Starship will attempt a launch this Friday

I've never heard it IRL but I absolutely love this sound, also from back then when the Space Shuttle launched. IDK why, but it is just such a perfect sound to me. As if it were the best indicator of the tremendous amount of energy being released there.

The total power output of Concorde was around half that of a 747, but for takeoff Concorde needed to use after burners - which I guess is the same mechanism at play here.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-26/spacex-sta...

I suspect the new water deluge system will help a lot this time around, though.

Sure, there are many people who work in the organisation that he built that help him achieve his vision, but none of that would have existed without him challenging the world to an impossible dream ("live on Mars!"). Without Elon Musk, the space industry would still have been focused on SLS-style projects: slow to develop and impossibly expensive, the domain of only one or two governments, and always at the mercy of the next administrations' priorities. Instead, if he succeeds, humanity will be transformed, from a species that barely dips its toes into space, to one that can finally begin to truly explore the solar system. It's as much the start of a new age as was the voyage of Columbus.

Giving Elon Musk credit for this is certainly not misplaced. Denying him that credit because you disagree with him politically (as another poster suggested)... I have no words for that, it's just so ridiculous. This is the pinnacle of human development right here, and you would deny it because the guy votes Republican? You know, like literally half the people in the country?

That's what makes this all so stupefyingly difficult to even begin to try to predict what will happen. We're not going through the usual window of exclusivity. We're going from [nobody can afford this, except governments - and even then only for toy missions] to ['everybody' can afford this for anything], instantly. So there's no reason that e.g. a nursing home, or anything else, on the Moon would be restricted to the super wealthy, besides demand. Obviously these industries will be being built from the ground up, and demand will likely dramatically outpace supply for the foreseeable future. But that cost imbalance would not be because of fundamental costs.

Also you left out the most fun. Who isn't going to want to go have sex in space? Either with a partner or catching some Moon Poon at a brothel? That's going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions, and shouldn't really require that much to get the initial infrastructure erected.

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

That's what SR Hadden did in Contact ;) as always, Carl Sagan is still teaching us to this day

A sad few with no remaining attachments to the rest of Earth might benefit from a reduced risk of hip fracture, but that hardly seems like a good economic basis for a Moon base.

My auntie drove a Renault Le Car in the late 1980s. I remember riding in it as a kid thinking it was a "fun junker".

Ha. This rambling is entertaining but has little depth or vision.

These are not ‘valid reasons’ these are ‘arguably valid reasons made by cynical ramblers’ :)

Just look at the first footnote, the guy does not understand what is relevant comparison nowadays or how the programs he talks about work/ed.

Like GP said, the Internet is very misleading about this. Healthcare is OK for the middle class and that’s why there isn’t enough pressure to change it.

Psychological experience of risk (fear) has a large component related to the degree to which a person has control over their exposure, combined with the worst possible (rather than typical) outcome.

So for example, statistically speaking very few black Americans will ever be assaulted by the police but no black American can feel remotely in control of whether or not this may happen to them. And the outcome may include death as a possibility.

Statistically speaking, very few women will be assaulted walking down the street (even at night) but essentially no women can feel that they have any control over whether this happens or not. And the outcome may include death as a possibility.

And so it is with school shootings: yes, statistically speaking it is a vanishingly small chance. But neither parents nor students (nor teachers) have any level of control over whether such an incident will take place in their school, and the worst case scenario is death.

When people feel they lack the agency to control whether or not a bad outcome is more or less likely in their lives, the actual statistics of the outcome tend to fade into dramatically lower significance.

[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...

You’d have to decide whether you agree with the methodology, but European nations feature highest in the ‘Global Social Mobility Index’ [0] while the US is 27th.

[0] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....

Then EU > US. In the EU most people have a shot at this, with free education and possibilities. In the US your chances are mostly tied to your parents' status.

> It feels like there's very little social mobility in Europe compared to the US

Maybe from middle class -> very rich. But from poor -> middle class Europe is absolutely better.

What told you that? The median American is significantly less wealthy than the median Brit, despite similar homeowning rates and Americans having way more income. Most of Europe (plus the Anglo offshoots) have higher social mobility.

Between June 1944 and March 1945 the Germans hurled 10,500 V-1s at Great Britain. Most of the missiles never reached their targets.

I couldn't easily find the # of rockets from the allies, though I'd guess it's a much smaller number, since they were delayed compared to Germany.

I couldn't find an easy # for the Ukrainian and Russian war.

So unless this latest disaster in Gaza ends soon, I'm betting they will handily beat the V-1 rockets.

Note: I'm not trying to side either way in this comment between any of the countries involved, All of the conflicts are a mess and I'm definitely not qualified to have an informed opinion.

SpaceX is not using lots of part you can just buy. Its pretty much all costume designs by SpaceX all the way down. Up to SpaceX having their own materials. And the suppliers SpaceX does have are American suppliers that China can't easly buy from.

So if China steals everything they still have to reverse engineer everything and then also reverse engineer the manufacturing.

And the other thing is, China has its own existing Aerospace industry and government. These people are proud of their own things and NIH is very, very real. The idea that they would just throw away 60 years of China history to copy an US company and spend billions trying to reverse engineer the exact same rocket just isn't gone happen.

And of course given that SpaceX is a huge supplier to the US military, such an act could be a huge international relations crisis and the US could retaliate in many way. So China would have to hid the fact that it did so in some way.

> and the answer is an emphatic YES: China is watching SpaceX and it is making its own progress

Ok, but I am watching SpaceX too. And so do many other people and agencies. Watching is meaningless.

In terms of progress, there are many others that are doing as much. RocketLab and Relativity space are working on things more advanced then anything China is currently working on. Even BlueOrigin is building a more advanced rocket.

The iSpace vehicle is barley more advanced then European tests that will launch in the next few years. And that is not much more advanced then what NASA did in the 90s. The rocket the iSpace demonstrator was supposed to be for is already canceled by the way, because the company knew they wouldn't have a market. iSpace also had issues with its smaller launch vehicle.

> Nobody else is catching up as quickly as China, in the new space race.

Again, everybody is falling further behind. That was my whole point. SpaceX is innovating faster then anybody else is catching up.

What I recommend to you is to actually look at what China is actually doing rather then just assuming they are great and fantastic.

Because while China is launching a fair amount most of their rockets are not very advanced, mostly copies of former Soviet rocket. The same goes for their human space flight. The rocket engines they are using aren't very advanced.

Non of the private space companies in China are particularly advanced either and its not clear they have much of a market. I would say all of them are behind the major US companies, Firefly, Relativity, ABL, RocketLab.

Neither US, Europe, Korea, Japan or India wants to launch on rockets from China. Even if these companies had launch capacity.

Its a real question if China has enough commercial launches as the state still uses its own rockets for the most part.

> Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place.

Well, SpaceX will commercialize it first. And maybe years or decades later others will copy it.

Sure eventually these technology will be commodities.

But you are moving the goal post. That wasn't the argument I object to. I object to the idea that China was hot on SpaceX heels and catching up fast. And that's simply not the case.

> Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..

Source ...

Yes, there are various motives and pressures at play, but that doesn't change for private industry. And I worry about the core motive of the private industry: Profit. If a launch won't be profitable, why would it happen, no matter how much it benefits humanity?

I worry about the profitiziation of space. I don't think profitization has done good things to the internet, media, and technology in general.

The 100th rocket you build and attempt to fly will be much more optimized than the 5th. So by ramping production you can develop much quicker.

Another related point is tolerance of failure. A failed test for a government program will immediately see pressure to cancel the program by it's political opponents. Any detractors for a company will have a much harder time exerting influence.

None of those were set expectations for a successful test. Why are people this resistant to understanding it was the very first test of a completely new and revolutionary rocket.

Additionally, the self-destruct mechanism also failed, though thankfully it produced enough damage to allow the rocket to naturally explode later.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2023/04/19/elon-musks-success-cri...

> Also, there were several apparent engine failures

It's pretty clear they were expecting this, as the status graphic had the capability to show on telemetry which of the engines had flamed out in real time.

I believe it has to do with risk analysis of not re-entering over populated areas. The open ocean around Hawaii doesn't have people, so if it re-enters and breaks apart, there's no risk. Also, I suspect there are good military radar installations on the islands that might be able to provide additional information.

You don't see 50 years old weapon systems stop working.

More plausable explanation, however, is that it simply did not exist at all and they faked everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

The solution to get Starship and Shuttle beyond LEO is the same: either use up the fuel required for landing and expending the vehicle or orbital refueling.

The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.

We can build medieval castles all day long with concrete and steel, but if you want an actual stone medieval castle, we don't know how to do it.

Sending a woman (or a person of color for that matter) to the moon has no scientific benefits unless the mission is framed as building a long-term colony there (where both men and women could participate) for example.

You enumerated several political reasons but no scientific ones as I understand. Hence my question.

If the goal is “but X can do Y too” then there are already women astronauts so goal achieved I guess.

Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.

The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly.

The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.

I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.

Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:

> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude

For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).

https://www.issnationallab.org/redwire-space-3d-prints-menis...

That doesn’t make it comparable to a space station any more than arguing here makes people rocket scientist.

We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity. Otherwise we might suffer a replication crisis, where cultural and societal advancements are not shared by all.

For example, many dystopian media in the past few decades has focused on images of what a hyper capitalistic society could look like in space. Where you may have to pay for every breath, pay for literally existing in a space. A society where every day of your life must be profitable and servicing the corporations you have sworn fealty, a world where the only purpose for the foreseeable future is growth and commerce.

Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered. One where the purpose of society is to nurture and spread life to where complex life does not exist. A society where the primary driver isn't growth for growth's sake.

The argument is that if we ignore our cultural and philosophical short comings, we could replicate them. Why is replicating them bad? Because the stakes are so much higher when you have a space fairing race. Do you know what a small crew of technically literate people could do with the tech a society building a mar colony would require? Capture and redirect an asteroid, and if they were half intelligent they would know that the best way for it to go undetected would be to play the long game and give it a long trajectory out of the solar plane where most of the solar systems mass is. Or they could just as easily purposefully seed a planet's orbit with debris to create an intentional Kessler's syndrome. And you might say that these are outlandish, but any society that lives in space or on an non-terraformed would be a society where the base competency would be vastly higher due to survival pressures.

So, yes we should keep advancing tech but I think it's an obvious deficiency with our silicon valley minded leaders. We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society because these newage business men have been indoctrinated into the ideology that technology is the one and only savior. It's important, but you can't build a society or a building with only one pillar.

I reject that interpretation of the the song completely—theoretically, a nation represents a single community. The issue is that the nation in question (the United States) doesn't seem to give a shit about its own needs outside those of its dominant (i.e. rich and ruling) class. Keep in mind that—although the song in question does present it as a racial matter, because race and class are so deeply intertwined in this country—that the focus on economic dominance over all other concerns leaves the poor in this country behind regardless of race.

And the implication that the poor (especially poor black folks) in this country are poor because they "can't seem to figure it out" is so asinine I'm not going to bother addressing it.

I expect it will be profitable in the future as it scales up. But there is probably only about 2x more scaling at the current price point (launching new countries, selling to people who aren't yet aware of it).

1. The indomitable human spirit and drive to explore and expand

2. It's cool

3. More room for humans

There are also reasons that don't apply to Antarctica:

1. Hedging our bets against planet-ending catastrophes (global warming, giant asteroid/comet strike, ultra-pandemic)

2. Another stepping stone to exploring further interesting/important space goals, like gathering resources from the asteroid belt/moons of jupiter/etc, discovering life on Europa, and so on

Missiles have to be launched and require much more acceleration to reach the moon and leave earths gravity.

To put it into perspective, imagine the moon can catapult 5000 massive rocks at earth every day. Earth can’t make that many missiles fast enough

Hypothetically a battery of missiles on the moon could be launched without being noticed by anyone on earth. With modern radar absorbing/scattering designs their transit could also be unnoticed. By the time they arrived at Earth they would be moving far faster then any ICBM could ever hope to achieve. Which puts them well outside the envelope of any existing/soon to exist missile defense system. You would also not have nearly enough time to launch a meaningful counterattack, and any that you did launch would be much easier for our moon based overlords to spot and counter.

Basically putting nukes on the moon breaks MAD pretty thoroughly for the foreseeable future.

My hope would of course be that opening space up would provide humans with sufficient rocks that we would stop trying to blow ourselves up over this rock. I don't expect that will be the case, would be nice though.

Small edit: Double checked the published reentry speeds of some modern ICBMs, ~8 km/s, it's a lot closer to the moon to earth reentry speed of ~10 km/s then I thought. Should point out though that the first is a ceiling and the latter is the floor. So my point still stands, it just means that the moon nazis will have to push a little harder to kill us all.

Interesting; you appear to suggest that an interest in politics makes someone more stupid - in that they become incapable of appreciating a nuanced view of a topic. Is this what you mean?

On the broader topic, the “it’s the workers that do the work not the CEO, man” point you made is often irrelevant to the argument it appears in, and amusingly (given it’s often levelled against him) is weakest in Musk’s case. When a CEO is just an interchangeable face at the top of an established company hierarchy, who has limited influence on the company for their tenure, it’s well taken. But in the case of SpaceX (definitely) and Tesla (probably) those companies likely wouldn’t exist at all (or wouldn’t exist in their current form) without the direct hands-on work and direction from Musk himself. Yes, he doesn’t construct or weld things himself, but that’s already obvious to any rational observer of the world; he employs many thousands for those and other roles, because that’s just how companies scale and operate.

But people also know that CEOs tend to have a huge influence in the success or failure of a company, and founders have a not entirely negligible influence in the company existing in the first place.

you can admire the guy for what he accomplished. you don't need to worship him like he is a second coming of Jesus.

Maybe I hang with a different crowd, but there's still a lot of anti-Bezos sentiment out there.

A couple famous chilled dudes prescribed to not punch at all. The ones I'm thinking of were referring to Romans and British colonisers, but I suspect they'd have applied it to white rich buddies as well.

(Please note that I didn't write what I think of it, I'm only fuelling the debate)

P.S. I disagree with you

Not all whites or blacks are the same. Hating someone you know nothing about due to race is racist, full stop.

The rule of averages don't apply to individuals. You can't beat a poor X child and call it punching up, because they are part of Y race.

After US civil war north attempted to demolish and rebuild the institutions in the secenniost southern states

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_era

In a way the melting of the statue can be viewed as a continuation of the northern purges of southern institutions.

Twitter/X is crap for nuanced discussion, but a facet of the US history is the tendency of the east coast to crusade over the sensibilities of the other states in a form perceived (rightly or not) as puritan zeal.

And as I understand it, not all of the cases are hardly as obvious as the abolishment of slavery.

I’m not from US so I might be completely off base though! I don’t follow the white supremacist scene so this might very well be a dog whistle from all I know.