planet habitability/asteroid mining. Of course it's an important step but by far I imagine it won't be the most important.

I feel Starship is going to be one of those "hey we figured out how to get 4x more processing power out of a new chip" lynchpins after which a lot of things that were infeasible and tossed early in planning / ideation, suddenly become possible if not even relatively easy.

What would have to happen to earth to make it less viable a place to live than mars? An asteroid rendering earth’s surface uninhabitable? Even that wouldn’t be enough - there’s still so much more on earth to sustain human life than any planet in our solar system.

Apart from proof of concept I just don’t see any practical reason to colonise mars.

There are a couple of ways to think about this that might help overcome your conservatism.

First: how awful would you consider a world-wide apocalypse to be, where the human race is effectively ended? Let’s call it massively, enormously bad. How likely is it that that happens? Well, probably incredibly small, but not zero. Multiply the two together and you’ve got a weighting for how much we should care and prepare. In this case, the incredibly small probability is likely balanced by the enormous awfulness - meaning some level of reasonable preparation for existence beyond Earth makes rational sense.

Second: think a thousand years into the future. Do you imagine that humans will be still only on earth, or will we have reached out and explored further - beyond our planet, beyond our solar system? If you can imagine any version of ‘beyond Earth’ - then Starship and Mars might represent the first baby steps needed to ultimately achieve that outcome.

To me the whole “Earth backup” aspect of humans on Mars is secondary at best.

The bigger benefit is how it gets the ball rolling on development of all the technologies associated with keeping humans alive and thriving in space and on the surfaces of other bodies in a way that the moon can’t.

The problem with the moon is that its distance. It’s convenient, which means that doing anything there isn’t much of a commitment and thus, can be canceled and forgotten about on a whim. It also means that there’s not much pressure to make human presences there self-sustaining — worst case scenario, another rocket full of supplies and/or personnel is only a week away.

A presence on Mars on the other hand by nature has to be something less frivolous. You have to plan to be there a long time no matter what, and from the moment the first crew’s boots touch the ground they’re going to be pouring themselves into becoming self-sustainable. The nations and companies behind the project can’t so conveniently pull the plug. Once it’s there, everybody involved is in it for the long haul and the longer it exists and more it grows the harder it is to back out of.

So I guess more than anything, out of the destinations that are being seriously considered by NASA, SpaceX, etc, Mars is the best at providing some kind of insurance against stagnancy and malaise in the crewed space program like we saw from the late 70s through 2010 or so.

> What would have to happen to earth to make it less viable a place to live than mars?

Another global airborne pandemic, but this time with a much higher fatality rate?

And how wouldn't that magically move to mars, given that it had to spread slowly, with relatively long incubation time, because otherwise it would kill its hosts too fast?

I mean, isn't the whole vision that rather comfortable and fast ride, like in an airliner, but the duration of a cruise? Without all that quarantine shit?

The time it takes to get to Mars itself would serve as a quarantine period.

Well... there is the phenomenon of antibiotica-resistant bacteria building up in places where they shouldn't be at all, surgical operating theatres for example.

Do you expect the masses to mars movers to be left alone unattended after reaching their destination, no maintenance, except under BSL-4 conditions, for being ready to go back?

Or the passengers showered and scrubbed in airlocks with antiseptic foam, ultraviolet light, and whatnot else, while their clothing is being 'recycled'?

The airlocks probably will be there, but the rest? One could probably argue that it all won't matter, like it mostly doesn't in Antarctica, because air too dry and cold, etc.

But can you be sure?

A colony in Mars opens the door to improving space travelling which at the same time opens the door to explore other planets. In a distant future humanity may be able to visit other solar systems and who knows, maybe find other species out there.

Colonizing mars doesn’t particularly help colonize space just mars because space is mostly empty not cold inhospitable planets.

A useful asteroid mining base might eventually let you expand into the Oort cloud and then colonize the rest of the galaxy assuming they could be 100% self sufficient and didn’t need solar power. But even here the hard bits are 99% technology we could develop on earth for other things like fusion power.

I don't get your point. Having a self-sustaining colony on Mars ready when suddenly the brother of the Chicxulub impactor appears on the radar and will hit in less time than it would require to create massive underground cave systems utilizing geothermal power would take to build, will literally save the species.

And that is just one apocalypse variant. Nuclear holocaust. Antimatter bombs. Possibly even a massive gamma ray burst, are all safe from Mars even if they might kill everyone on Earth.

Our species took an incredible amount of time to evolve, likely long enough to not re-appear in this solar system if lost. Which is a very weird point for me feeling that I have to argue for lol

I think Earth after nuclear holocaust or reasonably likely asteroid impact is still significantly more hospitable to human life than Mars. And any gamma ray burst affecting Earth would hit Mars too. Building survival silos on Earth would be cheaper and likely more effective to save the species in these situations.

Elon often talks about how exploration is exciting and inspirational and a prerequisite for future interstellar travel, and that works better as a justification to go to Mars, IMO. Also, while those disasters might not completely wipe out humans on Earth, they could reverse centuries or millennia of progress and delay further space exploration for hundreds or thousands of years if we don't do it now while we have the chance.

You might be right about the gamma ray burst.

From what I understand, for a nuke war, it is still _possible_ it will take out everyone considering the nuclear winter it will cause. In my thinking a redundant colony is worth even saving us having to play existential Russian Roulette with one loaded.

Which gamma ray burst would be so focussed that it would hit earth, but not mars?

IMO the biggest impact for normal people is that Starlink is going to get a whole lot better. Truly worldwide satellite broadband for unmodified cell phones. Faster speeds, lower latency (lower than fiber for intercontinental traffic), smaller/cheaper antennas, better reliability especially with limited view of the sky, and more support for areas of higher population density.

More esoteric: Commercial space stations. Space vacations. Moon base. Humans on Mars, and maybe even beyond. More and better space telescopes. Maybe some space based manufacturing. Eventually asteroid mining.

None of that sounds like a big impact on the lives of most people, who are already living in areas well covered by cellphone networks and will never afford to travel to space.

You could say the same thing about early airplanes, early computers, early radio, early cars… in fact many people did.

This bias doesn’t reflect the reality of technological revolutions but is very common. Be mindful of this.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

- Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

- Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

- Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

“Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

- Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995

“Apple is already dead.”

- Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, 1997

“None of that sounds like a big impact on the lives of most people, who are already living in areas well covered by cellphone networks and will never afford to travel to space.”

- hackernews user rick2b in 2023

Not much the same. Your examples were new techs that enables new thing, but no one knew how it useful . For internet access, fiber or 4G/5G cell tower are existing better solution for non-rural ground use. It's great for very rural area (including industry use) and I'm exciting how it make new use case on marine, but it's not so exciting for urban/suburban use.

I'm willing to bet that "most" people live in or travel to areas of bad cell coverage often enough that they will definitely appreciate an increase in coverage to literally 100% of the Earth's surface. Starlink capacity and reliability increases will enable a lot more people to ditch bad ISPs, not just people in extremely rural areas, and that can have a big impact on people's lives. Also I would say that international air travel had a big impact on civilization even long before "most" people globally could afford to fly internationally (if they even can today, I haven't found a good estimate for the percentage of people who will fly internationally during their lifetime but it could easily be less than a majority).

I don't think that would be a big change for the vast majority of people. Very few would even subscribe to an internet service that they will only make use of while hiking or doing other activities that take them to remote places. Maybe if they sell access for a few days and you no longer need any dedicated hardware to connect?

SpaceX Starship is projected to bring the price of space travel down drastically, to the point where non-1%-ers should be able to afford it.

I don't think it will. NASA has contracted SpaceX Dragon flights at about $70M per seat, and the OIG estimates the cost to SpaceX at $55M per seat. If we are extremely optimistic about Starship and say it will cost the same amount to launch as Falcon 9 / Dragon, and has 100 passengers instead of 4, that brings the price down to $2-3M per seat.

SpaceX could probably do suborbital hops on just the StarShip second stage for less per seat than what Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin do now, but I don't know if that is a market they want to get into. They haven't shown interest in it in the past.

> If we are extremely optimistic about Starship and say it will cost the same amount to launch as Falcon 9 / Dragon

That's pessimistic. Starship is targeting a significantly reduced cost per launch than Dragon + Falcon 9. Made possible by drastically reduced refurbishment, dramatically increased launch cadence, and full reusability (Falcon 9 second stage and Dragon trunk are both expended), among many other things. And it could carry a lot more than 100 passengers.

It's certainly possible that it won't meet its goals, but I wouldn't call that stance "optimistic".

That's still a huge drop, but I guess we'll have to wait a little longer before a ticket to the moon becomes commonplace.

Still not a big improvement for most of the population, maybe a few middle-class hardcore space fans spend their life savings to make 1 trip to space instead of going to some beach resort multiple years in a row. Good for them.

I'm usually seeing 50ms rtt from Hamburg, Germany to Denver, CO, a few more to my 'cabin in the woods' near there, and vice versa. Via fiber. It depends on the technology and peerings the involved ISPs use, and how overbooked they are, or not.

I'm not seeing how starlink will change that in a big way. Except where there is no fiber at all, or no choice of good ISPs. And as backup. That's convenient, of course.

> Except where there is no fiber at all, or no choice of good ISPs

So, like, a majority of the world?

One can move?

For space nerds, Bradbury wrote this: https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/r-is-for-rocket/ - one of his works, in some sense similar to the anticipation of these months.

Ive read some Bradbury but not that specific story, thanks for that.

Scientists being able to do more science stuff in place where things wobble so strangely.

Maybe move all data centers into geostationary orbit. They would be solar powered with direct communication between each orbiting center and transmitters/receiver stations on the planet surface. With that sort of lifting capacity, it wouldn't take too long to move most data center servers into orbit. Would it be cost effective? Maybe not. But I reckon there would be some climate change benefit by moving all that heat out into space.

Unlikely. Cooling is a huge challenge in space, needing crazy big radiators. Dumping excess heat into water or air is a lot more effective than black-body radiating it in a vacuum.

Definitely not. Cooling datacenters is a major cost component and that gets way harder in space as you have to radiate it away and cannot use air/water as a heat sink. Add in repairing components that break and that'll likely never happen.

I'd be more concerned about space radiation. As for cooling, in space you have a lot of space, and each computation unit may get equipped with its own radiator tailored for its heat production, and you may spread datacenters across large areas, so they have enough cooling capacity.

Each solar panel produces a shade, which can be used to put a radiator into, and between the solar panel and the radiator we can put some specific amount of heat-producing computation units.

US will be able to have military bases in space.

We will colonize the Moon.

The big caveat are the heat tiles. They were not a part of the very early design of what was then the BFR. They went with tiles when the liquid heat shield proved impossible, and they will probably need to be inspected after every flight.

The shuttle's tiles had to be manually removed and inspected. It took months to do. I don't know if Starship can escape that requirement.

I agree. I'm not an expert but the heat shield looks to me like the most uncertain thing about the project. I'm sure they can do better than the Shuttle, especially since stainless steel can go much hotter than aluminum, but I don't know if they can achieve reliable reusability without refurbishment.

Heat tiles were part of ITS though, and Dragon has them, so SpaceX has been thinking about them a long time.

Quoting Wikipedia article on shuttle, "there were about 24,300 unique tiles individually fitted on the vehicle". Starship is just a cylinder with pointy end, and tiles on most of the vehicle will be the same, so that will help.

"Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner."

Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.

> If Starship meets its reusability goals

Launching multiple times per day was never a design goal of Falcon 9 but it is explicitly a design goal of the Starship program. They're going to need fast turnaround for all the orbital refueling missions they've already sold for HLS.

The entire industry said they'd never land, then they'd never be able to reuse, then they'd never reuse 10+ times. They're up to 18 reuses. Now they'll never reuse twice in the same day? There's no physical law preventing it, it's just a matter of good engineering. It's not a sure thing but I wouldn't bet against them.

Also, Falcon 9 has been turned around in 21 days, with a significant chunk of that being shipping. And there's no indication that they've hit any limit, they simply don't need to go faster right now given their fleet and launch cadence.

They don't need to reuse the same one each time; A can go out, B can come back, etc.

Starship is designed with way faster turnaround time. Falcon 9 had optional reuse, while Starship aims to be the 747 of space access.

Elon said in 2020: > Starship is being designed to be relaunched an hour after landing, with zero nominal work

Now while that might take some time to reach, before that the pad itself is likely going to be capable of many launches every day given there's more ships. Starships seems to be made to be way more economical to manufacture per-ship than the shuttles or Saturns so I don't see a bottleneck in that.

> Elon said in 2020…

To be fair, Elon has said _a lot_ of things about his various projects and not all of them are based in reality.

Everyone knows that, but Falcon 9 is extremely successful and Starship is the main project that's been in the making doing good strides once in a while, and the whole "chopstick" lift tower has already been built, with the clear idea of ultimately landing Starships right in to it.

And Starship seems to really be the main focus of Elon where he doesn't just lead but is in the weeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY73exaVpyw

> And Starship seems to really be the main focus of Elon where he doesn't just lead but is in the weeds

There lies the danger, considering his work leading Twitter.

I remember ignorant folks commenting on HN a while ago that Twitter would not last 3 months after the massive layoffs. Proven wrong over and over again.

It didn't, and they had to implement very severe rate limiting just to keep it from falling over again.

Now when I open a tweet without being logged in I can't even see any replies.

Use Nitter, or, you know, just log in. I used a lurker account for like 6 years, nowadays I'm more active as the place is more interesting. Haven't faced almost any technical problems, maybe a persistent 500 error once, 1/1000 times tweets dont load on my own page

> Now when I open a tweet without being logged in I can't even see any replies.

So…you’re upset that you can’t do something for free now?

I didn't say I'm upset, I barely use Twitter, only when someone links to some specific tweet.

I was just noting a clear downgrade in feature set, made (by Elon's own words) so Twitter can better handle the traffic after having fallen over multiple times.

Twitter has never been non-free. You just need to register. Premium is nice, but not that critical. I have one account with and one without, mostly just the 280 char limit annoys without premium but that's how twitter was before anyway

“Free” in the holistic meaning, not so much as paid monetarily, but requiring you to trade something (registration and login) for access. It’s not necessarily unreasonable in my opinion to expect login to view content or use the site.

There's no strong authentication requirement. As long as you have an extra gmail account or similar or are able to create one that is not connected to your person, you should be able to create a reasonably anonymous twitter account.

(No I don't know how to create google accounts without using your residential VPN or avoid the phone auth if it ends up forcing that)

> avoid the phone auth if it ends up forcing that

You can always buy a prepaid SIM and used hotspot-capable phone with cash.

EDIT: dumb typo, I meant "residential IP"

What rate limiting? The login requirement change is policy, not a rate limit.

There are very strict rate limits as well: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672

I think they have increased them since then, but for a while Twitter was really struggling to serve regular users without hitting them with rate limit errors.

This has to be the most ignorant comment here. Elon has been heading SpaceX as a Chief Engineer for a LONG time now, with undeniable success. How on earth would what he asks X/Twitter to do affect this, even if you considered that bad or the worst thing ever?

You do know that’s just the name of his role, not the job description, right?

He was also quite adamant about not needing a fire suppression system on the pad while everyone else was saying to just dig a water trench and be over with it. Now he got his inverted shower head. It should work, but it delayed the second launch by almost a year.

People were talking about a flame trench, and it was just the usual "nooo you can't do things differently" kind of whining. Not all too different from people saying suicide burns and barge landings would not be reliable when early Falcon 9 landing attempts failed.

Even the internal engineers (ie the only people who matter in this case due to being the only people with the data) expected the previous pad to at least survive the first test flight (with some ablation).

The shattering was a surprise that did not fit their own models. Beyond that they had already started work on the current system as a long term solution prior to the first flight.

Read the Isaacson biography. Musk is clearly deeply involved in the details of all his projects, to a degree that would seem unthinkable for almost any other CEO.

Lol no. It is actually MORE de facto than de jure. Don't spread misinformation. I've seen that dogshit line replayed so many times. He's an engineer above everything else https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WY73exaVpyw

"by year" doesn't make sense.

Also, the flame "plate" was a reasonable test, it hadn't been tried before. Engines failing at start doomed what was otherwise at the very limit from what we've understood. If you watched the launch, you saw how extremely long the rocket stayed on the pad. It was because with engine failures the thrust was too low to get off and it actually needed to lose fuel. It was like 5x the time it would have been held down otherwise. It's a misnomer that anything really went truly "wrong" with the test. It's like pressing F5 and seeing the "There were build errors" popup.

> Falcon 9 is extremely successful and Starship is the main project that's been in the making doing good strides once in a while

We shall see. There might be some https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect in play with the Starship.

Can you give an example of 1 thing Elon said that hasn't become a reality and cannot become a reality in the next 10 years?

1 engineering or physics related thing. Deadlines don't count.

I'm waiting...

Everything Hyperloop related is not happening.

Elon literally said that he didn't have time to work on it, he just liked the idea. What more can he do manage expectation? Like people don't listen and just assume because they get information from secondary "news" articles.

Musk released a bluepaper and that pretty much it. SpaceX hosted a student competition also.

Other companies failing doesnt reflect on Musk.

I do think Hyperloop was a bad idea to be sure, but he very clearly stated he wasnt gone make it happen.

Has Elon actually promised something concrete about this? Elon's not the first guy ever to hype the hyperloop idea.

On its basis it is hard to think we won't this at some point as it promises essentially orbit-like capability on the surface, so everyone has the right to dream we'd get this sooner.

"Can you give an example of 1 thing Elon said"

..well known example is given..

"Has Elon actually promised something concrete about this?"

you can see that those things are different.

I think the reasonable limit is when something sounds like that he argues it is possible "soon" instead of not being thought about. Like, I don't think we'll have AGI or gene-modified catgirls in 10 years but those dont count as an answer to this.

Hyperloop was always being to be extremely expensive and Elon's role on it was never but just try to be a catalyst for more innovation towards it. He used terms like "open-source idea" and did that student competition to try to kind of drive other people to grab the idea. Things like FSD are instead considered concrete and produced by his companies.

And FSD doesn't work, at least not in the way it was promised.

Yeah well it will before 10 years and increases the value of even current cars

It will not.

Only if the world ends it won't. At that point Tesla will have licensed it to a ton of other manufacturers, possibly even reached a certified standard like they did with NACS so competition will be even more behind.

Your kind of thinking would say that no one will ever need more than 840k of memory or that rifling will never take off

Coast to coast self-driving by late 2017.

Did you read the question?

That is an engineering thing. And even your arbitrary 15 year extension is not realistic.

It's not my question but you still didn't bloody read it:

> Deadlines don't count.

HW3 Teslas will not reach robotaxi-level self-driving without hardware upgrades.

I also don't believe commercial Earth-to-Earth passenger service will ever be viable with the current Starship design. Certainly not in the next 10 years.

This is a very engaging question. No idea why anyone would flag this.

Because this part

>cannot become a reality in the next 10 years

serves as red herring and allows to move the goalposts arbitrarily, making the question pretty manipulative. Anything can become a reality in 10 years, theoretically speaking. At the same time this is not the main issue with Elon claims at all.

I get what you're coming from. But. I think it is fair considering some of the most beloved provider / consumer relationships we have often end up in the situation that everyone wants the thing as fast as possible, and the producer is very optimistic, wants to deliver and ends up "lying" about timelines without any ill intention.

Everyone still wants the damn thing. Critique is better aimed towards things that are actually impossible instead just being observed with too much optimism timewise. I don't think sharp unnecessary critique of irreplaceable multidisciplinary pioneers like Elon are healthy in any space, especially here. This is not Steam Forums.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960

> 1 engineering or physics related thing

Elon also said that he will have 1 million Robotaxi by 2020

Again, Falcon 9 wasn't dependent on reuse and was profitable as-is. As Starship has a clear design goal of quick reuse, it's being designed a different vehicle altogether. The reuse isn't only for profitability on earth, it gets a bit more important on Moon and Mars.

No, he never said that. He said his best guess would be 2020 after being put on the spot to come up with a date a few years in the future.

Elon bad, Elon bad at planning so Elon liar. /s

No, he didn't say it was his "best guess." He said, and I quote, “I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year. From our standpoint, if you fast-forward a year … maybe a year and three months, but next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road.”

"Next year for sure" is not a "best guess."

Checking the transcript, it is not unreasonable to say that

"Next year we'll have 1mil robotaxis on the road, the fleet wakes up by OTA update"

means "Robotaxi-capable in hardware" which is the main sell, IE that you buy car now, when the software is ready, and Tesla is closer than anyone else in having anything like that ready, your car will take the role of Robotaxi.

Maybe a bit ambigious wording like when what Sean Murray implied when the reality was a shared universe in place names, not realtime multiplayer at that stage

I don't know why you can't just accept that he makes crazy promises that are sometimes total nonsense.

Sometimes his crazy promises do mostly pan out. But he's clearly massively over-promised in driverless cars.

I'm really surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit from all the Tesla owners who were essentially tricked into paying $5k for a thing that can never exist.

Yes he has over-promised, but Tesla also has the most promising tech on this for many reasons. It seems more like the problem itself is turning out to just be harder to cover properly than foreseen originally.

However, cars last long and Tesla's batteries last as long as any, I remember seeing some very promising numbers from very old Model S's remaining battery capabilities, and of course the batteries can be replaced. I don't see why the robotaxi idea wouldn't increase the potential value of almost any Tesla considering even the NN chip hardware can be semi-easily upgraded if really needed

> that can never exist.

That sounds like someone saying muskets are a fad. Do you really truly believe that? Never heard anyone be _that_ pessimistic about it, especially with the continual improvements.

> the problem itself is turning out to just be harder to cover properly than foreseen originally

Than foreseen by Tesla. Everyone else knew they couldn't possibly achieve what Musk was claiming.

> Tesla also has the most promising tech on this for many reasons

After Waymo maybe.

> considering even the NN chip hardware can be semi-easily upgraded if really needed

Haha there's no way 20 year old cars (minimum; by the time FSD actually works) are going to get sensor and compute upgrades. Not going to happen.

> That sounds like someone saying muskets are a fad.

I'm not sure what your analogy is meant to mean but I think you misunderstood me. I'm not saying driverless cars in general can never exist. Clearly they will eventually (maybe 10-20 years?). It's the upgrade to FSD that people have paid for that can never exist.

You are dumbfoundingly incorrect. Tesla is just so much ahead everyone else it is a bit ridiculous. I wouldn't wonder if many have already given up and are just waiting for Tesla to front the R&D then willing to license their tech. No one else has even close to Teslas NN chips, Dojo, custom simulators, the FLEET, willing free QA people, endless data sources as all cars have the hardware ... You also have no idea how time works throwing around something like 20 years. In AI age that just leads me to believe you are at least 10 years late in your thinking. 20 year guess for software is something no one can make.

You do not even understand what field Tesla operates in if you're comparing it to Waymo. Waymo operates on HD maps and remote human operators who can take over every 5 minutes if needed. Those cars are not real "cars", you can't own them, they can't drive outside the city. They compete with electric scooters like Tier, Bolt, Lime, not Tesla. They have zero ability to grow, it's like comparing a hardcoded nature language engine to ChatGPT.

(Also note that the gain in value Tesla has gotten after Autonomy Day hasn't actually even been lost. Long-term investors aren't gonna miss this one)

Tesla is nowhere near the leader. The problem is hard, who could possibly have known? Oh right, any person with a bit of knowledge of how computers work and drive a car. Tesla can't make it reliably work in the car-centric USA. I'd love to see it perform in a busy Indian city or even just any old European city.

Tesla cars do not last long, and the battery costs a fortune to replace when it dies or gets damaged out of warranty.

Lol what. It's like you'd be trying to convince everyone Bing has been the leading search engine for the last 10 years. You don't even mention who would be ahead. Cruise, having to intervene every 5 minutes (literally, look it up) and basing on unscalable HD maps?

Get real man. Tesla has even custom HARDWARE for their NN's even, designed by the chip designer that has created some of the greatest designs BOTH at Intel and AMD.

And Tesla's battery lasts better than others. I remember seeing incredible endurance even for the first Model S batteries after like 10 years of driving. You buy a Tesla now or 5 years ago, it will likely last longer than any other car, all while it will receive SW updates to function as a Robotaxi when the time comes.

You're funnily arguing the exact polar opposite of where Tesla is strong.

> Tesla has even custom HARDWARE for their NN's

Their chips are actually nice, but you're betraying your lack of knowledge here - the compute hardware isn't remotely the hard part about self driving cars.

Using words like "remotely not the hard part" that is just not true man. There doesn't exist hardware that can do inference with even close to as low as the 100 watts Tesla uses. Also it is not just to drive FSD, it is to provide data, to detect situations of from where to send data as they can't just stream everything to base (check the Autonomy day talk, it's quite interesting), which is needed for the development of the software which we agree is an extremely hard problem.

To further demonstrate this, consider the fact that in the current AI landscape, hardware is actually the bottleneck. Everyone is trying to buy more GPU's NVIDIA simply can't supply fast enough. If Tesla still relied on NVIDIA for the in-car processing, the project would have to be shelved as they'd have to sell Teslas without the hardware, instead of just having it all cars even if they will never use it for running FSD directly on that car.

Elon and Shotwell in 2018 said that by 2028 it will have operating passenger service for between a business class ticket and coach ticket price. They claimed it again around 2020 or 2021. Competitive pricing with air travel.

And he said that the Semi will be competitive with rail and could already operate in follow the leader convoy mode back in 2017: they were just waiting on regulators to give the ok! Never seen testing it but I guess they did the whole project in secret and shelved it without applying to regulators in a public way.

This doesn't in any way even contest the original point. Timeline maybe, but we all know Elon(r) Valve(r) time, it's the kind of time we all hope would move faster but most don't rip their game pants out of impatience.

About the Semi, there's zero reason to believe anything is being shelved. The truck itself is ready and being tested in practice by Pepsico and Tesla itself. Jay Leno teste drove it and was impressed.

Where does this unnecessary negativity come from? We should cheer these kind of unique projects auspicious for civilization.

> About the Semi, there's zero reason to believe anything is being shelved. The truck itself is ready and being tested in practice by Pepsico and Tesla itself. Jay Leno teste drove it and was impressed.

I didn't say they couldn't build the Semi; he said it could already do automated convoy follower driving in 2017. Still nowhere to be seen.

To be honest that sounds like the easiest thing to do. I remember reading of a similar thing in some invention's book made in 1993 or so. They probably have a working version of it, mostly just need to release the damn truck, and figure out legal for it

How would this ever be possible given the volume of fuel a starship launch entails?

It would carry 1000 people, so divide by 1000, and methane is cheap, plus it's going to save up to 16 hours or so on long haul routes so people may be willing to pay a reasonable premium. The much bigger issue, to me, is safety. I don't see how the Starship design could ever be anywhere near as safe as regular air travel. There are also issues with noise requiring the launch and landing to take place far away from your destination, reducing the travel time benefit. And it's unclear if the general population would be able to tolerate the G-forces and wild maneuvers required.

> landing to take place far away from your destination, reducing the travel time benefit.

Thats where you get on your private jet to fly the last 10 miles. Simple.

Falcon 9 needs a brand new second stage and fairing assembly each time it flies.

The fairings are reused.

Sometimes, and via what it surely a much more complicated process (after fishing them out of the sea) compared to a fairing that's built into the landed vehicle (a la Starship or Shuttle).

Agreed it would be absolutely seismic.

How well does that look, from a cold, objective, non-Elon-hype point of view? I mean, he might happen to be 100% correct in his optimism but by now I learned to trust nothing that man says.

Personally? I think it's quite likely they will get it to work. I don't know about the timeline though. Explosions at the launch/landing pads could delay them a lot. I think reliability is likely to be an issue for a long time, and I don't see commercial Earth-to-Earth passenger service happening for that and other reasons.

They will have trouble getting customers who can actually use the capabilities Starship has. Seems like everyone is still designing missions for status quo. Luckily they already saw that issue and created their own launch customer in Starlink. And HLS with orbital refueling will also be key.

When George W. Bush announced "return to the Moon" program in the wake of Columbia disaster, some related companies (I remember reading about e.g. Caterpillar) started to figure out plans to participate with activities on the surface of the Moon.

Maybe it's wrong information :) and maybe a lot has changed since then. But by now I'd be really surprised if some of heavy industrial manufacture companies wouldn't have some plans for equipment to supply to the possible Moon base, as the chances of that happening in some not so distant future look plausible.

In order to send HLS to the moon they need something like 20 regular starship launches which is a bit insane. I think it will be great for putting people and things in LEO but past that point I’m not sure.

Maybe not so many. Assuming 1200 tons of fuel for Starship on LEO ( from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) ) and 100-150 tons of payload, it's 8-12 Starship launches to fuel up the orbital stage which can fly to the Moon.

Either way it’s a huge number of launches

But it's also a huge payload to surface, in one piece.

As for proportionality, it's up to Starship Isp - which isn't hydrogen, but rather good in comparison with kerosene (well... some Russian vacuum kerosene engines are quite good by Isp...) - and construction mass ratio, which, usually favoring large stages, is rather good for Starship. So, for those 8-12 refueling launches you get payload on the surface of the Moon which dwarfs the one sent by Saturn-Vs, by an order of magnitude or quite likely more. And - important part - all of that is much cheaper, because the main thing being expended is fuel, not rocket stage hardware.

> I learned to trust nothing that man says.

I admit I did get a little caught up in Musk's web of hype in the early days but fortunately my natural scepticism was strong enough to resist him. Eventually, I found a few detailed analyses of some of his technological fantasies which convinced me that some of what he proposes will not be happening any time soon, if ever.

I am by no means an Elon Musk hater but he does speak a lot of nonsense, from time to time, and he seems to be able to persuade many to abandon their scientific scepticism.

I was persuaded by what Common Sense Sceptic says about some of Elon Musk's plans: <https://www.youtube.com/@commonsenseskeptic>, even though he is clearly biased against Elon Musk.

I am convinced that

1. A city-to-city Starship shuttle passenger service will never happen.

2. A self-sustaining colony on Mars will not happen in the foreseeable future.

I have strong doubts about other SpaceX and Tesla claims by Elon Musk, but these two events I would actually bet on.

> I am convinced that

> 1. A city-to-city Starship shuttle passenger service will never happen.

> 2. A self-sustaining colony on Mars will not happen in the foreseeable future.

Both are in my opinion completely technologically feasible. Just not economically feasible.

If we had another space race I could see a mars colony in the 2040. But I don't think it will happen.

We will probably put people on mars eventually but a Mars colony is basically just not going to be self sustaining. We have Antarctic bases that are definitely not self sustaining which is a similar thing

Depends on what you consider self sustaining. Food, water and energy would be enough for me to call it self sustaining, even if it depends on Earth for things like computer chips.

Sure but that means it is reliant on earth for replacement parts for the habitation modules/structures so not self sufficient.

I feel sorry that you were convinced by Common Sense Sceptic [sic]. You should know that he's an anti-trans bigot. (Watch this video after the one in the second half of this comment.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh2vE5hsZhw

Secondly, and honestly more importantly, most of the information he relies in his videos is actually incorrect and outright lies. This is a really good long video that goes through CSS's "facts" and points out how his information is completely faulty and comes from a lack of understanding of rockets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQsyd4MmQCU

On your first point, why would you expect a sceptic to cease being sceptical just for this one particular belief system?

I'd take the other side of the bet on the #1 hard, and within the relatively near future, depending on how we define passenger. Militaries will 110% be using Starship for this almost immediately after its proven to be tolerably safe and reliable. Getting mass cargo, troops, and transit across the globe in the blink of an eye, with tremendous landing flexibility? If Starship somehow doesn't prove completely unworkable, I would not be surprised to see this happening in < 2 years. That's making the perhaps large assumption that their technology for landing, developed with the Falcon series of rockets, will translate to starting to nail Starship landings fairly quickly, relative to how long it took with the Falcon.

#2 becomes a much more interesting debate if you remove the self sustaining aspect of it, and consider just an Earth dependent colony. Full self sustainability will probably only happen decades after the creation of a persistent colony. There's just too much industry to recreate in an entirely new environment for it to be a remotely quick process.

Reminds me of the scene from Gattaca, rockets taking off for space all day long.

I have gone from watching rockets take off into space a couple times a year from my back yard to watching them take off (occasionally) a couple of times a week. It would not surprise me to see that get even more frequent in my lifetime.

But more important first is to put headphones on seals and play sonic boom sounds to test and make sure they aren't startled by the scary rocket sounds.

(Ok, stretching a little. That is what a seemingly similar survey did at Cape as a part of some similarly goofy bureaucracy thing that has been holding Starship back the last month or so. For Starship they're worried for the risk of what happens if Starship literally falls on a shark) Source: about 1:18:02 https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1722686021781835928

The Twitter mobile player displays no timestamp so seeking is pointless. Here it is on YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?t=1h18m. And here’s the transcript: https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-4-transcript#chapter12_ai_r....

I listened to the relevant section and there’s no indication that the shark question is what is blocking launch. In fact it is clear that question was already answered.

> One of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about a rocket hitting a shark.

> Eventually they managed to solve the internal quandary, and indeed the probability of us hitting a shark is essentially zero.

It’s not clear to me that Fish and Wildlife has actually behaved unreasonably. I would expect them to ask about fish and wildlife.

If you research this a bit more it becomes clear that the survey has been the blocker, after the direct FAA checklist was cleared. Just google around, this has been bouncing around as an annoyance for a while in the space enthusiast circles so it's assumed knowledge in the context

You provided a source and made an untrue claim about the content. The shark question may have been a blocker but you haven’t provided any evidence to support that.

You're incorrect. I did not place any untrue claim about the content!

-What is known is the survey thingy has been a blocker for Starship

-The shark, and separately, whale, issues are things that are also relevant for Starship. But there is no info about implicit or explicit direct connection of these details to blocking status. A connection is just implied by you, not me.

I found a better source here https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/03/31/2016-07...

This is why we can't have good things. A group people will cry about everything.

I think it’s more of SpaceX’s problem for building their rocket launch site in the middle of a nature preserve

Did Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation?

https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742

That's incredible. It's not really about whales and sharks, they know the probability is 0%, those agency people can't be that stupid. What they are really saying is they'll shove all the sticks they have in his spokes. If it was in some other country, I might have guessed they are just plainly asking for a bribe, but here I think they just really don't like the Musk and his company.

When some random person interacts with the bureaucracy, and hits these catch-22 scenarios, it's often not personal, they just fall under the wheels of the bulldozer, so to speak, and nobody notices or cares. But with something like Space X it's a bit more political, and it seems whoever drives the bulldozer was turning it towards Musk a bit to get him on purpose.

Little wannabe tyrants with their little fiefdoms with big political axes to grind.

I recommend the above link because it gets even weirder than you might surmise from the parent's comment.

Seconded, definitely need to watch or listen to a few minutes of that link.

I loved the bit where Fisheries and Wildlife refused to provide the shark density information because they didn't trust their own department with it!

Apparently SpaceX must wait patiently to take humanity to the stars because sharkfin poachers have infiltrated spies into a wildly unrelated government agency.

I feel like SpaceX should just launch the damned rocket and then if anyone from the government takes issue just demand a public explanation. As in, literally, get the busybody bureaucrat from Fisheries and Wildlife to stand up behind a podium and explain themselves on live, national television.

"Err... you see, Mr Musk was clearly in the wrong here because... umm... we couldn't... umm... share information internally to complete the appropriate paperwork, so... umm..."

It would be glorious.

I mean that’s kinda working with regulators sometimes… you just get lists of random questions every once in a while for several months. It’s fun when the employee turns over and you get to go through the same thing again with random questions that go off a slightly different tangent.

What else could they possibly do? Some dude at the Fish & Wildlife Service isn’t gonna bust out COMSOL. I don’t really know what people expect.

If it turned out the federal government was just dicking around out of some unrelated grudge towards Elon Musk, half the country would still support them. Some days most of HN would too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

The problem with Hanlon's Razor is that Grey's Law turns it into just "never attribute anything to malice" which is invalid unless you're willing to assume that no act of malice ever occurs.

Only when incompetence is also a credible explanation.

Hence Grey's Law.

Beside the point. I don’t think Fish and Wildlife is doing anything other than being annoying obstructionist bureaucrats, but even if you interpreted their obstruction in the least flattering way possible, which I agree is unfair and uncharitable, it still wouldn’t win any sympathy for SpaceX.

It is really insane how much government bureaucracy and regulation has needlessly impeded progress. From rockets to solar farms, activist environmentalism and the government have thwarted and held back so much human progress, not for any legitimate threat, but rather paranoia, fear, and the bitterness of single individuals.

The gov is not a monolithic entity. If an organization has power over an important private entity, it comes down to a couple of people and their ego's and I am damn sure their ego loved the idea of making the all important SpaceX and Musk do a little dance for them.

I sure sapceX don't have department of wildlife. we don't have enough research on this issue, I don't know why it is OK to do anything before we do not have information. maybe just like old Big oil companies, just do it before people found what do they do?

I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets.

And then I wonder if they would have to cancel multi-billion dollar missions to deep space if the answer is non-zero.

People really need to get a grip and use their common sense for a bit.

A hundred workers — humans — died in the construction of the Hoover Dam, and that was considered acceptable.

The Starship test could literally bomb the ocean with a nuclear weapon and the ecological consequences would still be worth it considering the benefits to the human race.

PS: The US government routinely nuked delicate ecosystems like the Bikini Atolls and I bet they never had to fill out the shark, whale, and seal paperwork.

PPS: any individual modern fishing trawler will kill more endangered wildlife daily than Starship might annually in a worst-case scenario.

Tell me again why this paperwork is more important than our ascendancy to the stars.

Be specific.

>Be specific you look so angry.

I just don't like the attitude that treat all investigation as joke.

Governments went on literal witch hunts, recently.

Many “investigations” are not done in good faith.

Ask yourself a simple question: does the government subject anyone else — especially themselves — to the same scrutiny?

Really?

Collision studies between space rockets and sharks!?

This. A thousand times this.

Even for just US itself, the Spaceship program might well have a chance to prove to be as existentially important as the Bikini Atoll tests (if we consider that it increased the believability of MAD and prevented nuclear holocaust).

If not that, it will likely still make US have an incredible lead in mass to orbit capability which might lead to dibs on, well, whole stellar objects like moons to mine, planet to realistically colonize ...

> I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets.

NASA has been actively involved in wildlife preservation since the beginning. By doing that they are effectively in control and can design it into their mission operations.

https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/07/the-wild-side-of-...

https://www.fws.gov/refuge/merritt-island/about-us

Is that why SLS launches cost billions of dollars?

No. That’s because the SLS was the safe bet, planned at a time when what SpaceX does was considered impossible.

SpaceX was unlikely to succeed and it’d be irresponsible for NASA to not have a human rated launcher in case SpaceX failed.

Also, it keeps a lot of rocket scientists current, sharp, and happily employed while it prevents them from considering moving to North Korea.

> I don't know why it is OK to do anything before we do not have information.

Because we never have it. Not once in the history of humanity has anyone done anything with the benefit of all the information. It's simply not possible to know everything about something.

Your choices are to do things where you don't know what's going to happen, or never do anything.

It turns out this is basically fine, because doing them is one of the best ways to find out what happens. And if it turns out something bad happens, then you can prohibit it, so it doesn't keep happening.

The seal story is amusing as well. Isn't there some other way to figure that out besides a real test? Does no one know the hearing ability of seals before?

I think the effects of noise on sea mammals is a fairly recent area of research. I know of a researcher who has been working on this as part of research into offshore wind environmental impact. But they were already researching porpoises and this was just a new thing to keep track of.

I was wondering after playing a recording of a boom to the seal how they figured out if it was distressed by that, as opposed to being stressed by being strapped to a board. Also how they figured the effect on it's romantic life. The mind boggles.

I believe the romantic life parts were just in the yearly observed population counts increasing over the last X years.

Didn't even realize there already was a comment for this. Pointed out the exact same timestamp independently in another comment.

Talking of the more reasonable bureaucratic hoops, SpaceX has done quite a job filling all of FAA's requirements they landed on the program from the previous attempt. In a way I hoped that SpaceX would operate outside US to not have to abide by all the crazy laws they have (even with hiring!) but this seems to be the only way.

Overall, Starship isn't being given a fraction of the coverage it should be. This is the Apollo of our time, but without the dependency of hyper-inefficient and unstable government funding. But this time, Moon will be just a bus stop.

It would be about the same chance of hitting a shark or whale when driving a boat for about 10 meters.

Footage of a boat hitting a shark - https://youtu.be/yYuh_TNLThg?t=332 this unusual event being .1% of their trip for the day.

I bet the chance would be low even if Starship somehow "flew" on the surface of the water for the whole boost period.

And even then it should be ridiculously easy to determine it is more beneficial for humanity to revolutionize mass/cost to orbit even if one or a few animals get hurt during many years of operation. If the US government truly cared this crazy much about sharks and whales we would have sent a carrier battle group to sink all Japanese whaling vessels already for example, or at least funded some black ops guys to sink them while keeping deniability.

Said carrier battle group is just waiting on Fish & Wildlife approval to sail to Japan.

Navy submarines regularly deafen all sorts of animals with their sonars and are implicated in whales beaching themselves to escape the noise.

But let’s make Elon Musk put headphones on seals (plural) because it’s funny to make the billionaire jump through hoops.

If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away.

> If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away.

Yeah good luck with that one. ITAR doesn't work that way. The worst threat they could realistically make is to make their IP 100% public domain (in the ITAR sense which is a bit different from the copyright/patent sense) and the US probably would not care in the slightest since that would be a massive whale fall for the domestic launch system industry.

He legally wouldn’t be allowed to and would go to prison for the rest of his life if he did. He would also not be able to use the vast majority of his team because they’d also personally risk prison and also losing security clearance which means their careers are over in the US.

For all the drawbacks of the USA, today it's the best place on Earth to build projects like SpaceX, period. That's the main reason to stay.

Notably the founding father of Chinese space industry worked under von Karman in Caltech and left the USA in disappointment. However that was just one scientist in a rather different time. Today, neither Europe, nor China, nor Russia, nor India or Japan offer opportunities to develop things similar to SpaceX; I'd be quite interested in Chinese development, but would still bet against them.

It is interesting that T-0 says "Excitement guaranteed" instead of "launch" or something. Besides being funny, it seems like they are officially accepting the reality that it may not go as planned (even at so early a stage), but will be thrilling nevertheless!

They said that for the first one too.

They seem to be increasingly confident about the Fish & Wildlife approval. Wonder what kind of internal messaging is happening there (F&W just saying "we're still signing it but it's fine" or something).

I don’t think the Fish & Wildlife Service approves spacecraft launches. They just need to amend their opinion within 135 days AFAIK.

The FAA won't issue a launch license until the environmental review of the last launch is complete, part of which is performed by the Fish & Wildlife Service.

Or maybe they'll just go for it and see if this was a bluff by the govt

Counterpoint: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...

Statistics are visibly wrong

"...pending final regulatory approval."

I'm highly skeptical that will happen before Thanksgiving, but would love to be proven wrong.

I’m excited to watch 350,000 gallons of water sprayed at fire.

I'm excited to watch 3,400,000 kg of fire sprayed at water, concrete, and hopefully open air.

I'm more interested in what that will make the rocket do, like move, though.

I am waiting to see the reaction of the different groups of human.

I believe some people will react to 11 million pounds going three times the speed of sound, but I also believe more people react to someone who says dumb stuff on twitter

I can’t wait for the time when Starship is proven and launching frequently - though there is a lot to be said about the excitement of right now, when it hasn’t yet had a successful launch.

Really got my fingers crossed for a true rapid drop in cost to launch mass to orbit.

I just looked it up and was stunned to see a target of $13/kg cost to orbit. That's insane. A human could go to space for under $1,000 (hand waving away the life support systems)

Those are still Musk numbers. But even 10x of that would be quite good.

Pretty crazy how nobody seems to even try to compete.

People definitely try to compete and don’t. Bezos is also spending countless billions and basically has technology from the 1960s to show for it.

I think China is going to give it a go.

Just like how Concorde made air travel 10x cheaper! Oh, wait…

I finished reading the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, and, for all his faults, Musk really knows how to get shit done. I was constantly amazed by his ability to strip a process to its essentials before embarking on its construction. SpaceX single-handedly* brought down the cost of space flight by using off-the-shelf and custom-created-from-metal components, where they only had to pay for the raw cost rather than the markups by others (the "idiot tax" as mentioned in the biography).

Generally, I simply don't give a shit about what a founder says, I have a Toyota in addition to a Tesla, and I don't care what the CEO of Toyota says at all, so I always find it puzzling when people talk about their dislike of Musk in particular, as if that should matter when buying their products.

*for some definition of the theoretical hand of a company

Elon Musk's biggest problem is his chronic inability to shut the hell up.

No one would care who he was as a person if he just let his media people do their jobs, and stuck to corporate press releases to respond to things.

Plenty of people say they dislike Jeff Bezos, but barely anyone even thinks about Jeff Bezos or knows what he sounds like.

I basically get what you're asking but having followed Musk for a long time and having a similar personality, this would be very similar to asking him to lie and break his principles, on which I think is motivation -> progress of his companies (at least SpaceX) are reliant on.

He's a VERY different person from the likes of Bezos for whom it is easy to "get" the benefits of the idea of not expressing themselves in their role, for the benefits they are personally after.

I wonder though, considering the amount of other popular people who do not share the same achievements who you probably just ignore anyway (think some influencers and youtubers), do we really want him to shut up? His opinions and promises might not sit well with everyone but I definitely think you can learn a lot by analysing him.

I personally prefer him over the random billionaire #362682 who haven't achieved half as much and won't share anything.

Also, I would recommend reading his biography, changes your perspective on a lot of things.

I mean, what's the point of getting where he is and shutting up just to make random people happy?

To efficiently reach his target goals?

It would be such shame if Starship never flew because he squandered $45B on Twitter and made a lot of political enemies being an edge lord online..

If I was the richest person on the planet and still gave any shits whatsoever about making random people, who often probably have poor values themselves, upset online, then I would be living my life extremely wrong

Transphobic and and similar problematic tweets aside

That’s his money, not SpaceX money. Do you think he pays for everything out-of-pocket?

How do you think "his money" works. How do you think credit works on this scale? Musk making a $45B investment in Twitter obviously carries risk to SpaceX.

Making random people happy means having less people unhappy about you which increases your global status, which gives you more ability to extract resources from the world to augment your goals. Yeah, it's very long reasoning, but it is why most people try not to offend others.

Because it would just be nice if he shutup ?

Him shutting up does the same thing as you ignoring him, for you. Him shutting up is not fixable by those who actually want to hear him.

TL;DR: No, you shut up and never say that extremely selfish and destructive thing again.

01:30:00 An exciting landing!

This will make solar radiation management a serious proposition.

Any idea what they mean by "recursive improvement"?

Rocket reusability is overhyped nonsense that we could have had decades ago except we only just recently produced the billionaire narcissist class that think that reusing the thin metal shell on a booster is somehow “game changing”. It’s not. It will never be.

The musk biography made me believe that I should have gotten a physics degree. Or at least taken physics.

Can anyone recommend any online physics?

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Was just about to recommend this. I have to add that this is one amazing resource. The only thing missing is a lack of practical problem sets.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200615 (and a few of older ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37202736)

https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics is aimed at learners who aren’t enrolled in a degree program.

Can't wait to have Isis in space.. We kicked the problem of growing up as a species down the road for so long, now it's time for a nuke for everyone (who is not in a gravity well). Let's get this over with by bribing us out of today's problems into even bigger tomorrow's problems with the tools of yesterday to handle internal crisis.

Sure downvote reality, that will make it go away. The sort of points I want to see, the bankruptcy of "I have no plan".

Are you on drugs? What the hell are you even trying to say? Something something if Elon instead worked in a charity we'd be better off just with no EV's, SpaceX, OpenAI etc... ?

I'm downvoting you because you're wasting everyone's time and being demotivational about a great thing. The only true progress is technological.

It's basically a line out of the Expanse series: if you make getting into orbit trivial, and if doing things in space becomes trivial, it becomes conceivable to redirect asteroids so they hit the planet, which would be bad for the people living there.

I don't know if it's a realistic problem, my guess is it probably is, but not significantly worse than what we already have with nuclear proliferation.

The basic problem is pretty real, though: we're at a stage of technical development where it's really easy to render the planet uninhabitable, while we're at an uninspiring level of cultural development that makes it really hard to produce sensible policy.

You're giving him a lot of credit turning a vague angry anti-tech tirade in to that.

However, I tend to agree and say that it would be hopeless to try consider something with a bazillion influential moving parts and as volatile like human civilization something we could try to "make safe" before working on better space access, which itself might well increase our robustness.

He seems very much under the influence or otherwise ill

I understand his point. He refers to the shortsightedness of human race in terms of handling new technologies which bring a lot of risks.

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