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.
-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.
Apart from proof of concept I just don’t see any practical reason to colonise mars.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another global airborne pandemic, but this time with a much higher fatality rate?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
So, like, a majority of the world?
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.
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.
Drop the cost like this and entirely new industries are possible and brand new never considered doors open.
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...
A similar dynamic happened with railroads. It's hard to predict just how much change this could cause!
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.
Heat tiles were part of ITS though, and Dragon has them, so SpaceX has been thinking about them a long time.
Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.
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.
To be fair, Elon has said _a lot_ of things about his various projects and not all of them are based in reality.
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
There lies the danger, considering his work leading Twitter.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
(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)
You can always buy a prepaid SIM and used hotspot-capable phone with cash.
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.
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.
We shall see. There might be some https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect in play with the Starship.
1 engineering or physics related thing. Deadlines don't count.
I'm waiting...
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.
..well known example is given..
"Has Elon actually promised something concrete about this?"
you can see that those things are different.
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.
Your kind of thinking would say that no one will ever need more than 840k of memory or that rifling will never take off
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.
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.
> Deadlines don't count.
>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.
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.
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.
Thats where you get on your private jet to fly the last 10 miles. Simple.
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.
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.
Elon bad, Elon bad at planning so Elon liar. /s
"Next year for sure" is not a "best guess."
"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
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.
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.
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 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 cars do not last long, and the battery costs a fortune to replace when it dies or gets damaged out of warranty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
#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.
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
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.
(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
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.
-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.