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Comment by avmich | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX designed reusable rocket first stage to slash costs. Everybody said reusability only makes sense when there's lot of flights - because large development costs have to be distributed across many flights.

So, roughly, to ensure Falcon-9 flies a lot, SpaceX invented Starlink which could use a lot of flights. Now they have a well-functioning rocket company - 2-3 second stages built per week, and ocassional first stage - and the Starlink, which is already in black.

Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization?

How much SpaceX as a company will cost then?

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The bright dividing line in the history of the west coast was when the first transcontinental railroad was built. It transformed everything at a pace that astonished its predictors.

Currently, we launch little things into orbit. With big, cheap rockets we can launch big things, like an interplanetary craft, a spinning space station, robots to spread out through the solar system, even a moon base.

But the question is what can they do that's more useful than communication satellites to people on Earth? That is, who pays for the rocket launches, and why?

More space science and exploration is nice. We'd get more for less. But I don't think space exploration budgets will increase?

> But the question is what can they do that's more useful than communication satellites to people on Earth?

Sure. And nobody predicted how incredibly useful the transcontinental railroad would be.

"Nothing Like It In The World" by Stephen Ambrose

https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1...

Space mining (for platinum etc) would probably be THE most useful and profitable business for big launches.

> Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization?

While I agree that there will be payloads built specifically for Starship's massive capacity, most aren't going to need that much space.

Historically, an entity (company, academia, government) that wants to launch a satellite has had to not only buy/build it, but also buy the rocket, then wait months/years for launch. Some small satellites have been able to hitch a ride on launches of larger payloads, but even there the timing is out of the smallsat's owner's control.

With Starship, an entity only has to build a satellite. As it nears completion, the entity will go to spacex.com, find a day with a Starship launch with sufficient open capacity, and reserve a slot. If the satellite is delayed, the reservation can be moved to another day (perhaps with some percentage of the deposit withheld if too close to launch time). In other words, Expedia for space.

There will be as many Starship launches as needed. Maybe the combined Starlink+outside customer demand will at first result in one launch a week (less frequent than Falcon 9's launch cadence, because of Starship's greater capacity). Maybe over time it will rise to two, three, five, seven, ten, 20 weekly. The more frequent and more consistent the launch cadence, the more confident customers will be that a launch slot will be available when they want one.

The commoditization of space launches is going to allow new developments in space for which there is no predecessor.

international shipping, and _maybe_ eventually travel

you can launch a rocket from anywhere on earth to arrive anywhere on earth in under 30m. first we'll just have better express package deliveries (oh, and military logistics). but eventually they'll decide it's safe enough for people to ride on and you'll just kiss the Kármán line on your way to and from lunch in Kathmandu

> so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights.

Mars. Their reason (and market) for Starship is Mars.

There is no market for Mars. No one needs, or even really wants, to build anything on Mars. Taking a human there just to show that we can might be a cute publicity stunt, but that's the only possible rational motivation for Mars in the next 500 years or so.

Nonsense. I can definitely see completely sealed habitats buried underground in mars.

You can imagine them, but they are not actually realizabile with current technology, and there is 0 purpose to actually doing it. Making them self-sustaining to act as a safeguard if the Earth is destroyed is also way, way beyond our current technology.

Why? 150 metric tons of concrete (what one starship can carry), is enough to build 4 single family homes. A standard excavator is 10-20 tons so you can carry 10-15 on one starship. It doesn’t take much more than that to build a deep hole and make a concrete hab. These would have to be modified for mars but not significantly. I’m not sure what this technology is that we don’t have. It sounds like you could have a functional research lab on mars with less than 5-10 starship trips.

Purpose is purely subjective. You could have said the same thing about the ISS before it was built but it has been invaluable.

First, starship is not a working rocket today. It will be made to work, but that's still in the future. They are now at a stage where they can take one completely empty rocket and put it in LEO, with a little bit of fuel left over for descent. Getting a fully loaded rocket in LEO, then sending another twenty rockets to refuel it in space, then powering it on a trajectory to Mars, with enough fuel left over that it can safely land on Mars, is still probably around a decade away. And then getting it to launch again from Mars and land back on the Earth is a whole other can of worms, especially if you want it to leave with living humans on board.

Secondly and more importantly, we don't have the robotics knowledge to do arbitrary construction projects in this way. Digging through frozen rocky terrain in the extreme conditions of Mars is not easy, and we don't even do that autonomous here on Earth. The Mars Rovers are at the forefront of technology in this area, and they can just about move over the rocky terrain.

And of course, sending people there to operate the machines without first having a shelter is not an option, they will likely die of radiation poisoning long before they finish the project - the thin metal walls of a rocket are not a good radiation insulator.

Elon has publicly stated that he wants to die on Mars. Considering that SpaceX has already launched a Tesla into an orbit that intersects that of Mars, it's not too farfetched to say that it's an attainable goal for him by EoL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster

There's an implied part where there's some living on Mars first and his goal isn't just to die in a crash landing shortly before he was going to die to life support systems giving out. Merely getting to Mars is difficult but plausibly attainable within his lifespan, but that is likely to turn out to be the easy part.

People would pay money to go explicitly to take part in than challenge.

>Elon has publicly stated that he wants to die on Mars.

Will an inn called Mars do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski#Legend

Elon has publicly stated many things that were outright lies, and many more things that were extraordinarily optimistic timelines (FSD next year, hyperloop, starship earth to earth, extremely cheap tunnels, Covid respirators, etc). His public statements mean less than nothing overall.

There was no market for a second global internet either, it already existed. If you build it they will come.

I think we see it time and time again, the steam engine, the internet, when you create something that enables radically new possibilities, people find ways to put them to profitable uses. The people inventing them have vision, they have ideas about what they could be used for, but ultimately nobody can predict how things will be used. We will probably be pleasantly surprised by the ways people are going to use mass scale space travel.

There may well be a use case for cheap plentiful space flight. That doesn't mean that there exists a market for taking things to Mars.

If there are people there there will be a market there. I do expect that there will be people there within 100 years, probably sooner, if not for any reason, because a really rich guy that runs the most capable space launch company wants to make it happen.

Rich and powerful people have wanted many things to happen throughout history. A lot of those things did not happen.

And a few dozen people living in a high tech cave is not a market.

Mars One demonstrated the demand. An immigration ticket to Mars costing $500k to $1M would be profitable for SpaceX, and there are probably 100k - 1M people worldwide willing and able to do that.

If this seems crazy to you, well you’re just not in the target market.

There are 1 million people who have $1M of spare cash who want a one way ticket to Mars and die there? Why?

There are too many bad assumptions baked into that question to attempt a meaningful answer. I don’t even know if you’re being serious or taking the piss.

What's the bad assumption in that question? Is the ticket going to come with a cure for aging too?

1. If you’re going on a one-way ticket to another planet, you don’t need $1m in spare cash. You just need everything you own (house included) to sum to $1m, which is an easier hurdle for an early career engineer, and Mars will want young engineers. In actuality you probably just need a down payment and premiums for an insurance contract. Costs could be closer to $100k.

2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay.

3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency.

If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.

Mars One is a cute prospect when it's just a dream, once reality sets and those people realise that the novelty of being in an inhospitable place, millions of kilometres away from any semblance of a life (air, water, food, nature, hobbies, loved ones, etc.) wouldn't be a good choice to live for 20-50 years I highly doubt that even 1% of those millionaires would still choose to be shipped off.

You’re projecting. A significant number will want to go BECAUSE OF the hardship. Frontier mentality.

You're mixing explorers with frontier mentality.

When life was hard and the prospect of getting to new land on a frontier to potentially improve your (and most of the time your family's) life, it gave people very potential tangible benefits to go there against the risks.

Going to Mars, a deserted place where living a bare life is only ever possible if a lot of life support infrastructure in small pods is running 24/7 without a hitch. Where there is no direct benefit in terms of human accumulation, not at least for a few generations.

Which millionaire living a good life on Earth would consciously choose living in a cramped pod with strangers for the rest of their life, to look out onto a Red Desert of nothingness every day?

The novelty of doing a short walk around will disappear fast, the motivation of "let's build a city here" would be 100% dependent on the provisions sent by Earth, and there would be no end in sight for your life in little pods while you toil away Martian soil, lose muscles, have to consume a diet of potatoes, while at any time if your life support systems fail you and everyone else you might bonded with are done.

Explorers without much to lose on Earth might embark on this, millionaires living a cushy life not so much.

Just because it’s not for you doesn’t mean there aren’t people who have dreamed their whole life of doing this and would sell everything they own to pay their way if given the opportunity.

Of course there is, there are people willing to do a lot of things. At the same time the overlapping of people with the means to do it and willing to endure the conditions is extremely small...

You are attacking an argument I didn't make, my argument is that the people who possess enough to be the ones paying for a one-ticket to Mars are much less inclined to go live under those conditions. You are going to need a lot of people if you want to transform a barren planet.

Imagine that a significant number of people went, say, to Mars. Now they are there, and suddenly they want better conditions. Could it trigger crash program in terraforming to improve the conditions, so that mere decades away Mars would be more hospitable? What money couldn't do here?

The framing of the question is odd. It makes the colonists seem passive spectators. What is holding back the terraforming of Mars is not money but human agency--people living there and doing the work. The people who want to go, want to take part in this endeavour. They're not going to go there and then sit on their behinds and lobby for better living conditions; they're going there to do the work themselves of building a 2nd garden of Eden.

No, the thing stopping the terraforming of Mars is any realistic idea of how to do it. Maybe in a few hundred years we'll have the technology to terraform a barren, cold, almost atmosphere-less planet to make it livable to humans, but not before then. And it will still take 1000 years to reach a livable state after you start.

And however this may be achieved, it definitely doesn't require humans living on Mars to do it. In fact, it is almost certainly going to only be possible if you don't have people there already, with life support systems adapted to the old status quo.

Terraforming has been well studied and we certainly have very good ideas for how to accomplish it. It is a centuries-long process, and no one is claiming otherwise, but not some impossible fever dream. The biggest gains are from rising temperatures, and global warming is something we actually have some experience with, after all.

I don't see how you expect it to be accomplished remotely though, without people on-site to build things, repair things, and most importantly create and expand local infrastructure so as to not need imports from Earth.

Terraforming is a pipe dream, just the atmospheric pressure issue alone is way out of reach. How do you expect people to increase the atmospheric pressure of a whole planet by 80k Pascal? Do you have an idea of the scale that is, to bring all that gas into a whole planet's atmosphere and make it stay there without being blown away by solar winds since Mars doesn't have a magnetic field?

It's not "well studied", there are a few studies on how it might be accomplished but all of it is unproven and untested, no one has ever done anything close to terraforming a planet, reality has a pesky way of getting in the way of untested proposals.

No, terraforming is not well studied at all, to any extent. There are some fun papers on it, but that's it. Global warming on Earth is not comparable to terraforming a planet, it's like saying that we know how to heat the oceans of Titan, after all we can heat our baths every winter here.

Even if we somehow fixed Mars' atmosphere (extremely difficult, but there are at least some ideas), we won't fix anything else. Mars is much farther away from the Sun, so it's always going to be much colder, whatever else happens to it. And it's covered in toxic dust and barren rock, that there is no realistic way to convert to livable useful soil. We should probably first "terraform" the deserts of Earth, as it will have much more value, and would be a good test. And of course, Mars has nowhere near enough water to sustain a significant human population + industry (the whole quantity of water ice is estimated to be similar to the great lakes). And most likely there is no natural water cycle that works at a human scale, due to the distinct lack of massive oceans.

And related to the remote part: robots.

No, there are not. There are people willing to spend money on this illusion, but the vast majority are not actually going to do it. Their best case scenario is that this never becomes attainable, and they can just remain with the image that they are supporting something like this.

Where you so convinced these people don’t exist? They do. They organize annual conferences. They spend their free time posting incessantly in the nasaspaceflight forums. It is a subculture that is out there.

I don’t get mad that there are companies targeting niches that don’t involve me. But when SpaceX does it…

There are many fandoms that organize conferences and spend their free time posting on forums. That doesn't mean they'll get to fly on the Enterprise or in the TARDIS or anything else.

The exact same phenomenon is happening with Mars. People like the idea of it, it's a wonderful fantasy. The new frontier, exploration, etc. None of them truly understand the hardships and ugliness of a life on Mars. It's not a life of exploration, it's a life of living in a small basement and obsessively checking a hundred different life support systems that will kill you if even one fails.

Also, every time one of these Mars fandoms went beyond posting on forums and meeting and speaking about it, they showed just how silly their ideas are. They have no idea of logistics, of limitations of construction equipment, of the difficulty of operating it even in good conditions, of how many things break down with dust, of how much water construction needs, of economics and fundraising for such a project, and so many other problems that are already known - not even discussing the unknowns.

If anyone truly planned to have a colony on Mars, they would obviously start with a colony project somewhere in the Arctic/Antarctic, importing the digging equipment, importing all the needed water, using exclusively solar energy and so on. They could use the experience as training, but, much more importantly, to actually estimate the required equipment and materials. They would start a relationship with regulatory agencies and suppliers, they would get a taste of the type of fundraising they need to do. If they succeeded, they would also have excellent proof that they know what they're doing, of a realistic time-line, and so on.

The fact that no one is even talking about starting something like this is 100% clear proof to me that there is no serious thought being put into this Mars colony fantasy.

Mars was debunked by Elon's own xAI https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dgyujd/comment/l8...

No matter how many times it's posted, it doesn't change the fact that it's just a large bunch of hallucinations.

> Starlink, which is already in black

But which isn't the business people think it is.

It is making the majority of its revenue from populated areas in wealthy countries [1].

Making it very susceptible to the improvements in the rollout of fibre which is happening in most countries. For example in Australia they are upgrading our fibre network to 1Gbps which is 10x the speed of Starlink.

[1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2024/05/09/starlink-o...

Not an either-or, if I need internet I need it, and have all manner of backups for power and internet. I added starlink to complement fiber, cable, and mobile broadband. Simply put I cannot be offline for any reason other than medical incapacitation / death

Yikes

> For example in Australia they are upgrading our fibre network to 1Gbps which is 10x the speed of Starlink.

I don't know of anyone using Starlink in areas with fibre, only rural areas with no fibre.

In Australia for example rural areas are all being wired for fibre.

And you only need to lay fibre once and you can benefit at least for the next century if not longer as we continue to invent new ways to multiplex data.

Do you have any source on the plans for rural fibre? My parents just keep being told to be content with Sky Muster. Australia is huge, it's going to take multiple decades to build out to even a fraction of the communities.

>My parents just keep being told to be content with Sky Muster. Australia is huge, it's going to take multiple decades to build out to even a fraction of the communities.

Starlink was designed for your parents, and everyone else in that situation.

Yep, my parents are on Starlink right now and are loving it.

GP was saying that fiber is coming to all rural areas though, so I was wondering if there was any truth to it.

Personally I think anywhere that has copper right now (and my parents do have an old crusty POTS line running to their home) should be built up to fiber - if we could do it before we should be able to do it again.

We have slightly different ideas of rural areas. My parents will never get fibre, nor their neighbours. Starlink is a game changer for them all

My mother lives in a small town half an hour outside a major city and has starlink because all of the national telcos, regional fibre ISPs, or local WISPs didn't want to take on the capital expense. If it weren't for starlink they'd be using 4G hotspots for everything.

It's pathetic, so many areas got copper POTS but will never get fiber.

>In Australia for example rural areas are all being wired for fibre.

What? Thats simply not true at all. I'm guessing you don't live in Australia, or you'd realize how much rural area there is, and how ridiculous that sounds.

What is actually happening is some areas previously served by FTTN (fiber to the node) or FTTC (fiber to the curb) or other, older technologies such as coax are being upgraded to FTTP (fiber to the premise), but there are around 500,000 Australian homes and businesses served by fixed wireless (4g) and around 400,000 additional homes and businesses only served by satellite.

I am willing to be corrected, but I have not heard of any plans for the NBN to upgrade anybody currently using a wireless/statellite connection to fiber.

I live in Australia and worked for NBNCo.

The intention has always been to upgrade everyone to fibre but there is obviously a question of budget and priorities. So in the interim they will continue to align the technologies on speed as best as they can.

But you can skip the queue so to speak if you're willing to pay for it:

https://www.nbnco.com.au/learn/technology-choice-program

You’ve assumed that the customers in developed nations are primarily fixed installations. Starlink is wildly popular with the rv/sailboat/second home crowd.

I also wouldn’t be betting on US terrestrial internet providers to outcompete anything.

Also people living in stealth campers (fancy converted vans with no windows), of which there are more and more every year in HCOL cities. You can only get so much data with 5G.

But will it do 1GBPs in the middle of the Gibson desert?

No one lives in the middle of the Gibson desert.

But they did run fibre through all of the regional towns in WA.

https://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/the-nbn-project/overcoming-rol...

that will be easy

The bigger satellites that are coming to starlink will allow much narrower signal beams, which in turn will allow far faster speeds for the same interference-to-gso budget.

The US makes up a majority of their user base. My property isn’t even that rural and I doubt I’ll get fiber before 2050.

5G is much more likely. It’s just too cost prohibitive to bring fiber to most rural areas.

They didn't invent Starlink. They bought the company.

I don't think this is correct. As far as I understand it, Elon/SpaceX did attempt a previous investment in satellite internet, but it had died long before Starlink came to be in 2014.

Indeed. Starlink was publicly announced in January 2015 with the opening of the SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington

Full surrounding history at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

> Starlink, which is already in black

It doesn’t make sense to claim “Starlink is profitable” if the underlying rockets still lose money and you don’t account for that in the claim.

> they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights

Losing money with your expensive solution? Easy, just invent a profitable problem.

If Falcon 9 was a company it would probably be profitable and Starlink could probably pay Falcon a fair price and still be profitable. Obviously SpaceX is not profitable overall because they are investing tons in Starship.

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